Gordon Lish Interview 1998

Gordon Lish Interviewed (1998) about the world of Fiction 

and the burden of The Reader looking over his shoulder

by Alexander Laurence

Gordon Lish has taught fiction classes for 38 years, but now he has retired. He has hung out with writers like Don DeLillo and Cynthia Ozick, and has inspired many writers by his fiction workshops. Many writers have even claimed to have taken his classes who may have not been there. Whether yes or no, Lish is known as an editor, at Esquire Magazine and at Knopf, and now as a writer of some compelling works of fiction, starting with Dear Mr. Capote, up to recent works such as Epigraph and Self-Imitation of Myself. How I became interested in Lish recently was that I had heard he and DeLillo meet once a week, watch movies, drink and talk about women. I wanted to join them on one of these nights but DeLillo refused to join us. As I entered the Upper East Side abode of Mr Lish, with the photographer, he told us to remove our shoes, which we did, and ended up having a conversation for over two hours. Here is some of our talk.

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AL: As far as the field of creative writing goes, you are a person who is known to a lot of younger writers, whether they have taken classes by you or not. Can you talk about your influence on these writers?

GL: I have taught at Yale, NYU, and Columbia. I used to teach week-long seminars and three-day seminars in various cities. I have taught privately. I used to teach two days a week at NYU. I would have about thirty students. At some point I wanted to teach longer hours. I ended up teaching as long as ten hours.

AL:  What do you think of academic writing? Were you teaching a certain esthetic or focusing on a certain type of writing?

GL: Absolutely. You have to pay a lot of money to find that out. (laughter). I have been linked to Minimalism, but I have also sponsored Harold Brodkey and Cynthia Ozick. This is a convenience for people who don't want to comprehend these matters. Minimalism has nothing to do with it. Amy Hempel once wrote an article for Vanity Fair where she was arguing for this esthetic, which she understood to be the one that I was promoting. She said "Well, it's just leaving out the uninteresting parts." My take on these matters hardly could be reduced to writing or information. I teach people how to manage to make a totality, a totalizing effect out of singularity. This term is also used in Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition. It's the means by which one dilates the origin into destination. I'm very specific about that. These poetics do not confine the result, but they tend to potentiate any result. There has, on the other hand, emerged an industry of writing. The Quarterly still receives mail after being defunct for three years. Before I throw stuff away I look at things sent in and there are still people who are delighted to give you their pedigree. They offer a recitation of where they published, where they studied, and often these people are teachers of writing. More often than not, they are teachers of writing, and you can't believe that they are writing.....

AL: As an editor and publisher, has a writer's resume or history ever mattered to you?

GL: Oh no. I throw it out. I don't look at it. If I do look at it now, it's just to share the ironies of it with my students. It's comical.

AL: Do you read a page?

GL: I don't even read a page. Less than a sentence. I fancy myself being able to read a page without reading a page. There's a look that good writing has, and I have a talent for seeing it. At Esquire Magazine, I used to look at a thousand pieces of unsolicited mail a week. I do think that there is a painterly aspect to the page, in the hands of a literary artist, or it's not there. I think it's either the typewriter producing these utterances, or it's a peculiar psychological or emotional presence. It's either coming out a sense of the error that art is, or persons who think they can get it right. Those people think writing is sounding like everybody else. They don't understand that real writing is sounding like only you can sound. I don't do a lot of reading, but I do a lot of looking.

AL: What do you think of the role of the writer presently? I know that Don DeLillo has written a piece about history and fiction. Does the writer have a social responsibility?

GL: DeLillo can look at things and get them right. That is to say, get them wrong, and by getting them wrong, making them stronger. I am not competent of looking at things. All I am able to look at is language, and behavioral features in myself, as occasions to fit the language to. If I tried to do what DeLillo does, or even render that bench stoop, I wouldn't have the ability and I wouldn't have the enthusiasm for the task. I wish that I had the strength of what DeLillo's texts exhibit to the world, and convey to others a sense of what ones looking at. I follow Walter Pater's view of the object only exists as a means for the subject to enact himself. In fact, I go further, and say that you, the subject, are only present to the object because of the nature of the subject. I only see anything because of the man I am. Everybody is looking at something else. I tend to be autistic and do things an autistic person does and which is failing to see what is central to the event, and instead sees something peripheral to it. If we went to see a stage play, you might find me distracted and looking at someone in another row or looking at the curtain, and not looking at the drama on-stage. I tend to be very solipsistic and very shut off from other people. The only objectivity, authenticity, stability there is to the extent that any of these words would apply to what I'm about to say, is in language itself, but of course the language is not stable.

AL: It's really strange that in the new book you deal with so few elements, there's a solipsistic monologue aspect, but at the same time you are referring back to the text as text, whatever it's called, "self-reflective," and I'm often reminded of Italo Calvino's work. An episode may be set off by a mundane occurrence in life, which eventually disappears into the writer's voice.

GL: The two new books which will be coming out in the near future, Arcade, and certainly the one that I am working on now, all represent a more considerable descent into the very terms you just described. These books become more and more self-reflexive. And how should I say, capricious, and caught up in the paradox of the reader becoming a burden. Yet what are you doing it for unless you are positing a reader? At least one person has to read. I imagine one among the mighty dead, like Beckett or Joyce. I might be happy if Kafka is the reader. I might not be too happy if someone in my immediate family is the reader. Besides my students, I think that Cormac McCarthy, Cynthia Ozick, and Don DeLillo are the only writers who I care about, and I would like them to be my readers.

Interview with NICK ZEDD

Interview with NICK ZEDD

"Making Movies/Menstrual Wars"

by Alexander Laurence

Nick Zedd is the founder of The Cinema of Transgression. His first films, THEY EAT SCUM (1979) and THE BOGUS MAN (1980), and his publication of The Underground Film Bulletin (1983-1990), established him as an important underground filmmaker and a champion of the movement. Zedd's manifestos promised "blood, shame, pain, and ecstasy, the likes of which no one has yet imagined." During the 1980s Zedd collaborated with Richard Kern, Lydia Lunch, Richard Hell, Cassandra Stark, Ela Troyano, Kembra Pfahler, and Alyce Wittenstein, most of whom are associated with New York underground film.

In the 1980s Nick Zedd continued to make movies and show them in New York City and at film festivals in Europe and around the country. His body of work includes GEEK MAGGOT BINGO (1983), THE WILD WORLD OF LYDIA LUNCH (1983), THRUST IN ME (1984), KISS ME GOODBYE (1986), POLICE STATE (1987), WHOREGASM (1988), and WAR IS MENSTRUAL ENVY (!990-92). Zedd has recently exhibited his films at The Museum of Modern Art and The Whitney Museum. In 1992, he published his memoir BLEED PART ONE (Hanuman Books). In 1997, we will be seeing his first book TOTEM OF THE DEPRAVED (2.13.61) which recalls his experiences with the New York film underground. Zedd is currently working on a new novel. Two collections of his films are available: STEAL THIS VIDEO and THE CINEMA OF TRANSGRESSION. These films and a catalogue can be obtained from Nick Zedd himself at PO Box 1589, New York, NY 10009.

Alexander Laurence: Do you consider yourself foremost a writer or a filmmaker?

Nick Zedd: I'm just a person like anyone else. When I was doing the movies I was writing because I did the screenplays. I used to write a lot for The Underground Film Bulletin. Trying to write a long book, I first started doing that in the late 1980s mainly with the idea of doing of a novel. I was living on 17th Street in a basement. It was miserable because all these rats were crawling everywhere. They were running around. One fairly big rat came up through the toilet swimming through the pipes. We couldn't flush it down. Then there was this horrible midget Super who would come in every morning at 5AM with his dog. He would make all this racket and wake me up. I thought about writing a novel about being a murderer. I was fantasizing about killing. Then the girl who I was living with disappeared and left for Hollywood to become a porn star. I thought about writing a story about her with sex and eating shit. The idea was that I was going to write about killing people because there were all these people who I hated.

            Then I went to Sweden, to show movies, and I hung out with this crazy girl, Frida. When I came back I realized that I had enough from that to make a book of true stories. Darius James got me a gig writing for Penthouse. One of the earliest things that I wrote for them was about Lydia Lunch. Then I had a chapter there. I finished that in a couple years. I called it "Bleed." Now it's called Totem of The Depraved.

