3:AM Magazine » Interviews

Exit Theory: An Interview with Paul Buck

stevefinbow — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 22:40:28 +0000

Interview by Steve Finbow.

Men jump from windows, from trains, starve themselves to slip through prison bars, they scale walls using ladders made from sheets, dive into helicopters, excavate tunnels with nail files & teaspoons – one even wore his teeth down to nothing chewing through wooden bars. Paul Buck’s The E-List is a thoughtful & entertaining history of the art of escape. From the 18th century exploits of Jack Sheppard to latter-day escapees such as the laxative-using Robert Cole, from Devil’s Island to Dartmoor, Buck charters the means & methods of escape, the meticulous planners & the sheer opportunists, the captured & the still at large, the heroes & the sociopaths.

Paul Buck worked at Better Books in the 1960s, his memories of this period can be found in Iain Sinclair’s anthology London: City of Disappearances. His work derives from text, from language, & through various performance approaches often resulting in other textual realizations. He has written somewhere in the region of 50 books, including the novel The Honeymoon Killers. In the 1970s he edited the literary/arts magazine Curtains, which published writing by Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida, Iain Sinclair, Allen Fisher, Eric Mottram, & Paul Auster. He has performed at the ICA as part of an Artaud/Genet weekend along with artists including Peter Sellars, Patti Smith, & Pierre Guyotat. He has translated works by Bernard Noël, Pierre Klossowski, Maurice Blanchot, Catherine Breillat, & Raul Ruiz. He has worked with Marc Almond, Melinda Miel, & 48 Cameras. Spread Wide (2004) is a work generated from correspondence with Kathy Acker. His current projects include works on Paris & the cinema & a new novel.

3:AM: Foucault wrote that “(t)he carceral texture of society assumes both the real capture of the body & its perpetual observation; it is, by its very nature, the apparatus of punishment that conforms most completely to the new economy of power & the instrument for the formation of knowledge that this very economy needs.” How were you drawn to these stories? Is it because you see a connection between the ‘outsider’ status of the prisoner/escapee & the writer/artist?

PB: Notions of the outsider go way back for me, not only because I read Colin Wilson’s book (The Outsider) at a tender age (Wilson has probably been more influential than many imagine) & followed up his references, but because my mother was Italian & I was reared as a Catholic & had to jump ship as soon as I could, mentally & physically. Not exactly the black sheep, more the wolf in sheep’s clothing. One could extend that.

Early on I fell into the right hands – by instrumentally taking those steps. Connecting to Indica, UFO, Better Books… & going from there. London of the mid-to-late ‘60s. & yet as I plunged in there, I also gravitated to the criminal mind (courtesy of Wilson again), setting off to explore murderers initially. The Honeymoon Killers is not about detection & capture, but about their exploits & falling apart. & so it went for all the criminals & murderers I studied & wrote about. & the novelists I pursued, preferring the ‘50s & ‘60s pulp novelists who didn’t involve detection of public or private nature. Thus, Goodis & Thompson… but more particularly Day Keene, Harry Whittington, Horace McCoy… That said I’m writing a novel at the moment that talks against solving by detection whilst at the same time going about the business of seeking to solve something. It’s always about standing astride the crevice with me.

The E-List is not compiled chronologically but rather gathers together escapes of similar ethos & method: by tunnelling, by scaling walls, while in transportation, by disguise & impersonation. The E-List is not an A-Z of men & women absconding from incarceration but a thesaurus of people responding to the catharsis of freedom; the book is a classification of liberation, & an important part of our human-behavioural domain knowledge.

3:AM: Under the current financial situation, I would argue that an appropriate addition to the carceral society – school, hospital, & prison – would be the banking system; mostly, the characters (with notable exceptions) in your book are not escaping for any reason other than to be free – money doesn’t seem to play much of a part (besides planning). Do you think freedom, in whatever form, is one of the overriding instincts of humanity?

PB: That would seem so, whether it turns out to be true or not. Specifically with escapees from prison, they all say, or are quoted as saying, that freedom is their object. But of course for some the cell is replaced with an equally restricting incarceration. James Moody spent much of his freedom holed up in a small room in South London. Frank ‘the Mad Axeman’ Mitchell was ‘rescued’ from Dartmoor (where he spent his days roaming the Moors, riding ponies, drinking in pubs, even having an affair with a local woman) only to be incarcerated by the Krays in a backroom in East London for a limited number of days before he was killed in cold blood.

What I discovered in the research (& with more time I might have gone further) was that once free the escapee often has little idea on what to do, or how to maintain freedom. Directly, or within a short span of time, they return to family, friends, familiar neighbourhoods… always watching their back for betrayal & recapture. Also they need to acquire money, which often means committing further crimes… or if money is stashed (& still there) then they need to get abroad & preserve their freedom at extreme costs. Many are captured no sooner they are clear of the walls. It’s as if the challenge is the meticulous detail & planning of the escape, the outwitting of the system by another method, having failed in the judicial cat & mouse process. (Note my lack of faith in the judicial system being an honest affair.)

Much like the writer who dreams not to be incarcerated in a room writing, & yet who spends his days there willingly in order to attempt to create exceptional work.

Whenever one looks at different facets of society, we seem to come up regularly against our inability to handle freedom. We actually like measures of constriction, whether we perceive those restrictions, or acknowledge them. Bondage in one form or another seems to be here to stay! It probably can be seen by anyone who has children. Parents & adults try to give children as much freedom as possible, only to see it misfire when the child cannot handle it…& fails, disappoints or goes off the rails in one way or another. The child wants to know the boundaries, the conditions, either so they can stay within them, challenge them or transgress them. It seems to be a perennial problem in parenting that we are conscious of today. There are shelves of books offering solutions; TV entertains us with a string of these programmes.

Reading The E-List is a cathartic exercise, one finds oneself rooting for the escapee, be they guilty or not of the crime for which they were incarcerated. The moment of release being orgasmic in its impact, while the reality of freedom is anticlimactic. Alain Badiou argues that “(f)reedom is a category of intellectual novelty, not within, but beyond ordinary life.” True freedom is conceptual, a construct of democracy, an evolution of consciousness in the disciplinarian society.

3:AM: Through your involvement in the radical movements of the ‘60s, do you think that that period was a failed experiment in social/sexual freedom? & how has that era influenced your views on freedom, crime, & art?

PB: I do not dispute that I had the escapee’s viewpoint in mind when I wrote the book, because I realized it was aspects of the escape itself that were worthy of attention. The downside of course is that some like Billy Hughes, John Straffen, Brian McCulloch, Robert Mone, Brian Nichols & others killed in their escape bids or after their escapes. Nothing is straightforward, nothing can be unanimously condoned, or condemned. & I guess I feel much the same about the 60s, or any other of the periods I’m lived & worked through. My projects have always made me an active & hands-on participant in various movements… & I’ve accepted that good things come from it, as bad, & all these are not always apparent at the time. What I do stand for though is the necessity for change & transformation, never to maintain the status quo, even if it means personally running one’s life as a never-ending string of risks. I’ve always lived on my toes, though in a different sense than the subjects of The E-List.

I guess you could say that I don’t see life as an ‘experiment’ or anything as a series of ‘experiments’ but rather life as a continual ‘research’. & that doesn’t just mean an artistic life, but life on the everyday level of experiences.

& thus since the 60s I have never had a full-time job, or anything that resembles a career. All my activities whether art ones or financial ones (which often come together) are all further steps that are pulled through to generate the next step. One way or another everything conspires to weave & drive me forward. Any notion of ‘rest’ does not exist… indeed is anathema to me.

The E-List embodies David Henry Thoreau’s famous quote “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” & seems to confirm the not-so-well-known appendage that “what is called resignation is confirmed desperation.” Writers such as Giacomo Casanova & the Marquis de Sade escaped their physical confinements & in their life & writing the sexual & social constrictions of their age. The E-List makes little moral distinction between the desire for liberty of an artist & the urge to freedom of a criminal.

3:AM: If I change the Thoreau quote to read, “The mass of artists lead lives of quiet rebellion. What is called creativity is confirmed rebellion.” – does that approach the way you have lived your life & is it analogous to the lives of people within the carceral system? Or, to again quote Thoreau, is it humankind’s lot to be “a parcel of vain strivings tied”?

PB: I purposely avoided bogging down the book with numerous distinctions, plotting instead the ‘escapes’ themselves, sometimes giving a bit of background, or consequences where necessary. It really was the mode of escape that I felt needed notating. It would have been easy to leave aside Casanova, de Sade, Baader… & indeed the IRA… but they all added breadth for us to ponder.

I wonder if it’s as easy as that to align the mass of artists, by which ones means many, the majority, with acts of rebellion. I don’t necessarily feel that many do rebel in any way, well, not that is noticeable to the rest of us. They might seek other interests within their creative pursuits. We like to think of artists as rebels, outsiders, outcasts, etc, but perhaps few are in any real terms. What I notice, & it cropped up again the other day, is that a person like myself who has lived on the edge throughout his adult life, with almost no money, no pension, no fall back… tend to take in my stride the daily questions & decisions of risk as naturally as breathing (& indeed subject my family to that position too, for good or bad) & thus tend to be bolder in my actions, whether in life or art, than others might be. As I said, in the last few days, I’ve encountered those who are generally regarded as risk-takers, but, in fact, at the crunch, were hesitating, desperate to make sure the risk factors were considerably reduced before they committed themselves to what was being proposed.

That analogy might be found among prisoners. Many will not escape, or try to escape. They might just talk about it, not really wish to do it. I think I quoted Harry Roberts as an example. According to Walter Probyn, the only way Roberts survived incarceration was by thinking of escaping, never really taking his fantasies through to fruition.

