Jonathan Lethem is the best-selling author of Gun with Occasional Music, Motherless Brooklyn, and Fortress of Solitude. He has recently re-located from his home in Brooklyn to Southern California to teach fiction at Pomona College. Rachel Elizabeth Jones joins him on campus to discuss his two latest novels, his trajectories to California, what “hipster” actually means, and how he finds his new life as a professor. His new collection of essays The Ecstasy of Influence is released being released this month.

Rachel Elizabeth Jones: Could you talk a little bit about your trajectory to California?

Jonathan Lethem: There’s a cartoon version of my trajectory, that’s been disseminated lately: uprooted-from-Brooklyn-comes-to-Pomona College. In truth I’ve been itinerant. I’ve moved from New York over and over again. It’s a place I love, and I obviously have a charged relationship to it, but it’s been a ritual to leave it behind, or to try. This is my second California life. I lived in the Bay Area for ten years in my twenties. I’m old. That was another life completely, but an important part of my life. It was where I invented myself as writer. I wrote my first three novels and became a published writer in that time. At one point I never thought I needed to go back to New York, or that I was likely to. So this present narrative seems quite ironic.

Rachel: You started college in Vermont. How’d you find that?

Jonathan: Yes, I went up to college in Vermont, at Bennington. It’s something I tried to explain in a number of different places, how influential and significant my brief college career could be, despite how quickly it might seem that I’d bounced away. I only finished three semesters. I was ambivalent about being a college student. I’m not sure I would’ve stuck anywhere.

Rachel: Was it expected that you go to college?

Jonathan: Well it is for anyone, right? Yet I didn’t expect it of myself, not completely. In high school I was obsessed with the Beat Generation script, that of self-invention and running away from things, and wanting to become a writer by going off into a garret, or immersing in raw experiences, like hitchhiking – that would serve as my college. At one point, quite absurdly because my temperament is not that of a student of Zen Buddhism, I thought, “No, not college, I’ll go off and enlist in a Zen monastery.” None of these things prevented my applying to some colleges and then going off to one, but they did seed the ground for the disappearance of my college career shortly after. I felt there were these other live prospects. Whether they were just in my head or not, I’d told myself that not all writers began with school, and since that’s what I wanted to do, I’d fool with these other possibilities. It looks very decisive in retrospect, it might appear that it worked out, in retrospect – neither was true at the time. I didn’t publish a novel until ten years after left college. I was a book store clerk.

From the distance of the East Coast, California is confusing, and you think everything is in one place. You receive a garbled impression, and mine was especially garbled. Yet the Bay Area, when I arrived, had for me the advantage of familiarity. The frozen-in-time 1960s quality of Berkeley reminded me of my parents’ milieu, and I fell into it very easily. I was sort of a vagabond student, and Berkeley is a place that is very congenial for vagabond students.

Rachel: Did you find that when you were in Berkeley that you would talk about New York?

Jonathan: Sure. I played the role of the New Yorker in California immediately, in a way that I wouldn’t have in New York. My street cred wasn’t really so impressive. I was a weird mixed bag of bohemian and Mid-westerner. None of my affiliations in New York seemed very clear or firm, but once I left, my affiliation as a New Yorker became something I could wear on my sleeve. It gave me a card to play. It was my way of continuing to think about New York. Before I really investigated that material, before I lived there again or wrote about it, I had some getting over New York to do. But I didn’t mind taking credit for being from a famously tough place.

Rachel: I recently read You Don’t Love Me Yet. What experiences did you use to inform that work?

Jonathan:The setting of that book is sleight-of-hand. I transposed my time in San Francisco in my late twenties and early thirties, when I was approximately the age of those characters. I spent a lot of time in the Haight Ashbury and the Mission, at a time when those places were funky and interesting. I was even sort of in a band, despite the fact that I’m not qualified by any talent to be in a band.

Rachel: What was the name of the band?

Jonathan: We never settled on a clear name. It bore an unworkable name for a while. “Emma the Crayon.” Which probably proves how devoted to self-erasure this band was. I drew some of energy for that book from my San Francisco days, living in neighborhoods that were being gentrified by tattooed kids. And simply the way you live at that age – anywhere and nowhere. I wrote about Brooklyn in a way that demanded a lot of cultural and sociological and political and historical specificity. Yet I got away with doing a Silverlake book – assuming you think I got away with it — because I wrote about characters who weren’t thinking about their cultural placement, or the meaning of urban life. I wrote about Los Angeles from the point of view of characters who might have actually been living in a bohemian quadrant of Minneapolis, for all they knew. It was a deliberate attempt to do something more playful and irresponsible, specifically in the relationship of my fiction to place. I’d just come off a a decade writing these grounded and accountable pieces about Brooklyn. I wanted to flip a switch and be full of shit. To write about a place that I didn’t know well and make it up and get away with it.

Rachel: So speaking of Silver Lake, and speaking of being in your twenties in the Bay, talk to me about what “hipster” means. At this point it seems like an insult.

Jonathan: I’ve watched this cultural formation in the past decade – hipster-shame – and it strikes me as a red herring, a way of channelling disgruntlement that ought to be reserved for greater evils into morose self-loathing on the part of people who are actually all more or less complicit. On the other hand, a defense of hipsterism isn’t something I’d want to sink a lot of stock into, because it doesn’t actually matter at all. Either way, it’s exactly one of the least important things you could be worried about, whether or not it’s shameful to be a hipster. I suppose I’m drawn perversely to entrench myself behind the term, the way Quakers or the Queer community adopted a term of abuse and made it their own. Why this horror of hipsterism? It’s basically people not wanting to be themselves, not wanting to listen to the music they listen to, or be apprehended dressing the way they dress or feeling the way they feel. A hipster is mostly just an unfinished person – I think that’s where the shame really comes in. People are eager not to be counted among the unfinished. They want to be something real, something complete. But you know what? It’s okay to be unfinished.

Rachel: What is the relationship between the idea of the hipster and cultural critique? You use a lot of cultural critique and you seem to poke fun at it while still holding a deep respect for it. For example, how Perkus Tooth in Chronic City gets lost in movies, or how Bedwin in You Don’t Love Me Yet gets lost in this one movie and chooses one tiny part to focus on – that sort of obsession.

Jonathan: I look at a lot of things through the lens of cultural hunger, cultural voracity, cultural obsession. My characters often identify dangerously, even overwhelmingly, with their affiliations. If you paraphrase the usual critique of the hipster it might be that their cultural affiliations are all too lightly held, that they’re received notions. That they’ve decorated themselves with cultural style, but it’s not a life or death battle for them. I doubt that’s usually true; that’s one of the ways I would defend hipsterism. People’s tastes matter keenly to them, even if they’ve been made to feel embarrassed about them and brandish them with a degree of irony. Anyway, for better or worse, I’m helplessly on the team of the super-taster – he for whom salt is too salty, sugar too sweet, and cultural treasure too precious, for whom it is as crucial as oxygen. I’ve always been very easily colonized by the books and music and movies I love. It’s not only extremely intense for me; it becomes my way of thinking about nearly anything. I use the artworks I love as a lens, or perhaps a crutch, or a tool… or an exoskeleton? There are all sorts of metaphors, each with slightly different implications, but anyway, they’re my apparatus for grappling with the problem of being a person. A novelist tends to write ruefully, or to couch in reservations, the things that are actually most defining of themselves. So, I write about this kind of character passionately, with sympathy, but also I tend to put them in social or political or interpersonal contexts that make them look absurd or problematic. I try to see characters like myself from the inside and the outside.

Rachel: With that said, say you go to a fancy LA party or a fancy New York party and you have all these characters walking around with their cultural critique or their specific project, or whatever it is, how do you personally respond to that? How do you tell if someone’s full of shit or not?

Jonathan: Full of shit about what? Sometimes being full of shit is an amazing way to get started. I was full of shit about everything at the outset, especially about being a novelist. I wasn’t one and I had no idea how to do it. I had to be full of shit for a while. I’m often most drawn to the people who are at the greatest risk of seeming full of shit, because they’re usually not risk-averse. They’re attempting something. Also – this is one of the subjects of Chronic City – life is a performance with scripts, and it matters that you recognize this. Your task is to be in play, to step onto the stage, to make something occur. That means risking being full of shit, or being called full of shit, a lot. So I wouldn’t say that’s what I’m screening for, when I walk into that room that you’ve proposed. What I am looking for is that thing you know when you meet it that’s hard to name otherwise. To be awakened. It’s what I look for on a bookshelf, it’s what I look for when I’m flipping the radio dial, and it’s what I want out of people.

Rachel: Have you always had that mindset, or did you get there later?

Jonathan: I was given a head-start. I’ve never before articulated this exact thing, that I tend to be forgiving of the full-of-shit among us. But in fact, in my parents’ world…they were bohemians and they were artists, they were activists, they were radicals, they were fools. My house, their social set, the other grown-ups – I grew up in a space that was full of preposterous people. Accepting them as a version of the world, one I could tolerate and take pleasure in, and to choose from among their flavors of magnificent bullshit as if at an ice cream parlor, and even to choose some to attempt figure out and believe in – all of that came with the territory, for me. To the small extent that You Don’t Love Me Yet is a serious book, as opposed to a waffle heaped with strawberries, it asks exactly that: How do you define interpersonal meaning when you yourself are still full of shit? That’s the question.