AL: I suppose that people ask you often what you meant by making films like THEY EAT SCUM and THE BOGUS MAN. From your book I notice that you don't talk about the films as much as you do with the people you worked with?

NZ: To me the mechanics of making a movie are not as interesting as the personalities that you come in contact with.

AL: I think that Richard Kern's take on The Cinema of Transgression was that there were all these film people working and living in the East Village in the 1980s and at some point you gave it a name, people started talking about it, then some people stayed on the boat and others got off.

NZ: There were a lot of rats that jumped off the sinking ship, but I was not one of them. There were opportunists and there still are. People pretend now that they were so exploited back then. They say "We deserve more attention than Zedd, Kern and Lunch. Poor us, we don't get any attention." But they weren't the people who were putting up posters. I'm the one who did, and still do. I put up five hundred posters and got arrested. These other filmmakers put up three posters and nobody showed up, then they complained about getting no attention. As with any movement, it disintegrates. People end up hating each other. I guess there were some things we had in common: we were all the same age and lived in the same neighborhood.

AL: Which people from the films do you still associate with?

NZ: I still talk to Kern, Richard Hell, and Tessa Hughes-Freeland.

AL: There was a retrospective of many films associated with The Cinema of Transgression at The Whitney Museum. This film series was called "No Wave Cinema, 1978-87" and curated by Matthew Yokobosky. This series included your films THE BOGUS MAN, THE WILD WORLD OF LYDIA LUNCH, and POLICE STATE. Did you have a big influence over the selection of films included in this series?

NZ: No. Well, the curator bought a full set of Film Bulletins to educate himself, belatedly. That helped him. I think that they were a bit lazy. Their emphasis seemed to be dictated by what the journalists said to them, which is typical. They just went by what other journalists wrote instead of examining the films that are more significant.

AL: What do you think of Yokobosky's inclusion of filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch and Abel Ferrera? Do you think of yourself working along similar lines as those guys?

NZ: No. I really have nothing in common with those people. Ferrera is a commercial filmmaker: making movies with Madonna? That really has nothing to do with no wave cinema. The academic community is always very slow in catching up. They are arrogant. They assume that they are the center of the universe, when in reality, they are quite irrelevant. The people who organized the retrospective at The Whitney are living in the year 1980. Maybe in twenty years they'll do a "real" retrospective of The Cinema of Transgression. They are very slow but they're catching up. A lot of this is based on the nostalgia of the person curating. They wait until something is dead so they can pay attention to it. In the meantime they ignore all the current work done by these same people.

AL: What did you think of his inclusion of POLICE STATE which is a conventional movie? They preferred that instead of something radical....

NZ: POLICE STATE is not a conventional movie. It has a radical message, even though it's a linear narrative. WAR IS MENSTRUAL ENVY is more experimental. The Museum of Modern Art had no interest in showing that one, and neither did the Whitney Museum, which was enormously foolish of them.

AL: What sort of spirituality are you interested in and does this influence your work? Do you have any thoughts on Christianity?

NZ: It's great that Christianity is falling apart. I'm surprised that so many born again Christians are invading Manhattan. These are people who claim to be creative but mentally they are not too creative. I don't believe in God. I'm an atheist. I think that religion is really stupid. It's a sign of weakness.

AL: Do you think that secular humanism is a step in the right direction?

NZ: Yes. That means that man is the center of one's universe, instead of an unseen humanoid deity. That belief in a higher authority being there to bail you out after you die is really a form of cowardice that I don't respect. It's intellectually weak. I am surprised that there are so many people in the so called art scene who fall for this. There are a lot of weak people I guess. New York is the center of the world to them, so they figure that they can leech off other people's ideas, or become part of a scene. There are a lot of fraudulent people who zero in on the East Village. They're just opportunists looking for some of the limelight. They are not offering us anything new, especially if they're going to church on Sunday.

AL: Is it necessary to have some belief system to live?

NZ: No. Belief is not necessary. You live your life and you do things. God is not a necessary concept. I thought people knew this. Nietzsche pointed this out. There are people who are ignorant enough to think that Nietzsche has something to do with Hitler. He has nothing to do with Hitler. That's what the powers that be did to denigrate and demonize Nietzsche, because his ideas are revolutionary. Nietzsche hated nationalism and militarism. He's the exact opposite of Hitler who used these things to enslave millions of people. Anyone with a brain who reads Nietzsche will see that.

AL: What do you think about artists infiltrating the mainstream? The idea that an underground artist can no longer work in an elitist way, but must seek maximum distribution, then once gaining access to mainstream avenues of popular culture, trying to introduce revolutionary content?

NZ: I think that people get confused by thinking that maximum exposure equals subversion. Not necessarily. It depends on the message. I do think that it's better to create media than to absorb it. You should be making something and getting it seen.

AL: What about infiltrating certain institutions? Is it more possible to send a subversive message to people through distribution at the video store or The Whitney Museum when it's highly unlikely that they'll rent the video or maybe they'll walk out of the screening room and go see the nice pretty pictures by Nan Goldin?

NZ: Whatever assumptions you have about any institution, you bring those assumptions with you. It's probably more subversive having my video at Blockbuster rather than having it shown at The Whitney Museum. Both places are just platforms to get my stuff seen. So then the snooty uptown art fags go to the museums, and the rest of the general population goes to the video store. Of that group of people, the majority is just going to rent the latest Michelle Pfeiffer film. There's a tiny minority that's into something weird or subversive. I don't think much changes in the world when you make a movie or a book. You can affect a few people. I don't have illusions that it's going to create a big change, doing anything. But sometimes things that are buried, ignored and marginalized by one generation are then revered in the future when people look back to see what had some purity. What was created that didn't have the sole intention of making loads of money. What was done for other reasons.

AL: In your book Totem of The Depraved there were many colorful characters. One that stands out is Rick Strange (aka Eric Pryor). What happened to him?

NZ: Rick Strange started his own satanic church, and moved to San Francisco. He led a group of pagans and occultists on a protest against an evangelist, and then converted to Christianity and destroyed his church. He became an evangelist himself. Eric then married a girl who he performed an exorcism on without divorcing his first wife. Nightline did an exposé on the evangelist who Eric befriended, Larry Lee. Lee bought Eric a golf course condo, and started giving him a thousand dollars a month to appear as "The witch who switched: from Pagan to Pentecost." Eric Pryor started preaching in military fatigues. The last time I heard from him, he called me long distance from a motel somewhere drunk out of his mind claiming that he was going to be leading a para-military operation in Central America to save souls. I haven't heard from him since. He was hoping that I would convert to Christianity so they could claim that the evil Nick Zedd had switched over. They wanted me to be one of their big triumphs but I refused. Eventually Larry Lee's empire crumbled. It was nice that Rick Strange helped to destroy that empire without even knowing it.

AL: What about these people who have changed overnight?

NZ: Those people have been inconsistent. I've remained consistent: I still hate the government, and I'm still doing what I've always done. Rick Strange was a con-artist. Everybody hated him. He was pretty wild. He stole from everyone.

AL: What happened to Donna Death? She was the star of GEEK MAGGOT BINGO and THEY EAT SCUM?

NZ: The last time I saw her was four years ago. She was with the same guy that she's been with for years. She hasn't done anything since. She still seemed to hate me for dumping her for Lydia Lunch.

AL: What about Cassandra Stark? I noticed that she wasn't included in this Whitney retrospective.

NZ: She's making bad home movies that nobody cares about and people laugh at when they see them. Who knows why The Whitney didn't show her films? That's what I thought was weak about that show: they ignored other people who came after. They stopped arbitrarily in the year 1987. There's a whole era that has occurred since then.

AL What about your relationship with Chris Gore, the editor of Film Threat? You met him at The Ann Arbor Film Festival and he wasn't aware of New York Underground Film. You said that he was into this post-Godard Marxist film angle, etc.?

NZ: I don't talk to him anymore. Gore is a mainstream clown who doesn't have anything to do with underground film. He's just another opportunist. When he discovered the Film Bulletin, he was thrilled because it was a chance for him to learn something new. He was able to reprint some of my articles and use my knowledge to make himself appear more aware. But for him it was a social ladder on his way to the money. Film Threat is like Entertainment Weekly now. It doesn't matter. It's too mainstream.