So what you are suggesting is that I align myself to a degree with the escapees… or that is what intrigues me about the subject of this book. You are probably heading me in the right direction. Perhaps though, unlike many an escapee, I’ve been on the lam for too many years now, & that despite what the system has done to trap or force me into submitting to their whims & caprices. I’ve managed to be strong enough in myself to maintain my ‘freedom’ or at least a sense of purpose or direction that appeals to me. If I was asked to chose between Alfie Hinds & his great escapes, or Wally Probyn’s, then I would chose Wally’s exploits… though I don’t think I’d pursue discussing or seeking to unearth his life since prison. Nothing shapes up neatly for comparison, does it?

One could note that I’ve done this interview in much the same way. Not that the reader is to know. But I responded directly. Fast & decisive. It’s the only way I know. I’ve learnt to live that way. If I make mistakes, or what others perceive as faults, it’s not a big deal. I adapt, I transform, & continue. Different things evolve that way than from the approach of slow consideration. Though again one can’t assume that I don’t meditate or ruminate at other times in the day. I was a jazz aficionado way before my teens, & improvisation is at the heart of my existence… & improvisation is based on preparation & self-discipline.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Steve Finbow’s new novel Balzac of the Badlands is out October 2009.

A Pulpy Eyeless Balaclava: Will Self Interviewed

Andrew Stevens — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 15:33:55 +0000

Interview by Jamie Kenny.

This also appears offline in the latest The Big Issue in The North.

We were supposed to meet at Wigan Wallgate Railway station: just like Brief Encounter. But that didn’t happen.

Sitting in a cave under Southport Arts Centre, Will Self began to talk book design.

“The original cover had a photograph of a whole liver, in close up, in a surgical dish, with a small artistic trail of blood…but”

An expressive wave of the hands: “marketing.”

You have to sympathise with the marketing boys and girls. A book called Liver – a story cycle called Liver – doesn’t exactly promise sales. In fact it threatens them, in a muffled way, from behind a pulpy eyeless balaclava. You can hear the conversations: Can’t we get him to call it Heart? No, think yourself lucky he didn’t come into the office and throw Anus on the desk.

So Liver it was. “Both my mother and father died of liver cancer; and then last year my father in law died of liver cancer. It had been on my mind a lot.”

Liver cancer is the subject of the main story of the collection, a novella in which a terminal sufferer goes to Zurich to take advantage of the local facilities for assisted suicide, only to be immersed in a kind of living death. Elsewhere in the collection, a private drinking club turns out to be a front for an alien project to harvest the congealed livers of alcoholic bohemians, an advertising genius seals the deal with the aid of a vulture that eats his liver three times a day, and a convocation of hopeless junkies is evoked from the perspective of the Hepatitis C virus present in their…well, you know where.

It’s all good fun, in the style of Self. It fits in neatly with the literary genealogy: the smoking ban as enforced in post apocalyptic Iraq (The Butt), the ravings of a misogynistic taxi driver taken as holy writ in a half drowned London (The Book of Dave), a vast council estate of the dead in which nothing much happens (How the Dead Live).

And then there’s the book tour, the Self Live Liver Tour. Soon, the man himself was to appear onstage like the original Lovecraftian colour out of space, tearing off bloody strips of the offending organ and throwing them to members of the weeping, hugging crowd. Questions and answers followed, members of the audience picked out by means of a baby’s head on a stick. At length, a chariot pulled by giant bats flew the author to the next transfixed and trembling assemblage of provincial literati.

Yet if the books have a continuity of theme – making unusual sense of the grotesque, the fantastic, the sordid, the depraved, the ill-matched and the banal - the man himself has gone through changes. And in Southport his audience, a considerable gathering of the Self-ish, were solid provincial book lovers. The readings themselves may have involved sex, violence and incurable disease marinated in apocalyptic swearing, but the listening-reading public took it all and chuckled heartily. After the break, Will handed round sandwiches. And when the gig was over he took out his foldaway bike and headed for a nearby Bed and Breakfast.

It all showed disturbing signs of a work ethic, or at least of a man getting on his bike and looking for sales. What happened to the Will Self once caught sniffing heroin on the Prime Minister’s private plane? What happened to bohemia?

“Well the avant garde in Britain is just dead to the extent that it ever existed. But if you look at the Colony Club (the Soho drinking club which appears as the Plantation in Liver) at the time it was founded in the 1940’s you had a kind of time capsule of the future: it facilitated all day drinking, there was open display and acceptance of homosexuality, there was no taboo at all about swearing.

“None of this is transgressive anymore. It’s just modern life in Britain. And while things like homosexual liberation were needed and very much worth having, the same can’t really be said for saying ‘fuck’ in public or drinking all day.”

Will Self was once quoted in an interview saying that he didn’t want to be seen as some sort of literary craftsman, who viewed his day’s work as though it was sanding down a table. That fitted in with a persona that at times seemed to include the writing as part of a general display of multimedia fancy goods. He was always popping up on things. But now the journalism is regular and the books emerge at a solid rhythm. Is he turning into a kind of literary artisan?

“It was always about writing: a writer was always what I wanted to be. But there is this danger, this lure of branding. It’s the effect of television really. No matter what you are known for, if you’re known at all you’ll eventually get someone calling you up and asking you to go and talk about underpants on the Five O Clock show. You really have to say to yourself: this is nothing to do with the work.

“But, a literary artisan? Well, it doesn’t feel as bad as I thought it would. It just feels like life. And when you’ve been writing for a while you learn how to do it, how to write and assemble a book. When you’re a tyro it’s like assembling a hang-glider in mid-air.

“A novelist is naturally an autodidact. I don’t understand all of these creative writing programmes. It seems to me that if you’re going to do it with any originality you’re going to teach yourself, on the job. And that wasn’t as bad as I thought. And of course there were all the drugs and the nihilism. Now I’m not stoned and I’m not a nihilist any more.”

What Will Self is, when he isn’t a writer, is a walker: a psychogeographer, no less, according to his weekly column in the Independent. At its most simple, psychogeography is simply walking without an end point in mind, soaking up the territory between departure and destination. At its most exotic it can become a strange marriage between Marxism and Mysticism, an analysis of the terrain that criticises capitalism for depriving the working classes of ley lines and places of pagan child sacrifice. Will Self’s approach is closer to the original ramblers, to the men and women who stormed Kinderscout in the 1930’s.

“I think that is apposite. It is important to walk: otherwise you’re just beamed up at your starting point and beamed down at your destination. Conventional travel is a means of removing people from their environment, and I think that the human environment should be reclaimed.

But I don’t go to look at beauty spots. They’re just visual bonbons: walking in that sense is just consumerism for pedestrians. If I was walking into Manchester I’d take the train to Runcorn and walk into the city along the ship canal. These sorts of places are human creations and have been let slip into neglect for no other reason than that they are on the way to somewhere. Remember the feminists marching to reclaim the night in the seventies? It’s the same thing.”

This sounds like a manifesto. But what would actually improve if everyone were to reclaim the airport slip road and the turnoff to the business park?

A deep breath: “Localism, in a word. More conversations between strangers. Less aggression. More knowledge of who your neighbours are. The development of genuine communities…of course, my wife says I just want to go out for a walk and I’m being pretentious about it.”

There may be more going on here than a change of lifestyle or a renewed dedication to work. Consider the posture. Will Self tends to business in a comfortable batcave on the publisher’s midlist. From time to time he emerges to sniff the air. There’s a hunkering-down here, combined with reconnaissance. And that’s a posture more generally shared in the age of exploding people and imploding banks, when the most obviously sensible course of action is to keep your head, mind your business and gird yourself for what happens next, whatever that may be. Perhaps surprisingly for a self-described pessimist, Will Self sees some hope emerging from the financial rubble.

“I think we may be nearing the end of something” says Self. “The Big Issue, for instance, exists because there’s a general toleration of gross inequality - you didn’t see homeless people on the streets back in the seventies – and the payoff for that was this gross accumulation of wealth. But the collapse of the US banking sector has put an end to that model. Governments are now intervening in the banks in a way that contravenes every textbook definition of free market economics.”

Perhaps before too long there may even be a garde worth being avant to again. Meanwhile, tend your garden. Get some fresh air. Sniff the wind. Eat your liver.

Many thanks to The Big Issue in The North.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Jamie Kenny has spent most of his life indirectly promoting the circulation of commodities.

Embracing the Bull: An Interview With Lydia Lunch

Andrew Gallix — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 20:32:16 +0000

Interview by Simon Friel.

Lydia Lunch is a name you should know. Lydia moved to New York at 16 and, with her band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, was one of the founders of the still influential, but short-lived, No Wave movement. She has collaborated with artists and performers such as Nick Cave, Sonic Youth, Henry Rollins, Omar Rodriquez-Lopez, Asia Argento, Richard Kern and Hubert Selby Junior, and today from her base in Barcelona continues to produce a vast and diverse range of work.

Her memoir Paradoxia: A Predator’s Diary chronicles her life from its conception up on through to a self-defining reawakening in her mid-thirties. It has been translated into 8 languages. Paradoxia bulldozes through emotions and sensibilities in much the same way that men’s cocks tear into Lydia throughout her numerous, anonymous encounters; ruthlessly and without remorse. Incest, satanism, rape, bestiality, cannibalism paedophilia, insanity and destitution are just some of the many themes explored, devoured and left for dead as the reader is pulled along a road of broken glass under the influence of acid while Lydia rips through the cities of New York, L.A., Amsterdam, London and New Orleans.

