Magazines
Bret Easton Ellis: Bateman Was Me
Nearly two decades after American Psycho was published, Bret Easton Ellis has come clean on who Patrick Bateman was - the homicidal, Genesis loving cannibal. You can view the interview at James Brown’s latest offering Sabotage Times. I liked James, like his magazines, like his role as an editor and writer, and I was glad to see that James did the interview, which can be viewed here. Take time out to see into the mind of writer who is beginning to like his characters, and by the sounds of it, is becoming them, or has always been them. Contentious? Dangerous? You make your mind up at Sabotage Times.
ARCHIVE: Why One is a Magic Number Editorial
Okay, Battlestar Galactica is over. I have to get over that but when something you love ends, the tendency is to turn to extremes. So, welcome to the Violence issue. One editor’s way of getting over what was one of the best television drama in years and yes it was science fiction. Do you want to make something of it?
Fist raising aside. It comes as no surprise that BSG was one of the first programmes to deal with the often violent invasion and occupation of Iraq. Let’s not call it a war because let’s face the facts, we’re the bad guys and all of the world knows it.
It is wonderful that television has at last remembered that they can hold up a mirror to society and say in beautiful images of storytelling, look this is what you have done, don’t you feel like an ass that you perpetuate these cycles of violence?. Don’t believe me?
Let’s take the twentieth century, one continuous act of violence. Even the hippie movement ended up being kicked to death by the Hell’s Angels as the Rolling Stones looked on.
So, how do we break the cycle of violence? Well, first let’s not do it with guns or religion and call it peace keeping. Peace keeping is letting people come to the decision they should shake hands without a jackboot in the base of their spine.
The problem is, we love violence. Everyone runs outside during a hot summer if a really good thunder storm rolls in. Come on, I’m not the only one that does it. I’ve seen you all. It’s the release of tension. If you don’t believe me, go to any city centre on a Friday or Saturday nights and watch the boys who didn’t get the girls beat the living daylights out of anyone they can find. They could have gone home and masturbated, this would have released the tension.
And that’s why world peace can only be solved by going to another physical extreme. Pleasure.
So, my solution to violence is compulsory masturbation. Let’s face it, anyone after good sex will agree to anything. If the USA and the UK had been wanking frantically for the last five hundred years, everyone would be much more happier. There would never have been any desire for colonialism. There would be no arguments about who owns what and no one would invade anything. As now, day time talk shows would be peppered full of facts on how to please your partners or who was caught masturbating in Regent’s Park. So some things wouldn’t change but it’s a small price for world piece.
It would break the cycle in a very sticky way but who’d want fire a gun made by someone who wanks? Of course, world hunger would also be a problem. Ready meals would never have been invented. But at least and at last, we could with hand on heart say all our politicians where wankers. Anti-social members of the community would be put to work, wanking for a better tomorow, and no one would hand out an ASBO without wondering where it had been. I could look out my window and everywhere across this green land people would be smiling. Hate work? Stay at home and wank. You’re supporting a peaceful tomorrow. Hate your friend? Wank. Make peace. Not done your work? Wank. It relaxes the body, frees up the mind, cures headaches and staves of cancer. That’s a fact, it was on television. God bless television, it gave us BSG and guilt free wanking.
Sure, no one would want to imagine their parents wanking or even their friends but imagine the result. We could create rooms at work, designated wanking zones. Come on, they’ve killed smoking and taken away the only upside of smoking, the smoking room. We could have the wanking room, it could be sponsored by Kleenex or wet wipes.
Okay, you may all have just gone, that’s gross. You make think that that’s not on. It’s not savoury but I would take a nation of wankers over any army.
If wanking was compulsory, I’d bet that unwanted childbirths, anti-social kids and pissed off people would be consigned to history. So, join with me, raise your free hand to the storm overhead and wank for a better tomorrow.
ARCHIVE: From Pulp to Aylett Interview
Andrew interviewed Steve Aylett twice in the last five years, this second interview appeared in 2008. ‘I admire Steve’s work,’ says Andrew, ‘Interviewing him though is a strange experience because you can never predict what Steve is going to do next. I love that about him’.
From Pulp to Aylett. Interview by Andrew Oldham
Certainly in the design and content of your new book, Lint, there is a feel that Pulp Fiction of the 20th Century has had an imposing effect on your work. But what does Pulp mean to you as a reader and a writer?
‘The colourful and kitsch presentation is definitely there. But in terms of pulp writing I tend to think of it as writing quite quickly and disposably, neither of which are me. And a concentration on narrative rather than ideas, maybe. Again, not like my writing – there’ll be a lot of story in my books but it’s mainly something for the ideas and gags to live in. LINT was a great housing for thousands of ideas because it contains hundreds of books in summary plus what was said about them, and the stupid things the author got up to. So there are several juicy idea-shapes on every page. It’s interesting to start with a familiar-looking genre and take it somewhere else immediately. A lot of people have done their own take on the hardboiled detective genre, for instance, and used it for their own various purposes. Even Bukowski did it, with PULP. SF pulp stories were a bit more idea-oriented than the crime stuff but would tend to have only one idea per story, and they were still written at quite a rush – and, as I said in LINT, many of them really were written to fit an already-painted cover image. So it would be, ‘We’ve got a cover picture of a green kangaroo emerging from a storm drain holding some sort of thermos – write a story for it.’ Then – as writing teacher Natalie Goldberg would say – go! But that’s not how I do it’.
Which writers did you admire when you first set out to write your first novel?
‘JP Donleavy, Voltaire, Kerouac, Greg Egan, Dostoevsky, Brautigan, Raymond Chandler, Robert Crais, Billy Childish, Ray Bradbury, Walt Whitman, Kurt Vonnegut, Rudy Rucker, John Wyndham, Bruno Schultz. There’s nothing wrong with writing just for expression or therapy rather than real creativity, but it’ll almost certainly have been said before by someone, so it’s like inadvertent duplication. And that stuff does get published by the bucket load, unfortunately’.
What piece of advice would you give someone who wanted to write a novel?
‘I’d suggest that they write something original, but that would be a cruel thing to tell them if they’re hoping to get published. Publishers tend to publish the sort of thing that’s been published before, unless someone gets in by fluke or masquerade, as I’ve done. Real creativity is originality. By definition creativity is the making of something which didn’t exist before you produced it. There’s nothing wrong with writing just for expression or therapy rather than real creativity, but it’ll almost certainly have been said before by someone, so it’s like inadvertent duplication. And that stuff does get published by the bucket load, unfortunately. Originality, though, is gold dust. I’m sure I can’t be the only person in the world who’s into it. I’m still clinging to the hope that there are enough people into genuine originality to make a market for it’.
LINT is your present novel, concerning Jeff Lint, ‘author of some of the strangest and most inventive satirical SF of the twentieth century’. Where did this character come from and what does SF mean to Steve Aylett and why did you choose to create a character akin to Phillip K. Dick?