AL: Who are some of the directors you admire? John Waters is cited as an influence. Do you like the Kuchar brothers? What about Thundercrack!?

NZ: I like them a lot. I hate Thundercrack! I like Richard Kern's films. The list is endless. There are so many directors. I love Otto Muehl and Oscar Fischinger.

AL: You have cast large women in many of your films. I notice that your personal esthetic includes large voluptuous women. You have a thing for big butts?

NZ: Yeah. I think it's a terrible thing what Twiggy did. (laughter). She made millions of women insecure. I give parts to many different types of women, like Kembra Pfahler is quite thin, while Brenda Bergman is quite voluptuous. If you look at the past, this anorexic fetish that we are being oppressed by is only a recent historical development, and it will disappear. Artists will then pay attention to big beautiful women like they have for centuries. That's what I do. It's sad that women are made to feel inferior by fashion models that are so anorexic that they are really genetic freaks. To me these hyper-skinny women are more like boys. It's almost a conspiracy by people who hate women.

AL: Do you have respect for film schools? Can anything good come out of a school?

NZ: Martin Scorsese, I guess. It's possible to unlearn the mistakes they teach there. I'm against so called underground festivals that charge entry fees and are just there to exploit film students and fool people. But who cares what I say? There's a bunch of idiots who go to these festivals like lemmings. If people want to learn more about the history of underground film they can write to me.

AL: What do you think about the films of Tessa Hughes-Freeland and Ela Troyano?

NZ: Both Tessa and Ela, for some reason, are very much about hiding their work, and not being seen too much, and making it difficult for people to see what they have done. I don't understand. With Totem of The Depraved, I thought up the title to the movie, and I came up with all the ideas, and I was promised a print of the film which I was never given. Ela decided to hide the movie so nobody would be able to see it. Therefore since I came up with the title, which I had been saving for years to go with the right project, I thought why waste it? I will use it for my new book. The book is very similar to the film. It's about my methods of surviving in the city with very little money, and the people who I interacted with.

AK: I guess it's obvious that Dada and Surrealism has influenced The Cinema of Transgression, but how has Situationism and Guy Debord influenced you?

NZ: Affecting everyday life and creating a situation is more important than how much money you make. I was showing movies on the wall out of the bar at 2A across the street on the wall. People were seeing it as they were walking by on the sidewalk or driving by in a car. When I projected Kembra having sex with an octopus on the building it seemed to really upset the bartender downstairs. But it also got people excited noticing something they wouldn't have seen otherwise, creating a revolution in everyday life.

AL: You were arrested the other day?

NZ: I was putting up posters and the undercover cops arrested me, and took me in an unmarked car to the 9th Precinct. They put me in a cell for two hours and fingerprinted me. Now I have to appear in court. I didn't realize it was illegal to put up posters. I have been doing it for 15 years. How else are people supposed to know that a movie is playing somewhere?

Magazines and Book Covers 2017-1992

Charles Gatewood interview

My Life with a Thrill Kill Photographer

San Francisco Photographer comes to New York

Charles Gatewood Interview

by Alexander Laurence

Photography by Terrence Miele

I met Charles Gatewood early this summer when I was in San Francisco. I went to his studio and his house to watch him in action. When I arrived he spent an hour shooting some photos of Ivy, a model, who is featured in many of his videos. He was preparing for a retrospective in September at Williamsburg Art Center. Gatewood's photography documents the sexual underground, the bizarre, and fetishes. His recent photography involves the taboo subjects of cutting flesh and drinking blood. He has also produced several video for Flash Video about these subjects as well as about piercing and tattooing. His work is distinct as is bound to disturb.

Alexander Laurence: You have a new book, True Blood, which is more graphic and harder than your past work. It is mainly concerned with people who are into cutting and blood play. How did this book come together?

Charles Gatewood: Most of my work is about body modification, body art, and body play. Cutting is the latest thing in body modification. A lot of people are playing with blood and doing blood rituals. A lot of this is going on in San Francisco right now.

AL: Is San Francisco the center of cutting flesh and blood rituals?

CG: To my knowledge. Ron Athey is in LA. There's a big radical sex community here in San Francisco and they cut themselves. There's a big Goth scene, Goth people and vampires, who play with blood and drink blood. The lesbians have been into S/M and may be the first who were cutting themselves. The Goth people have always been into blood on a fantasy level, or an Anne Rice or Poppy Z. Brite level, or a Dracula or Hollywood level. It's only natural for some of those kids to do cutting real. Danielle Willis, the writer and performer, invited me to video and photograph her and her friends who really are real-life vampires. They played with blood and drank each other's blood. That got me involved in the blood scene. The pictures and the video were really good I thought and I knew that there was a book here. There's a story here to be told.

AL: You submitted the movie "Bloodbath" to the San Francisco Film Festival, but they rejected it for some reason. Do you think that they were chickenshit to play something that controversial?

CG: They have a board of reviewers who decide what gets in. They make notes on their cards when they vote. You can ask them to send the cards to see their comments. I asked them, and their comments were "Ugh, disgusting," "revolting," "pornographic," "yuck," and needless to say it didn't get in to that film festival. But it has been shown at many underground film festivals. It rocked the house at the New York Underground Film Festival and Chicago Underground Film Festival. It's showing now in LA. It does have an audience.

Original publication Cups Magazine 1998

AL: Why do you think that this sort of film makes people queasy when they see blood or cutting or piercings? Is this the edge of film?

CG: Some people faint. Yeah, they're queasy. It is a scene that is growing and booming. There's a lot of interest in blood these days but no one has connected all the dots. I think that it's an extension of the Modern Primitive movement. The bottom line is that people are exploring their bodies and trying to wake up their numb bodies back to life. A lot of young people feel numb, and cutting yourself is one way to feel something.

AL: David Aaron Clark is a very well-known writer. He wrote several novels, and wrote for Screw and now writes for The Spectator. He wrote the introduction to the new book. What was it like working with him?

CG: He's a great writer. Some people think he's the new Burroughs. He's an amazing guy. I think he's a genius. We have worked together for a long time. We strike some hot sparks when we work together. I was working on a book called Players about two years ago about the S/M scene and the radical sex community. The book wasn't focused enough. The strongest pictures I was getting were the ones about blood play and blood ritual. After a while I said to myself that the real book here was about blood. I've only been shooting the blood ritual stuff for about three years.

AL: Do you encourage people to push the envelope and go further into what we haven't seen?

CG: I encourage people to play with their bodies and take control of their bodies. In one sense this is to tell Big Brother on Madison Avenue to get lost, and saying "My body belongs to me, and I can do whatever I want to do with it." I did the video "True Blood" with Dharma where she cuts her wrist and her throat and it goes on from there. Dharma basically directed the video. I just turned on the camera. Same with Danielle Willis. They claim that they have all been tested but who knows what is in blood these days. Maybe there's things in blood that we don't know about. One of my models passed out in a taxi from shock I guess. Another woman who I was photographing was drawing blood from her hand and her hand swelled up like a grapefruit, and we almost had to go to the hospital.

AL: A lot of people who used to be into tattoos, piercing, S/M and other things are now getting into cutting flesh and blood play. Where do you think it will be going from there?

CG: I have been hearing a lot about implants. You can get titanium balls implanted in your penis, to make a nice bumpy decorative surface. Some people have been getting horns implanted into their heads. I've talked to some guy in LA who wants to get marbles implanted into his arms, connected to a pacemaker battery, so they will light up at night. I think that Stellarc makes the connection between the Cyber and the body, because he's doing interactive work now with robots. He has a mechanical arm that's programmed to be independent of him while still attached to him. He has a little robot that he swallows and that runs around in his stomach and does things. He's a really smart conscious person, and he's really taking that union of man and machine to new places. I'm really interested in Stellarc's work. Fakir and Stellarc are the two main players in this field. Fakir is doing his work in a more ritual context and Stellarc more in a performance context.

AL: How did you meet Fakir Mustafar?

