Claire Phillips, author of the novella Black Market Babies (11th Hour), presently teaches writing at UC Irvine, and is Visiting Faculty in the MFA Writing Program at CalArts. Her fiction can be heard at the KQED Writers’ Block, and her novel, The Story of Dora, is due out in June, 2013 (Paradox).
In this interview, Phillips discusses the experience of taking on the voice of Valerie Solanas for Black Clock 15, the influence of Second Wave feminism, and the pleasures of “drecky TV.”
BLACK CLOCK: In your piece, Invisible Woman, you write from the perspective of Valerie Solanas, best known for her SCUM Manifesto, as well as for shooting Andy Warhol. What prompted you to take on her voice?
CLAIRE PHILLIPS: I have been a fan of the SCUM Manifesto since my first introduction to this seminal radical text when I was seventeen years old and attending my first Women’s Studies course at San Francisco State University. Later on, when I self-published Black Market Babies and sold my first 250 copies to Ron Turner of Last Gasp Books (distributor of R. Crumb), I was given the option of turning some of the cash into credit for books they distributed. Excited to have found myself in the clutches of this purveyor of low-brow art, I browsed their warehouse shelves looking for excitement. The SCUM Manifesto, published by AK Press, was one such find. I had kept it through several moves, rereading it, noting the excellent acerbic wit and continuing relevance of this satiric tract. Wishing I, too, could string together words with such dynamism and force.
When Steve Erickson invited me to participate in this genius issue, I knew I needed to conceive of something singular because of the roster of writers who would inevitably be asked to participate. Solanas’s story immediately came to mind. Tragic and violent, yet perversely brave in her observations, she suited me fine. Having grown up in the ’70s in suburban New Jersey, where every woman was a stay-at-home housewife and dull, dull, dull, I found Solanas’s salvo a necessary voice in the dark.
BLACK CLOCK: Was there a point where you decided to switch from Solanas’ make-believe letters addressed to Warhol to allowing the reader to read the script she sends him?
CLAIRE PHILLIPS: I wanted to start with letters to Andy Warhol because I’d been sort of annoyed by The Andy Warhol Diaries when they appeared excerpted in the New York Times in the mid ’90s. I was living in New York at the time and was pained by how enthralled with money and class Warhol appeared in these diary entries. Solanas’s letters would be a rebuttal of sorts. Prior to this I had been musing on rewriting Invisible Man. Steve mentioned in his email request to the writers that we could include any medium – letters, reviews, scripts, etc. Naturally I wanted to cover as much ground as possible. I had written a couple of scripts during my post-graduate haze and deemed it time to employ these chops. Once I researched Warhol’s diaries, I discovered that they were not as unwholesome as made out by the NYT. In fact, I was hard pressed to find, among the thousands of entries, Warhol’s sad and fawning musings on Jackie O’s every non-gesture. The rancor wore off, and I veered naturally in other directions. First in the Open Letter to SCUM Participants, based on such a letter. Then, happily, onto the script of The Invisible Woman. Luckily Steve suggested that Invisible Woman be the title instead of my original choice, “The Solanas Letters,” which didn’t make sense beyond the story’s originating point.
BLACK CLOCK: The third person narratorial voice in your book Black Market Babies is clearly having fun telling the book’s story. In Invisible Woman, as Solanas, you seem to employ a connected method. Both seem to be pulling from dark but amusing places. Was Invisible Woman a departure from your other works as far as perspective and research?
CLAIRE PHILLIPS: Yes, I shocked myself with this voice. Early on, when my writing progressed from poetry to fiction, I vowed not to write in first person. I didn’t want to write a coming-of-age story (not exactly) and I didn’t trust my “I”. Didn’t think it was strong enough, or something. Writing inevitably holds these surprises. You limit yourself, and then suddenly, you find buried treasure. In Black Market Babies the story is strongly voiced through an ironic over-the-shoulder narrator until you get to the final sections of the book, when Helvetica Thistle-Brun tells the story of selling her baby on the black market in order to pay for her PhD (ha!) A critic for The Village Voice declared this the best part of the book–the best writing stylistically–and I would have to agree. That I found myself once again working unwittingly in the first person inspired in me feelings of both ecstasy and dread. Ecstatic to be working in uncharted territories, uneasy to discover previous limits rendered null and void. As far as connected narration goes, yes, I think I work more linearly than I first did. But this isn’t to say I may not once again employ a more circular or purposely disjunctive form. I’ve told myself I won’t do it again, won’t work so explosively–which means it’s out there somewhere.