Rachel: Could you talk a little bit about your use of animals?

Jonathan: That’s germane to me right now. I’m preparing a course on animals in fiction, next semester. Watership Down, Call of the Wild, all of it. Now that I’m in an academic department I’ve gained awareness that there’s a lot of really good writing and theory going on at the moment on precisely this subject. Of course as a working artist I’ve just stumbled into the material by my own migrations as a reader. Animal stories were at the heart of my first interest in writing per se, through Lewis Carroll. The talking animals in the Alice books were imprinted on my sense of how characters are portrayed in writing in the first place. My first novel was full of talking animals. People associate that book with Raymond Chandler or Phillip K. Dick, not wrongly, but just behind those lies Alice in Wonderland. My detective strolls through a world of these baffling and annoying creatures, whose ability to speak is a given. The animal element activates a lot of the persuasiveness in the fiction that I love the most. Henry James means a lot to me, but it’s absolutely confounding when you realize he never shows people eating. They just don’t eat, or if they do, the meal is glossed over without you ever learning what it was. I wanted to go the other direction and have my characters defined by their hunger, defined by their sleepiness or horniness, by the animal life of their bodies. You Don’t Love Me Yet is partly an exercise in having the characters always needing a meal or drugs or sleep or…Their bodies are present. The zoo is there as a mirror for this. You find that in Dickens his characters are everywhere described in animal terms. It’s at the heart of fiction, but it hides. Except when it doesn’t. For there are so many great animals in fiction. I’m actually having a very difficult time narrowing the reading list for this course. Once you look for them, they’re everywhere.

Rachel: On that note, how do you find being a professor?

Jonathan: It’s a new experience. I’d been a teacher a lot, I’d even been called “professor”, but I wasn’t exactly. I’d parachute in from the world of writing and be a guest star or “distinguished visitor.” Sure, I grew comfortable in the classroom, and learned I had something to offer in that setting. But here at Pomona I’m actually a professor – I’m part of the department, I’m part of the careers of the students, I’m an advisor. I really have a job. And I haven’t had a job since I was a bookstore clerk. [Laughter]

Rachel: Was that your first job?

Jonathan: The only job I ever held, until this one. Honestly, this is a revelation for me. The collegiality of a department like this is an incredible thing. It’s always being said that writing is a lonely occupation, and it’s true – I remove myself from the world to write novels. It cuts against family life and against the illusion of fraternity among writers, and it cuts here against the idea of academic collegiality because I’m still the novelist. It’s a very hermetic identity. It’s a very strange choice to go away and invent people who don’t exist and spend time with them instead of the real people, right? I go and I commune with the fake people. Yet I don’t do that because I think it’s morally superior to being part of the world [laughter]. In fact it leaves me desperately hungry for the world. So as a professor, I have a really interesting version of a world: this environment, what’s expected of me, and what I find myself excited to deliver. It’s a terrific kind of engagement precisely for being such a good antidote to living in my head.

Rachel: I noticed that Richard Abneg, an important character in Chronic City, shows up in You Don’t Love Me Yet – to what extent is Chronic City a sort of New York transmutation or a sequel to You Don’t Love Me Yet?

Jonathan: There are a few little trails like this. I suspect a lot of people, for superficial but inarguable reasons, see those books as divided, utterly. One weighty if not ponderous, and set in New York, and the other Californian and frothy and small. Yet, You Don’t Love Me Yet taught me how to do Chronic City in the most direct way. The small book was the laboratory in which a lot of the terms of that bigger book were derived: how to enact my plot in terms of a group of friends who behave as friends really do, in these kind of repetitive, solipsistic, self-enclosed rituals. The reason that Seinfeld was not really a show about nothing is that it was about how appalling and fun it is to have friends with whom you develop a private vocabulary and a private world and running jokes that make you feel that you are the only real people and anyone outside that charmed circle just doesn’t get it. That’s the lineage that leads from You Don’t Love Me Yet to Chronic City.

Rachel: Can you talk about Perkus Tooth, from Chronic City? Have you gotten a lot of feedback about him?

Jonathan: People identify the book with him. When people don’t like the book, it’s because they feel that Perkus his failings have been indulged, or that he’s a jerk to begin with. When they love the book they think he’s a martyred saint. So he’s the Rorschach blot. The irony for me is that I feel that hiding in the foreground, almost too near to see, is Chase Insteadman. He’s the character I identify with secretly much. I guess it’s obvious to see where I’ve lent parts of my cultural obsessiveness to Perkus, or to observe that he’s a quasi-writer. But Chase is one of the most important characters I’ve ever gotten onto the page. It must be that because he declares himself as bland, as a chalk outline of a human being, people take that invitation to overlook him. They quit thinking about him, which I suppose is something the book had to invite them to do, in order to make itself happen. But for what it’s worth, the character I still think about, more than Perkus, is Chase.

Rachel: Have you been put off by people being so concerned with Perkus?

Jonathan: No, Perkus is attractive and strange and fragile, so if he’s the popular hero, that’s lovely. I sometimes joke that, in Motherless Brooklyn, the main character Lionel Essrog is quite a lot more loveable than I really am. He’s a magical-geek character, in the way that Holden Caufield, or Ignatius J. Reilly is, or Charley, from Flowers For Algernon – an attractor for reader sympathies. Perkus Tooth functions in a similar way. He’s a magical geek character. You feel that he’s fragile, which pulls the reader towards him.

Rachel: So now that you’re in L.A., I read that you’ve sold the film rights to some of your work?

Jonathan: Over the years I’ve done this again and again: let someone try to develop one of the books into a film. My hopes for these projects get aroused; I’m like a fan, hearing about something I want to see, and hoping it’ll be good. The one that’s like that for me right now is As She Climbed Across the Table, which has been optioned by David Cronenberg. He’s one of my favorite living directors – I’m flattered that he’s even trying, I think it’s a good match, it seems very possible that he’d do something wonderful. That’s the one that I’m in love with right now, but it’s really outside of me. It’s a thing that happens to the books that has weirdly little to do with me as their author.

Rachel: Did you learn that or it’s been like that?

Jonathan: I figured it out pretty fast. I had advantages in figuring it out because I was already a student of film – or a fan, not a student. The best adaptations of books, when books are involved as the sources of film, are the ones where they do very little “justice” to the book. They just take something they like and transform it. And so, I always thought, this is likely the best fate – just take it, make a movie. You’re filmmakers, you do your thing, and I’ll wait and see what happens. I’ll cash your check in the meantime and use it to write another book. That seems like the best relationship possible. I haven’t been seduced into thinking I could be the screenwriter or could control the outcome of these projects.

Rachel: Have you done much exploring of L.A.?

Jonathan: I know bits and pieces of L.A. Over the years I’ve come here on different kinds of trips. I lived in L.A. for a month or six weeks, now three or four different times. So I know it in bursts. I gather this is true of L.A. in general anyway, you can’t know it comprehensively. You know it in fragments. But I’ve plenty more to discover.

Rachel: What do you like about it, or what do you notice about it?

Jonathan: I really like very obvious and corny things about it – I like its diversity. It’s real. It has real diversity. And there are places that brag of diversity when what they mean is that everything is neatly balkanized. It’s not here.

The Ecstasy of Influence is out now from Doubleday, $27.95
Author Photo: Mara Faye Lethem

The Dossier Readings #2 with novelist Peter Straub. Bestselling author Peter Straub (Ghost Story, Koko, Lost Boy, Lost Girl, A Dark Matter) reads from the work of the late Donald Harington, an Arkansas-born novelist best known for his many novels that take place in a fictional Ozark hamlet known as Stay More, AR. This reading was recorded in lo-tech fashion in Manhattan in the fall of 2009, only a month before Harington passed away at the age of 73. Peter is a great admirer of Harington’s work, one of many who think Harington’s readership is not nearly what it should be. In an oft-used quote, the author Fred Chappell says of Harington, “[He’s] not an under-appreciated writer, he’s an undiscovered continent.” When Dossier asked Peter if he’d be interested in doing a recorded reading for a website project we call The Dossier Readings, in which writers are asked to read favorite passages from favorite works, he came to us with a pretty serious stack of books, ultimately settling on an excerpt from Harington’s 1972 novel, Some Other Place. The Right Place (Toby Press). Hope you enjoy.