CG: Annie Sprinkle introduced me to him in New York around 1980. I heard about him before because he was associated with PFIQ and Jim Ward. I read a number of articles about him and I knew that I had to meet him. At the time he was still in the closet about his Modern Primitive rituals. He ran an advertising agency in Silicon Valley. He was very private about his activities because he thought that it might affect his business. Mark and Dan Jury made a film about my work called Dances Sacred and Profane. Fakir decided to be in that film. During the making of that film, I introduced Fakir to the editors of RE/Search Magazine, and that was the spark for the Modern Primitives book. So between this film and that book, these underground ideas started to go out into the mainstream, and changed the thinking and behavior of people all over the world. That's probably been the most significant thing my work has ever done.

AL: Can you talk about your relation to Marco Vassi and R. Mutt Press?

CG: I lived in Woodstock in the late 1970s. We had a group based in Woodstock and New York called R. Mutt Press. It was me, Annie Sprinkle, Marco Vassi, Spider Webb, Michael Perkins, Mam'selle Victoire. We influenced each other, and worked together, and helped each other. I was hugely influenced by Marco Vassi. It was an exciting group and an exciting time because all these ideas were about to explode into the straight world. I wrote a novel at that time that was very influenced by Vassi, Michael Perkins, but also by Bukowski. In the writing in Forbidden Photographs you can see a very strong Bukowski influence.

AL: There this show in Williamsburg during September and October. What's that going to be like?

CG: It's at the Williamsburg Art Center which is right under the Williamsburg Bridge. It's a new and exciting art center. They are giving me a whole floor of building for a retrospective of my favorite photographs of body play. It's called "Charles Gatewood: The Body and Beyond." It will be fifty master prints, both black & white and color, plus some big silk screens. It will run for five weeks. The opening will be a scene. It will be a zoo. I have had shows of eight silk screens at Morphos Gallery and a thousand people came to the opening.

AL: How do you describe your own photography style?

CG: Elegant perversion. Classical decadence. I like to do portraits. My early work is mostly candid shots. These days I do mostly portraits. I do a little street photography, but not as much as I used to. I like working closely with people, one to one, like we just did. I don't use any lights. I use natural lights and like to take pictures of people with window light. I shoot in the day. I like working with models, like Ivy, again and again over time.

AL: What do you think of some other photographers whose work may be compared with you?

CG: Ken Miller is a good photographer. He photographs dancers and junkies and street people. He gets out there and lives with the people who he's photographing. He not a dilettante. He's the opposite of that. He's out there for hours and days. When he was photographing people living in Golden Gate Park he was living in his van. Eric Kroll does nice pictures of the fetish world. His work has its own style and he's probably documenting the fetish world as well as anyone. I've known Ralph Gibson for twenty-five years or more. His work is cold and dry for my taste. It's very formal. It's fine for what it is. But I prefer work that has life and soul. The work of Elmer Bathers doesn't move me like the work of Joel-Peter Witkin or Andre Serrano. Richard Kern is good. His work is original, sexy, fresh. Kern made a film of Kembra Pfahler sewing her pussy shut. I'm jealous. I wish that I made that film. We have a friendly rivalry. We photograph the same models. Kroll did a book called Fetish Girls. Kern did New York Girls. So I have to do a book called West Coast Girls. This week's title is Hungry Women. I have been working on such a book and it's almost done.

Write to Charles Gatewood to get a catalogue about his films:

Flash Video

PO Box 410052

San Francisco CA 94141

Cups Magazine: twenty years ago

I moved to NYC 20 years ago. We left San Francisco on March 11th, 1996. Went to Barstow, Laughlin, Las Vegas, Rifle and Boulder, Colorado; also stayed in Kansas near the Eisenhower Library, Normal, Illinois, where we hung out at Dalkey Archive, Cleveland where we saw the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and nine days later made it to NYC.

William T. Vollmann: a history

William T. Vollmann: a history

By Alexander Laurence

I remember I first heard of William T. Vollmann in late 1989 or early 1990. There was some guy named Stuart who was couch-surfing at my place in North Beach in San Francisco. Stuart had a VW van and his girlfriend was my roommate. He lived there for free the whole time I was at that apartment in Spring 1990. I later saw him working at the library or at some bookstore. But the only conversation we had was about new writers. I think Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland came out around that time. Stuart mentioned that Vollmann was good. I had only read one excerpt by him in Conjunctions about skinheads. It was more documentary style writing with photos by Ken Miller. I used to read Conjunctions and Paris Review back then. Vollmann only had two books out at the time. I think that I read Rainbow Stories first.

A year later the editor of Conjunctions, Bradford Morrow, hosted a reading in downtown SF, maybe fall 1991. The readers were Vollmann, plus Quincy Troupe, Kathy Acker, and the poet Norma Cole, who were all contributors. For such a spectacular lineup there was hardly anyone there: mostly other writers and people who I knew. It was the first time I met Vollmann. He came in the room in a camouflage jacket, looking like he just came back from a war zone. His latest book was the very difficult read The Ice-Shirt. As I recall Vollmann read mostly from 13 Stories and 13 Epitaphs, which hadn’t been published yet in the USA. Back in those days Vollmann fired a starter pistol with blanks at certain points in the reading, as punctuation. He read for quite a long time, and left right after. Quincy Troupe also read for at least a half hour. By the time we got to Norma Cole and Kathy Acker, many people had left. Kevin Killian told me later that he chased down Vollmann and got him to sign his books.

So there was a time around 1992, where it seemed like Vollmann came out with 6 books in less than two years. In 1993, there was an issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction, by Larry McCaffery, that was about Vollmann, DF Wallace and Susan Daitch. By this time I was writing for a few Bay Area publications. I was a writer at Cups Magazine that was edited by Dave Eggers. Most publications at the time were not very interested in doing an interview with Vollmann. There was a bigger focus on gay writers or multiculturalism I suppose. Eggers was more interested in this sort of interview. So the first interview was arranged in fall of 1993. I met Vollmann at Brainwash café. I soon learned that Vollmann lived in Sacramento now, and he didn’t drive a car. We spoke for about an hour or more. Some friends came by. It was a positive meeting. I didn’t like the final result though. Very little of the interview was used, and Eggers didn’t even use the picture that I gave him.

 

So during that time I ran in to Vollmann often. He was at book readings, he was at Book Fairs, and he would be at City Lights. I ran into him at Book Expo in LA in 1994, not long after his accident in Bosnia, that killed his friend, Francis Tommasik. I met other writers like Larry McCaffery, Michael Hemmingson, and Eurydice, who all came to San Francisco at that time, and knew Vollmann.

I met Ken Miller and Jerome Caja, and also Ben Pax who were Vollmann’s friends from    when he first lived in SF. Ken Miller ended up giving me some photos to use in Cups Magazine. He was very down to earth and also larger than life. He did wedding photography. He lived in the Richmond with his wife, who was from exotic place. Ken told me that he heckled DF Wallace at a reading in NYC one time. It was funny. Jerome Caja was a drag queen who I had taken photos of at Folsom Street Fair. Jerome had many art openings around town. His lipstick paintings are mentioned often in Vollmann’s books. Both Ken Miller and Jerome Caja went to SF Art Institute when it was crazy in the early 1980s. Ben Pax lived around 24^th and Sanchez, and Vollmann used to stay there a lot. I met him there once and we walked down to 24^th Street BART. I was with Vollmann for an interview and a book reading in Berkeley.

Another coincidence was I knew Brandi the prostitute who is mentioned in many of Vollmann’s early books. I used to see her a lot when I lived in the Mission District. Around this time Vollmann made it clear that he was looking for nude models. I asked a few people and they weren’t too interested. There was one person who was the managing editor of Cups Magazine who ending up doing it. Around this time, Vollmann also hooked up with Dave Eggers and Might Magazine. He ended up writing something for them or Eggers also found some nude models for him. I don’t know exactly what happened. Vollmann also gave me a piece for Cups Magazine about how we should eliminate cars, and go back to the horse.

Somehow another interview was set up with Vollmann towards the end of 1994. We had a longer interview and pictures by Ken Miller. We had an interview with Eurydice. Both Vollmann and Eurydice were writers at Spin Magazine at the time. I sent a big stack of the magazine to the Spin offices and I heard it was very popular there. In a couple years in SF, it seemed like Vollmann was far more known in the Bay Area and all the readings were well attended.