The writing is the most honest that I have ever read and for the same reason some of the most beautiful, shocking and poetic too. Lydia never seeks to justify and explain the things that happen or proffer empty apologies. In spite of all the blood, violence, destruction and waste that are left in her wake, it is, for me, Thurston Moore’s final line in the book’s afterword that rings most true: She can love you.

I was lucky enough to meet up with Lydia. This is a little bit like how it went;

3:AM: What is Paradoxia?

LL: Paradoxia fills a void that really exists in literature, which is an aggressive, honest, non-glamorous psychosexual voice. And I think we can find traces of that hyperreality in a lot of different male writers especially from the 50s, 60s and 70s but for female writers there’s still a vacancy. It’s just not their language, and I have a much more blunt way of expressing what I think needs to be expressed. I’m not the only one who behaves, acts, feels or has this kind of void that they look to fill with whatever means necessary until eventually they realise that only the self will suffice and goodbye garbage.

3:AM: I was just reading the first part which says none of the names have been changed, everybody is equally fucking guilty.

LL: Even though I’m not even really naming their names.

3:AM: Exactly, that was the question, because I read a couple of reviews, and every review was positive but there was a frustration that they want to hear more about the real Lydia Lunch story and the real people in it.

LL: Well, the thing is that most of these experiences are with anonymous people, so what good does it do to name their names? I mean, look, people may be waiting and they can wait until the day that I fucking die to hear of the — for me — minutia and the boring details of the rock aspect.

SF: Will we really have to wait all that time?

LL: For me that’s not the most interesting detail. What’s important is what the search was about and what it was for. I mean, believe me, anyone asks and I’ll give them the run down and the score card. Maybe I have a different take on it because from the time I was 12 years old I would always say to my parents when I had to be at rock concerts until 3 in the morning that it was for “my career”. What career would that be, young lady? Yes, Gene Simmons probably has a photo of me at 12 in his Kiss collection. So if it starts there, it’s like, you know, names, names, names… Who cares? Who cares? And for the most part, in spite of it, it’s not like there’s that many names that people would really recognise. They weren’t the most interesting sexual partners. Sorry, they’re not — boring! Just to be a gossipy groupie, the most interesting rock and roll sexual experience was Julian Cope. I didn’t even know who he was, but I have to say that dropping acid with Julian Cope was a beautiful experience.

3:AM: I suppose this leads to a much larger question, one that draws comparisons with the epilogue where it compares your work with that of Brett Easton Ellis, which is the fact that you are very anti-capitalism, anti-consumerism, so doing that would I suppose be trading on yourself as a commodity.

LL: Exactly.

3:AM: But is that not a big fucking temptation?

LL: It isn’t a big temptation. Maybe because I think, in my own mind’s eye, I’m a bigger rock star than any of those motherfuckers. I don’t even mean rock star, I don’t give a shit about rock stardom. I don’t think of myself as a star, I think of myself as a fucking planet, honey. I’m sorry, they’re just stars, I’m a planet — fuck off!

3:AM: Ok, I mean, that’s another thing, we’ve got Nick Cave doing a big concert tonight here.

LL: Yeah, at the fucking basketball arena!

3:AM: These are all people from your history, and that’s what I mean by temptation. It must sometimes be frustrating to think they are doing that and I could be doing that.

LL: But I couldn’t be doing what they do, the same way they can’t do I what I do, because I think what separates me from a lot of the people I came up with, which would be like Sonic Youth, Nick Cave and Henry Rollins, is all three of them, in so much as all three have diversified, they have the ability to take one thing, whether it was The Bad Seeds, or Sonic Youth as a four piece, whether it was The Rollins Band, and do it and do it and do it, and I would fucking die of brain damage.

3:AM: So you don’t have the patience to do this?

LL: I’m a conceptual artist; I’m not a rock band. My concept from the beginning was you find the collaborators, you do a few shows, you document it, you fucking go on. So I don’t understand how anyone has the patience, the capacity for this kind of boredom, to play the same songs over and over. My message is always the same, it is always sexual insanity and political hysteria, or sexual hysteria and political insanity, however I have to find new ways to express this.

3:AM: So it’s not so much you not having the patience, but rather other people not having the patience with you because you’re always doing different things?

LL: How can they even keep up when I don’t work inside the machinery that lets them know?

3:AM: The world can’t keep up.

LL: I don’t fucking care. I can’t care. At 17 one of the first songs I wrote was “Popularity Is So Boring”; fuck off, I still feel the same way.

3:AM: You obviously still have a lot of energy and you have been running it for 31 years, so why Barcelona? I don’t really see that same energy out here in the street.

LL: I don’t need that same energy. I left New York because it was like plugging my finger into a light socket. It was enough. I don’t need to plug into a city for energy. Here, I can just breathe, I can relax and the pace is different. As America went into fascism, I came to a place that is 30 years out of it, although there are a still a couple of danglers here and there. It’s a different energy, and part of Spain’s amnesia sees to that. If I’m focusing so much on what drives me insane, on how politically fucked things are, I need a place that doesn’t further aggravate that. I need a place that doesn’t give me more fucking cancer.

3:AM: So Barcelona is a safe haven?

LL: Curative, because most of the damage that has been done here is in the past. The architecture impacts me. I get very emotional in certain places at certain times, the history infects me. I love the hospital San Pau at the top of Avenue Gaudi: this is one of my stomping grounds. I use the architecture more for stimulation than I do the bars or the club scene.

3:AM: Ok, so what would your advice be to any young images of you who might be out there trying to make their mark today?

LL: Look, people have to be comfortable with being alone, and if you’re strong in yourself, any communication, any experiences you have are going to be far better anyway. If you understand that you may be permanently an isolated individual in a world of six billion people, be comfortable in that, then you — like I — will be able to be an endlessly wandering nomad seeking other like-minded individuals to collaborate with. So, I think you have to make whatever the time is, work for you. You have to figure out a way because there will be so many things always against you, against the individual, against someone who wants to radically create. So you have to find historical references — as I did with Hubert Selby, Henry Miller, Jean Genet, the Marquis de Sade — that can at least inspire you to create or do whatever it is that you have to do. It’s going to be the few who make a career out of complaining about everything that pisses them off, and there is only room for maybe one or two of us. I’d encourage everyone to do it, but to make a career out of it, good fucking luck! So, in other words, do as I have done: create without a budget and find a way to get it out. You’ve just got to be stubborn. I don’t care what your age is, you’ve got to be a fucking bull. Embrace the bull.

3:AM: Embrace the bull?

LL: Take the bull by the horns, cut its balls off, sew them on to the fucking base of your spine and get going. It’s that easy. What’s so hard?

3:AM: You know, I won’t have enough space in the piece for all that we’ve talked about, but that’ll definitely be going in there!

LL: That’s right, grab the bull by the horns and cut its fucking balls off. I mean, there is no other choice. I can’t find a better way of putting it.

This interview first appeared in BCN Week. First pic by Julie Gorton. Second pic by Bart D. Frescura.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Simon Friel lives in Dry Town, Barcelona. He is a columnist for the city newspaper BCN Week, and his fiction and poetry have appeared in Ping Pong, Cherry Bleeds, Sein und Werden, Dogmatika, Underground Voices and Retort. An excerpt from his novel, Murmur, is online at Unlikely Stories.

Derving On Weekends: An Interview With Thomas Leveritt

Andrew Gallix — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 14:32:07 +0000

Interview by Lander Hawes.

3:AM: Both the prose style and the post-war location of the novel are very Pynchonesque. Was there a point when your material found its medium of expression? I mean were you carrying the story around in your head, then read Pynchon, and said “Eureka!”?

TL: For me it was the other way round. It’s style and voice that blow my hair back, and Pynchon ― which, just to define what I’m taking about here, I’d say Pynchon throws out the whole corpus of ‘novelistic’ English, used by most writers without even being aware of it, and writes instead in the rhythms of slang and poetry, using this weird and rather T.S.Eliot language as a sort of emulsion to bind together many different tropes of writing: scientific, magical, military, sports reporting, whatever. Gravity’s Rainbow really is “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock” extrapolated into half a million words. The plot is fun and so on, but the hit is all poetic. So it was always this approach which appealed: language so delicious you just keep turning the pages, gorging on it. The lesson being, if you want to be a poet anymore, best disguise it as a novel. Better still a pop song. Because it strikes me that publishing poems in the traditional way today is mainly a way to get ignored by the main sequence of contemporary culture. Novels not much better, but still. You adjust to the technology available. If Byron was alive today, he wouldn’t be writing verse, he’d be freaking his shit off at King Tut’s Wah-Wah Hut. So I’ve been writing these wilfully anti-genre things for a while. The Exchange-Rate Between Love and Money is soberer than most.

3:AM: I assume that you wrote the novel in drafts? How many were there? How long did it all take?

TL: I started in June 2005 and finished it in September. I then finished it again in March 2006, and then finished it again in August. It was then sold to Random House in October, at which point I dismantled it entirely and categorically re-wrote the novel during February, introducing a number of new characters and themes, which was something of a surprise to Random. But they were able to get behind the changes I’d made, as long as I finished it in April in time for the London Book Fair, which I did. I then finished it several more times over the summer and autumn. Random finally wrestled it away from me around November 2007, when it got sent to press, and we all got on with our lives.

3:AM: What lengths did you go to in analysing Pynchon’s style? Did you spend much time dissecting his paragraphs?

TL: Nothing overt. Whole passages just sank in and stayed there. I assume they’re still down there, like the Titanic.

3:AM: What’s the longest time you spent on one sentence? Which sentence was it?