This past week, Symphony Space presented the ‘Selected Shorts’ program in which Richard Russo discussed editing the Best American Short Stories 2010. (His introduction is not be missed, I might add. It may be one of the most simple yet moving intros for the series.) Two of the stories were read aloud- the actress Hope Davis read Jennifer Egan’s, “Safari” from her linked story collection A Visit From the Goon Squad (which also features “A to B,” originally published in Dossier No.2) and Tony Roberts read Joshua Ferris’ story “The Valetudinarian.” To hear them yourself, you can click here for a nifty public radio calculator to find out what time the program will play in your local area. Here’s the interview from WNYC with Egan discussing “Safari” with OneStory editor Hannah Tinti:

Image by Peter Beard

Adam Novy’s The Avian Gospels is published in two pocket-sized maroon volumes made to mimic the Bible, complete with red pleather covers and gilt-gold edged paper. A narrative masterpiece with a healthy dose of social commentary on politics, class systems and war, the visual imagery in The Avian Gospels is filled with elaborate death scenes, horrific violence, scores of attacking birds, underground tunnels and well, some sex. All of this action takes place in a fantastical world (where Hungary borders on Oklahoma) at the end of a long civil war, where massive flocks of birds have overtaken the city from the human ruling class. In post-apocalyptic fashion, there is an entire race of gypsies that live underground, of whom two of them, father and son team Zvoninir and Morgan have a special gift- they can control the birds actions through telepathy creating diagrams, causing or ceasing attacks and in some cases just making them go away. At 97,000 words, Novy has created an alternate reality that has been widely compared to both magical realism master Gabriel Garcia Marquez and horror genius Stephen King’s The Stand. However, Novy describes his book this way: “The Avian Gospels has a shifting, bathetic, ironic surface that’s meant to keep the reader on her heels, and if someone is reading this interview and thinks my book sounds boring, let me add that there are also chases, action, jokes, and many explosions.” We got to ask Novy a few questions about why he would write such a boring book.

Katherine: The story is kind of epic- did you sit down and plan out to write such an epic two volume book as your first novel? Did you ever stop and think you were being overly ambitious?

Adam: I knew the plot almost right away. The ambitious city-building stuff got necessary to give the book the kind of verisimilitude something this weird needs. I needed the city in the book to seem like an actual place with a history, a topography and a culture that grew measurably in time. The dictum ‘write what you know’ has always left me cold, since nothing really interesting has happened to me, so I wanted to show that ‘knowing,’ in this context—ie, making a fictional world seem credible—is really just a way of manipulating nouns. The news is always written like something known, but most of it isn’t true.

Katherine: How did you start writing? What job did you do before this?

Adam: I always thought I’d be a writer, because I like to be alone. I’ve had many unusual jobs, some great—like walking dogs—some unbelievably bad. I temped for a data entry company in Chicago one summer, and they kept all their pieces of paper, all their raw data, in the basement. That was the summer Chicago’s new sewer system, the Deep Tunnel Project, had its big debut, and it failed after a single night of rain. The basement with the data flooded out with sewage, and every piece of paper had to be wiped, dried out in the sun, and cleaned again. I sucked at entering data, so instead, I cleaned pages. It was awful.

Katherine: I take it that was the worst job you ever had. At what point did you stop your other jobs and just be a writer full-time?

Adam: Well, I’m a college professor now, and, the world being what it is, unless I write a vampire novel, I’ll probably always need a job.

Katherine: What was the first speck of an idea that led to the Avian gospels? Why did you set it in this dystopian mythical place?

Adam: Not long after 9/11, I started writing in the first-person plural—we do this, we do that—because I felt a connection to history for the first time in my life. I had this “we’re all in it together,” kind of feeling, which lasted about two weeks, but by then, I thought it might be fun to try to narrate from the perspective of the bad guys, the ones who history hates. As for the oddness of the book, I have a theory that things get mythic right away if you screw around with place-names. We get unsettled if proper nouns are twisted, which shows how tenuous our grip on things is.

Katherine: How much research did you have to do for this book?

Adam: I have about a million guidebooks on birds, but I tried to make everything up and outright lie if possible.

Katherine: Have you ever been bird-watching?

Adam: I went bird-watching once at camp and saw a family of bald eagles. The feeling was almost religious, though not for patriotic reasons; the birds just seemed so beautiful and private. I love birds and think they’re beautiful, but that’s not why I used them. I used birds because they seem so automatically poetic and symbolic. I wanted to suggest a big religious mystery without explaining it. I don’t own a bird, but I’m about to adopt some stick insects. Have you seen stick insects? They’re incredible! They’re also technically illegal.

Katherine: I googled them. They are creepy. Why do you want one?

Adam: I just think they’re beautiful, and plus, they reproduce by parthenogenesis. That is, they clone themselves.

Katherine: Why did you decide to make The Avian Gospels look like a bible?

Adam: Making the book look like a bible was the idea of my editor at Hobart, Aaron Burch. He’s been an excellent editor in every way.

Katherine: Do you think that will help or hurt sales?

Adam: More than sales, I hope the book begins its own religion.

Katherine: Really? Like L.Ron Hubbard or Joseph Smith?

Adam: Oh no, they were entrepreneurs. I want my religion to be mystical and ancient, like Gnosticism.

Katherine: Have you seen anyone reading the bible and thought it was your book?

Adam: I haven’t seen anyone reading it anywhere, alas. I saw someone reading Nicole Krauss’s book at the airport and pretended it was mine. That was a lovely feeling. Once, I read the bible, end-to-end, on public transportation. People kept on interrupting me to ask what section I was reading. I made all kinds of friends, got asked to dinner, etc. The subtext was always: See you in heaven.

Katherine: How much does the bible play into your influences for the Avian Gospels?

Adam: The Bible is often very fast and violent, like great pop fiction. It’s filled with indelible stories that everyone loves and fears, and it’s supposed to tell us who we are and what to do, but we don’t even know what it is, or, by extension, who we are in relation to it. I absolutely tried to mimic that. I want to unsettle the reader’s relationship with the text. The world is just so confusing, you know? I wanted my book to capture that dislocation and make it worse, so we can know it better.

Katherine: How is your work influenced by science fiction or magical realism?

Adam: My favorite science fiction is Lilith’s Brood, by Octavia Butler, and it definitely affected how I write, because of how it probes the way we change in relation to our circumstances. Everyone should run out and read this book immediately. It’s indelible. It seems to me we live in a kind of sci-fi dystopia, and science fiction is changing from the genre no one respects to the one that everyone has to write to be a realist. I like the way Italo Calvino uses details, especially in Cosmicomics and Invisible Cities. He describes with crisp, precise language, but one can hardly visualize his world, which teeters on the edge of the imaginable. I don’t mean to be precious, but I experience our world this way.

I really admire the way James Ellroy uses plot. I want the energies released in the story to be attributed to characters, and I like accountability and consequences. This makes me sound like a Republican, as though my characters aren’t victims, which they are, but they discover that too late to really separate themselves from that which victimized them. I think it’s interesting when decisions made under pressure end up being more consequential than they seem to be at first, or than they should be. That’s probably where the book departs from magic realists like Marquez: the characters don’t lope along through life and make adorable mistakes, with all of human folly keening like a wind in their ears. My characters are trapped in a kind of death spiral of their own making. By the way, I know that that’s the dumbest description of Marquez, ever.

Katherine: I was drawn to the love story aspect and found the Jane/Katherine triangle to resemble American Tragedy. Did you mean to put class struggles in with all of the other themes at work here?

Adam: Love triangles are great! Kids get stuck in them all the time. I think there’s a difference between what Morgan, Jane and Katherine represent as public figures in the world of the book, and who they are as individuals. Morgan is a terrible leader, but the more screwed up he gets personally the stronger he becomes as a myth. Jane and Katherine love him, and he loves them for very different reasons, which connect, at least in part, to how much money they have. Love can’t give these characters what they want from it.

A great way to complicate class and ethnic distinctions to make individuals fall in love with those outside their caste. Music is good for this, too. Katherine’s brother Mike hates Gypsies but loves their music, so he ends up liking Gypsies. On the other hand, it was important to me to preserve the book as one where the rich show no compunctions about fucking over the poor. I needed to find the truth of the world I was making, and it was a place where people were desperate, and therefore meaner than they are in other books.

There’s this anonymous guy on Twitter who calls himself PourMeCoffee, and he joked last month that the rich may do away with weekends as a budget-cutting measure. He was kidding, but he wasn’t.

Katherine: Who else do you follow on Twitter? Which websites do you look at?

Adam: Oh dear. I follow Dave Weigel, Brian Beutler, Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Ann Lowery, Choire Sicha, Alex Pareene, Liz Penn, Zonal Marking, Maria Bustillos, Sid Lowe, Daniel Taylor, Adrian Chen, Blake Hounshell, Bill Simmons, Evgeny Morozov, Andy Mitten, The Cockney Red, R_o_M, Peter Daou, Tom Scocca, Melissa Broder, The Girl At The Pub, and my cousins Charlie, Molly and Katie. Those are just the ones I can remember. I read The Awl and The Hairpin, Gawker, Bookslut, Pitchfork, io9, The Guardian, Red News, The Republik of Mancunia. I’m an addict! Help!

Katherine: Which author has made the most impact on you in your life?

Adam: James Ellroy, Jose Saramago, William Faulkner, Italo Calvino, Ovid. I like Henry James and Proust and Virginia Woolf and the plays of Chekhov but I don’t sound like them at all. Octavia Butler and William Shakespeare. Thucydides and Herodotus and Lawrence Wright. Richard Slotkin, Klaus Theweleit, Michael Hart and Antonio Negri. Samuel Beckett.