One time I was with my girlfriend at City Lights Bookstore. It was around Christmas time. Vollmann was there with his family and his parents. He told me that they were staying at the Hyatt and I should come down and visit. I came with my girlfriend Laura. We were late. Vollmann left me a note. We went upstairs and we chatted with Bill and his sister. Vollmann’s wife made him put on some dress slacks for some dinner they were going to later that night. So we watched Bill try to avoid the pants for almost an hour. It seemed weird so we left.

I moved to NYC in early 1996. Infinite Jest had just come out. DF Wallace did a few readings in NYC back then. I went to one with Susan Daitch, who was a friend by then. They were packed and uncomfortable, and one was in the middle of summer. I never really met Wallace, or ever interviewed him, although we talked about it and exchanged letters. I thought he was academic at the time. Vollmann was also in NYC a lot in 1996.

He was doing a reading at Books and Company, in the upper east side. Jonathan Franzen was there. My friend Gabor had wanted to translate Whores For Gloria into Hungarian. Not sure if that ever happened. Some other famous writers were there. Some others not so famous. My writer friends Joanna Rakoff and Robert Anasi were with me. They both have published books since then. A group of us headed over to some bar on 81^st and York. Apparently this was some place that Vollmann and Franzen used to hang out five years previously. When they sat down they both ordered rosemary hamburgers. I was trying to seem different so I ordered a French dip sandwich. I was sitting next to Franzen and across from Vollmann, so I was considered someone important. That didn’t prevent Joanna Rakoff from calling Vollmann “ugly” and Franzen “some dork from Oberlin College." I doubt that they heard them. At the end of the night publicist Paul Slovak, who I had met at Book Expo, pulled out a credit card, and paid for everyone’s food and drinks. “This is for you, Bill!” he said.

Another time Bill came back to NYC for another reading. This must have been our 10-12 time meeting. It was somewhere in Chelsea. I was with the writer Eurydice. It was a good reading. Afterwards we stopped by a bar nearby called Man Ray. There were about 10 of us. We had some drinks and spoke about some crap. One good looking guy who I didn’t know, who didn’t say anything the whole time, stood up and said: “Man, I like your books, but in person you are disappointing.” And then he walked away and left. Eurydice was a little pissed. Vollmann laughed it off. I only half heard what he said.

Another time Vollmann was staying at the Algonquin Hotel. I get the feeling he stayed there before. He invited me over. He was with his sister. His sister made me do some personality psychological test. I had to make some drawings and describe them. We had some more rosemary hamburgers. I think they cost close to 25 dollars at the hotel. But he paid for it since I took the test.

I didn’t see Vollmann much from 1998 to 2001. It was a very dark period for me. I went through a divorce. There was a lot of changes. As I remember, Vollmann was sick during this time as well.

I decided to do an interview over the phone for Free Williamsburg. It was 2000 and The Royal Family had just come out. It would be my third interview with Vollmann. After this I rarely did any literary interviews. I started writing about music. I saw him again at a reading in LA. I brought a friend with me who hadn’t read any Vollmann books or anything at all.

At the end of 2002, I decided to go visit him in Sacramento. My photographer friend Carla was taking pictures of authors, Wallace and Vollmann among them. Carla lived in NYC. I was in LA at the time. We had a rendezvous in San Francisco. After a successful portrait of Dave Eggers, we took a bus out to Sacramento, and met Vollmann at a café near his house. We chatted for an hour. Carla took some pictures. He even tried to make out with Carla, which was a laugh.

In 2003, my book of stories was being designed and formatted. I was looking for some book quotes. I called up Vollmann a few times during this time. I thought he would give me a book blurb. By 2004, the book was ready to be published, and there was a delay. It finally came out later in fall 2007. I remember sending Vollmann a layout of what it would look like. I called him soon after Vollmann won the National Book Award. I spoke to him around then, and wished him luck.

My own books came out: Hipster Handbook (2004) and Five Fingers Make A Fist (2007). I have written some others since then. It was difficult to keep up with Vollmann post Europe Central. Everything the Greeks wrote can be collected into 40 volumes. I have met only a few people who have read them all. With Vollmann, there is a lot, but you don’t feel like you have to read everything.

Novelists' Favorite Novels: Markson, Vollmann, Moody

Novelists' Favorite Novels

What writers are considered the best by the best: David Markson, William T. Vollmann, Rick Moody offer their opinions about what we should be reading

By Alexander Laurence

After years of interviewing writers I noticed that there are a few special writers who are always cited as influential and important. James Joyce's Ulysses, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow are often listed by critics and scholars as the main books of the 20th Century. Pynchon, along with Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy are probably the most frequently mentioned writers who are still working today. But who is writing the Ulysses of today? I talked to recently to three writers who themselves are often mentioned as being extremely influential.

David Markson: A Link To The Past

David Markson is one of the most well read and literary people I know. Conrad Aiken, Malcolm Lowry, William Gaddis, and Frederick Exley were among his friends. He is the author of Wittgenstein's Mistress, which Ann Beattie has called "An absolute masterpiece." He is also the author of Springer's Progress and Reader's Block. He has lived in Greenwich Village for almost fifty years.

Markson was a big reader of literary allusions and quotations. When he first read Under The Volcano, he wrote a fan letter to Malcolm Lowry. They met in Canada a while letter. Markson went on a personal crusade to draw attention to Lowry's work: "Which is why I wrote a master's thesis (at Columbia) on Lowry's Under The Volcano only four years after it was published, for instance, when nobody else had written anything except the original reviews, and so I had the allusions all to myself to dig out."

Markson was also the first person to give William Gaddis' The Recognitions its high rank also. He called it the most important American novel since Moby Dick? "Actually it was just a throwaway passage in an old detective novel I wrote," Markson confesses, "but there too it was only three years after Gaddis had published. I'm delighted, or even honored, when I'm still given credit for it.

Although he would give his right arm to have written The Recognitions, Markson is looks down at Gaddis' later work:  "That business of the nonstop conversation, with all the repetitions and digressions and so forth that are supposed to be precisely like real life--except that art is selectivity, damn it. I read an interview where he talked about authorial absense, but what happens instead is that what he hopes will sound natural simply sounds faked. It's a gimmick, and it ultimately makes us infinitely more conscious of the writer than we'd ever be otherwise."

Markson has little interest in current fiction, although he occasionally reads it. His all-time list would include Moby Dick, Wuthering Heights, The Stranger, early Celine, The Sot-Weed Factor, Nightwood, The Ginger Man, early Beckett. He thought very little of Thomas Pynchon. "I've got an odd bias against him. I've always believed that it's a serious reader's responsibility to pick up on virtually any valid literary allusion--even though a shrewd novelist tries to bury such things too, of course, so that the context makes sense even if the resonances are missed."

Markson did read Infinite Jest when it came out, but would make no comment. He remarked "Most of your enthusiasm is for the major stuff just before your own time. But deep down I know, know, that there are books out there just as good as Under The Volcano or The Recognitions--and it's my own damned loss that I've misread them."

William T. Vollmann: He Likes Ovid

William T. Vollmann, who lives in Sacramento, is the author of several novels, and ten have been published between a eight year span ending in 1996 with The Atlas, which is a book which looks back at his previous decade of world travel. His books like Rainbow Stories, Whores For Gloria, and Thirteen Stories & Thirteen Epitaphs are his inside look at the drug culture and the world of prostitution in San Francisco during the 1980s. His historical novels, The Ice Shirt, Fathers and Crows, and The Rifles, are expansive novels about exploration, technology, and discovery. These novels take place in Iceland and Northern Canada, and are a personal journey for Vollmann about why American history developed like it did, and looking back at the history of its people.

As William T. Vollmann told me: "Most people nowadays, including writers, know less of the body of facts, and aesthetics--the basic core of information about the work and culture and so forth, that makes up our heritage--than people did earlier."

When asked about favorite contemporary writers, Vollmann said: "By contemporary I assume you mean from the last two hundred years. Hawthorne may be the best, then Faulkner. Hemingway is usaually a wonderful read...

Vollmann's first book, Bright and Risen Angels, was often compared to Gravity's Rainbow in the first reviews. Vollmann then bought Gravity's Rainbow and brought it home on a bike. He crashed and the book fell in a gutter. It took a while for it to dry. He told me: "I hadn't read Gravity's Rainbow until after Angels came out, even though I'd read the other Pynchon books. But I don't think my stuff is much like Pynchon's."