TL: Who knows. Possibly days. I remember spending a long time trying to put my finger on what was wrong with the word evil:

A word vastly more malevolent than her own German ‘böse’ or French ‘mal’, neither being as jetblack in their refusal of any possibility of redemption… a word powerful as a spell, that removes all restraint or decency, a dangerous magic shot through with the Anglo-Saxon genius for violence.

3:AM: I take it that you have some knowledge of the Bosnian Serb conflict? Is there anything you want to say here on the matter?

TL: Some knowledge. Basically, the Serbs went to war for lebensraum. The Bosnians by contrast didn’t want to die. But it was sold by the British government as too complicated to do anything about, and intelligent people still think it was between sides that were ‘all as bad as each other’. Admittedly the Croatian sideshow, every bit as unpleasant, muddied the waters somewhat.

3:AM: The novel includes some terrifying details about the Bosnian Serb conflict and the local political organisation in its aftermath. Do you see fiction as having a part to play in the public representation of war?

TL: A small part. Novels are too far off the pace any more. Oxbow lakes. Movies are where it’s at in terms of shifting public consciousness, or for opinion-formers it’s all blogs and likewise, www.nowthatsfuckedup.com and whatever’s replaced it. That was the website where GIs posted pictures of dismembered jihadis in Afghanistan and Iraq in order to get free access to porn. Good title, by the way.

3:AM: What lasting effect has the war had on your consciousness?

TL: Revealed to me that people mainly take the decision to not know.

3:AM: Do you think further conflict in the region is likely, given the recent Bosnian declaration of independence?

TL: I think you mean the Kosovan declaration of independence. I think it’s unlikely. UNMIK (UN Mission in Kosovo) is all over it. I’d put it at 20%.

3:AM: Has your attitude to the representation of war in the mainstream media been changed by your experience in Bosnia?

TL: Well… when Gulf War I happened I was 15, and my favourite t-shirt was of an F-14 dropping a bombstick with ‘We Came We Saw We Kicked Ass’ on it. By Gulf War II, I just wonder where all the death is. By which I mean TV stations sell the war as being about military hardware, territory conquered, prisoners and casualties, jets taking off etc ― the acceptable parts. You never actually see the death, which strikes me as quite an omission, given that it’s the central― indeed, in many ways the only― fact of war. The British media is clearly a lot better than the American media on this, but all the same: not showing corpses on TV is supposed to be this civilized thing, about decency and respect and watersheds and so on, when in actual fact if you confronted voters with the reality of what was done in their name, there’d be fucking uprisings. Specially in the US, where the glory of war is still much more dearly pressed to people’s hearts. But if they got rattled by El Salvador, then they’re not going to like 100,000 civilians dead.

What was very clear from the Bosnian war was that when the media started showing actual death, mass graves, sniper shots etc ― it was more politically acceptable in that situation, as it wasn’t us causing the death, not directly anyway ― you got a rapid groundswell of popular pressure to do something about it. Certainly after Srebrenica, by mid-1995, gory TV coverage was quite explicitly the tool advocated to force NATO off the fence. So I think after Bosnia, that’s just a sociological law: corpses on TV, political pressure. Al-Jazeera doesn’t shy away from showing corpses, and look how Arab Street feels about that. So to answer your question: entirely. I don’t think there’s much delusion, inside the TV networks ― including the BBC ― that not showing Iraqi bodies is about decency. It’s about what’s politically acceptable. I mean the West is barely OK with the Iraq war as it is, and journalists are not, on the whole, very pro it, but I think if they tried to show bodies here the British government would shit on them all over again, as with Gilligan. Murdoch would pile in behind, the campaign to strip the licence fee would gain ground, etc. In America, it’s simply unthinkable.

It occurs to me that’s it’s fun to see people dying ― which is what movies are about ― but not so much fun to see them the morning after ― which is what life is about. A pretty cheap dichotomy, now I think about it. I’ll take it away and work on it.

3:AM: There’s a lot of thinking about whirling dervish in the novel. Does this represent a particular interest of yours?

TL: No. But there really are dervishes in Bosnia still. They have day jobs like everyone, and they derve on the weekends. But they still chant, rock, whirl and so on, this very medieval technique for achieving mental displacement. When the French built the Cathedral at Chartres, they used every technological tool at their disposal. I just find it bemusing that religions don’t keep their techniques updated. If communion wafers had rapid-acting MDMA in there ― which was after all once licensed as an appetite-suppressant ― I think you’d have more believers. C of E takings would be up, and when you gave your neighbour the sign of peace, there’d be a certain conviction currently lacking. Priests would be allowed to take mushrooms, and above them the bishops ketamine, archbishops acid ― I don’t see the problem. You’d hear back from god for once, anyway. Rastafari’s got the legal framework all in place.

3:AM: What advantages do you think that Pynchon’s style allows a writer?

TL: The advantage to not sell many copies.

3:AM: Do you feel that Pynchon’s style allows you certain freedoms in relation to your material?

TL: I don’t know if it’s entirely Pynchon’s style. I flatter myself The Exchange-Rate Between Love and Money has a little bit of me in it as well…

But on the whole it does make it easier to cut through the bullshit. When you’re trying to weave a golden thread through a novel, where a typical English-English novel might spend most of the book weaving it, making everything else beige so the thread appears bright and shiny ― it is liberating when you realize that instead you can write, “so the golden thread? that’s Clare. She’s amazing” and get on with other things.

3:AM: Had you done much writing prior to The Exchange-Rate between Love and Money?

TL: Well I’ve always written, like I’ve always drawn. I have some novels still floating in those water-cylinders you grow clones in: one about a selenium-mining pueblo hanging onto the bottom rung of NAFTA; one about the Jacobite Diaspora and the Maori Battalion in WW2; and one about PR in London in 1997. Plenty of short stories.

3:AM: Do you feel committed to writing in a Pynchonesque style forever now?

TL: No. See next question

3:AM: “Paths were turning to rails”: that’s a great line. Can it be applied to your current feelings about writing?

TL: Thanks ― and no. What I’m writing now is almost entirely dialogue; the descriptions won’t come and the characters won’t shut up, so it’s a bit different. Things are always changing. Pynchon, by contast, is extremely sparing with dialogue. There’s one scene in Gravity’s Rainbow where Bodine seduces a Red Cross girl, and the entire exchange is rendered by Bodine looking at her significantly and saying “So”.

3:AM: Where does your writing gene come from? The English or the American side?

TL: I learned to speak in America, so maybe that’s why I prefer American writing. But also ― like the Impressionists, it seems more plein air. English writers seem to write writing: learn how at UEA, riff on EM Forster, pun, use certain set-piece phrases that haven’t generated their original brightness for centuries― clean bill of health, spreadeagled, well-heeled, hands down, etc. There’s some crack in The Exchange-Rate Between Love and Money about “the sort of novel that favours aquiline noses”. If I want to read vivid metaphor, I’m picking up Hunter Thompson, Denis Johnson, William Burroughs, Pynchon of course. I ain’t picking up no Somerset Maugham.

3:AM: Are there any descriptive passages that are your favourite?

TL: This is OTT enough for a trailer:

Bannerman tries, really he does, but the mask is heavy. There comes a point when he’s in bed with Clare, his heart can’t maintain its distance, and tiny shivers spiral out of his chest, dancing capoeiras in front of them, confettiing through the air, over the erect points of her hip-bones, shivers brilliant green and yellow, little fluttering softnesses homing in on her sleek wet face, chin rucking up as she looks down her body, swatting lightly against her eyelashes like they’re looking for friends… Clare indifferent to all this, her face gone a deep cardiac crimson under the freckles, lips almost grossly swollen, and staring Bannerman clean through the mind while she fucks him. And how can he not arc his torso back down to meet hers, translucent rorschach blot of love left in the air behind him, enter her again with the biting of lower lips, shutting of eyes, pastel butterfly presences dancing double, and triple-helixes in the rising air above their bodies…

3:AM: What’s your favourite Pynchon novel? Why?

TL: Gravity’s Rainbow. It’s got everything. I haven’t got my head entirely round Against the Day yet, but there seems to be more heart in Gravity’s Rainbow.

3:AM: What are the lessons in Pynchon’s work for a contemporary writer?

TL: Have a private income.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWEE
Thomas Leveritt is half American, half British, and 32. The Exchange-Rate Between Love and Money is his first novel. He has won the Carroll Medal for Portraiture from the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. In addition, he has: programmed computers, aid-worked in Bosnia-Herzegovina, an Army scholarship into the 5th Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards, a Law Scholarship into Middle Temple, 28 cousins in Texas, and held the UK distribution rights for the very excellent Sarejevo Pivo.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Lander Hawes has written two unpublished novels and currently has a third dismantled around his flat. There is a wad of short stories that he is also responsible for. In his twenties he lived in London, Brighton, Spain and currently rests his head in Norwich. He has recently abandoned a PGCE, and a period of time working in libraries/bookshops seems imminent.

Fatal passions: An interview with Lewis Crofts

Susan Tomaselli — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 08:49:13 +0000

3:AM: When did you first encounter Egon Schiele and what led you to write The Pornographer of Vienna?

Lewis Crofts: I first came across Schiele’s paintings when I was living in Hanover in 2001. The blatant nudity was the first thing to catch my roving eye, but, artistically, I didn’t think much of the pictures at the time.

It was only a few years later on a visit to the south Bohemian village of Cesky Krumlov that I learnt of the story behind the man. Schiele’s mother was born there and the artist took refuge in the village for some time. I wandered into a gallery and read a 200-word summary of his life hanging next to one of the pictures. His story seemed worth telling.

3:AM: You say in your acknowledgments that “nowadays art thrives off coffee tables” and that for you it was no different. The Pornographer of Vienna strikes me as incredibly well researched. How much work did you put in before you committed pen-to-paper? Was it organic for you; that is, did you find yourself adding more as your novel progressed?