BLACK CLOCK: In a previous exchange, you mentioned the influence of Second Wave feminism. What of that period made its way into this story?
CLAIRE PHILLIPS: Probably one of the most exciting parts of writing this story was doing the research. I picked up Alice Echols’s seminal work, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975. Echols is a fantastic, clear-eyed historian. What I discovered, revisiting this time period, was the rich variety of radical activist groups of slightly differing philosophies and agendas. The New York Radical Feminists. Cell 16. The Red Stockings. The Feminists. The names alone give reason to pause. After her attempted murder of Andy Warhol in 1968, Solanas became the cause célèbre of these vanguard groups. According to Sara Evans, reading the SCUM Manifesto was “the first order of business” for celibates and karate aficionados of the radical group Cell 16. She wasn’t just the “slightly mad and kooky, well-meaning but inevitably misguided” version of Solanas portrayed in I Shot Andy Warhol. (Don’t get me wrong: I love that movie.) What I mean is: Solanas wasn’t a lone voice of misandry. She was an activist whose parodic manifesto sparked change on the national stage. A fire had been lit. I tried to incorporate this when Valerie writes her Open Letter to SCUM Participants in The Village Voice. In this alternate timeline, by remaining “underground” at a private psychiatric hospital in a bid to win over Hollywood (Warhol’s unrealized dream), she’s missing out on some pretty groundbreaking radical protests: most notably the NYRW Miss America Protest. She should be out there leading the revolution against institutionalized “sexism,” working for the “degendering of society.” Not sucking down tranqs and lithium in mind-numbing amounts. This should have been her moment. Hence, the letter involving her coterie Hollywood-style in the revising of her film script: she’s got the feeling she better not go solo, that she had better branch out if she is to remain relevant.
BLACK CLOCK: As a satirist and a fictionalist, how do you feel Invisible Woman speaks to feminism both on the whole and to whatever anyone might call modern feminism?
CLAIRE PHILLIPS: I began this piece like practically everything I write: focused on the budget crisis in education in California. The loss of access to Women Studies classes in this era is inevitable, as are the losses for many of the gains fought for in the early ’70s. Last year, California turned away 250,000 people from the state college system. 250,000 people. I can’t even fathom this. Without my first classes in Women Studies, in Experimental Writing and Poetry, I don’t know where I would be. And perhaps this speaks to modern feminism, where women’s rights become, more broadly speaking, integrated into the struggle for economic and social equality, access to education, to health care, and other basic rights.
More prosaically, women still struggle with issues of identity, work and power, almost in the same way they did in the ’70s. Whether they are bartering back-seat mothering for stay-at-home bourgeois privileges or struggling with ambivalence over inclusion in “the world-at-large.” So I guess this kind of aggression undergirds certain privileged “female trouble.”
Teaching Joanna Russ’s 1970s feminist SF novel The Female Man this semester, I was surprised and also relieved to discover that my female students found the themes of female actualization and independence still pertinent. In fact, I was very careful to suggest that perhaps it wasn’t so relevant anymore, in order not to color my students’ sensibility with my own. It was revelatory. I expected the women to find the motifs to be outdated and the men to be slightly put-off. This was not the case. Just the opposite.
BLACK CLOCK: The almost preschool-esque scatological language found in Invisible Woman seems to push the boundaries of what Solanas might write. What inspired the use of this puerile vocabulary?
CLAIRE PHILLIPS: The puerile language is strictly a response to Solanas’s writing. Her play Up Your Ass, which Warhol famously refused to produce or return to her, incorporated many scatological remarks. Solanas engaged in this speak, I believe, in order to don the swagger and agency of the male writer/artist whom ironically she held in great contempt. As we all know, the scatological holds particular sway over young boys obsessed by poopy talk. “South Park,” for instance. In garnering the respect of a phallocentric world, how could she resist? This was undoubtedly an essential part of her satire. As it would be mine if I had the guts!
The toughest decision writing this was how much to cop Valerie Solanas’s voice. The superlative, incandescent writing of SCUM was beyond my reach. But not her poopy quips. I could manage that. Also, don’t forget that great scene in I Shot Andy Warhol in which she is accused by Warhol and Factory hangers-on of being an undercover cop, to which she unzips her fly, framing her bared pubes with her hands and remarks witheringly: “Yeah, and this is my badge.” Utterly fearless and funny. I don’t think any part of the body was off limits for Valerie.