Katherine: What’s the last good book you read?

Adam: The Instructions, by Adam Levin. It’s incredibly tender and cruel, and the quality of the rhetoric is just frightening. It’s a masterpiece.

Katherine: What are you planning on reading next?

Adam: Eugenie Grandet, by Balzac. My fifth Balzac novel of 2010.

Katherine: Can you share with our readers a list of your top ten books, short stories, etc..

Adam: Lilith’s Brood, by Octavia Butler. My favorite science fiction.
American Tabloid, by James Ellroy. I dare you to find a better plot.
Lost Illusions, Balzac. Beneath the cranky verisimilitude is a deeply jaded ache, and under that, a profound love of money.
The Portrait of a Lady and The Ambassadors, Henry James. These book sees Europe as a kind of exquisite trap for damaged people who can’t quite live their lives. These are the novels I wish I could emulate and can’t.
Antony and Cleopatra, by Shakespeare. The play treats the Roman Empire as a gorgeous illusion. As Auden says of this play, “You can’t suggest that the world is destructive without showing it in all its seductiveness.”
Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler and Red Harvest, by Dashielle Hammet. These books go together because they have nothing common, which is how they set the boundaries for detective fiction. Chandler’s world is gorgeous, his prose is to die for, loss and moral outrage suffuses everything. Hammet’s world is endless midnight and everyone is evil, drunk and doomed.
Regeneration Through Violence, by Richard Slotkin. I found this book because the title is mentioned in a blurb on the cover of my copy of Blood Meridian. The book is non-fiction, so it doesn’t create a world so much as convince you that the one you’re living in is different than you thought. Regeneration Through Violence describes the myths our country told itself as it was born. It’s a terrifying, invigorating joy to see through this lens.
Operation Shylock, by Phillip Roth. Roth’s explanation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict goes as follows: everyone is crazy and more-or-less well-meaning and can’t stop yelling, and, beyond their madness, there is nothing. It’s a very rhetorical book, and my book has almost no rhetoric at all. I went for no ideas but in things, while he tried no ideas or things, just spazzing people. Roth for the win!
The Cherry Orchard, by Chekhov. Once I’d finished writing The Avian Gospels, I spent two years failing to write a book that captures time and loss and melancholy like The Cherry Orchard does. Chekhov treats the world like a kind of time machine that keeps you from inhabiting the moment, and life goes by, unlived. My novel, which I never named, failed. I am writing another one.
Love and Rockets, by Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez. These comics deal with time and plot and character in a really sophisticated way, and there’s a lot of awesome sex in them. The storytelling is great. I like how comics use text and image. It’s a different kind of narrative, and I’m just starting to understand it.
Time Regained, by Proust. The best book I ever read. Having four thousand pages or whatever it is to flesh out themes and characters really helps. I had this thought while reading The Instructions, too: how am I supposed to write a novel in just three hundred pages?
The Piano Teacher, by Elfriede Jelinek, who haters like to label as an undeserving Nobel laureate, but her prose is so many things at once: ironic, flexible, angry, hilarious, nasty, intelligent, generous. Her rigor is absolutely merciless.
Naked, by David Sedaris. Because he sells so many books and everyone loves him, he doesn’t get the credit he deserves as an artist. His work is brave and sensitive and dark.
The Collected Stories of Flannery O’Connor. Either she was right about Catholicism, or else she’s just the cruelest American writer. Could somebody this mean get into the canon in 2010?
To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf. For me, the perfect fusion of text and life.

Katherine: What are you working on now?

Adam: I’m writing a book about the youth of Perseus and Medusa, before they get discovered. It’s called The Gore and the Splatter, and, the title notwithstanding, it’s a sweeter book than The Avian Gospels.

Sloane Crosley is a super-hero of sorts; book publicist by day and best-selling author by night. For her day job, Sloane works at Vintage Books as the publicist for big dogs like Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, Jay McInerney, and Dave Eggers. In her free time, she wrote her own book I Was Told There’d Be Cake, the best-selling collection of essays that HBO bought the rights to and is currently being turned into a pilot. Her much anticipated second book How Did You Get This Number? comes out this week. Although some of these essays take place as far away as Alaska and Portugal, they are all very rooted in that wonderful melancholy New York humor she’s become famous for. Highlights include an essay that reads like an ode to smelly taxis and how difficult finding a decent apartment in New York is, weighing the pros and cons of a kleptomaniac roommate. Also, whenever you can quote “I believe you are in league with the butcher,” you win my vote.

Katherine Krause: How many hours a day do you write?
Sloane Crosley: Depends. Sometimes five. Sometimes none. Though I don’t think you can write well after three hours. Or at least I can’t. I hit hour four and it’s like I write one sentence, get exhausted, and need a cookie.

Katherine: Do you have any rituals for writing?
Sloane: I need a full glass of water and a clean apartment. And I usually start sitting on the floor.

Katherine: Do you try to write humor or does it just come out that way?
Sloane: Mostly it comes out that way. That said, I have a general sense of when it needs to either be drawn upon or cut back.

Katherine: Do you read a lot of humor writing?
Sloane: Actually no. I appreciate it. I love David Rakoff and Nora Ephron and humor novelists like Sam Lipstye. But I don’t seek it out. It’s how I feel about potato chips. I’ll eat them if they’re there and I’ll like them but I’ve never pulled off the road for them.

Katherine: You’ve said you are a short story fanatic- what are some of your favorites?
Sloane: Oh my God. Well, okay. Collections are too many so I’ll go with individual short stories:
People Like That Are The Only People Here by Lorrie Moore
In The Gloaming by Alice Elliott Dark
Pie Dance by Molly Giles
Things You Should Know by A.M. Holmes
Christmas Is A Sad Season For The Poor by John Cheever
White Angel by Michael Cunningham
The Dead by James Joyce
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates
How To Give The Wrong Impression by Katherine Heiny
A City of Churches by Donald Barthelme
Love and Hydrogen by Jim Shepard
Mortals by Tobais Wolff
Send Me To The Electric Chair by Clyde Edgarton
Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story by Russell Banks
Down Through the Valley by Wells Tower
and maybe Girl by Jamaica Kincaid. I think of the last line of that story all the time.

Katherine: Do you write fiction or poetry?
Sloane: Fiction. My poetry sucks. I know because I’ve never really tried. I think you have to have a special calling to write good poetry.

Katherine: Did you always want to be a writer?
Sloane: Yes. Mixed with other things like archeology and art but pretty much, yes.

Katherine: Did you always want to be a publicist?
Sloane: Fuck no. I had no idea what a publicist was growing up. But it turns out to be a pretty excellent job when you believe in what you’re promoting.

Katherine: What is one book or story you always try to push on people?
Sloane: When people come into my office and just say they need something to read I’ll give them Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro or anything by Lorrie Moore or Dave Eggers. Also The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon is a crowd pleaser. If I could push any book on anyone? Maybe The Moon and Sixpence.

Katherine: Is there one book you re-read again and again?
Sloane: Dubliners by James Joyce.

Katherine: What’s your opinion on the iPad and digital technology in the publishing industry?
Sloane: Call me when it makes waffles. No, really: I think we’re so simultaneously scandalized and fascinated by it but generally I think the iPad is great. Though the glare in the sunlight sucks if you intend on taking it to the beach. But it’s not blanketly bad for books. But it’s hard for me to have a definitive opinion on e-readers yet. I think both their advantages and damages have yet to be realized.

Katherine: How many actual books do you think you own?
Sloane: 600? 1,000? I can’t do math so good. It’s why I work in publishing.

Katherine: Who are some of your favorite artists? Photography, painting, mixed-media, etc…
Sloane: Gregory Crewdson, Tracy Emin, Amy Cutler, Tokihiro Sato, Sally Mann. I like Robert Montgomery. In general I end up liking one piece by an artist, which doesn’t bode well for art collecting.

Katherine: What’s your best NYC survival skill?
Sloane: Ignoring my instinct to turn when called. That and walking over sidewalk grates in heels without really having to see when one is coming up.

Katherine: When people come from out of town to visit you- where do you take them?
Sloane: The Russian Samovar, Raoul’s, Death & Co., Egg, Frankie’s, Barney Greengrass or Russ & Daughters. I like Omen too. I like to ply people with food and drink, clearly.

Katherine: What is a book or a piece of art that sums up NYC to you?
Sloane: The giant Chagalls in Lincoln Center. I remember standing beneath them with my grandmother when I was about 4 and her explaining what everything in them meant. It’s one of my earliest memories of the city.

Katherine: Any plans to leave NYC or are you here for good?
Sloane: I would leave if I had a good reason or a strong desire. Put it this way: if I felt I absolutely couldn’t live anywhere else, I’d force myself pack my bags tomorrow. I’m here by choice.