‘Jeff Lint more or less arrived fully-formed, as this obliviously creative character. He’s the sort of vividly rampaging author I wished existed. I could put hundreds of book and story ideas into the book. In the other Lint book I did, “And Your Point Is?” I finally wrote a story that had been in a holding pattern for a long time, called “The Retrial”. It was done as a critical review of Jeff Lint’s story ‘The Retrial’, which we get to see through my ‘essay’. The same thing with ‘Rise of the Swans’. They’re beautiful Voltairian satire, really juicy with controlled, justified resentment. Books and stories want to be a certain way, and it’s good to be patient until you see what that is, so that you can make them that way. Sometimes it’s even a case of waiting until you’re a better writer. Speaking of which, Alan Moore wrote a blurby thing for the back of LINT and mentioned a writer called Harry Stephen Keeler, who I hadn’t heard of. I asked him who this was and he told me about Keeler. It turns out he was a prolific pulp author in the 20s-50s, and very like Jeff Lint, though a worse writer I had portrayed Lint to be. Keeler actually had brilliant ideas for stories, but his execution was usually terrible. He didn’t know what to leave out, so he just included everything. He was obsessed with skulls, clowns and midgets. One of his books was called ‘The Skull of the Waltzing Clown’. Another was ‘The Riddle of the Travelling Skull.’ Loads of these things got published somehow, and he kept writing them even when the publishers stopped publishing him. I can’t read Keeler’s stuff, but I like the idea that he existed, as a figure. The New York Times said about him: “We are drawn to the inescapable conclusion that Mr. Keeler writes his peculiar novels merely to satisfy his own undisciplined urge for creative joy.” That’s beautiful isn’t it? That oblivious, unstoppable quality’.
The worlds you create in your books are often alternative and I’m thinking of David Barett’s early quote on your work in the New Statesman, that, “Steve Aylett’s distorting lenses are crueller than most”. How much do you feel this is true of you now and why do you think your books often look at the surreal, cruel side of life?
‘I don’t think I ‘distort’ at all. But I don’t see the point of writing something that just ‘blends in’ with life either, because that’s like doing nothing at all. I’ll tend to enhance and heighten things, exaggerate and take things to their natural conclusion. It’s easy to see the hole in an argument and then use that hole to worry it in half – but satire will tend to use a mechanism of sort of disingenuously taking the argument seriously and running it to its conclusion, leading to surreal absurdities. It’s extreme stress-testing of the position. Also when presented with a justification you can reverse the equation and see if you wind up at the first cause that people claim. Most often you’ll either arrive at a different origin of motivation or go down a false trail that doesn’t honestly reconnect. I write a lot about power manipulation, right up to’Rebel at the End of Time’ which I finished recently. If you’re good at pattern recognition as regards power and powerlessness, it’s like watching people going around with unencrypted motivations. Especially people who are powerless, and the amazing contortions they go through to avoid admitting they’ve been screwed over. The tendency to deny the reality of victimhood is a widespread coping mechanism, and it prevents real justice. I said somewhere that ‘You should be careful when asking people to repay their debt to society: you invite revenge’. Culture usually levels out at fairly dull and mediocre but especially so at times like this ‘1980s Part 2’ period that we’re living in at the moment, and it’s good to make something that’s its opposite. A sort of gleeful density like a drug’.
What draws you to writing this kind of material?
‘I’m writing the sort of books I want to read but couldn’t find anywhere’.
How do your ideas start?
‘They show up whole & entire, the whole book, as a sort of colourful mind sculpture with a particular feeling and flavour, which can be used as a schematic for the book. I then create the book that has that shape when extruded up into 3D or 4D. It may take time for the detail to gather that will make that shape. I think this is the way most writers get their ideas, but because I’m a bit synaesthetic I’m probably a bit more conscious of the strange mechanism of it’.
Where do you see yourself in the tradition of English Literature or do you feel yourself to be something new? A new kind of writer and if so, how and why?
‘The main tradition would be as a real old-time satirist, sneaking little mind-bombs into people the way Voltaire did. That alone would make something like Casey Maddox’s brilliant “The Day Philosophy Dies”. But I also have a tendency toward a very concentrated colourfulness, a specific-rich thing, which comes from not wanting to waste people’s time for even a moment and also to provide an antidote to the general vacuum of the times. Culture usually levels out at fairly dull and mediocre but especially so at times like this ‘1980s Part 2’ period that we’re living in at the moment, and it’s good to make something that’s its opposite. A sort of gleeful density like a drug. Also as you go through the book the pages previously read don’t rot down and so the effect is cumulative. Because my writing is a lot more than just narrative and description it’s more or less the opposite of pulp, in fact. But it’s fun to use pulp fixtures and fittings. I don’t know what category this kind of writing will be called when people work it out but so far it’s been called Slipstream, Offbeat, Chemical Gen, Bizarro, and so on’.
You seem to be a prolific writer but what drives you to write?
‘See above, and writing the kind of books I’d like to find in bookshops etc. But I don’t think I’m prolific. I’m a very slow writer’.
Where will Steve Aylett be in another ten years?
‘I will have finished the four books I’ve decided to focus on next – the first couple won’t be so difficult, but then there’s two difficult ones that really challenge what I can do, what I’m able to do – that’s why I’m allowing them time to pull together. I’m not a good enough writer to do them yet. So anyway, that’ll be 20 or so books out there, finally, and I’ll either withdraw and basically disappear at that point or, depending on the way the world goes, become more visible but in a different capacity. And hopefully I would have got the hell out of England, obviously. This is all assuming I’m still alive and haven’t done myself in or died in a dismal fireball with the rest of the human race’.
What does Steve Aylett the writer mean to you, Steve Aylett, the average man in the street?
‘Steve Aylett the man in the street is just this thing that walks around like a wishbone in a coat, looking gormless. You wouldn’t think it was a genius, and you’d be right’.
In the tradition of Pulp lazy assed journalism that frequented many of the magazines in the 80s and 90s. If I would only allow you to have five things on a desert island, what would they be?
‘I’d probably be hysterical with happiness at the absence of people. Then lonely at the absence of female people. I’d only need a few basics though, plus maybe some music. I probably wouldn’t last long but I’d die fairly happy’.
Now, what would they be if you were in a housing estate in 2011, Boris Johnson has just banned all participants of the Olympics and London had been overrun by cats with bad attitude?
‘In the long run I try not to be swerved too much by arbitrary circumstance – meaning circumstance decided by other people – so I’d be doing what I’d already planned to do at that point – writing, resenting, weeping, eating, sleeping. So, again, I’d need just a few basics’.
What’s your favourite pulp?