LC: When I decided to look into his story more closely I found that there was already a mass of information available in coffee-table books. And many of them were exceptionally well written and researched. It quickly became clear that his life was rich in all the dramatic elements needed for a novel: poverty, infamy, rebellion, love, death etc. The anecdote that his father had infected his mother with syphilis on their wedding night seemed an irresistible way to start.

Once I had the broad outline, I found myself adding more detail as I went through the drafts and my research progressed. Having studied German literature at university and spent several years living in central Europe, I already had a good idea of the period from the likes of Georg Trakl, Arthur Schnitzler, Franz Kafka and Stefan Zweig. My writing was definitely organic and research continues to this day.

Some opportunities cropped up which I just couldn’t turn down. I remember blagging my way into Christie’s one summer when they were auctioning one of Schiele’s long-lost paintings. I think I claimed I was representing a Czech art collector. I couldn’t muster the 31 million euros it went for but I got close enough to see the brush-strokes.

3:AM: It’s based on a historical figure; would you describe it as a historical novel? Also, how many liberties did you take with Schiele’s (short) life and how did you decide what went into the book?

LC: In trying to recreate decadent Vienna on the brink of World War I, I’ve doubtless written a historical novel. But it was always the character of Schiele that interested me more than the historical backdrop. I needed to take numerous liberties, sometimes due to a lack of evidence and other times out of narrative necessity. It was always my intention, however, to capture the spirit of the man rather than give a roll-call of his girlfriends or the precise length of a paintbrush.

Although his life may be inherently dramatic, it doesn’t naturally follow the kind of narrative arc which can sustain a reader’s interest over 300 pages. Also, in any life, there tends to be a surplus of characters playing bit-part roles. I had to make tough decisions to keep the scope of the novel manageable but at the same time ensure that the essence of Schiele – the tortured iconoclast we know from the paintings – remained.

3:AM Why did you choose to portray Schiele’s story as a novel, rather than a straight biography?

LC: I am not a historian. And certainly not an art historian. My interest always lied in the narrative power of the events of Schiele’s life – rebellion, fatal passions, imprisonment, fame, death – and the way the paintings seemed to evoke each of those stages.

Also, biographies often have to reach conclusions about why and when. They have to unearth new facts not previously covered in previous biographies. They have to analyse and explain.

I felt that a novel was the perfect way to explore some of the ambiguities in Schiele’s story. Did he or did he not sleep with his sister? That’s a question which I never wanted to answer. As a novelist, I could simply hint at the kind of relationship they had and let the reader make up his or her mind. The novel revels in the gaps in the story, the grey areas, the fluidity. Biography tends to seek light and stability.

3:AM: “While on honeymoon in Trieste, Adolf infected his wife with syphilis”. As opening sentences go, yours is very striking. It sets the tone – of sex and of death – for the novel nicely. I’ve heard a version of the first paragraph set to the music of Elton John’s ‘Daniel’. Have you heard that? What do you make of it?

LC: Yes, I’ve heard it. In all the times I’ve read and tweaked that line it never occurred to me that it scanned so perfectly with the iconic hit. I’m flattered. I’m not sure Elton is. I’m trying to shoe-horn the opening line of my second novel into the la-la-las of ‘Crocodile Rock’.

3:AM The Pornographer of Vienna explores Schiele’s key relationships – with his sister Gerti, with Gustav Klimt, but most importantly, with Valerie “Wally” Neuzil, his muse and model to his most-loved paintings. Yet little is known of her. How difficult was that, to flesh out the character of Wally?

LC: Valerie is the true tragedy of the book and I’m delighted we managed to get her picture onto the front cover. So little is known about her historically yet at the same time she’s one of the most famous women in all of art. Her poster is on the bedroom wall of virtually every art student in the world.

It was the gulf between the few details we know – a low-born girl, probably given to Schiele as a ‘gift’ by Klimt – and the proliferation of her image in Schiele’s work that made her the most interesting character to develop in the novel. Both in pictures and in actions, she is the canvas onto which Schiele depicts his changing desires. Everything is projected onto her and she ends up as the main victim.

After Schiele splits up with her, we never really relate to the painter in the same way again. Something snaps within the reader. The end to Valerie’s life – when she dies of scarlet fever as a nurse on the Balkan battlefields – is the story’s greatest tragedy.

3:AM: Much like the enfants terribles of the contemporary art world – Damien Hirst, the Chapman brothers – Schiele was regarded by the public as degenerate. In your novel, Schiele is told to “live a little. Soak it up. Eat it. Drink it. Fuck it. Revel in it. And then paint it,” advice he seemed to follow to the letter. How do you think Hirst and co compare to Schiele, if at all?

LC: Avant-garde artists always provoke. Schiele certainly did and Hirst & co have done so, too. Tracey Emin is probably the closest modern-day comparison to Schiele. She has openly acknowledged her debt to the artist and her self-portraits as well as the infamous condom-laden bed, exhibited in 1998, succeed in presenting her troubled intimacy as art – a step Schiele also made in his own haunting and disfigured self-portraits.

That said, Schiele still shocks some people almost 90 years after his death. I am not sure Hirst & co will.

3:AM: Does Schiele perhaps share something with the English fin-de-siècle artist Aubrey Beardsley – “gaunt, dandified, racked by disease [he] mirrored the perverse yet elegant distortions of his art.” The only lesson Schiele seemed to take from art school was, “We are great but we are doomed.” How much do you think Schiele adopted the role of artiste maudit?

LC: The two artists do indeed share a fascination with human sexuality and the comparison is one that might be worth pursuing. Beardsley’s work, however, reminds me more of the playful, frolicsome Parisian fin-de-siècle rather than darker, introspective Viennese fin-de-siècle which was so characterized by Schiele, Mahler, Freud et al.

I think Schiele was happy to wear the cap of an artiste maudit but that was not necessarily his intention. Anyone who sticks two fingers up to the establishment – and suffers for his insult – is branded maudit. The most interesting part of Schiele’s life, however, is when he decides against this life and opts for stability through marriage to a bourgeois wife. He turns his back on life as the ‘maudit’ outsider and nestles into the bosom of the world which is collapsing around him.

In many ways, this is inconsistent with how we like to see our artistic iconoclasts. In a Hollywood bio-pic this would be glossed over and the painter would be a resurgent rebel to the end. But his denial of the ‘maudit’ life is what makes Schiele’s story different.

3:AM: Can I ask about the cover of The Pornographer of Vienna? It’s rather cheeky and has, in itself, been causing some fuss. What’s your reaction to that? How much have we changed from the days of Oskar Kokoschka, Schiele’s rival who tagged him “pornographer”?

LC: The jacket was designed by Will Webb, a very talented designer and the man behind striking covers for the likes of Carlos Fuentes, Will Self, TC Boyle and Margaret Atwood. I was set on having a picture of one of Schiele’s women on the cover and once we’d found the right one we saw that if we folded it around the book, it made the spine – an often overlooked part of a book – all the more punchy.

Some disgruntled folk from Tunbridge Wells kicked up a fuss since the spine exhibits the section between the model’s legs. When I heard about it, I couldn’t stop laughing. Firstly, the genitals are clothed, and secondly you’d need a doctorate in anatomy to work it out from the spine. I find it ludicrous. But I do enjoy watching people pick the book off the shelf and realize, as they turn it over, that they have their finger and thumb on Valerie’s nether regions.

I don’t think the huffing and puffing of Tunbridge Wells folk says anything particular about today’s society. But there have been plenty of other instances where The Pornographer of Vienna has tested people’s sense of decency.

One magazine refused to publish a review of the book because they were frightened of scaring off advertisers; a TV station projected the cover of the book onto a backdrop and then took it down, thinking it too racy; and, MySpaces removed several of the Schiele pictures I uploaded, judging them illicit. What’s more, my ‘spam’ filter at home is clogged with all sorts of filth. Google is an unforgiving archivist and my name will forever be associated with porn.

3:AM: Schiele headed the group of artists to succeed Klimt, yet it is Klimt who is more of a household name. Why do you think that is? Is Klimt’s work a little more comfortable for the viewer?

LC: If Schiele had lived to be as old as Klimt [55], he might have challenged his mentor for the mantle of Vienna’s greatest painter. Or perhaps he would have disappeared into middle-aged mediocrity. We’ll never know.

Unlike Schiele, however, Klimt was acclaimed and at the forefront of Viennese art for most of his long life. He was given a gong by the Emperor and made an honorary member of various universities. His work was all over the city on murals, in palaces and on gallery walls. His works were grand and possessed by the grandiose. And although his works created a scandal, he was never publicly shamed and imprisoned like Schiele. That, I’m sure, helped establish his legacy. In short, Klimt is more palatable for the art establishment.

3:AM: Have you seen the John Malkovich movie Klimt? What did you make of Nikolai Kinski’s portrayal of Schiele? If there was a movie of your novel, who would you cast as Schiele? For some reason, I can’t get the idea of Sebastian Horsley out of my head…

LC: I found the film Klimt tedious and painful. Nikolai Kinski’s portrayal of the Schiele was, however, one of the rare highlights. Being a marginal figure in such a film will perhaps inevitably result in caricature, but that aside, I thought Kinski nailed the sense of tortured obsession which we remember Schiele for.

I’ve never met Sebastian Horsley but I could see how he might interpret the role. However, my impression of Schiele is of a deeply introspective and troubled soul, yet bubbling with creativity. I think someone like Giovanni Ribisi would do a good job. I know he happens to be a big Schiele fan.

