Up on the stage of the 100 Club for National Poetry Day, Horovitz rallies and drifts, dithering over what’s next, he’s entirely comfortable to bumble across the microphone knowing always that his audience is with him, on his side cheering. And if you start to wonder if art should be mixed up in politics, doesn’t Billy Bragg slightly stain a good pop tune? What did Lennon sing about? Remember what Picasso said when asked: what is the function of Art? To Combat the Darkness.
Sophie Parkin reviews / interviews Michael Horovitz on the occasion of the publication of his New Waste Land.
Although I’m conscious of that problem among Japanese youth in anime, I think it’s more important to show the younger generation how great it is to be successful. I’m not criticizing Hayao Miyazaki, for example, but I wish he would make more of his status. He should have gone to the Academy Awards ceremony [when Spirited Away won best animated feature film], and he should be showing off his winning of the Academy Award, and showing young artists his status, his international wealth and fame.
I see myself as both a New York and American writer, particularly since in many ways I feel that New York carries some of the finest aspects of America. In regard to New York writers, some more current writers whose works I enjoy are Jennifer Belle and Kate Christensen. New York writers of the past who were inspirations for me include Poe, Whitman and Herman Melville.
He acknowledges B.S. Johnson’s influence, but is keen to namecheck other sources of inspiration. “One [book] I haven’t spoken about very much is The Pledge by Friedrich Durrenmatt. I read it maybe four or five years ago I suppose; I was really struck by how formally perfect it was - how very beautifully the main narrative is wrapped up in a framing device, and how uncluttered it is. It tells a very simple, very linear story which nevertheless sets off incredible resonances and echoes.”
I think TV and film often do surreal very well because of the visual aspect, and as I like to write surreal things myself, they can really stimulate my imagination. I’m not alone in this — Haruki Murakami is a great admirer of David Lynch for example, and wrote most of The Wind Up Bird Chronicle while watching Twin Peaks.
I’ve always managed to get myself out of trouble. You know how that all ends though? It all ends very badly. When you’re lying on the hospital bed going ‘oh my god I’ve really done it this time – all my life had lead up to this one moment. I’m smashed up I can’t move my neck, my face is all smashed in. My wrists are broken, my arm looks wonky, will it ever be straight again? When your girlfriend walks in and she’s crying her eyes out saying ‘ I can’t be with you anymore because you’re a fucking idiot’ – it’s very hard to argue it out.
I really hate when it is blatantly apparent some writer got a book deal for all the wrong reasons. Sometimes I read a writer that perhaps is visually closer to me than say Don Delillo and I think about a sort of affirmative action in the literary world that has something to do with countries we are at war with, countries we *may* be at war with, countries we are robbing, or countries we have demolished.
The Crass output became self-conscious and ‘preachy’ once they got an audience — I felt sorry for the people who were perhaps young and encountering Crass and punk for the first time at this juncture and so bought into an opinion as though it was a reality. The map is not the territory.
My using heroin didn’t have any kind of literary significance for me at the time. I never thought, “I’ll try heroin and then write about it”. I mean, at one point I really thought I wasn’t going to survive. I took notes, absurd things that happened I jotted them down, but I never thought “One day this will be a novel”. I mean I had more pressing concerns. Like where I was going to get my next fix from. Algren’s book was written in the voice of a narrator. Mine was written in a way to take the reader into the bathroom stall, so to speak. And how do you write about love if you have never experienced it?
You see, left alone, a gay person is hardly gay at all, but put two such people together and they are four times as gay as they were separately. Four gay people are sixteen times as gay as two and so on. And where my friend does that leave me? Are you going to suck my cock while I am having this conversation with myself?