‘I don’t know whether he qualifies as pulp except in regard to his publishing history, but the SF/fantasy writer Jack Vance is an amazing thing. There’s a very particular flavour to his books, and people who are into him will know what I mean. There’s a humour and intelligence there, a sort of sensible individuality, and amazing worlds he describes. His aliens are, for the most part, genuinely alien and unknowable. Most of his books – including some of the best ones – are out of print, and there are seemingly hundreds of the damn things’.
There is no one else in UK Literature who blends the cyber-surreal with a distinctly British humour. What the hell did this to you?
‘It was probably growing up in that vacuum I mentioned, and wanting to generate an antidote to it for myself to feed on, because that vacuum is just nightmarish. So, richness in the face of vacuity, meaning in the face of incoherence, honesty in the face of wall-to-wall lies and evasion, real humour in the face of crap jokes. The result, when it works, is this rich surreal satire. And it’s nice to do something really stupid occasionally, too, so long as it’s still colourful and interesting. I once wrote a book that didn’t mean anything, ‘The Inflatable Volunteer’, which I think is hilarious. And I recently made a comic called ‘Get That Thing Away From Me’, about a pig who feels generally overwhelmed. Also it’s great to do stuff in the wrong order, disengaged from time and fashion. Why wait until a world event happens before writing about it? These things are pretty obvious several years ahead, so long as you don’t have any motivation not to see them, such as optimism’.
ARCHIVE: Editorial on Pulp
I’ve just purchased forty-eight battered and bruised SF magazines from a dotty old woman who spent twenty minutes looking for them before wheeling them out before me in an old M & S shopping trolley. She was soon joined by an equally barmy old man who declared that they where worth between $1 and $7.50 each – I don’t know where the odd latter price comes from but it always seems to be the kind of numbers that volunteers pull out of the hat in every charity shop I visit. I offer them £20 for the lot and confusion reins as they try to load the magazines along with the shopping trolley into my car. I try to tell them that I don’t want it and another forty minutes of bartering ensue and now I’m a proud owner of a shopping trolley and they own my car. I got $7.50 for it. So, now I’m sat in my lounge and the rain has returned to the world beyond my window and I am dancing as I have found a Napoleonic coin amongst the pages of Weird Tales.
Amazing Stories surfaces from the pile of old magazines, there amongst the musty pages that gleam with bright artwork is a name I’ve not seen in print for a long while, Poul Anderson. Then other names drift up, Burroughs, Bradbury, Asimov, Leigh and for a moment, my guilty secret threatens to erupt as the child inside me giggles. These are the names that kept me sane as a child, that gave me hope and taught me to dream and to make that impossible leap into the great void of SF. Back then I did not know or care about the fact that they were classed as Pulp. For God sakes, I watched A Team and Magnum PI on television, was forced to sit down on a Saturday evening and watch Metal Mickey with the family – the gayest robot ever to come out of the 80s – there was no surprise that I took great joy in staring at those brash SF covers that promised horror, danger and worlds of mystery. Metal Mickey merely gave us a man in a dustbin and ALF was surely a alcoholic by season two.
Many of the Amazing Stories and Weird Tales are adorned with gruesome aliens, buxom women fainting and men who stare wistfully at the horizon. Even in the magazines, men were escaping and so were women. They were a world away from the drab streets of my childhood, the cold winters, the wet days and the tiresome rehashing of Star Wars on TV and in film. These magazines were my escape, my guilty secret whilst my friends ran around playing army and football, I kept them in my duffel coat pocket, under the maths book in my desk and dreamt of a gateway to Mars, shining red and dangerous in the dark.
As I grew older, the cover art of many of these magazine where seen as inferior or sexist, and ultimately as a distraction to real Literature. A term I have never understood, writers do not write Literature, they tell stories and it is beyond me why anyone would want to use that term – Literature can kill a good book dead, I have seen many reviewers toss books into bins when they are told that it is the next great Literary work of the twenty-first century. I have seen writers paralysed with fear when they think they have to produce a tome to hold up the word ‘Literature’. An example is Margaret Atwood, is she (a) A Feminist Writer? (b) A Literary Writer? Or; (c) A Fiction writer who tells stories and doesn’t care what they are? I plump for the latter, The Handmaid’s Tale, is SF and so is Oryx and Crake and in some way all her work touches on Fantasy but I doubt she’d give a damn about the word ‘Literature’. Yet, Margaret is classed under the A’s in the Literary section and SF is tucked away and anything that resembles Pulp is shipped out to dusty areas around the shop. Poul Anderson should be in the A’s alongside Margaret but poor old Poul is relugated to a distant land called SF, Jeff Noon should be in the N’s but is also sent to the back of the class for not being Literary and poor old, misunderstood Mickey Spillane should be in S’s but he is somewhere in crime. In a shop in Cambridge I found poor old Mickey in the comedy section and the shop keeper just sneered at me and said, “Well, it’s not exactly great Literature”. ‘Literature’ a buzz word that is the kiss of death for any great story. Pulp is at the other end of the spectrum, it kills too.
ARCHIVE: Editorial on Travel
I abhor travel. Maybe that is a little harsh but trust me when you’ve landed sideways in an air plane at O’Hare, buffeted by one of the worst hurricanes the USA has ever seen, it tends to put you off the act of travelling. I love to go places though, so I am in a Catch 22 situation. Many of us now baulk as we face the new guru catch word – carbon footprint; a catchphrase dreamt up in some PR company, to make us all feel guilty that the planet is indeed warming up, whilst human compassion, trust and love amongst fellow men and women is distinctly dropping down the temperature scale. Let’s face it, we’re stuffed.
So, how big is your carbon footprint? Is it so big that you can now actively brag to male friends about it? Is it big enough to make even China go weak at the knees? Let’s face it, this is how the whole travel problem is being pitched at us – we are being made to feel incredibly stupid and guilty but there is no real mention of the companies that are also to blame or even the governments.
Yet, our lust for travel and the throwaway lifestyle is contagious. Come on, who hasn’t amongst you told friends that you went to somewhere warm and sat by the pool for a fortnight, drinking bad wine and reading equally bad literature? And felt good about it? Openly braggedabout fucking up the country you holidayed in? And we all do it, we go to gems hidden amongst the lapping waves of some undiscovered place. These solitary hideaways where we find ourselves, find peace, discover beauty and feel at one with the world. And, a fortnight after returning home, we have told all our friends, family, colleagues, lovers and any passing stranger or old school friend what a great place we’ve just holidayed in. What do they do? They go there! The cheek. The sheer bravado! What happens then? They tell all their friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances of their pets about a great place they’ve just been too. Oh, the beaches! Oh, the people! The culture, the food, the warmth! – LOOK AT OUR TANS – and what happens then? They go! And then more people go there, then actually live there. Four years later, you meet the first person you recommended the gem to and say quite calmly and in that innocent voice, “I went back on holiday there, but I wouldn’t go again – it’s so commercial, there’s no culture left. There was even a burger bar next to a temple! The people have sold out”
What do you expect? You waved great fistfuls of dirty money in their faces. Sure, beauty is wonderful, empty tranquil beaches that stretch off to the blue horizon are great but you don’t live there all the time. You don’t realise how poor some of these countries are and how much the humble tourist has them over a barrel. Money or poverty? Money or starvation? The irony is though, that England too is becoming a tourist trap. It’s the fastest growing market in the UK at the moment. Will we adapt though to being the one’s accepting the money and bending backwards over a barrel to do it? Could we, after so many decades of package holidays, shouting for food in slow and clear English in the Costa del Sol, Lyon, Delhi, Rhodes and Paris actually welcome the same back? Package holidays are coming back to roost, and I wait with baited breath for the first Spanish Man to shout slow and clear in some greasy spoon, in Spanish of course, that he wants paella.