3:AM: I know it’s bad form, but The Pornographer of Vienna is a cracking debut so, have you settled on what your next project will be?

LC: Thank you. That’s very kind. I’m working on my second book at the moment and although I’ll probably write another historical novel at some point in the future, my current project is straight fiction, set in an imaginary dictatorship. Traces of my interest in central Europe will certainly be visible. Apart from that I can’t really say. Anyway, you know how it goes: Draft 1 starts off as a heart-rending tale of unrequited love between a young soldier and a farmer’s daughter, and by the time you get to Draft 7 you’re inserting multiple car-chases and a sex-scene in a chip-shop.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Susan Tomaselli is Edotor-on-Chief at 3:AM Magazine and at Dogmatika. She resides in Dublin.

The Mad, The Bad, The Rad: An Interview With Noel Lawrence

Andrew Gallix — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 13:21:17 +0000

Interview by Aline Duriaud.

Noel Lawrence is a co-founder of Other Cinema Digital, the DVD distribution arm of San Francisco-based Other Cinema. He answered questions about Other Cinema and current projects including his latest venture, Provocateur Pictures, and his work on the legendary J.X. Williams.

3:AM: Please describe the history of, and your current involvement with, Other Cinema.

NL: Other Cinema began about 25 years ago as an underground exhibition space in San Francisco. The idea was to show marginal film that would not get exhibited in multiplexes or museums. Craig Baldwin put it best when he defined Other Cinema’s film programming as “the mad, the bad, the rad”.

The Mad as in alternative subjectivity and the repressed perspective.
The Bad as in camp, kitsch, low-culture.
The Rad as in radical, progressive politics.

We launched the DVD label about five years ago with the idea of promoting alternative work to an international audience through home video. The twenty-title catalogue we built speaks for itself and I am very proud of the work I did there.

3:AM: Can you talk about the interaction between “high” and “low” in the films you distribute, and in the modes of distribution and exhibition of films and compilations?

NL: I like to think of the work I curate as a mixture of the “high” and “low” or, better put, breaking down the barriers between “high” and “low” art. For example, when I first exhibited my Experiments in Terror program around Europe back in 2002, I would program ‘70s horror trailers with “fine art” films from Peter Tscherkassky and others. This juxtaposition rattled some audiences who thought I was mixing garbage together with legitimate art. However, I see parallels, interactions, and influences between fine art and mass culture and I like to underline that in the programs that I curate.

Further, the DVD market is, to some extent, a mass audience that is looking for “entertainment”. For me, however, the Other Cinema Digital project was a chance to show innovative and challenging work within the “Trojan horse” of entertainment. The programs were fun but they also had deeper resonances and meanings. For example, a lot of people enjoyed The 70s Dimension at the level of nostalgia for silly commercials, but it was also an anthropological document of consumer culture.

3:AM: Is there a performative element to the screenings you organise?

NL: As for the screenings I have organized, I really like to include a performative element, especially when it involves providing the unexpected. For example, I once did a program called Medical Madness (old education and experimental films about hospitals) and Craig came out before it started to announce I couldn’t do the show because I had a terrible accident. Then, an ambulance siren sounded and a bunch of our friends in nurse uniforms wheeled me out on a gurney. I was covered in blood-stained sheets and my head was wrapped in bandages. I then proceeded to introduce the program while screaming in pain. I wonder where my video of that might have gone…

3:AM: Where do you currently distribute and screen Other Cinema films?

NL: These DVDs are distributed through a combination of commercial outlets like Best Buy and institutional spaces such as universities and museums. That goes the same for my new distributor Microcinema.

3:AM: How is Other Cinema funded?

NL: It’s always been a hand to mouth kind of thing.

Almost all of my projects have been done with very small resources. I am a believer in a variation of the Einstein theory of e=mc2. In my theory, energy is not just matter but money. The more creative energy and inspiration you put into a project, the less money you need to make it happen. That’s why George Kuchar can make a masterpiece for $200 while Hollywood makes a piece of garbage for $200 million.

3:AM: What are your projects involving the J.X. Williams archive?

NL: I have several irons in the fire. I am currently editing a book on the great director which includes a number of critical essays as well as historical documents from the Archive. I am hoping to see that come out by the end of the year.

I am also working on a documentary called The Big Footnote which will be a tell-all on the life and work of J.X. I am raising money for that right now. Meanwhile, I have a smaller but very interesting project called J.X. Williams L.A. which is a video tour of the seamier side of Los Angeles. I show the viewer where important events happened in the life of J.X. Meanwhile, the Archive will be unveiling a few fragments we have recovered from lost films by J.X. Williams later this year.

3:AM: Please also talk about any other projects you’re involved in currently.

NL: I guess you can announce it here first but I just teamed up with Microcinema International to launch Provocateur Pictures. Mission is about the same as my past efforts: when Hollywood and Sundance reject your work, I’ll screen it. When your film is called weird or subversive, I’ll embrace it. I am interested in taking chances on great films that others don’t have the guts to show. As always, I want to get work out there that is different and possibly helps people think different.

The first release, Rob Nilsson’s Words For The Dying will be out in the fall. It’s a documentary about Brian Eno and John Cale. I have several other titles on the horizon. Among them, I am planning to release an amazing documentary on Fidel Castro where he hangs out with the filmmaker for a whole weekend. We get to see the Cuban dictator play baseball, tour farms, give four-hour speeches, etc. Really unique stuff and a beautiful film portrait.

I will be focusing more on feature documentaries, but I will continue to release more short film collections too. People have been nagging me for a third volume of Experiments in Terror, so I think I will need to do that sooner or later.

Until I find myself lying in a gutter, I will continue to get cool stuff out there.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Aline Duriaud is a writer, curator and mental health advocate. She is currently curating an exhibition at London’s Vegas Gallery, which will open in February 2009.

Not bored, neutral: An interview with Tao Lin

Susan Tomaselli — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 14:03:55 +0000

By Lee Rourke.

In the final week that this interview was conducted over email (taking about three weeks’ time in total), just after Tao Lin had sent me his final answer, a very strange thing happened: Tao Lin was interviewed on the Chris Evans show. Tao Lin, a master of self-publicity, had posted a simple (or so it seemed) plea on his blog. Within one day three British broadsheets had covered the story. I could only sit back and admire Tao Lin’s temerity, insouciance and media savvy.

Tao Lin is quite a special writer and like all special writers he is either loved or loathed – there is no in-between. His writing is pared down, ironic, minimalist and often extremely amusing. He essentially writes about himself – a subject in which he constantly teases us with throughout his burgeoning collection of work.

It took me quite a while to warm to Tao Lin’s writing. I was meant to review his debut novel a long time ago and after three false starts I eventually got around to reading his book and was finally overwhelmed by the ontology at play beneath its deliberately monotonous surface. Just as I was about to sit down to write my review I read this by the critic Stephen Mitchelmore – it was a review that said everything I wanted to say, only it was said far better than I ever could.

So I never got around to reviewing Tao Lin’s work, which turned out to be a good thing, because now I can just read his work without ever worrying what I should say about it, I just delight in the words he writes, reading Tao Lin is a pleasure, a relief, a great thing. I’m not the first person to say this, but I’m going to say it here anyway, more people should read Tao Lin.

3:AM: Having read Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy - and in reading your poetry in general, as well as your fiction - I have noticed that you manage to create a unique loneliness, or otherness, within your work. A dislocation within it that can either mesmerise a reader or repel them. Not many writers - in my opinion - can achieve this and I wondered if this is a conscious element within your writing as a whole?

Tao Lin: When I am editing something I reread it a lot and try to “observe” myself rereading it, to see what effects my things are having on me, to know if I want to change them or not, so I think whatever happened was “conscious.”

3:AM: Your editing process reminds me of something Tom McCarthy posits in Remainder: the work of art - to paraphrase - is already there within in the block of marble; all the sculptor has to do is remove the surplus matter to reveal it. Is writing poetry more suited to this methodology than writing prose? I mean, you’re certainly capable of switching between the two but which, if any, do you prefer?

TL: I feel really alone or “helpless” or something thinking about this, like I’m about to type a sentence that includes the phrase “the arbitrary nature of the universe” to answer your question but I don’t want to do that for some reason. I think the main thing is that my poetry has line breaks and my prose doesn’t. For many of my poems if you took away the line breaks it could be interpreted as prose maybe. In conclusion I think poetry and prose are probably equally suitable to the methodology you described, “I’m not sure really.”

3:AM: Stylistically your poetry (and prose) is simple in form and free of syrupy attempts at being ‘Literary’. Your poetry, orthographically at least, reminds me of ee cummings‘ work, as it seems to possess the same insouciance and overt avoidance of metaphor, grammar and versification: a modern example of free verse that still, like cummings’, manages to be rather traditional. Is it important for you as a writer to openly avoid being ‘Literary’ yet knowingly be ‘Literary’ in doing so? And if so why?

TL: I really feel alienated from “serious literature” or something. Last night I tried to read books and I didn’t really want to read any books. I read the same 15-25 books repeatedly and feel satisfied. I think I don’t want to make people feel stupid when they read my writing. Currently I want to write things that I feel comfortable reading out loud. This includes not making the audience feel bored or think I’m smarter than them or something.

I almost never feel stupid when I read something someone else wrote. If I read something really abstract or something about quantum physics or string theory I think things like, “This person has done certain things in his head to create certain connections or something, connections I don’t have currently.” I also never feel “profound” or “deep” or really smart or something. Over time I have thought less about intelligence and more about differences. I don’t know who is more “intelligent” than who, just that two people are different. When I was ten or something I would look at other kids and think about who was smarter, if someone was really smart I would know they were really smart, some of my friends I thought were not that smart, it wouldn’t really affect how much I liked a person, but I feel like I even would think about a person and think things like, “His IQ is probably around 120.”