Vollmann seemed unwilling to mention any recent writers favorably. When he wrote a blurb for Infinite Jest, the publisher misspelled his name on the back cover. When I mentioned Lautréamont, Vollmann said "Yeah, I like Lautréamont. I think Cormac McCarthy is really wonderful. He’s terrific. Some of the older writers I like better than most contemporary writers. I like some of the real old stuff like the epics and sagas like Ovid. Some of the Eastern European writers are neat."

The Literary Novel Is In Hiding: Rick Moody

The fact that literary novel is the only thing that will outlive us, and may be read long after the author dies is an interesting idea.  Rick Moody remarks "There are writers who we don't read right now who in thirty years will be considered the great writers of (those years)." Rick Moody is the author of The Ice Storm and Purple America. He lives in Brooklyn.

When asked about his favorite writers, Moody asks a familiar and funny question: "Are we speaking only of living writers?" We laugh. "Of the dead: Beckett, Bernhard, Genet. Woolf, Melville, Joyce, Plato, and Angela Carter. Of the living: Lydia Davis, Grace Paley, Donald Antrim, Jeffery Eugenides, Ben Marcus, and Denis Johnson."

Recently I heard a panel discussion about Thomas Pynchon's new novel Mason & Dixon, which included Rick, and most of the panel talked about the book with religious awe and with reverential respect. It like many readers treat books by Joyce and Pynchon like they would were the Bible. Rick Moody tells me "I think that's a really good comparison. I've been an armchair hermeneuticist for a while. That's one of the senses that I think I'm interested in theological debate, as a way of investigating what books mean, how they come to be books, how they're canonized as books."

There seems to be plenty of books out there to read, and I'm always excited when someone, maybe an author, mentions a book by someone who I have never heard of. It's possible that even those who I talked to, Markson, Vollmann and Moody, will be read far into the next century.

_______

Alexander Laurence is a writer who lives in New York City. He has done over 100 interviews with novelists, many of which, are accessible through the internet. His book reviews have appeared in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, American Book Review, East Bay Express, LA Reader, Bay Guardian, and American Book Jam. He has been the editor of Cups Magazine since 1993.

Bennington Conversation: Bret Easton Ellis + Jonathan Lethem + Joseph Clark (1997)

Bennington Conversation

With Joseph Clark, Bret Easton Ellis, & Jonathan Lethem

Moderated by Alexander Laurence

Three novelists who met up at Bennington College (in the mid 1980s) look back at their lives and their works. I met novelists Bret Easton Ellis, Jonathan Lethem, and Joseph Clark at The Bowery Bar in New York early this summer and we had a little literary round table. Bret Easton Ellis is of course the writer of four works of fiction including Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, and The Informers. He is at work presently on a fifth work, which we will probably see in Fall 1998. Jonathan Lethem is the author of four books including Gun With Occasional Music, Amnesia Moon, Wall To The Eye Wall To The Sky, and As She Crawled Across The Table. Joseph Clark is coming out with his first work of fiction in next Spring, Jungle Wedding, and soon will follow with a novel, Nord Eliot.

Alexander Laurence: It's a muggy day. It's Friday the 13th. Isn't this a great day to be here at the Bowery Bar? (laughter)

Joseph Clark: We were thinking that we should do it on the 12th, and then we thought "What the hell!" Some people think it's a lucky day.

AL: One thing that I wanted you guys to talk about was the whole "Bennington Writing Phenomenon." I'm making this into a category. What is this phenomenon? Talking previously with Bret and Jonathan, I think that the decision to be a writer had already happened prior to attending Bennington College. By the time you went to Bennington, say between 1982 and 1986, we find that there are other writers forming their identities at this crucial moment. The ten or so writers of your milieu turned out to be mostly very different writers. In other words, there appears to be no definitive style that predominates. The amount of writers coming out of Bennington has decreased rapidly since 1985. Could you all tell us what it was like going to Bennington at this time and how the whole experience influenced you?

Jonathan Lethem: It's nothing but a happy or unhappy coincidence. The fact that we were all there, and with each person like Joseph who turns up now, who's also publishing out of those years, it's more and more like a freakish marvel, but I don't know what it is beyond that.

JC: Did you go there because it had a reputation?

JL: Not at all. I was admitted as a painting student. I got there on the strength of my portfolio.

JC: I went there because it had a reputation for writing, plus it was a John Dewey type of school: no grades. Did it have that reputation?

Bret Easton Ellis: Yes it did. But I also went for the very simple reasons as you mentioned that it had no grades. You got in solely based on your portfolio. It had nothing to do with your grade point average or your SAT's. That really appealed a lot to me. I can't figure it out either actually why so many writers published from that class, from those two years in particular. At other places like Brown or Yale, or places where a lot of writers go, like Columbia, I haven't seen any campus where it was so focused on this one age group, this one class. I think it's a coincidence. I don't think that Bennington particularly has a better writing program or more proficient teachers, but for some reason there was a bunch of really talented writers and really different writers too.

JL: We were really all there during the same four-year time span. You can't draw any meaningful line through all the work.

BEE: The fact that there were so many types of writers who were going off in different directions, and there were a lot of empty slots that needed to be filled in a way. So you could say, the fact that there were so many different types of writers, publishing only wanted "this kind of book." But I don't know if that is really true. If people knew that they would doctor it up. I didn't go to Bennington because I had read about it, in terms of fiction or anything. I also went as half a music major and half a creative writing major. For me one became more overwhelming than the other.

JL: That may be part of what happened, that there was a synergy there, and that was exciting there. It drew people. I already knew that I wanted to write. I was probably already moving away from the painting. The energy probably pushed me further into writing.

BEE: I have to tell you at Bennington that I didn't know that you wanted to be a writer. I read recently in The Voice that you weren't really turned on by the scene. You were very right about it. There was a certain type of writing that was trendy and accepted those years that we were there. It was very minimalist and very Raymond Carver-ish. It was very pervasive among the students.

JC: I wasn't into it.

JL: It didn't fare that well.

BEE: It's true. Other writing that came into those workshops got rejected. The timing was wrong for people who wanted to write a different way. I could imagine people wanting to pull away from the whole rich people talking in non sequitars with very minimalist setting, which a lot of writers were doing at the time.

JL: Bennington was such a small school that if anything predominated, it predominated completely. There was no room for a second tier of voices.

JC: Do you think that it was the faculty pushing that sort of style?

BEE: No, I think that it was the students who were really pushing it.

JL: It's funny that you should say that because I think it was a combination of the two, but I think the faculty was ultimately more inflexible. Because I think that some of the interesting kinds of writing that wasn't welcome there, in fact, our generation of readers is very open to.

BEE: Yes.

JC: I was reading a lot of Don Delillo at that time. I remember buying White Noise then, and it blew my mind.

JL: I checked End Zone out at the library, and it was the first time it had been checked out since the year it had been published.

BEE: I know people who reading Great Jones Street and who were then also reading Cathedral, and they thought the styles were not totally dissimilar. There was a lot of thing that Delillo was doing that could be applied to minimalist technique that was really prevalent at the time.

JL: I'm certain that the reading protocols were more open ultimately. The kinds of writing that could be liked were more open than what was functioning well in the workshops. There's a tendency for workshops to close down and become relatively pedantic, even if they're very intense within that range they are functioning.

BEE: The teachers were also sick of so much sloppy bad writing, that at least with minimalist writing (laughter) the stories were very short, the sentences weren't that messed up, because it was basically "I walk into the cafe and sit down. He orders a bagel. We share a beer." How could you fuck that up?

JC: But then Jill Eisenstadt wasn't writing like that.

BEE: No, Jill wasn't. But there was a little bit. Jill had an element of it there, I think.

JC: I don't remember Donna Tartt's work then.

BEE: Kind of an element of that too. There was a certain sort of milieu and a certain of character and a certain sort of sensibility that was at the forefront there, I think, that were really about repressed closed people in unhappy relationships and taking a lot of drugs and getting drunk and spending money. I remember a ton of stories about that. It was about boyfriends and girlfriends. You know, they would always end like "I'm sitting alone. It's dawn on commons. I don't know where to go." These were the stories at the time. Whether it was Donna Tartt or Jill Eisenstadt or myself, whatever, that was fairly prevalent at the time.