Fill in the blanks:

If I could follow in anyone’s footsteps it would be: George Plimpton

The last thing I think about before I go to bed is: what I’m doing with my life

The last thing that pissed me off was being ridiculously nice to someone I can’t stand because I was nervous

What I hate about NYC is crowds

What I hate about suburbia is a lack of crowds

My favorite flavor of ice cream is mint chocolate chip or that cereal milk thing at Momofuku

If I could be re-incarnated I would come back as a panther

Best cultural institution in NYC is The New York Public Library

House on fire- what do you rescue? Mabel (my cat), my passport, my computer, photographs, first edition of Franny & Zooey, a box of sentimental things, a Givenchy bag

The last thing that scared me was getting caught doing something I wasn’t supposed to be doing

How Did You Get This Number is out on June 15th followed by a nationwide book tour. Visit Sloane’s website to find out when she is reading near you.

Barnes & Noble Tribeca
7PM • Wednesday, June 16th
97 Warren Street

McNally Jackson
7PM • Monday, June 28th
52 Prince Street

Cast and Crew of Parwaz Playhouse’s debut production, Glass.

New Yorkers often forget that the theater is a treasure. For when you live amongst the fixed twinkle of Broadway, the art of mimicking life can become as repetitive as a bodega or a yellow taxi. But the theater is not something that we should take for granted; it is that one place where we can go to see ourselves through our eyes only, and not through the eyes of the media, which are too often narrowed by societal constraints.

Rest assured, we now know that two young men (both by the name of Imran) have the enlightened-mindedness to not be so jaded. Co-founders of Parwaz Playhouse, the first major Pakistani-American theater company, Imran Javaid and Imran Sheikh have created a self-described “sanctuary” for the creative people within their cultural community. This month, the Playhouse presented its first project, Glass, at the annual Downtown Urban Theater Festival in the East Village. The festival strives to promote “diversity in theater” by speaking “to a whole new generation whose lives defy categorizing along conventional lines.” Glass does just that; at DUTF, it was a hit with Pakistanis and non-Pakistanis alike. In fact, only three of the ten shows featured at the festival sold-out and Glass was one of them. The play, which debuted at the Nuyorican Poet’s Café back in November, is set in the editorial office of a newspaper in “a nation much like Pakistan.” Written by Javaid, Glass challenges the present and future states of its set nation by dexterously weaving a tapestry of political discussion, philosophical rumination, wry humor—and, yes—even a hearty dollop of badminton.  And the players of Parwaz do so, all of it, within a tight, 20-minute frame.  While all of the actors give commendable performances, it is Sheikh (portraying editor, Khalid) and Adeel Ahmed (copyeditor, Mohsin) who are particularly entertaining with their natural, needling banter.

Clearly, Javaid and Sheikh have embraced their status as pioneers for the Pakistani-American dramatic arts, and with such a honed focus, it’s hard to believe that they have only known each other for one year.  The two met during the production of Wajahat Ali’s Domestic Crusaders, a play about Muslim-Americans living in a post-9/11 world that was hailed by the New York Times, the BBC, Time magazine and Academy Award-winner, Emma Thompson.  After Crusaders, the Imrans became restless, ravenous to feed their people, who they feel have been theatrically-starved. Up until now, that is.

“You see,” explained Sheikh in an interview, “There is a rich history of artistic ability and intellectualism within [the Pakistani-American] community. So, through the medium of theater we will re-awaken that, and show it to the world. Good theater is a study of the human condition, we think. And there is a maelstrom of imagery of Pakistanis and Muslims in the media.” Unfortunately, that image is too often negative. And so, Sheikh adds, “It is nice to be able to shine a light through that and show us not necessarily as negative or positive, but just us as we are—to show that we are the same thinking, feeling, rational human beings as everyone else.”
That is the mission of the Parwaz Playhouse, its moniker a mirror for the troupe’s refreshingly romantic ideas.  The first part of the name is derived from a term which appears countless times within the ghazals, or lyrical poetry, of the modern Pakistani writer/philosopher/politician, Allama Iqbal.  In one ghazal, Iqbal writes: “Ascend oneself to the point where even God Himself asks you, a man, ‘Tell me, what is it that you desire?’” In another: “‘You are an eagle.  Your parwaz is among the mountains.’”  Well, the Playhouse, they want to be heard.  And their parwaz is among stages, scattered all across this twinkling city.  Don’t take your opportunity to see them for granted.

Although DUTF has come and gone, Parwaz isn’t taking the summer off. Currently, the company is working on a few films, as well as preparing for a full-length, 90-minute play scheduled for this Fall. More info here.

John Pound is an illustrator artist based in California, probably best known as the creator of Garbage Pail Kids trading cards. More recently he has been experimenting with software to produce randomly generated comics and animations and just a few months ago even designed a series of t-shirts for Stüssy. Currently he has work in The BLAB! Show at Copro Gallery in Santa Monica, California.

As a child, Garbage Pail Kids was the first place I ever saw paintings of vomit, blood and gangrenous, mutilated flesh…. Do you remember your first encounter with the grotesque, abject aspect of cartoon characters?

Underground comix in the early seventies. Before that, there was MAD magazine and the early MAD comics. I found something really unpleasant yet powerful in those things – and entertaining too. Even old Warner Brothers animated cartoons (originally made for theaters) seemed like they were pushing that edge, with the violence and rebelliousness.

How did the cut-up technique and John Cage’s use of chance in composition influence you?

There’s a nice surprise factor you get by combining things, images, words, etc. You don’t get that by just showing one thing, like a portrait. People start making up ideas about what has been combined, to make sense out of it. Good art leaves room for the viewer to bring their own meanings, on more than one level. As opposed to illustration-type art, where only one meaning is found and the work is quickly exhausted, I like John Cage’s ideas. His work has a nice feel. His writings are harder to read. Maybe I’m more into visuals than music and poetry.

Someone wrote about his work at a printmaking place, and I noticed Cage went to great lengths to set up and control what would happen randomly. And that’s what I find I have to do too, with randomness. A lot of the randomly generated results are not too interesting, but some are really rewarding.

You started working on computer-generated comics in the early nineties. Did you write the software first, or did earlier experiments with automatic drawing/writing lead you to develop the software?

It grew from earlier experiments. I bought my first computer, an Amiga, in 1986, and started dabbling with programming in BASIC, to see what it could do.  That work was mostly endless abstract designs and color patterns. But one project was a little program that combined words to generate lists of ideas for Garbage Pail Kids. They were fun, and mostly bizarre nonsense. I got one useable idea for an actual Garbage Pail Kids painting from using that program.

During this time I became fascinated by Harold Cohen’s AARON computer drawing program, thanks to his very articulate writings on his own work. He was using programming to deal with issues of drawing and painting from a painter’s viewpoint, not a programmer’s. He had it drawing crude child-like forms based on primitive rock drawings. Later he added the ability to draw figures and scenes.

As a cartoonist, I began wondering what a computer program could do for cartooning. Not just as a mindless drawing tool, but to help with making creative decisions and surprising me. Over the next few years I was jotting ideas in my sketchbooks for how you could make programs to draw simple figures and forms. Along the way I realized that if you combined random sentences in word balloons with random cartoon drawings, put them in panels, and maybe have a horizon or background forms, you would have a little nonsense comic strip. You could make a huge amount of them if you wanted. It didn’t seem like anything the world needed, but maybe because it was such a wrong-headed idea I grew curious to see what would happen, what it would look like.

I took the plunge and bought a PostScript laser printer and a couple books on PostScript. Then I had to find out how to get some lines on paper, anything that looked like a comic. What helped was seeing some naive-style cartoons by Mark Beyer. I realized that the more primitive the drawing methods I used, the easier it would be to draw by programming. And I saw a charm and lightness in naive drawings that was quickly leaving the computer graphics world, as most artists moved toward realism and 3D rendering, which can look suffocating.

By late 1992, things came together in a few little test programs. One program for getting random sentences on the page, one program for drawing a minimal cartoon figure with varied poses. (No hands or feet, just tube-like arms and legs.) Then I combined them in a grid of panels, with a title box over it, and there it was, a nonsense comic page [for examples see Pound's website – ed.].

A year later I started doing a monthly comic strip in local free entertainment newspaper. That gave me more practice and a chance to try a few ideas, and see what resembled comics. I found I just loved the idea of making art by programming, using random choices. I didn’t care a lot about the stories or jokes or characters in the comics. I was more interested in the creative process, the ideas, the systems, and the designs, than in whether the comics were entertaining or popular. I liked the unexpected combinations and the graphic clarity.

I played with these comics and cartoon designs in black and white for a couple years. I re-wrote the program to allow multiple-pages, and I made a little zine of experimental comic pages and designs, but I never published it, as the work was unfinished. Then I got side-tracked with some non-computer projects.

Meanwhile, I saw ideas everywhere for things I could do random versions of. Ideas for shapes, figures, scenes, posters, books, etc. I have a notebook full of these ideas. I will probably never have enough time to do them all. Of course some are more promising than others.

In 2002, I got back into the programming again, and found out how to use color. A local printer had a nice large format color printer that I wanted to try, so I made some new pieces poster-size, and entered a few art shows with them. People liked them.

Would your ideal comic-generating software be a completely autonomous system?