ARCHIVE: Sex Editorial
You switch on the television, sex, you open the pages of a newspaper, sex, you tune into the Archers, sex. It seems that Benny Hill became so ingrained in our minds in the 1980s that his ghost has risen from the grave and he is being chased through every medium accompanied by a bevvy of scantily clad women. And now men are getting in on the act. Once there was the bimbo, now there is the himbo and years from now they will have populated the planet with good looking chavs. I know that last one is hard to imagine but trust me, they have devolved to a point where they can only go up or else dig holes in the ground and changed their names to Morlock. Which makes the rest of us the Eloi. For those of you unaware of H.G. Wells classic, The Time Machine, the Eloi where the good looking ones who fed from the Earth. They where apathetic, watched others drown as they sat on the perfect bums on a perfect riverbank and ate fruit. God, that sounds awfully familiar, does it remind anyone of celebrity culture? Where vacuous talentless Z list stars, whose only claim to fame is being racist or so talentless that they’ve come out the otherside in a post ironic thingy that they don’t understand but ain’t their Mum a bitch? And look at the new boobs they gave her. Ten grand they cost, so they can’t be a racist, can they? I pray for one of the new hybrid cars to run them over. At least it will cut down on polution. It angers me that they spill their pointless philosophy (which they could write on the side of a match) to every tabloid that can hold a crayon. I’m digressing, in fact it’s not a good idea to think of celebrity culture.
Really, when did putting people in a house for several weeks, with little food, little chance to wash their clothes become sexy? It wasn’t when you flat shared. We should just take ALL Big Brother contestants (they’re not stars) and just shit them into space. Brian and the twins could boldly go and piss off. Poor Davina, her soul has been sucked dry by endless line of mincemeat and suckers.
And that’s what sex is really about. At its essence, sex in the media is making a fool our of you. It preys on your base instincts, from every ad to every soap – come on, Hollyoaks, you didn’t think it was written? It’s just a group of images for frustrated teens – turn the sound off and you’ll see it’s just top shelf fodder not very well disguised.
But why shouldn’t we revel in sex? Let’s face it, it’s programmed into our DNA. I tell you all those stars who have been caught over the years, all those wives and husbands, and partners couldn’t help it. It’s bad enough that it’s our primal drive but when they start putting it on the back of buses and on mobile phones and in music videos, who stands a chance?
ARCHIVE: Food Glorious Food Editorial
Over the coming months we will be reprinting Editorials written by Andrew. These tend to be themed. Do leave your comments.
FOOD GLORIOUS FOOD
It will soon be Christmas. I know that many of you will lift up your hands and huff that the jolly season is months away. Tell the high street this, go over to any bookshop cookery section and see all the new titles grabbing your attention for Christmas. Those feel good volumes that blend you into the ground because your life is grey. You know the ones, they start with personal recipes, that state, ‘my kids love these sumptious little parcels of cheese in bread, they literally wolf them down every Christmas morning before they run to open their presents, their faces glowing and their bellies full. Makes you feel like a real Mother’. Yes, they’ve sexed up cheese on toast and the fact that when their kids wake them up at five in the morning on Christmas Day their brains are incapable of cooking anything beyond toast. Yet food has become sexy in the last few years, be it to do with Nigella, whose new Nigella Express shows that formats have to move on from pouting at the camera and languidly stating that you can cook something in fifteen minutes if only you’d spend five hours shopping. Food has crept into Literature, thanks in part to the likes of Joanne Harris and the subsequent film Chocolat.
At last, we all screamed, it’s okay to revel in food and find it sexy. Let’s face facts, food and sex are the very reasons we are here, if we don’t eat, we die, if we don’t procreate, then there’s no hunters, no growers, no teenagers pushing trolleys at a supermarket.
So food is bloody well sexy but being fat isn’t, this is the paradox, eat and be merry, eat but don’t get fat and this is wrong. There are two types of people in this world, those that eat and those that pretend to eat. The latter sit in front of immaculately presented food and pick around the edges. The rest of us dream of sandwiches that would make Scooby Doo baulk. I must admit I fall into this category, I love food. So, when it was suggested that we do a food issue I was the first to shout out a plethora of people to interview. It would have been lazy to trot out the usual names, the ones that always seem to be on the front of magazines, smiling vacantly over their interpretation of a Sticky Toffee Pudding – does it annoy anyone else that traditional food is buggered up? A Sticky Toffee Pudding should come with lashings of custard not appear in the corner of a bowl too ashamed to say its own name.
Gargoyle: Issue 55
Andrew features in the latest issue of Gargoyle: Issue 55. The magazine publishes the short story, The Song of the Whale Boy, a fantasy story about a mutated whale, a hunter, a daughter and an abandoned wife. The magic tale takes place in the streets and sewers of Paris. A home away from home for the writer.
Gargoyle is a great magazine, Issue 55 features some great poetry, fiction and non-fiction and is more like a book than a magazine. It looks good on anyone’s shelf. Gargoyle covers are always bold and simple and the latest cover features the lovely Aoife Mannix (photo by Andy Rumball). Buy the magazine today!
Let us know what you think of Andrew’s story.
ARCHIVE: Making Snow Angels With Michael – An Interview with Eva Salzman
Andrew interviewed Eva Salzman shortly after the death of the talented and much missed Michael Donaghy. Michael and Eva where good friends and this interview serves to celebrate not just Eva’s work but the memory of Michael. The interview was published in 2004. Andrew says of the interview, ‘It was a dark time in the world of poetry, Michael’s death had come as a shock to many of us. I only met him once, he was kind, open and warm. I remember this interview as having that same feeling. Eva didn’t just answer the questions, she came up with answers that made me want to question her more. She is a fascinating poet and a warm human being. It has always been a joy to interview her and I hope I will interview her again in the future.’