BLACK CLOCK: This may be an unfair question, which is maybe why I’ll ask it: What do you think Solanas would think of Invisible Woman if she were alive to experience it?
CLAIRE PHILLIPS: Very fair. She might have been pleased I gave her a lecturer position at SFSU. I think this might have made up for those feelings of invisibility–but, of course, not enough to truly take the edge off. The hardest thing for Solanas would be to confront her mental illness. Even before you’ve read her post-Warhol interviews with The Village Voice, it’s pretty clear Valerie was suffering from some kind of paranoid psychosis. She was undoubtedly psychotic when she chose to shoot Warhol and associates. When I wrote this, I wanted to incorporate the horror of this affliction. I felt it was expressly important, particularly when making jokes at her expense–going underground as a paranoid schizophrenic for instance. I don’t know if she would read through the lines of this story and get this. In truth, Valerie Solanas died in a hotel in the Tenderloin poor and alone, and no doubt psychotic. This is a terrible fate. I don’t know if she had consistent access to medication. Perhaps it wouldn’t have helped. Those weren’t great times for the treatment of chemical imbalances. Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time is perfect confirmation.
BLACK CLOCK: I’ve heard you have a book coming out next year. What’s that all about?
CLAIRE PHILLIPS: The Story of Dora is about a cyborg whose orgasms predict the stock market for her financier husband, Wade Park. It’s basically my response to the prediction machines engineered by physicists for Wall Street, and was written mostly prior to the Subprime Debacle. The novel is due out in June 2013, in collaboration with Dutch photographer Monica Nouwens to be part of an exhibition at FOAM Museum in Amsterdam. This project has been in the works for several years. We think we’ve got it sewn up now. We’ll see. The collaboration itself is loose. Based on years of creative dialog between Nouwens and myself. About the thrills and spills of living in Los Angeles. Bohemia. Economic insecurity. And architecture.
BLACK CLOCK: What are some of your favorite films and why?
CLAIRE PHILLIPS: When Steve asked us to include our favorite film as part of our biographical notes to this issue, I decided to include The Highway Patrolman (El Patrullero) directed by Alex Cox because I thought it captured the spirit of my favorite type of writing/drama, and perhaps the spirit of Invisible Woman. It’s also underrated and underexposed, and just out on DVD finally since it’s 1991 film debut.
El Patrullero is about a highway patrolman living and working in rural Mexico, where corruption is systemic and there is little to no hope of creating a just and ordered society, or of having an economic future beyond the deep tentacle reach of crime. The protagonist of the movie, played by Roberto Sosa, is a petite man whose woes are some of the most tragic ever committed to celluloid barring flicks of war and genocide. Even so, this petite man with accumulating troubles is unbearably funny to watch, and just as tender. This is what I relish most. When a story is unbearably sad yet funny, and true to a political reality. The Assassination of Richard Nixon was also a brave work that didn’t receive much attention. Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience, written and filmed during the latest Wall Street debacle, is also a recent stand-out film. Through the latest digital technologies, he catalogs our Gilded Age redux with the thrilling immediacy of a documentary. Big. Beautiful. And bad.
That said I don’t get out to see many films these days–I drive so much. Instead I end up staying home, watching lots of drecky TV. Like Revenge, Downton Abbey, Head Case, reruns of Absolutely Fabulous in order not to lose my mind. If I don’t laugh, I’m miserable. Oh, and the science fiction show Fringe. I adore the updated character of the “mad scientist” who is literally mad, a schizophrenic who has engineered his own insanity (and cure), who is brilliant and able to solve the latest biotech mysteries. Wish I’d thought of that.
BLACK CLOCK: Are you working on a piece of fiction? What’s next?
CLAIRE PHILLIPS: I’m finishing a book of satire based on the recession, oil spills, and fantasy. If all goes right, I should get time to finish this summer.
After that I think I’ll go back to angry women.
Phillips joins fellow Black Clock 15 contributors Anthony Miller, Mark Z. Danielewski, Jonathan Lethem, Geoff Nicholson and Matthew Specktor for a reading at Mandrake this Sunday, April 29th at 2:00pm.
By Patrick Benjamin
an Editorial Assistant for Black Clock and an MFA Writing candidate at CalArts