I have fantasies of that. Like a website generating endless random comic strips, or a TV station making 24-hour randomly-generated cartoon animations with sounds. Or maybe a large video wall installation of slowly animated cartoon landscape designs. Such a system would probably work better as a background artwork, like wallpaper or ambient music or a screensaver, instead of something to give our full attention to, like watching a movie.

I have a little program I call LOOP that I showed in a couple gallery group shows, which draws endless random variations and combinations of a few figures and scenes. It’s hypnotic to watch. It runs within another program on older Macs. I started re-doing it in Flash Actionscript, but it’s not done yet. Other projects have been more urgent.

But I think that viewers get used to everything – at least I do. So even with an autonomous system that was random and non-repeating, over time the patterns and images would start to feel similar, and the novelty would fade. I find that to keep me interested, each new project or idea requires the program to be updated, with new forms, new designs, new ways to combine things. With each new piece, I like to find a fresh “organizing idea”, so it feels new to me.

Has modernist and contemporary art/music, as opposed to mass media, always had an influence on your work?

They were probably less of an influence than mass media, at least in my younger years. As a kid, I was into cartoons, Disneyland, monsters, comics, and a little bit of horror and science-fiction, until college. Then art classes and friends introduced me to experimental music and art. But a lot of that went through my brain, instead of going directly to my heart, so a lot of it had little emotional weight.

For reasons that elude me, a few things stuck, like Brian Eno’s early solo work, both the crazy stuff and the ambient stuff. Maybe, again, it’s because he was so articulate about what he was doing. I’ve listened to a few old taped interviews he did more times than I can count. I like Eno’s ideas of making complex music (or art) by combining a few simple parts. I like that idea more than the actual music even.

I see a similarity between the computer-generated comics and Garbage Pail Kids. In both of them there’s this joke, showing a something basically wholesome like a comic strip or a doll repeatedly transformed into this totally irrational thing. Do you see a kind of continuity in your projects? Is there a similar satirical, critical voice at work in all your work or is each new project a complete and separate thing?

Maybe there’s a thread of subversiveness, rebelliousness, or humor, but I take each thing, each new project, as pretty separate – like I’m solving a new problem and what I’ve done before may not even be relevant to the new problem. Over time I acquire a certain amount of craft, like how to draw or paint, but each piece has to be felt and considered fully.

One of my favourite  stories about Frank Zappa is one where he says he got into music as a kid after he heard a hi-fi salesman using an Edgard Varese record for an in store demonstration of  the speakers. Was there a specific situation where you became aware of art’s potential for experimental thought or play?

I love that Zappa story.  Much earlier, when I was about 14, I saw a comic strip on a newspaper page crumpled in the gutter. The paper was from a nearby high school where they put out a school paper every so often. When I saw that simple little comic, I thought, “That’s what I want to do!”  So I took the journalism class and started doing comics and cartoons. I loved seeing them printed and seen by everyone. And I loved playing with a mass media form, like comics. The possibilities seemed endless. Also at this time underground comix were coming out, which were heavy into experimentation, in all directions.

Years later, I found that same sense of endless possibilities when I started playing around with random comics programming. Ideas would pop up everywhere. Like I’d found a world that hadn’t been explored yet. Of course the trick is to get some of those possibilities down on paper and out into the world.

If Zadie Smith is to be believed, the future of the avant-garde lies in the hands of artist and writer Tom McCarthy. Through his novels and the parodic/splenetic interventions of the INS [International Necronautical Society], he ceaselessly returns to questions of death and space-poaching in the fissures of the symbolic and political like an agitprop pathologist. Having once before paced the “epistemic disaster zone” with Tom as a student of his Catastrophe course, a curious desire for repetition drew me back to the brutalist confines of London’s Barbican.

Let’s ease into things gently and talk about something nice: death. Here in the Barbican’s “concrete island” I can’t help thinking about Ballard and his recent demise, something he had of course rehearsed many times. How did he influence you and did you ever meet him?

R.I.P. I went to a talk and asked him a question. That doesn’t really count as meeting him, I suppose. I think the guy was a genius. He was the only contemporary British writer that interested me or had any kind of influence on my work. The thing about Ballard is that he’s a great writer without being a good writer. I mean he’s not Nabokov or Updike. He doesn’t care about prose and texture of narrative. He’s almost a conceptual artist and in fact The Atrocity Exhibition was originally a catalogue for a show at the ICA. That overlap between visual art and literature is something that I’ve experienced a lot in my own work.

There’s also a big similarity in the forensic interest.

Crash was a huge influence on Remainder: that totally traumatic logic. For Freud and everyone else, trauma is intimately linked with repetition and Ballard gets this. Not just Vaughn [the anti-hero] but every character in every novel of his just does the same thing again and again. He’s like the painter Morandi or Warhol, where the repetition becomes the subject. Even at the level of prose, I imagine writing Crash he had a car manual in one hand and a medical dictionary in the other, both open at the index page and he was going down the list-”His spleen was splattered over the… windscreen wiper and his gallbladder was wrapped around the…”

Binnacle!

And on and on: this incantatory state of repetition. Vaughn does re-enactments of car crashes of the rich and famous and his big goal is to do the über-crash that would be a transcendent new combination. Vitally he gets it wrong so the one genuine event in that book – an event and not just a re-enactment – is this accident. So it’s got that brilliant first sentence: “Vaughn died in a car crash today. He’d had a million crashes but this was his first accident.”

That structure is in Remainder too, when one of the re-enactors finally trips over a non-existent kink in the carpet.

Yes, during the bank robbery. I was thinking directly of that. It’s the only event in the book, apart from the disaster that started it-you never know what that is. The script going wrong produces the genuine event, not just a repetition. When I “met” Ballard, he’d given this talk and I shot my hand up at the Q&A session and said that I thought Crash was a re-write of Don Quixote. This guy goes out on the highway and re-enacts moments from the tv of the day-trash, twopenny novels. He says “I’m going to do that bit in Don Belianis of Crete, page 94, where…” Ballard was really charming. He said, “That’s a wonderful theory and makes complete sense. I’ve never read Cervantes. I don’t read proper literature.” That’s not true-he’s obviously read Conrad really carefully, for example.

But it’s nice to think that the avant-garde is in the hands of people who don’t care about it.

Yeah but it’s always a bit disingenuous isn’t it? Joyce said he never read any of Freud, which is nonsense-Nabokov too. They’re covering it up when clearly they’ve both read “The Wolfman” [Freud's famous long-running case file]: they’re very indebted to that.

I went to the Freud Museum recently and was interested to see in turn that some of the Wolfman’s white wolf paintings are themselves hidden behind a flat screen tv.

How dumb. How weird. How… appropriate!

In contrast one could say your role as an artist and a writer is to conduct a sort of “unveiling” that brings to mind semiology. Are you into Roland Barthes?

When I was 18 or 19 he was my total hero and in the book I wrote about Tintin [Tintin and The Secret of Literature] his S/Z is the main codex. I love the whole cross-disciplinary side of Roland Barthes, Derrida and so on. These are people who a century earlier would just have become novelists-would have been Balzac and Flaubert. At the time when they were coming up in France this philosophy/ anthropology/ politics had become the most exciting place to do your discourse and although I always just wanted to be a novelist, I’ve always been excited by other modes like visual art and philosophy. I wanted to find an arena that manages to combine all those and coming of age in London in the mid-90s, art had become that. It’s so broad and it’s not just about drawing or painting. Remainder was first published by Metronome, which is an art press. None of the main ones would touch it.

Related to that I wanted to ask you about your writing versus the INS. I know the latter has very strict rules. I was wondering if it had ever occurred to you to eject yourself since after Metronome you signed a pact with Film Four and Vintage?

Ha! No, because the people that were ejected were not ejected for publishing with the big companies. My next two books are coming out with Cape and Remainder is with Vintage [»Random House»German Conglomerate] in America. It wasn’t that they signed to them, but that they wrote the books those people told them to write and became copywriters. Anyhow that wasn’t me that was the executive council, to whom I’m not entirely answerable, so…

I think you should. Because anyway it’s full of quotations, the INS, it’s almost autonomous.

Yes maybe there will come a point where I will be ejected. The council could evict us all: no one knows who’s actually running it anymore. These things tend to schism. There was this guy “Richard Essex” who kick-started the London Psychogeographical Association (LPA) in the ’80s. He wanted to get splits going really quickly so he announced that the different parts of his personality were splitting. He had the Nashist wing and the Debordist wing and his own schizophrenia was a schism within his one-man movement. I thought that was good. His arm would go off in one direction…

Stewart Home was involved with that, wasn’t he?

Yeah. Stewart’s very interesting. He was writing manifestos and starting movements way before me. With the INS, in about ’94 I lived in Berlin and the NSK [Neue Slowenische Kunst] came to town. They were an alliance out of Ljubljana, Slovenia and they had Slavok Zizek, Laibach and some other artists who configured themselves as a formal avant-garde. They had their official philosopher and their official rock group-everything was dogmatic and they were very reactionary in their demeanour. They had a 3-day event, but it wasn’t billed as a festival. They declared a state. At the time when Slovenia didn’t exist as a state, you had to go in advance and get a visa and your passport stamped with these jackbooted, uniformed people checking you on the way in. There was a press conference and all the German journalists were saying “Are you left or right?” and they were going “Well that’s a stupid question.”

