Most of my novels are deliberately set in nightmarish dystopias and either read like a screenplay or function according to the laws of cinema. In other words, I employ the techniques of screenwriting and the machinery of celluloid to represent the horrors of everyday hyperreal life. I do this a lot in the novel I’m writing now, The Kyoto Man, the third and final installment in my Scikungfi trilogy, which combines different kinds of written and visual media. One chapter is a comic book called “The Nightmare of Reality.”
Alan Kelly talks to D. Harlan Wilson.
I feel like I’ve gotten better over time at getting it closer and closer to what I want the sound to be earlier on in the process. For years I wrote and labored over every inch of it, and ended up beating a lot of things to pulp, overworking it, resulting as I mentioned in a ton of dead novels that I’ll never do anything with, but also in that process I learned how a sentence can come onto you, more than you coming onto it. I definitely spent a lot of time in revision, and playing, teasing those sounds into their final form, but the closer I can hit to that rhythm in the first draft, the more powerful it feels in manipulating it later.
If your body dictates that you should try to breed with a violent sociopath, then you may find yourself with a good story to tell. If you survive. Animals do all that scanning stuff too, but they don’t write books or pop songs. Still, that’s no reason to ignore science. Or animals. It’s just that recent scientific developments in no way supersede all the fascinating work on love that humans have produced over the last few thousand years — science is just another strand of it.
If it is a poetry that stirs up political emotions, then I am against it. The reason is rather simple: if political emotions prevail to political reason then one can easily slide off the track of reasonable judgment and thinking. I believe poetry here should come as close to Aristotle’s definition of it as possible – led by a special kind of mimesis and in proximity to “political realism” and truth of events that looks into the future. Inasmuch as politics is “the art of the possible”, (engaged) poetry is “the politics of the possible.”
There’s such a lot to take in with Zola; the research, the detail, the crowds, the weather.. basically what everybody says when they say nice things about Zola. But for me..it’s how he does it all that holds me to his work, how he controls it all, how he takes down all that scaffolding of research and painstaking observation and how he leaves us with those towering edifices of Germinal, The Earth and L’Assommoir. Anybody could have made 1200 pages of notes about the French railway system if they really wanted to. Only Zola could have done that and then turned them into the monster novel of La Bête Humaine.
My Grandma gave me these weird Watchtower books with all the bible stories in them, re-written with a fundamentalist Jehovah Witness bent. The JW artists create pictures of heaven, hell, paradise, sin, damnation – perfect families living perfect lives and a world free of disease. I know for a fact that some of the artists started subverting the medium and pictures appeared in Awake where in the foreground a lion would be lying down with a lamb and in the background – if you squinted – you could see a man jacking off in the bushes… They really are completely nuts. It’s a glorified Apocalypse Cult. I knew from a really early age that it was all a load of codswallop, but I was totally enchanted by the art… Those pictures pretty much sold the idea of sin to me. Sin looked like a right laugh. Paradise looked fucking depressing.
Mostly, I’m trying to point people in the direction of a lot of great stuff. By quoting from Hammett the hope is that people will go and read or re-read these books, or listen to some Cab Calloway records or Ronnie Dawson or whatever. For me, it’s a fascinating world, and I’m just trying to shine a spotlight on it. I think the language was hugely more inventive than anything that’s used these days, and the people seem to have been having a hell of a lot of fun with it.
I thought Mishima was terrifically nice, I really liked him. He spoke English, which amazed me… I met him several times in Tokyo and in London. I had one of the last letters from him before he committed suicide… I was very surprised, because it was a side to him I had never seen, but in a way it made sense because he was very vain. He’d go the gym every day, even in London… He was worried about his looks. I think, too, he had written himself out. He’d written everything he’d wanted to write, and he though he was descending into middle age and then old age. Also he had these rather odd nationalist or fascist tendencies. He was a very complicated man.
I don’t read a lot of ’shock’ literature but I know there is a feeling that horror cinema has abandoned morality, and even story, in favour of voyeurism. The need to shock and challenge just for the sake of it, is a strong one, especially in a world where that’s often the only way to get any attention. But even in these cases, there’s often some morality, albeit twisted to some degree, in even the darkest of tales. Where Meat is concerned, I knew from the start that it would be a strongly moral tale. Not all my work is like that though. Sometimes I just write nasty stories for the hell of it.
On several occasions I met Dalí. He was pretty unpleasant; not directly unpleasant – he wasn’t nasty. He was a major artist, but I felt he lacked integrity. I was there once and during the course of the evening we were given some horrible sweet sparkling wine which was palmed off as champagne. I met his wife Gala once as well when we first made contact, although they didn’t answer letters and I had to go to his suite in a hotel on the rue de Rivoli. He was into money, so if something made him money he was interested. He said to me, ‘Dalí loves money. Have you brought me some?’ 