JL: At some level my radar was that I had to work the margins there. I benefited from the energy, but indirectly. I never took a fiction workshop but I sat in sometimes. I didn't even take independent study. I took a poetry workshop class and swapped manuscripts with people. Jill and I sat in a room off campus and read to each other a couple of times. In the summer of 1984 I remember having several long talks with Bret during the summer workshops. I learned more about Bret's tastes over that break than I had before.

JC: That was the first time I heard Bret read.

AL: What were you working on at that time?

BEE: I had a workshop and my teacher was Mary Robison. At the time she was the queen of the minimalists. There was a time believe it or not when short story collections were really big and she would get great reviews. Such a book would go through four printings. She along with Ann Beattie and Raymond Carver is really considered one of the people who brought to the forefront minimalist writing. Mary was sexy and young. She was a popular teacher. She got drunk with all the students. Minimalism became attractive to a lot of people who were there. "I want to be like Jim Robeson and Mary Robeson, fuck the students, and get drunk every night." They had really good pot. That was the situation. Minimalism became attractive for a number of reasons, besides the main one, which I don't think we touched on, which was a lot of people had gone to the workshops who were unsure of their talent found that minimalism was the easiest way to write. If you didn't know what to do, and if you didn't really have a full-fledged sensibility, it was very easy to mimic minimalism and get away with a story.

AL: You brought up briefly the fact that short story collections were at one time a respectable thing to do. Now in publishing, short story collections are like an afterthought, and if you have a successful novel maybe a publisher will cash in on the success with a collection of stories, in lieu of the next novel.

BEE: I'm not going to raise my hand. But I know what you're saying.

JC: I hope that I can get away with it. My first book is a short story collection.

BEE: The Informers was a short story collection. The reason is purely--and I hate to be this crass--purely economical. Because of the way that publishing is set up and because of the way that the bottom line figures into 98% of what goes on in publishing, short story collections don't sell as well as novels. I was so shocked when Knopf published The Informers--which I said this is a book of short stories--they didn't put short stories anywhere on it and they also didn't put a novel anywhere on it. I told my editor "This is going to be misleading. People are going to open this thinking it's a novel and they are going to get lost and confused when one story jumps to the next." They told me "Listen, we can't get as many copies of this book into bookstores, no matter who the writer is, if it says short story collection on it." Which is very depressing. But still at the same time, a lot of short story collections do come out and are reviewed. Mary Gaitskill is the prime example of that. It happens.

JL: Knopf was very coy about that. You can still announce yourself, or create a reputation, with a debut collection of stories, but the expectation is then that you will raise the ante by writing an important novel.

JC: Some of those stories in The Informers I remember reading in a workshop.

BEE: That's true. Most of the stories were written before 1986. When Rick Moody reviewed The Informers, he said "When I was hanging out at Bennington, I remember someone had a copy of this vampire story. What the hell is Bret doing? Does he really need to fulfill a contact?" Rick, the answer was yes.

JL: I got a similar book of stuff that was lying around, but I disguised it as a novel, so I got away with it. It's Amnesia Moon. There's stuff in there that dates before Gun, With Occasional Music. It took a while to weave it all together, but there was stuff in there written in '84 or '85.

BEE: Really. Amnesia Moon seems so thought out in terms of a plot and a narrative, that's hard to imagine it being separate pieces. You know that Donna Tartt began writing The Secret History in 1982, and it was published in 1992.

JC: Were any of your stories in The Informers inspired by Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone? We were reading him back then.

BEE: My stories? No. Raymond Carver and Mary Robeson inspired them all.

JL: Some of those stories in The Informers are a lot funnier than anything Raymond Carver ever wrote. I feel that's the aspect of Bret's work that people miss. That vampire story is criminally funny. No one should be allowed to write another vampire story ever again.

AL: Joseph. Can you tell us a little about your formation as a writer? You are coming out with a collection of stories early next year, called Jungle Wedding, published by Norton.

JC: I wanted too much to be a writer when I was seventeen. Wanted it really badly, very ambitiously, in all the wrong ways. I was writing, for whatever reasons, to please my parents, to please the world....

BEE: Terrible reasons by the way.

AL: What sort of writing were you doing?

JC: I went through a period of time when I was really influenced by the South Americans, and then the god-awful thing happened, I made it all the way through Gravity's Rainbow, and then I read it again. I got completely influenced by that, and was writing stuff like Pynchon. When I was at Bennington, I think that the early Denis Johnson, Don Delillo, Stephen Wright, Tom McGuane, and Jim Harrison influenced me. I always wanted to be a writer and I was always writing. I wouldn't say I would call myself a writer till the last year. I took a break from writing because I don't really think that I had really lived, I wasn't wise enough, I didn't know enough about myself. I was able to razzle dazzle, and I would get influenced by the razzle dazzle of Pynchon or whatever, but I realized that I didn't really have that much to say. I wasn't really fleshing out the characters very well. I wrote a pretty good novella as my graduating thesis at Bennington that I'll think that I'll make into a short story. But then I took a break from writing for six years, until four years ago, when I started writing this novel, Nord Eliot, which I hope will come out in the next few years.

JL: Another thing about Bennington besides what was overtly there, there was still a legacy. Bernard Malamud was still around sometimes.

JC: There was a joke about him that on a certain day in October, Bernard Malamud took his annual walk across campus.

BEE: And John Gardiner was there. I never really felt that there was a specific Bennington sensibility about how you should write.

JL: I wouldn't call it a sensibility, but I would say that there was echoes of greatness around there if you wanted to search them out. I actually sat at Malamud's feet for a couple of little talks and soaked in his aura. And then there was the whole legacy of Shirley Jackson living at Bennington. Her traces were everywhere there, and if you had read her stories when you were living there, you realized that she was a realistic writer.

AL: Did you two, Joseph and Jonathan, read Less Than Zero when it came out in 1985?

JC: I didn't read it right away. I read it after I heard Bret read in a workshop. For some reason, I had bought it and hadn't read it, but after I heard him read I was laughing so hard. I got all the sardonic, droll, dark humor.

BEE: I was reading a very serious story about my mother's illness and I remember hearing the heckler in the audience. Thanks.

JC: Bret and I could talk about books in common, and we liked some of the same writers. He came from such a completely different place and background than from where I came from, which is rural Pennsylvania, that I was fascinated by where he came from. Having talked to him and other people of a similar background, when I read Less Than Zero, I realized that this is fiction but it isn't that much of a stretch on anything. It had a profound impact on me. To see what I thought were perhaps at one time spoiled and very wealthy kids who had too much money, and to see them as human beings, it doesn't matter where you come from, you're still a kid. It's still hell. It doesn't matter if you have a platinum card at twelve or not.

JL: For me frankly it was complicated that Bret published a book so early. I knew that I was ambitious and by most measures I was a prodigy. I felt like a prodigy most of my life and yet here I was just warming up to this process and here was someone right along side of me had blown off the top of the chart. I was confused by it. It became part of what I reacted against initially when I backpedaled from Bennington.

BEE: I think that is not an atypical response. I think that a lot of people had a complicated feelings toward that book being published while we were all still in school. With the Less Than Zero thing I think that there was an immense amount of fascination and a kind of feeling that on one level if someone here can do it maybe it's opening a gate that we can go through, on the other hand I think that there was a ton of jealousy and people thinking that this book isn't that good and there was an undeserved attention focused on it, what was a short and simple almost a novel about a trendy topic at the time. There was a lot of feelings of "Why that?" And why not something else.

JC: There's also the thing with literature majors and the hierarchy of the academies, that maybe it wasn't literature. And it's still out there. "Well it ain't Faulkner!" Of course it isn't Faulkner.

BEE: I always get suspicious when I hear the word "literature." My feelers start going up. Who said that? Where did that come from?

JL: I always think of confused used bookstores that have a literature section and a fiction section. (laughter) There's no order who's in which one.

AL: Let me ask this: What is appropriate subject for a novel written presently and what is not? Maybe people reacted to such books as Less Than Zero because they had a prejudice as to what's literature and what's appropriate subject matter.

BEE: There's no topic that's off limits for a book. It's really what a writer brings to the material, and how he investigates it and discusses it and feels it out and works with it. You can write about anything.