Yes. It seems to me the INS cherry picks the best elements from both left and right. It’s got the fascistic element, but then you also learn from your mistakes.

They dovetail anyhow. When we were doing the “transmission, death, technology” hearings at Cubitt that set up the ICA radio station show we looked at the McCarthy Un-American Activities Committee photos because we wanted the room to function in a certain way. Then we looked at the Stalinist show trials and it’s the same! If you look at a figure like Marinetti, in order for him to move from being an ultra-leftist to a fascist, he doesn’t have to change anything. He’s already both. In a way there’s a bigger question about politics in art in general. I find art that just declares a position and advances that is always really banal and really bad. Art is good because it enables what Claude Lefort calls “radical ambiguity”.

That might itself be the manifesto of postmodernism. Like yours – which implodes because it contradicts itself. Political manifestos are more one-sided. But actually even Marinetti and the futurists had clear enemies: the symbolists, the Venetians, the English. Barthes hated the bourgeoisie. Who do you think your enemy is? Haven’t we all learnt about ambiguity by now?

Liberals. Liberal humanists. That would be the enemy, in all positions. This confessional, self-assertive tone that dominates publishing. Not what dominates contemporary art, despite the sentimental valorisations of someone like Tracy Emin – although even she actually takes this whole avant-garde tradition and overwrites it with self-confessional expression. But on the whole I think art is classically not that. What dominates mainstream media culture and literary culture is psychologising: the kind of discourse where the self is never put into question. There is a self who exists prior to anything who goes around emoting, experiencing and developing. This is what I hate.

Your novels eschew mainstream, “psychologically” rounded characters. There’s obviously that influence of the Nouveau Roman.

Or they start with the world. First there is the world, and language and structure and technology. Actually I don’t think that’s necessarily an avant-garde thing. I think that’s what proper literature has always understood. That’s what Shakespeare is about or the Greeks; Oedipus and Antigone experience their subjectivity as a kind of trajectory through space, networks and legal systems.

Of course the nameless “everyman” narrator is also a literary type-the anonymous voice which can’t find its subjectivity. Would you be afraid to have “proper” characters?

No, in the new book that’s out next year, “C“, there’s a main character and the book is all about him. His name is Serge and he’s not some postmodern construct, he’s a person. We follow him from birth to death. Again what drives that book is technology, so while he’s being born his dad is trying to invent radio, trying to get the patent before Marconi. It’s all about communication systems and stuff so his whole subjectivity hovers around mediation-or the experience of his own experience. That’s what the book’s about, and that’s what life’s about: we are all mediated!

Okay! The difficulty of being authentic in Remainder is precisely that of living quotation. The narrator is living other people’s gestures and not even doing them as well.

So’s everyone else! That’s what he realizes when he watches the cool kids in Soho, striking their poses. He just knows it and has endless money to work through the implications.

That state of being too self-conscious to act is one of your tropes: being unable to have an existential crisis because you’re laughing at yourself for having an existential crisis. It reminds me of Jean-Phillippe Toussaint.

I’m writing a long piece on him right now-he’s brilliant. I read The Bathroom when I was 25 and then never re-read it. At the Forum for European Philosophy I read a bit of Remainder and someone in the audience said “Have you read The Bathroom? You know there’s a crack on the wall…” and I remembered.

Exactly: and one that he obsesses over. That crack actually has a literary pedigree. It’s in Sartre and it’s also the crushed centipede trace in “La Jalousie”. So it’s literary déjà-vu and not just déjà-vu?

Yes, I was really conscious of it. That whole building [in the novel] is called Madeleine Mansions, like the madeleine in Proust and the house setting is like Huysmans’ Against Nature. Even more I was thinking of Ionesco’s only novel, Le Solitaire. This guy gets loads of money, holes up in a flat and just watches the world explode while he’s still on the same glass of expensive wine. Or in Grabinoulor by Pierre-Albert Birot there’s this really good scene where the hero notices a clock on his mantelpiece that’s not quite straight and when he tries to straighten it, he realizes it’s not the clock but the mantelpiece. He tries to straighten that, but realizes it’s the floorboards, then the foundations of the house. He tries to dig up the street. By the end he realizes the earth is not right: it’s magnetic. He’s causing earthquakes and tsunamis. There’s this escalation from one tiny detail.

The ripple effect.

Yes. If you start with a crack on the wall you only take four escalations before you’re killing people and stuff. There were a million things I was thinking of-Hamlet for example. He can’t experience authentic emotion, he’s too aware of the mediations and all the precedents. He even re-enacts his father’s death scene at one point. I was very aware of those things and folding them in, but at the same time I didn’t want it just to be a set of references. You don’t have to have read any of that.

The Madeleine thing must surely also be Hitchcock and Vertigo, to which re-enactment is completely central.

Totally.  I’ve just finished working on a film with Johann Grimonprez called Double Take about Hitchcock. Johann uses a story Borges wrote twice about meeting his own double as a window on the Cold War. He got me to adapt that with Hitchcock instead, which becomes the film’s monologue. Hitchcock is a genius. I watched all his films in my early ’20s, and especially Vertigo: he [James Stewart] becomes aware of the repetition, but that doesn’t stop it happening.

It also leads to the fatal ending, which is what happens in your work, whether matter gets in the way, or whatever. It’s the attempt at mastery that goes wrong that interests you.

It’s got to go wrong otherwise it’s real fascism! There has to be a fray in the tapestry or you’ve just got the police state.

Because it seems that the people that are scared of non-being and obsessed with it at the same time are fundamentalists! Like in Conrad’s Secret Agent.

Yeah. I grew up in Greenwich and I used to skateboard around the Observatory [the setting of the novel's terrorist attack]. About four years ago I did this art project about it with Rod Dickinson [Greenwich Degree Zero]. We reconstructed that explosion but we made it a success! The interesting thing is that there are endless newspaper reports about the actual event, but they all get the details slightly differently. It’s so contemporary because the guy that did it-Marshal Bourdin-was a French Jew, an asylum seeker and a refugee. All the newspapers afterwards could be yesterday’s Daily Mail if you just replaced “Jew” with “Muslim”. They’re all saying “We’re a tolerant liberal society but if people come here and start bombing us then…” We just remade all the newspapers but we changed one word here or there. We made a film with a really old crank camera and got a guy to dress up as a policeman and another a Georgian gent and run towards the building. It was post-produced in Soho to be on fire. The Hayward bought it-it’s in their permanent collection, but not on display.

It’s in the crypt corroding everything else!

In the crypt or behind the tv screen. It turns out that the day after that explosion the Lumière brothers premiered cinema. There’s this link between them. In Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, the first rocket bomb falls on the meridian in Greenwich Park. And it’s got a piece of porn inside. Verloc in The Secret Agent runs a porn shop, that’s his cover. Pynchon was obviously plugging into that, remixing it.

Speaking of porn, have you heard about Nabokov’s son Dmitri inventing a vision to ratify his decision to sell his father’s last novel to Playboy?

I didn’t hear about the vision!  “Don’t worry son, it’s what I want!” Apparently when Kubrick’s Lolita was being cast, Dmitri claimed to be the casting director and just screwed loads of young actresses on the casting couch. It’s appropriate. And the title-The Original of Laura-makes me think about how actually the whole of Lolita is a trauma re-enactment, because she has an original: the 12 year-old girl who dies when they have unconsummated sex. The whole book is an attempt to get the hit he never got and she’s like Madeleine in Hitchcock: the substitute.

Can we talk for a second about catastrophe, one of your fetish subjects?  I’m interested in how the course you taught went wrong towards the end when you attempted to make the students draw up a manifesto. I thought perhaps the problem was one of meta-language and symbolism. Occasionally you’d get a voice saying “But remember how many people died!” and there’s that aporia between the real event and its symbolic mapping, which particularly interests you. Is there a gap for you? A disaster, it seems to me, is a “real” disaster and a symbolic disaster.

That bit in Remainder when he wants to re-enact the drug dealer’s death is where he tries to close that gap. Society’s way of dealing with it is for the police to come, take forensic photographs, clear away the blood-erase everything. The hero says “No, that’s not enough. It needs more attention than that. It’s ethical, despite his psychopathic thing.” He’s committed to the event. I hadn’t read Levinas then, I read it after. But I thought yes, that’s exactly what I meant. Levinas talks about the death of the Other as being an absolute command. Your own subjectivity is breached open by that ethical encounter. You have to return to it, can’t resolve it or move on. You don’t have to solve it, because it’s unsolvable. I suppose in the book one could say the whole machinery of re-enactment is his symbolic order. But he’s just lying on the street looking at cigarette butts, wondering did the victim see it from this angle, what did he think about? The thoughts become less concrete and he slips in and out of consciousness. That’s an attempt to close that gap. It’s important. People’s death isn’t only significant in what it “means”.

But with disaster, there’s a real resistance to discussing these kinds of questions in anything other than a humanist manner.