I don’t think things like that anymore. Now I think about people in terms of personality more, like whether someone is autistic and to what degree, or if they are “unalienable” or really nervous or something. I don’t look at things like David Foster Wallace or Thomas Pynchon or some physics person and think they are really smart. I think about them alone, doing things, different things, not better or worse things, and doing things with people, like interacting with people, I actually do think like this or force myself to which is why I think I feel unable to write book reviews or rhetorical essays. I think of people who look at something “simple” and say that it is “deceptively simple” and I think, “That person has associated ‘complex’ with ‘good’ and ‘simple’ with ‘bad and stupid’ or something,” and if I think other things I resist it.

In terms of my own writing I have thought about it and I have changed a lot over 2-4 years. At first I was writing things that I do not like today as much, and which are not published, but which I really liked while writing them (and I do not think those feelings were “not legitimate” or “stupid” or something; if I kept writing the way I did I would probably still have books out today, they would just be different books), then I wrote Bed which I still like but has many parts I would not write today, then I wrote Eeeee Eee Eeee which I think has certain things that today I would not write, then I wrote you are a little bit happier than i am which I feel surprised that I wrote (I feel surprised how different the style is compared to Bed and that I don’t remember ever having some kind of realization of changing my style or whatever), then I wrote Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy which I also feel surprised that I wrote, because I would not write that today. And my next novel is something I want to not feel embarrassed to read aloud to any audience including hipsters or farmers or my parents or something. This is over 2-4 years, which is surprising to me a little, I will explain.

I think since Melville House is probably willing to publish almost anything I write I can actually “evolve” over time, whereas I feel that most writers that, throughout history, got enough “media attention” to still exist to people today just had their works that did not “fit” into their “oeuvre” not be published, due to “intervention” by editors and literary agents and friends and critics and whoever. This is just a “theory” or something.

But with me I have little “fear” that Melville House will not like my next novel, and I don’t have anyone else I am showing it to, I have no literary agent. I feel free to write whatever I want to read and even to “ruin” my books like I did with Eeeee Eee Eeee by adding animals to it. It feels exciting to me to “ruin” a book in that way. I feel like it would be exciting to write a linear, realistic novel that has not been “ruined” in any way, which is what I want my next novel to be like I think. I also “ruined” Eeeee Eee Eeee by giving it certain things like cancer and terrorism (I think) and death to make it more “important” (I don’t want to do things like that anymore, currently). I’m not sure how much exactly I thought about those things but I know cancer is in the book. I am surprised I actually put cancer in the book. I feel like it has been a “joke” to me for at least five to seven years to “make a person have cancer in a book so the book will be more important” yet there is cancer in that book, I inserted cancer into that book, I’m not sure what the level of sarcasm of the cancer in that book is though, maybe I was “being sarcastic.”

3:AM: Your writing in its approach explores a territory of human consciousness I would call ’surface movement’; I suppose you would call it ‘concrete reality’. I think this has to do with something we both share as writers: the weight of boredom within ‘Being’. Can you elucidate a little about your thoughts on boredom and how it infiltrates your writing?

TL: I’m not sure if I know what I mean exactly anymore when I say “bored.” It doesn’t really create any images in my head or cause me to feel emotions. In high school I read a lot of Kurt Vonnegut and thought about meaninglessness a lot, and during that time, and in college some also, when I thought “meaninglessness” I think I actually had some kind of image or feeling associated with it, that I would feel or see or something, but now I really don’t have anything associated with “meaningless” (if someone says “life is meaningless” I don’t feel like I have any connection with that person), which is how it is with “boredom” now, I think. I only use those terms sarcastically now I think. Gradually more abstract words are having less effect my brain. Sometimes I read sentences and it is almost the same for me as looking at a wall or something.

3:AM: Whenever I read your work I always think of Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. Not so much his heteronyms but his underlying everyday ennui. Are you influenced by his writing in any way?

TL: I like The Book of Disquiet, I’ve read it more than once, but I don’t think I’m much influenced by it, partly because when I read it I had already written all my books except Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy I think. I like his tone, I think it is “emo” and sarcastic and ultimately playful, like I feel like he enjoys making jokes about how sad and bored he feels because he “likes” his sadness and boredom to some extent, or at least thinks it is funny. Yes, I like Fernando Pessoa. He is probably the earliest writer who had that tone I just talked about that I have read. I forget when The Book of Disquiet was published. Jean Rhys also sort of had a similar tone in 1939 with Good Morning, Midnight.

3:AM: So, is it the right ‘tone’ you are looking for in your writing? In fiction and poetry in general? You recently published a ‘K-mart Realism’ list of favourite books/authors. Each of the books you chose - the ones that I have read - share that same ‘tone’ I think. It’s a pretty fine list, Jean Rhys tops it (I must say that I think the juxtaposition of ‘Jean Rhys’ and ‘K-mart’ is a work of poetry in itself); can you explain a little about ‘K-mart Realism’ and the ‘tone’ such writing shares?

TL: The tone I currently am writing in (second novel) is “neutral” I think. I am writing it like a journalism thing maybe, like an AP story. AP stories are really funny to me, they have funny quotes and describe things concretely, “severely detached.” The tone I currently like to write in most in poetry is like Matthew Rohrer’s A Green Light maybe, or the poems by Zachary German I read in his magazine The Name of This Band is The Talking Heads. I don’t know, I just thought about what tone I like to write in and a lot of things went into my head, out of the twenty or thirty books that exist that I like I feel like there are twenty or thirty different tones. I would try to describe the tone but I don’t think that “works,” I mean when I describe something it doesn’t work at all, people will say that they like the similar kind of writing as me but then later I will learn that they like books that I do not like and like things that I do not like. “It just doesn’t work.”

My favorite “K-Mart Realism” books are Chilly Scenes of Winter and Distortions by Ann Beattie and Escapes and Honored Guest by Joy Williams. A one sentence description of “K-Mart Realism” could be, “They mostly only use ‘said’ for dialogue tags and their characters are capable of feeling depressed ‘for no concrete reason’ and don’t have cancer usually and there are not political things mostly.”

3:AM: I read somewhere that Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy is being used on Psychology courses, is this true?

TL: Yes, a professor at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania is using it in her “clinical psychology” and “personality psychology” classes. She has read the book, she even wrote a review / academic essay thing on the book and submitted it to a Harvard psychology journal. I would like to be in her class. I took a “personality” class in college and the textbook was $120 or something.

3:AM: You have already mentioned ‘K-mart realism’ and a specific ‘tone’ that you desire, do you see a school of writers and new writing emerging in New York, especially in Brooklyn? A kind of K-mart realism revival?

TL: I think there is a tiny “K-Mart Realism” revival on my blog maybe. I have probably caused 10-15 people to read Chilly Scenes of Winter by Ann Beattie, 10-15 people to read something by Joy Williams, 3-4 people to read Two Against One by Frederick Barthelme, and 3-4 people to read Shiloh and Other Stories by Bobbie Ann Mason. Some of these people have blogged about those books after reading them, causing 5-10 more people to read those books. Overall I may have caused indirectly 75-125 people to read a “K-Mart Realism” book over 2-3 years.

I think in Brooklyn I know of one other person writing things that I would consider similar in some way to “K-Mart Realism” that I like, “Zachary German.” There are 2-3 other people also but I don’t talk to them regularly. “Deb Olin Unferth” has some things I would consider similar in some way to “K-Mart Realism” and so does “Rebecca Curtis.” So far no media coverage has occurred saying anything about a new school of writers emerging in New York that has something to do with “K-Mart Realism.” I think if someone did it it would be true, 2-3 people are enough to be a “revival” I think, so I guess there is a “revival.”

3:AM: Which forces me to ask you who are your favourite contemporary writers?

TL: I think Joy Williams, Lorrie Moore, and anyone published by Bearparade.com.

3:AM: So, what’s Bore Parade all about? And who is behind all this? Do you know them?

TL: I think bore parade is started by a person I met in Amherst, he had an afro, he is white. Later he and his friends came to my launch party in Brooklyn for Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy.

werner herzog floating in outer space angry thinking
i have too much experience in the business for this
by Ellen Kennedy

3:AM: Is there anything that interests you in the UK or the rest of Europe right now? I’m thinking Literature, music, stuff like that?

TL: I like Chris Killen. His first novel The Bird Room is coming out in 2009 from Canongate. Other than Chris Killen I don’t have a “clear” thought about writers in the UK. I feel like there are 5-8 Toby’s. Toby Litt. I can only think of one specific Toby but I feel there are 5-8. I know Martin Amis exists. I also just thought “Julian Barnes.” When I look at “Barnes” right now I think “Barnes and Noble.” I just thought “Rick Moody” for some reason, I know he’s American. The Collected Short Stories by Lorrie Moore came out in the UK I think but not in the U.S.

I like Werner Herzog. I think he has “forsaken” Germany, I’m probably wrong, I think I read that somewhere. “As for music” I like “The Refused” and some other bands like that from I think either Sweden or Switzerland. I don’t know what else to type. I have heard of a book called Naive. Super from the Netherlands or somewhere that I want to read sort of.

3:AM: Finally Tao Lin, you are very, very adept at eschewing anything personal about yourself whatsoever. Could you please leave us with at least one personal secret?

TL: A lot of things in my books are “true.” “People should just read my books” to learn about me I think. I’m not just trying to promote my books right now, I really think people can learn most about me by reading my books.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Lee Rourke is the author of Everyday and the forthcoming The Canal.