Making Snow Angels With Michael: An Interview with Eva Salzman
Interview by Andrew Oldham
Eva Salzman grew up in Brooklyn and on Long Island where she was a dancer/choreographer. At Stuyvesant H.S., her teacher was Frank McCourt; she received degrees from Bennington College (BA) and Columbia University (MFA), where she studied with Derek Walcott, Joseph Brodsky, C.K. Williams, Edmund White, Elizabeth Hardwick, Stanley Kunitz, Carolyn Kizer, Josef Skvorecky, Stephen Sandy, Patricia Goedicke, Ben Belitt, Thoms Lux, Stephen Dunn and Jorie Graham. Her books include Double Crossing: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe), One Two II (Wrecking Ball Press), illus. Van Howell, Bargain with the Watchman (Oxford), and The English Earthquake (Bloodaxe), all Poetry Book Society Recommendations/Special Commendations. Her grandmother was a child vaudeville actress, and her mother is an environmentalist. This background, and a diverse range of jobs – as Exercise Director of a Brooklyn orthodox Jewish diet centre, out-of-print book searcher and cleaner of rich ladies’ houses – all inform her writing, especially her cross-arts projects with performers and visual artists. She has collaborated with the director Rufus Norris and with composers Gary Carpenter, Rachel Leach, Philip Cashian and A.L. Nicolson. Shawna and Ron’s Half Moon: An Americana Satire and One Two, commissioned by the English National Opera Studio, were performed there, at Hoxton Hall and at Greenwich Theatre. Cassandra, a mini-opera written with her composer father, Eric Salzman, has been performed in Dusseldorf, Vienna and Oslo. She won 2nd Prize in the National Poetry Competition and major prizes in the Arvon and Cardiff Poetry Competitions. Grants and awards include those from the Arts Council, Royal Literary Fund, London Arts Board and the Society of Authors. Her poetry and fiction has been frequently broadcast on the BBC; she’s read at the Royal Festival Hall, Barbican, Poetry Society, Troubadour and at festivals all over the UK, as well as in Ireland, Spain and France. In the US, she has read at the Nuyorican Café, the Walt Whitman Association and at Wesleyan Writers’ Conference, where she taught as a Fellow two years running. Her varied teaching work has included Adjunct Professor at Friends World Programme (Long Island University, London), regular teaching for Arvon courses, for community projects in London’s East End and a residency at Springhill Prison, as well as continuing input to the Poetry Society’s educational programmes and co-devising the Open University’s first Start Writing Poetry course.
Her poetry, fiction and features have appeared in the New Yorker, Kenyon, Review, Independent, Guardian, Observer, Poetry Review, TLS, London Magazine, and in the anthologies: The Firebox ed. Sean O’Brien; Hand in Hand ed. Carol Ann Duffy; Sixty Women Poets ed. Linda France; Last Words eds. Don Paterson & Jo Shapcott; and two New Writing anthologies (British Council/Picador/Vintage) eds. John Fowles, A.L. Kennedy, Penelope Lively & George Szirtes.
How do you feel the two Literary Cultures of the USA and the UK differ?
‘Despite my years living in a Home Counties cliché (Tunbridge Wells) even now I cleave to an idealised view of the European intellectual, with England virtually part of Europe – not how the English see it. Who wouldn’t want to be part of Europe I thought?! Though transplanted to the UK ages ago, I’ve never felt anything but an outsider in England, where American literature is permitted its place in the hierarchy…eventually. The English aren’t keen on us actually living among them. Once poets are safely dead, they’re drafted into the canon. The anti-American bias was in evidence since before this Bush era – maybe a hangover from WWII’s “Overpaid, Oversexed and Over Here”. This poet’s not overpaid. Pass on the other two. The English frequently mistake me for a representative of the US government. You’re supposed to be able to tell from the shoes. It’s a contrived division between the two literary cultures which, historically, a certain kind of writer feels determined to bridge or ignore. (I’m in a train trundling across a bridge at the very moment I write this, leaving New London, Connecticut.) I recall attending an event protesting the closing down of Oxford’s poetry list, at which a starry array of poets read, including on behalf of absent or dead American Oxford poets. Michael Donaghy and I, the only two Oxford published Americans in the audience, were the only two poets not asked to read at this event. This odd omission is not uncommon. Recently, the publication of Faber’s “Selected Poems” by Robert Lowell was celebrated at the London Review of Books bookshop by a panel of three English male poets. The fourth panel member – the co-editor – was a visiting US academic, whose first words to me were: Why weren’t any American voices taking part? Don’t ask me I said – I only live here. I often wonder whether most current English editors, faced with Mr. Lowell’s typescript themselves, might have simply returned it to the poet, with a cool note about his voice sounding “too American”! Hush my mouth. I’ve just finished a month of giving workshops and readings at universities such as Brandeis, Connecticut College and Columbia University, I’m reminded of the assembly line poetry culture of US academia, which turns ‘em out, like it turned me out too. My Columbia MFA fellow student’s parting shot to me, when she heard I was boarding a plane to England, was a warning to “Watch out for those formal elements”, as if the Formalist mafia were lying in wait on the other side, pens drawn like pistols. I watched the growth of the so-called New Formalism with some bemusement, since I thought all poets secretly beavered away at form, even if from the privacy of their own homes. I wouldn’t be surprised if the slightly illicit nature of the activity was precisely what appealed to me. This whole movement’s lines were more sharply drawn in the US where the prevailing aesthetic seemed almost dependent on an ideological stand against rhyme or metre. Even now, there exists in the US this “us” and “them” mentality, perhaps because poets, and people generally, seem to need to belong to some church. Frequently, I’ve exchanged rants about language poets with the poet Michael Donaghy. Such schools define themselves in exclusionary terms, with reference more to what they are not, than what they are. It’s a slightly less elevated kind of playground fight. The fun is to smash a few icons, while crafting some new ones of course. Actually, a lot of what Language Poetry did originally has been subverted along the way – as this kind of experimentation often is – by ideologues only glancingly interested in the poems themselves. God forbid. Why bother with such trifles, when there’s all that theory to get your teeth into? When I first heard about Language Poetry, I thought: “Language! In Poetry. Now there’s an idea!” The news of Michael Donaghy’s death came to me during my US tour and I’ve been utterly heart-broken by it. I was talked out of cancelling my tour by the Maddy, his wife, who insisted I stay in what was, after all, Michael’s hometown. My husband attended the funeral for both us, and I used my radio interviews and readings to talk about Michael and read some poems. We met within a year of both moving to the UK, where I live right round the corner from his house. We’ve frequently read and taught together, on Arvon courses for example. I recall both of us finishing our Poetry Society reading, which I’d gotten through with the help of some wine and he with the help of glass of water which turned out to be the proverbial vodka. Passing through the Poetry Society lobby, having accomplished our mission, Michael’s impromptu hop-scotch over a carpet of interlocking leaflets on the floor (somebody counting them, I thought, somewhat bemused by the activity ) went down well with me, but was not so happily viewed by what turned out to be the artist installing his art installation. Michael’s inadvertent