But humanism is the problem in the first place! I went on the Today programme to talk about Marinetti and they had a Labour minister in before and their first question was “But wasn’t he a fascist?” I thought well it’s not dodgy Italian artists torturing people in Guantánamo, in Abu Ghraib! I think in a more abstract, philosophical sense, to put the human and the self at the centre of an ontology is deeply problematic. It’s why I love the whole continental tradition through Levinas and Derrida who just turn that on its head.

It might be going out of fashion though, that passivity in Levinas and so on. Zizek and Badiou for example are looking for something else, something more pro-active. They toy with things like God and Communism as a structure rather than as content. Death is that too for you isn’t it, a structure?

Yes it’s a framework to talk about other stuff. I set up the INS because I wanted to have what the German critic Enzensberger calls a post-historical avant-garde. A slightly ironic, dysfunctional or reactionary group is more interesting than an original one perhaps, especially now. And then I was reading the stuff we’ve been talking about. It seemed to make sense. You have to fetishize something right? Marinetti fetishizes technology, Freud dreams and so on. Death is the main thing that runs through the philosophers that I admire so why not make that the fetish subject? It’s ridiculous as well.

The absurd is obviously a massive part of what you do. Your novels are funny although they’re about all this stuff.

They’re really silly, which is something I like. Another influence on the absurd thing in the INS was the AAA [Association of Autonomous Astronauts]. They were brilliant, their whole thing was serious-”Why are we taking the whole military-industrial complex into space? Why is it all about Nasa? Why don’t we take imagination, artists? Why don’t we have sex in space?” They would release all this stuff that looked scientific but was obviously totally bogus, about sex experiments and stuff. One of their mottos was “Only those who demand the impossible will realize the absurd”.

In “Men In Space” you take Czechoslovakia after the fall of Communism with Václav Havel [playwright; first Czech president] who is obviously a very symbolic figure for the weird union of art and politics. Beckett dedicated his play “Catastrophe” to Havel and Havel in turn talked about how Czechoslovakia under Communism had been in a mode of waiting for Godot. You went there didn’t you?

I lived there for two years, from ’91 to ’93, just after college. Artists were running the country: it was amazing.

Situationism was really fashionable then…

Totally fashionable, but they were playing catch-up. All their artists were trying to be Warhol, the situationists or Yoko when she was good in the ’60s, doing happenings, tipping paint over themselves and climbing up buildings naked. And again it totally failed. They thought they were going to get something genuinely new and autonomous and they got Starbucks like everywhere else. Now it’s sad, it’s basically a puke bucket for Ryanair stag parties.

One thing I think unites you and Situationism is the accent on tactics, on a sporting use of space and time.

Oh sport is a huge thing. Phenomenologically-speaking, I think there’s three modes in which being in the world, being towards death and so on is most intensely staged and I’d say that’s war, sport and poetry. There’s all that stuff in Remainder about cricket, watching it, re-enacting, reading it. I’m a big cricket fan.

It’s a literary thing! There’s Beckett, and Harold Pinter.

I never got into Pinter, he’s a bit Beckett-lite, a bit Little-England. Beckett’s writing about death, time and being and Pinter’s talking about family. I don’t want to badmouth Pinter. It is really literary, cricket. It’s about repetition and citation, archives, time and geometry. So are football and tennis. Nabokov was into tennis. He was a tennis coach for a while.

Teaching nymphettes?

That’s right, teaching fourteen-year old girls to pick up the ball.

R  EA   LL    Y S L   O W L   Y

Most writers who write about sport are in the CLR James tradition. They use it as a metaphor for politics and post-colonialism, which it is. But what interests me is the kinetic aspect. Zadie Smith was good on that in her article in the New York Review of Books. I haven’t read that other book she was talking about, but I’ve got it-Neverland. Have you?

No! It certainly looks confessional. It is interesting though that there are these two novels, doubling each other but coming at questions of space, identity and so on from radically different perspectives: a symbolic conflict for literary space.  Where one comes to a conclusion, the other drifts endlessly in circles in the sky. That trope is familiar from quite a bit of recent literature.

The end of Infinite Jest [David Foster Wallace's satire of North America] is unresolved like that; someone with his head stuck to the window, trapped, and watching the disaster happen. I was really influenced by that for Men in Space: the endless loop of unresolved stuff is more interesting than an ending. Toussaint wrote this really interesting piece that’s 7 pages long, but Minuit or Gallimard published it as a book. It’s called La mélancholie de Zidane.

It must be an influence on the film [Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait]?

I wonder. Toussaint’s whole thing about that red card and the headbutt in the World Cup is that it was the fear of finitude. Zidane had said “At the end of these ninety minutes I will never play again. This is it.” He didn’t want the end to come, so he tripped it, short-circuited it by getting himself sent off, which is brilliant. He also says the card wasn’t red it was black, for melancholy. Really interestingly, Toussaint was in the stadium and says like everyone else he didn’t see that episode because they were all watching the ball. It slows down and a whistle blows and nobody seems to understand why it’s stopped. They’re running back to something in the other half, conferring with the linesman and the red card comes out.  There’s a scream in the stadium, when they saw what we all watched on tv, the headbutt. The whole stadium gasped in horror when they watched it back. Even in the stadium it’s about the repetition, it’s interesting that the great event, you don’t see, even if you’re there.

Speaking of which, what happened to the film of Remainder? Has it been credit crunched?

It’s going into production later this year. It’ll be directed by Pavel Pavlikowski [My Summer of Love]. The screenplay is by John Hodge who did Trainspotting and all those Danny Boyle things.

Choose death…

Choose repetition! I’ve read the screenplay, it’s really very good. The first meeting I had with them they said “Who would you like to see directing it?” I said “David Lynch! Harmony Korine!” They said “Absolutely not!” They want to make an intelligent mainstream film, a Fight Club or Donnie Darko. There’s a certain vocabulary you have to have in a mainstream film. So the American girl now is a major character.

Oh no, not a Love Interest!

Yes! She says “Stop this re-enactment madness!” and so on. It’s what you have to do; I got their logic. They don’t want to make a low budget art film that 4000 people at the ICA will see who’ve already read the book. They said “We want to make a big film. Popcorn. All that! Millions of people will see it and they’ll go and buy your book Tom!” If I were directing it, it would be the trip-an hour and a half version of the tripping on the invisible kink. They have done good things though, scenes where you see a re-enactment happening and the camera pulls back to show the people with walkie-talkies and clipboards and keeps on going back for as much CGI as their budget can manage. The only demand I had was that I have to be an extra: I’d like to hold the clipboard.

Houellebecq and Hitchcock have done that, been extras in their own films.

Houellebecq’s first novel Extension du domaine de la lutte was brilliant. It seems to have gone a bit downhill from there.

He’s into cults now-they feature in both Atomized and The Possibility of an Island. Doesn’t that appeal to you? I mean it’s just on the other side of repulsion with the materiality of the world right?

Cults are really interesting. The guy I did the Greenwich project with looked at cults a lot. He did re-enactments of Jim Jones’ sermons, the Jonestown Massacre guy. It had the miracle cure in it. He would always call someone forward and say “You’ve got cancer.” He would bring it out of their body-a chicken liver or whatever. He did it in the ICA to an invited audience, editing together 10 hours of transcript of Jim Jones’ speeches. There was a bit where Jones is going “You are selected. You are the chosen people. You understand the meaning” which are the original words, but it becomes about art-what you’re willing to believe. Cults are good…

Maybe for the next novel?

Actually my new novel is going to be called Satin Island, like a mispronunciation of Staten. It’ll be about like illness and creaking matter. I think it’ll start with an oil slick. Nature is totally boring until it has oil poured over it-the condition of beauty being loss. When you see those birds covered in oil, they’re like statues. I like the idea of vinyl and protozaic slime, covering, wrapping things and the whole Tarkovsky thing [Stalker] about the polluted zone being the place of magical transformation. It couldn’t happen outside of that. The one I just finished, C, is going to come out next year. I haven’t started this new one yet. It’ll have zombie parades in it.

You’ve just done a talk about parades. What is it about them?

In Remainder the narrator talks about going to a demonstration and joining in. He can’t remember what the demonstration was about. It comes from Yeats’ Meditations In Time of Civil War where he’s watching this parade go by and they’re shouting “Vengeance for Jacques Molay!” and he joins in even though he doesn’t know who that is. Zombie things started in 2001 or so. My brother lived in Paris and there were these rollerblading things.

Pari-Roller!

They got 10 000 people. The Mairie had to create a new type of event, which they called an MSP – a “Manifestation sans Plainte” [A Point-less Demonstration] which is brilliant. Demonstrating, but not for or against anything: no complaint. I think it started in Toronto, where someone decided to have a zombie parade and march around the streets. There were about 200 people, then the next year 5000, then 10 000. Now it’s franchised to 20 different cities. That seems to be the logical extension of the MSP because zombiedom is just re-enactment without content.

* The novelist Tom McCarthy, not to be confused with the filmmaker and star of The Wire or motivational speaker of the same name. They are of no interest to us here: they are too literal.