Madame Bovary C’est Moi: An Interview With Andreï Makine

Andrew Gallix — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 20:18:44 +0000

By Gerry Feehily.

It’s said that on his death in 1982, Leonid Brezhnev, leader of the Soviet Union, was so obese that his body fell through the bottom of the wooden coffin meant to contain him. Reassigned to a metal casket, a final indignity still awaited at his graveside by the Kremlin walls. The pallbearers lowering him down on ropes proved unable to cope with the weight. The coffin slipped, clunked off the grave’s edge, then disappeared into the hole with a loud crash.

The coffin fell, and so, as Soviet born writer, Andreï Makine, would have it, did the USSR. “You could have heard a gasp go through the length and breadth of the empire, a gasp that said, ‘It’s all over’.’” One might question the historical validity of his argument, but not the metaphor. After an hour of free-ranging conversation with Makine, covering anything from Martin Amis’s Russian-based novels (”Aren’t there enough Russians to write about in London?” he asks) to quoting chunks of Flaubert, one is struck by his novelist’s knack of coupling personal insight to literary and historical anecdote.

Indeed, Makine’s life has something of a Promethean quality, one where life and literature constantly blur. Author of twelve novels, he has fashioned a new identity for himself in a France which, from his native Siberia, he dreamed of in the works of Balzac and Flaubert, and from tales told him by his French-born grandmother. “France is temperamentally at odds to the Russian mind,” he says. “But it’s the intellectual capital of the West, unlike America, its economic one.”

Granted asylum here in 1987, the rude existence of hard-up émigré provided him contrasts between dream and reality which have informed his fiction ever since. “I occasionally slept rough at the cemetery of Père Lachaise,” he says, “observing from my cover women lying out on the tomb of murdered French journalist, Victor Noir, a reputed cure for sterility.”

Makine was at the same time enrolled at the Sorbonne, working on a doctorate on Russian Nobel prize winner, Ivan Bunin. While writing his first novels in a succession of cramped chambres de bonne, those seven-floor walk-ups under Paris’s peaked lead roofs, stifling in summer, freezing in winter, he eked out a living teaching Russian culture and language. “No-one wanted to publish me,” he says. “Editors didn’t believe a Russian could write French like this.”

Having persuaded a French friend to pose as his Russian translator, Makine’s first novel, A Hero’s Daughter, came in by the back door in 1990. Like its two successors, it sold a few hundred copies before sinking into the great book ocean with that plip most first-time authors fear. His fourth, 1995’s Dreams of My Russian Summers, was another matter.

Set between the doleful reality of “real socialism” in Russia, and a dreamed-of life in France, it managed to take with the public and critics, winning both the Prix Goncourt and the Medicis, a feat unique in French literary history. With fame came a number of pleasures and engagements. An avid traveler, Makine amusingly describes literary junkets and colloquiums. “It’s not always a good sensation to feel mummified in an academic paper. There are also one’s fellow writers, who are sometimes as stiff as sphinxes, all tremulous dignity. Beyond the hours of composition, however, I believe a writer owes it to himself to be frivolous.”

Frivolous, however, is not how Makine appears. He is lean, with one of those rock-like Russian faces which wouldn’t look out of place as a monument to the glory of the USSR in, say, Berlin’s Treptow Park. This is reflected in his choice of the unostentatious, café populaire where we sit, at the foot of Montmartre. Having eschewed family life to pursue, with something of a monastic fervour, a literary calling, he lives, as he admits, “a spare life”.

Indeed, he lives in a former mental asylum where, notably, author Gérard de Nerval was treated. “A place which very much suits me,” he says, and spends part of the year in a rented house in the historically resonant Vendée in Western France, where counter-revolutionary Chouans fought and fell to the Jacobins, prototypes, one could argue, of those Soviet zealots of the revolution which, to judge by his novels, he seems to abhor.

Or perhaps not quite. The question of revolution and how it emancipates is the enigma central to his latest novel to be published in Britain, Human Love (translated by Geoffrey Strachan). Elias, an Angolan growing up as his country enters into a war of independence against its Portuguese colonial master in the sixties, is the son of a rebel, who has escaped to the Congo. Having seen his mother die from injuries sustained in a Portuguese jail, he is raised by a Portuguese priest. Attaining to the status of an assimilado (a native Angolan with certain privileges in the colony) he joins his father in neighbouring Congo, where he fights alongside Che Guevara in his unsuccessful 1965 expedition there.

His father killed by Belgian mercenaries, Elias travels to Cuba. Disappointed by what he has seen in Congo and Cuba of middle-class revolutionaries who could “sacrifice millions of lives at the altar of an idea, but who wept …(thinking of a)… blind dog,” he nevertheless pursues the cause in Moscow, where he is readied for service back in Africa. “Elias,” says Makine, “is a ‘total man,’ one of those men Musil believed could no longer exist in our parcelled, segmented, dispersed age. Totalitarianism, however inhuman, did produce such men, monoliths of dedication to the one cause.”

A cause, one might have imagined, difficult for Makine to sympathise with. “It was a real struggle for me to create this character,” he says. “If you grew up in the USSR, having propaganda drummed into you daily, the mere mention now even of Le Parti Socialiste is enough to make your heart sink. It’s a writer’s task, however, not to present a political position, but the world. How could the monarchist Balzac have described the capitalist society of the nineteenth century so copiously?”

Makine’s point of entry is a crack in Elias’s monolithic persona — his capacity to love. As a young man in the Congo, witness to “breathless jiggling” between rebels and local women, he wonders why the “revolution had not yet taught…a different love…”. With Anna, a Siberian destined for life in diplomatic service, love provides a raison d’être to sustain him through the disenchantments of the seventies and eighties, as Africa becomes engulfed in proxy wars fought out by the Soviet Union and the United States.

A novel filled with horrors — Elias’s mother’s collar bone sticking out of her skin, a child soldier who walks around a rebel camp high on dope, wearing a gas mask — Human Love’s rage is such that it would be too easy and too treacly to conclude that love will save us. It depicts a world where idealism is futile, but offers little comfort elsewhere. In Auden’s words: “History may say ‘Alas’, but cannot pardon”. “History is a nightmare,” says Makine. “A white man in Africa can push a fat steak aside and think of slimming, while a child fifty miles away is gnawing at the bark of a tree. Wouldn’t this drive us mad if we didn’t have art?”

The Africa where dictators’ wives fly to Paris to have their hair styled, while child soldiers butcher entire villages, has haunted Makine for decades. “I wrote Human Love in 2005, but carried it within me for nearly twenty years, waiting for that period of African history to resolve itself, so to speak. I myself have painful memories of Angola and Somalia, where we exported the Communist ideal, when it had been dead in the USSR for decades. It still persisted in Africa, this belief that the ‘other’ is not one’s enemy, and this imposture and lie was a terrible experience.”

This raises an intriguing question about Makine’s own past and political commitments. Championed by right-wing journals like Le Figaro, Makine, in a 2006 essay entitled “The France We Have Forgotten to Love”, railed against car burnings in Strasbourg’s North African banlieues, symptomatic, he feels, of a climate of political correctness which tolerates anti-social behaviour. Elsewhere, however, his scorn of Western materialism suggests he cannot be so easily co-opted. As to the identity of Human Love’s unnamed narrator, a disillusioned Soviet intellectual sickened by a world which “turns humans into objects of commerce,” Makine says, “The narrator, c’est moi. Madame Bovary, c’est moi.”

So could it be safe to infer then that Makine, like the narrator, was once a prisoner of UNITA rebels in Angola, on a mission in 1977 with a group of other Soviet “instructors” to prop up the Marxist-Leninist MPLA government? As the interview closes, this part of Makine’s life will remain enigmatic. Flaubert, after all, was not really Bovary, or at least not quite. “If I gave you a three-minute summary of my life, you could write a novel about it, but then I would have to drop some polonium into your coffee,” he says.

“My past is the only one I have,” he continues. “Let’s say I was a teacher, and be content with this. A novelist must say only so much, otherwise his inspiration dries up. This is true of everyday life—- like the poet Mayakovsky, who at the cinema with his mistress, as she commented on the unusual clothes a group seated in front of them was wearing, told her, “save it for the novel”. The novel that is Makine’s life, the novels he has wrought from it.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWEE
Russian author Andreï Makine was born in Krasnoyarsk, Soviet Union, on September 10, 1957 and grew up in city of Penza, 440 miles south-east of Moscow. He obtained a doctorate at the State University of Moscow, having written a thesis on French literature. He then taught philosophy at the Novogrod Institute. In 1987, while on a teacher’s exchange in France, he sought and was granted political asylum. A period of penury followed, but he eventually became professor of Russian language and culture at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and wrote a thesis on the works of Russian Nobel Laureate Ivan Bunin while at the Sorbonne. His early novels, written in French, met with little success. However, his fourth novel — 1995’s Dreams of My Russian Summers — was critically and commercially acclaimed, and was awarded both the Prix Goncourt and Medicis. Since then he has gone on to write several other works, including Requiem for a Lost Empire (2001) and The Woman who Waited (2004), all of which are translated in English by Geoffrey Strachan. Human Love is published by Sceptre in the United Kingdom. Andreï Makine divides his time between Paris and a rented house in the Vendée, in the west of France.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Gerry Feehily was born in London and raised in Ireland. As a teenager in the eighties, he took to heart Phil Oakey of the Human League’s exhortation to “take time to see the wonders of the world” and has lived in Italy, Spain, Germany and Japan. Paris-based since the mid-nineties, he is the translator of Sniper, by Pavel Hak (Serpent’s Tail), and writes regularly on literature for Guardian Unlimited and The Independent. Fever, his first novel, was published by Parthian in 2007.