critique seemed apt to me, but I mean what could a person say in apology? I thought. Sorry, I didn’t realise this was art?! This must have been not long after I’d introduced Michael and Don Paterson, my boyfriend who I lived with for a number of years. Frequently, I’d told Don how I couldn’t wait for them to meet; I’m sure Don must remember this well, and how we all went to France together with Maddy, before the birth of Ruairi, to stay in the house of my friend. Our car broke down en route, which prompted lots of tears and then mitigating alcohol. Actually, when we finally arrived, Maddy and I swam, rode horses and enjoyed ourselves lots, while the two male poets sat glumly in the shade, complaining about the heat, unable to swim and therefore proving my contention that most male poets can’t swim…nor drive very well. (I also remember Michael’s frantic call for us to evacuate the ever so slightly smoking car, and we all fled frantically from the mildly dysfunctional car, and stood there in a field for a while, observing it, until we realised it was not going to explode and we were the only ones who could do something about it. As with so many things in life, we waxed lyrical about the trip after it was over, just as the Irish love Ireland from a distance – and the way I love America from even further away – but I’d like to think that some of us waxed lyrical about Michael – about the guy and the poet – while he was still alive. He was also a wonderful Irish musician, as many know. Okay, so he rehearsed his jokes to perfection, but the showman really was a genuine poet. The first time I met him at Colin Falck’s poetry group (where I met Don too) the group weighed in about his poem “Pornography” as if it were no better than the usual, which was quite clearly not the case, as I insisted, amazed by the generally cool reaction. For god’s sake, I said, couldn’t we tell when something was really good? Colin, our fearless leader, must have. Michael and I departed that session together, and our friendship lasted from then, even though not all friendships forged in cups ever last more than plane-ride. This one was forged through poems too of course, and those by him will last. There weren’t enough, but it’s a good thing there were that many – more than the handful of good ones per book, which someone once said is the best one can hope for. Michael knew some London zoo orangutans personally, and did a very good chimp imitation. He was from the Bronx and I’m from Brooklyn, which may or not explain my also-close relationships with various beasts from the animal kingdom. (I don’t mean poets.) We both also held a series of unlikely jobs, knew a little of the underworld, even if he was Irish Catholic. (Like Sarah Bernhardt, I’m a lapsed Catholic Jew.) I was just in Santa Cruz, California, hanging out with some sea lions, blubbery lumbering beasts which spend their days squirming and squelching around gracelessly, shoving each other off their dry perches, constantly vying for room and bickering in distinctly inelegant honking tones. Not that Michael was the bickering type – he avoided all confrontation to a fault – but he would have appreciated the raucous spectacle. He had a hard time saying ‘no’ and that positive, friendly mask he presented to the world was often at odds with what he really felt inside, to the point where sometimes I’d want to shake that smile off his face. But then lots of people really liked him for this warmth, and women were incessantly falling in love with him. I’m taking up a lot of this interview talking about Michael Donaghy, but naturally this is the moment and opportunity to do so. Perhaps someone will want to hear more sometime; it’s an urgent need to talk people you love when they die. I was delighted that he chose to visit my dream the night before he died (when he had so little time and so much to do!). Side-by-side, we fell back into the soft snow, made snow angels and had a brief conversation about the cosmos and the starry sky overhead. He said he could stay there looking at the heavens forever. It was a lovely dream. To return to the question, I think the British literary scene is more maledominated and sexist – perhaps like the culture. British publishers often seem unwilling to take risks, but instead tend to congregate in aesthetic coffee clutches, all backing the same horses, rather than wanting the pleasure and excitement of putting their own stamp on things. Maybe this is the stock US individualist speaking, or how Americans like to think of themselves. My host just described to me a poet colleague who is a literary entrepreneur – in the best possible way – with her energetic Mickey Rooneyish approach to new projects. Maybe you’ve seen the films? “Hey, guys! I got an idea! Let’s put on a poetry show in the barn!” I should say that my host was describing this with admiration, even if this approach may seem culturally shallow, tasteless, tacky or exhibitionist to some – this kind of “hey, let’s make do and put together a show just for the heck of it” thing which, these days, I find refreshing for its energy, spontaneity and innocence (god forbid I use such a word about anything American!) which I really miss sometimes. Many English people find this impulse excruciatingly embarrassing, and I did too…once’.
As a New Yorker, now living in the UK, how did 9/11 affect your identity and the feeling of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’?
‘At the precise moment US friends were insisting I was damn lucky to be out of this damned country, these events have made me long for home more than ever – rather perverse I know. Of course I don’t think of myself as American, but as a New Yorker, Actually, I was back in the States for 9/11. Fortunately, we weren’t in the city at home, which is just across the water from the twin towers. We were terrified where we were though, just outside the city. I felt like my past really had tumbled down, virtually in front of my eyes. Before that, from a distance, I could almost pretend it was still all the same. Was that some loss of America’s innocence? That innocence was long gone from me – maybe part of the reason I left the place like I did, holding a cynical view of Americans, as does everyone these days. I see things differently now. Maybe it’s the so-called ignorance of many Americans which keep them innocent too, not always in a pleasant way. But many really do believe in the corny precepts America is based on. Meanwhile, the English seem to prefer the idea of the American as an ignorant dolt, but that is ignorant thinking too. Also, it is precisely the diabolically bad media which prevents anyone from getting a clear picture of the American opposition to the clichéd, imperialist, war-mongering, redneck mentality which I sometimes think some English would prefer to believe is an accurate picture of the American character, when of course the truth is infinitely more complicated…and interesting, if I may say so. By the way, on this trip, I’ve been hanging around with a lot of Republicans, all of whom said they’re planning to vote Democrat. Fingers crossed. Kerry recently said: “Bush has united our enemies, divided our friends.” It does seem to me this nation is deeply divided right now, which aptly represents an internal division I’ve felt culturally for many years living in the UK, but felt even when I was living in NYC, partly for political reasons and partly as a twin’.
You were a dancer up to the age of twenty-two, what drew you from this Artform into writing Poetry?
‘I can’t remember not writing – both fiction and poetry – so I never turned towards poetry from anywhere else. It may seem odd that I practised both verbal and non-verbal art-forms, but I’ve never felt any contradiction. However, reading and writing are and have always been utterly essential to me; they are part of my identity. I’ve written for as long as I can remember writing’.
Artists/Poets are often perceived as making things happen, politically, socially and/or emotionally, how do you see your work in this?