JC: I would have to agree. I think that the people who are designating things as literature or not are people who are holding onto the idea of the Modernist voice, and the Modernist book, and that goes right up to and ends with Carver. The end of late Modernist writing which I would say Carver would be. I know people who are mimicking when they write the sound and the look and the feel of literature as they know it. They have obviously read all the great 20th century American writers. But that doesn't interest me at all because it has nothing to do with being alive today. The thing with Less Than Zero and with White Noise and other books, is that's what it is like. There's the cadence of TV, film, products, advertisements coming into the narrative. There's so many books written by thirty-year-olds that are written like they are in the 19th century. There's no cars. There's nothing, purposely.

BEE: I think less and less. We're all products of everything that we have assimilated whether it's movies, rock & roll, fiction, comic books, tons of stuff that we have assimilated that really comes through some way unconsciously into our writing.

JC: Think about even fifteen years ago now which we are coming close to being, that was not acceptable, and not as accepted as it is now.

BEE: I think that no one cares now basically. I don't think that anyone cares except a coterie of writers somewhere. I don't think that agents particularly care, publishers care, or editors care. But it's interesting that it's a concern of yours. It's not really something that I really think about. I don't think of writing that consciously in terms of where I'm going to be in terms of this canon.

JL: I think it's hopeless and paralyzing. If you make a prediction in that context, you're doomed to fail. You'll be wrong about how it turns out. But as far as my influences, the organic mulch of influences, they were set so early. The books I read as a teenager, the films, and the rock & roll.... It always cracks me up that critics will often receive newly published books as if they were written in ten minutes as a reaction to a book written six months before. Given the mechanics of publishing, this is literally impossible. It is so far from the deep ruminative sources of what I end up writing. If something written echoes with something else published in the same year, or five years, it is a mere coincidence.

BEE: I find myself being influenced by things left and right, not majorly into a way that has completely changed my temperament, or what I want to write about. I find reading a really great writer, you can suck it in and it can completely influence you, and you want it to affect your work somehow. I know that I have come to Delillo a little late, but I feel that the book that I am working on now is really totally influenced by him in some way. He's gotten into my system and now I see things his way. It's hard to write a contemporary novel without thinking of Delillo.

JL: As She Crawled Across The Table was heavily influenced by Delillo. It was inevitable. For a while, he offered, as you say, a set of eyes to see through that seemed compelling than any other windows. But for me my influences from film are just as vital. If I go to a Howard Hawks retrospective and absorb fifteen of his narratives in two weeks, I'm thinking through Howard Hawks' vision of life, or something more contemporary, all the time. I remember arguing with Bret at Bennington about obscure Robert Altman films.

BEE: Right. Howard Hawks for you, Robert Altman for me, in terms of, if I had to choose a director, in terms of just having someone who enters a milieu and just floats through it and doesn't really push the hard sell narrative. Basically it's watching people behave. The impact is accumulative. You see a series or scenes or a series of events, that aren't that tied together, but kind of wavy and dreamy, and then because of the accumulation there's some sort of power to it.

JC: Did either of you read David Foster Wallace's essay about television and fiction writers? It's in his new book of essays. It's pretty seminal and it's been quoted a lot I've noticed.

AL: Was that the essay that he attacked Bret and blamed him for a lot of stuff?

BEE: He was hard on me in another essay I read, not that one. He blamed me for a lot of stuff and at the same time thrash me. He called me Alice Cooper. (laughter) I still think he's very very smart. David, you're very very smart. He's a very intelligent guy. He is.

JC: In the essay he talks about White Noise a lot. He brought up the idea how that in his workshops recently a voice is creeping into fiction by people in their late twenties or early thirties. The constant critique by older faculty members, often in their fifties and even sixties, is that it's too much about watching television and film. It's a sitcom. The essay is mostly about how the ironic culture of television is permeating everything. You can't get away from that, whether you watch TV or not.

BEE: What a revelation! That's so boring.

JL: I'm a bit allergic to manifestoes. Novelists are always so much smarter in their novels than they are in these position papers. He's definitely a lecturer. There’s been a rash of these defensive passive-aggressive position papers from good novelists.

BEE: Remember when Jonathan Franzen did it? (laughter)

JL: I wasn't going to name any names.

BEE: There was a lot of people who were doing it. That Harper's thing. Well.... I like Jonathan. I think that he's a very talented writer.

JL: Twenty-Seventh City is a wonderful novel and he should write another novel.

BEE: But that wasn't a wonderful essay though. It was so self-congratulatory. It's like something that you think about but you don't need someone else to type it up and put it in the December Harper's. It's very obvious. In a way though it's interesting because rarely does anyone want to write about writers and what's going on in publishing at this time. It's just not a sexy topic in some ways. You shouldn't complain in public. Or do it through your fiction. It's always more forceful.

AL: What did you all think of Brad Morrow's new novel and the article about him in New York magazine?

JL: Haven't read it.

BEE: No desire to read that book. Everyone told me it was terrible. It was a real shitty book. Someone said "You got to read the last paragraph." So I went down to The Strand Bookstore, and picked it up and went "Whoa!" The churchbells were chiming because someone fell in love. I had a feeling like it was a low-brow but literary book.

JC: It was "literature."

BEE: Exactly. It's exactly what publishing houses want. They want low-brow literature. I think that book fit the bill. Even with all the publicity about it, I don't think it was that successful. Boy, was that a depressing article at the same time. Why didn't you read the article, Jonathan?

JL: I read the article! I can quote from the article: "There nothing less interesting than the commodification of literature" said the novelist who permitted this article to be written about him over a three-year period.

BEE: These articles don't help.

AL: Can a novel compete with other mediums which basically assault the viewer like film, television, or rock & roll?

BEE: I think that by it's very nature the novel can't compete. It's a different kind of assault if a novel is powerful. All those other mediums makes for a passive experience. Why it can't as assaulting is because you're holding the book and you're pulling the strings and deciding when you're going to stop. You're creating everything you see in your mind. It's your own vision. It can never be that sort of assaulting or overwhelming experience that a movie can or a rock concert. You're in control in many ways when you're reading a book.

JC: And I think that you get in trouble as a writer if you do try to consciously compete.

JL: Yeah. It's a false issue completely. Novels work there insidious means on you, and it is a collaboration. The reason that novels can be ultimately more unsettling is because of the complicity, because you participated. But novels were never in competition in that same sense. In the history of the novel, there's this only this one strange moment, this Dickens moment, when they really were, across the board, a popular entertainment. What novels did was go back to their previous position which is, not in a class sense, an elite activity in that it is a chosen self-conscious arena.

AL: Kind of like stamp collecting.

BEE: Poetry readings.

AL: The novel is not dead. That's good to hear.

JL: I think that's always such a silly thing.

JC: It dies every year.

JL: I'm working on a novel that might be dead but.... (laughter)

AL: Who are some of the other writers who went to Bennington that we didn't mention? Joseph told me about Lawrence David who has a few novels out.

BEE: Lawrence David. Yeah. Donna Tartt. Jill Eisenstadt.

JL: And Nancy Hertzberg

BEE: April Stevens. Angel Engels?

JC: All these people graduated around the same time in 1985-86.

JL: You know who's having a lot of success right now who went to school with us? Reginald Shepard.

BEE: Right.

JL: I don't know if you have your eye on the poetry world at all but he's been in the last three year's Best Poetry.

JC: He won the Yale younger poets award. I remember him. I think he also wrote a memoir or a novel recently. Who was the person you mentioned?

BEE: Mylen Levine. He wrote one extraordinary novel. He was there then. He was so wasted on drugs the whole time that he didn't really get his shit together. His manuscripts were always covered with hair and sauce, and all this crap. You had to wipe it off to get to them.

JC: He was a wreck. You should have seen his room at Bennington. Whoo. Fuzzy sandwiches.

BEE: He wrote one book called The Pacific Revelation. It took place in Venice. He finished it in 1992. I read it. It blew me away. Very difficult and very long, but with long stretches of being lucid and funny and readable, and then there was difficult stuff being thrown in. It was kind of like Pynchon. I sent it everywhere. The silence was deafening. No one got it. No one understood it. These were all big agents and editors. Then slowly trickling down, they said "We really like it but we can't do anything because it's too hard and we can sell only 500 copies." He wrote another book which is pretty good, then he has this new book which I've seen and it's the most accessible. I don't know. I hope that it works out for him. He's really talented.

June 1997