Chris Killen, 3:AM’s other famous editor [see Tao Lin], talks to Pirooz M. Kalayeh about his band The Miniature Swans, the influence of Richard Brautigan, film-making and David Lynch, and his novel The Bird Room:
The main thing I’m interested in – or at least the thing I was most interested in when I was writing The Bird Room – was the urge towards self-destruction. If I look at the novel now, and think about it for a while, that seems to be the element that stands out most: self-destruction, sometimes on a sub-conscious or unconscious level. ‘Self-destruction’ sounds kind of serious and over-the-top, though. I will try and explain a bit more … It’s like the feeling of standing next to a river, and thinking ‘I could just throw myself in,’ or of having an important business meeting or something and thinking to yourself, ‘I could just say something completely inappropriate here,’ or, ‘I could pick my glass of wine up and throw it in this person’s face.’ I think things like that a lot in my life. I think most people do. I don’t act on them, but in my novel, the narrator at times acts on these urges.
Also, I think people are sometimes motivated unconsciously towards things that will ‘harm’ them or ‘worsen’ their situations. Like a person being attracted to a ‘bad’ character type; they know they should be in a relationship with a ‘nice’ person, someone who treats them right, and they go out with a string of ‘bad’ people, who are cruel to them and mess them around. Why? I have no idea. Maybe they like the drama. Maybe they seek some kind of punishment. I don’t want to ever completely answer these things, flat-out. To me, that would be too simplistic psychologically, and also kind of preachy and putting myself ‘above’ the characters. I think that people are often motivated by about five or six conflicting feelings and urges at the same time.
I like Knut Hamsun’s early novels a lot. In Hunger, Mysteries, and Pan especially, the characters do things that don’t always make sense. They follow urges and often – for no obvious reason – make their situations worse. When I first read Hamsun (I’m thinking, for example, of the scene in Pan where Lieutenant Glahn takes the shoe off Edvarda’s foot and throws it in the lake) I felt very excited. I really felt like I understood the characters; they felt more ‘psychologically complex’ to me than other fictional characters I’d read previously. I hope I’m not just copying Knut Hamsun. I feel it’s more like he proposed a new way of doing things, and people read him and went, ‘Yes, that’s true, that is how people are,’ and then they went back to writing simplistically motivated characters and forgot about him. I would like to read more Hamsun-like characters in novels.
First posted: Wednesday, August 13th, 2008.