‘I’ve written the odd polemic, but much of my work is implicitly political. I’ve been told I’m the sort of person who makes things happen – both good and bad. Watches don’t exactly stop dead when I put them on, but machines do malfunction when I go near them. I have a far better relationship with animals, and men. I don’t know if I’m going off-piste here to mention how the kind of people who put themselves forward in some way are also the ones who end up taking the flak. The stereotype of the American makes them the crass but also outspoken one which means I say what others often tell me they’d like to say, but don’t, and this foot-in-mouth tendency I try to put to good use if I possibly can. However, the “messages” are less in my writing, and more in the uses I put the writing to, or in the kinds of teaching I end up doing, often in the service of good causes – the kind of work most writers I know wouldn’t and don’t touch with a barge-pole. It sort of started with the English seeming to not know what to do this NYC Jew, so I’d get placed among ethnic communities, for fellowships and teaching. That worked for me fine, even if I roll my eyes at the pigeon-holing and incomprehension about my work. Even if I don’t write politically, I want to be able to do a little for some greater good. Part of this comes from Jewish (Catholic?) guilt. I’m obsessed by the injustices of the world, and often see in the smaller cowardices and lies of people the far larger crimes they seem to represent. I see the tyrant and large-scale hypocrite in the petty playground bully, for example, or even in my fellow poets. This may sometimes be a fault in me, or a curse’.
Your new collection, Double Crossing was Poetry Book Society Recommended, but what poems or Poets would you recommend and why?
“I’m assuming you mean poems by others, but I’d say to read both American and British voices. It’s important to read in different genres. I’m reading a book about Mormons at the moment. However, I don’t recommend Mormonism as a life-style choice, and neither does this book, about a largely forgotten massacred perpetuated by these breakaway Christians (another advertisement for atheism!). When I came to England, I was simply carrying on with a literary love affair I’d had with England as long as I could read my grandmother’s classic, old-fashioned collection of some books; she ran a book business from her home, but this was just an excuse for accumulating something like 20,000 books in her home. My first reading was intensely old-fashioned: Fielding, Dickens, Fielding, Richardson, George Eliot, Austen, Melville, Hawthorne, Hardy…and then later Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Edith Wharton. I worked my way up to modern times; I was trying to approach things chronologically but now I mix and match eclectically, which perfectly suits my temperament. Early poets I read included Keats, Dickinson and the Romantics, and then Frost, Auden, Bishop, MacNeice, Kavanagh, E.B. Browning. I go back to most of these poets, and also admire Molly Peacock, Derek Mahon, Carol Ann Duffy, Kate Clanchy, Colette Bryce, Simon Armitage, C.K. Williams, Sharon Olds, Marilyn Hacker, Kathleen Jamie, Ciaran Carson, Sean O’Brien and Michael Donaghy. I like individual poems, rather than poets, if you know what I mean’.
Double Crossing deals with various issues of gender, love, sexuality, politics of sex, drawing from a myriad of the everyday and from the realms of mythology. What draws you to mythological figures and what do they have to say about modern situations and events?
‘Of course we’re all just re-writing the same stories, over and over. When I wander towards some mythological topic, I might do some research, but usually long after a first draft. Then, I’m often struck by the uncanny way I’ve made connections unconsciously, as if we’re all dipping into some collective unconsciousness when we tread this territory. I found this when writing “Poor Relations”, when I was reading about some early creation myths and their connection to certain elements such as gold and silver, and when I was writing “Helen’s Sister”, which gives a voice to Helen of Troy’s not-quite-so-beautiful twin sister, living in the next town, her life lived in the shadow of fame and beauty. Also, my muse poems, with their conceit of the muses as men (or women dressed as men, and other such subversive things) allowed a broader palette from which to draw, while writing about the things I was going to write about anyway. With these last, I ran out of muses, and so began to make up new ones, allowing myself to add to myth a little, in my own small, and irreverent way’.
What do you think makes a Poet?
“If we only knew, eh? I do know a little what doesn’t make a poet. Selfexpression is inadequate, as is dull competence with form. One can improve one’s work, but I often think poets are born, which is not to say that one can’t blossom late, or come to the genre through the back door. Poets must have an instinctive, musical understanding of how language works. Some well-known poets let me down in this respect, having a feel for anecdote or narrative line, but being painfully unmusical with no feel for the music in the words and lines. I recall one saying she couldn’t in a million years write a traditional sonnet! Eh?!’
How much does personal culture, background, religious upbringing affect your writing? And, how do you see your role as a Poet within the wider realms of this?
‘I’ve talked about guilt as a motivation in the political realm. I think sometimes of the wandering Jew; I loathe nationalism, even as I feel its pull. I’ve managed to belong nowhere, or everywhere. Nothing seems to fit perfectly, or it all does. The club I belong to is the large one consisting of writers who never settled, or moved around incessantly: Joyce, Lawrence. All New Yorkers are foreigners to begin with anyway. What is a New Yorker, but somebody from somewhere else? I never thought about being Jewish at all (why would I, living in a Jewish city?!) until I moved to England. Now, I think of identity as imposed on me by others. I realise that my cultural roots (and this is my primary attachment to religion, coming from a staunchly secular, liberal, intellectual family…who were all rabbis two generations back) are inescapable. I’m not painting NYC as some kind of racial utopia but I honestly never noticed people’s colour or religion particularly – unless they’re highlighting it in some way – in the same way I notice it in England. The English seem particularly deft at pigeon-holing and putting people in their place, as I’ve said. I never experienced antisemitism….until I came to England, and that makes me happier to be part of my minority – again, maybe out of sheer perversity. Where I live now I feel I’m part of a number of minorities: as an American, as a Jew and as a woman, that great majority minority. I’m most at home in exile, among exiles. I feel more affinity with a Palestinian (which isn’t really so odd, when you think about it) than I might with an Englishperson. I’ve managed my outsider situation by working in prisons or in a place like Ruskin College – the ‘working man’s college’, as it is known – or among the disenfranchised. Of course I’m now a foreigner in my own country now, America being strange to me in precisely the way England used to be. There’s a certain poignant sadness in this situation. Some of my poems (perhaps more so the earlier ones) have a kind of peculiar nationalism of – the learned nationalism of the outsider or displaced person, which its own language, subsequently employed more broadly, for all transactions, including romantic ones. My family came through Ellis Island in NYC, like a huge percentage of the US population. It was the usual emigrant story of Jews seeking a better life in the US, and running from Cossacks and Pogroms. One grandparent was Polish/Russian, another Latvian and the third from Hungary. I’ve never been to any of these places but hope to go sometime and see if I can track down a few Salzmans or Jacksons (a changed name of course). One side is Pasternak, and I grew very excited when I heard this. My Great-Aunt reassured me that yes, it was indeed the same family as the Hollywood Producer, when naturally I was thinking of Boris. We’re still not clear on this connection. I live in hope. I am related to Edward G. Robinson, an actor from the 30’s who played mainly gangsters – a criminal-ish connection I can’t help but relish. My grandfather was an extraordinary polymath but he and his six siblings all worked to put money into the pot to send the youngest to medical school – that’s how it was done – from where he emerged to become a pretty famous shrink, specialising in human sexuality. Two other brothers were union men; one Great-Uncle subscribed to Soviet Life his whole life. My grandfather tutored me through High School – where Frank McCourt was my English teacher – as he did my grandmother, which was how he met and courted her. This polymath grandfather was a Levi or Cohen, I forget which; the fact is passed down in families through word-of-mouth, but is relevant only to those with the appropriate genitals – as with so much in life. His wife, my favourite grandmother, was a child vaudeville actress. My father is a composer, and my mother is an environmentalist. Well, all this is raw material, and I don’t expect I’ve gotten through a quarter of it. Who knows what I’ll do with it all, but I doubt this mix of artistic and political will go to waste. Of course I lost relatives in the Holocaust so I have only a short ancestry behind me whereas my artist husband’s family came to the US as pilgrims. Before around 1900. there’s a big blank. I have some early c.1900 photos of various relatives, some of whom look intriguingly dark-skinned and Gypsy…). Although Americans are mocked for their search for roots, in another way the Jews especially re-invented themselves by obliterating whatever of their past was available to erase. One set of my grandparents seemed to air-brush out their Jewishness completely, and even my father’s generation are strangely uninterested in their own history. Maybe this is partly why Americans, more generally, are cavalier about their heritage – because their identity is conjured up, invented, newly-minted, even though they appreciate the notion of heritage in England, where everything is supposed to be old. In the US everything’s supposed to be new. I wonder if this accounts for the US poet’s willingness to take more risks (which may mean more bad poems too, but, hey, at least they try!). This is another affinity I feel with Michael Donaghy; I often thought that both of us had reinvented ourselves in another place from scratch, away from family and a familiar place. Right now, I’m interested in returning to an American vernacular overlaid on all this Britishness instilled in me. Of course, I’m not convinced that this American voice has ever been absent – as I’m sure various English editors who have seen my work would agree’.
You also write essays, in particular I’m thinking of Babel (printed in Mslexia and reprinted in Incorporating Writing Issue 1 Vol 3), this medium is often seen as a direct opposite to poetry. What drew you, to what is traditionally perceived as academic, to writing essays?
“I’ve never thought of myself as a writer of any particular genre, but simply a writer. Reticent is not a word people who know me would apply to me, but that’s exactly what I’ve been up-to-date as regards my fiction, which I’ve always written, along with various kinds of non-fiction: essays, journalism and criticism (about which I’ve not been reticent enough!) The poetry world is a small one, and the criticism culture in Britain emphasises a biting wit, often at expense of the writer. This is not to say I think criticism shouldn’t include opinions, but it’s easier to be witty while being cruel. I’m very interested in writing which I term cultural journalism, which includes under its heading a multitude of literary sins (memoir, travel writing, anecdotal essays which verge on the academic), and I’m fond of sin. I’ve even written a screenplay with Anne Rouse, another American poet who has been transplanted in Britain long enough to also have a shared identity. I’m working on fiction and have been writing libretti and lyrics, a natural progression from my musical training. I don’t feel the desire to write much criticism anymore, but would love to have a year off teaching to do what I know I can do with a longer work of fiction. May I be granted that blessing. I’ve learned how few writers – and poets in particular – are genuinely self-supporting freelance writers, with no second income, trust fund or the luck (or pedigree) to have a succession of grants, minus the hard teaching slog which many of us depend on. I’ve never been anything but completely self-supporting, and it’s tough. Very few poets I know are, of if they are they have a domestic and/or secretarial support system’.
Do you feel there is a ‘glass ceiling’ for female poets in UK Literature?
‘This is my hobby-horse (god forgive – many others don’t) but I love the way the (mainly guy) poets, in their charmed circles, dismiss as nonsense whatever one says about the realities of being a woman poet/writer. Let them try to live my life for a week, or the lives of many others struggling year in and year out. Oh well, mustn’t complain. To hell with that; I’ll complain. A well-known female poet friend once said to me that it takes two or three books for women poets to achieve what male poets achieve in a single book. Repeatedly, I see nice bright young lads showing up and sweeping away the awards, and scratching each other’s backs for the next ten years, in pubs. It’s impossible not to be just a little cynical. Of course, some women achieve quick success too, but often more through facility with career game-playing than with words – forging the right alliances, and having amazingly helpful love affairs. I knew who my real friends were after I broke up with Don, which event affected my ‘career’ (if you can call it that) profoundly. I have to remind people that I ‘discovered’ and pushed Don, and supported him financially, domestically and as secretary for years, although of course we were mutually beneficial as each other’s editors. It’s never a good thing to have to tug on people’s coat sleeves and remind them of such things. Naturally, I never had this kind of support myself. I’ve have to do my own taxes and my own laundry – that great enemy of the writer, as I believe Martin Amis once put it. The joke is that women poets need wives too. Early on, I had a fairy grandmother who helped support my career – if it could be called that. I spent the rest of my life irritated to discover I had to eventually figure it all myself, and do it all myself. Having figured it all out, I realise too late one important secret: be incompetent and very bad at things so that someone else steps in to do it for you. Many women poet colleague describe in private their own similar experiences, which they know better than admit to many men, since such statements endanger one’s position. I’m acutely aware of the kind of backlash I invite by saying these same old tired things here again, but then the same old, tired things rule our lives. When I broke up with Don Paterson, some friends (only a few) suddenly dropped from my orbit, and I was once reduced to complaining that I got more attention for my alliance with a male poet, than for the work itself – thus reiterating exactly this fact, by pointing it out. Don himself, who’d certainly championed my work previously, suddenly failed to mention me when it counted. When Oxford dropped its list, I was out in the cold for a while. This is personal experience but it there are analogies in others’ stories, often told in private. (Here’s the impolite Yank speaking out again on a few unpleasant home-truths, which certainly are not just relevant to me…). I do think women are much more at the mercy of things nothing to do with the work itself. Some poets have been known to sleep their way to the top. My joke is that I’m the sort of person to sleep my way to the bottom – sheer perversity again’.
The editing process is often where Poets are made or destroyed, how does your personal editing compare to working with an editor?
‘I’ve done virtually all my own editing, except for isolated experiences with newspaper editors – usually good ones, although occasionally editors have abused this position to introduce their own agendas via some new, young writer, who puts herself forward for the job, without suspecting the Machiavellian strategies at play in the small, back-stabbing poetry world. I do believe that editing is a large part of the writing process, but I equally treasure the other more instinctive and mysterious part of the process. I’ve had to become a good editor, never having had the luxury one at my disposal as often as I’d like. I enjoy all the editing work I’ve done – for Bloomsbury, The Printer’s Devil magazine and for other book projects – perhaps more than I enjoy teaching in fact. When they start hiring American editors in the English poetry scene, somebody let me know’.
What are you working on at present?
‘I’m working on a novel, and short stories. Or rather I’m not working on the novel I should be writing, since I to pay the bills. Teaching is hard work, if you do it well, which I try to, and I teach all ages and levels, and in all situations, as I’ve taught myself to do – out of necessity. I need to find some impossible sum of money for medical things. I think patronage is a terrific idea. Should there be any rich people who are also keen on this system, I’m available for work’.
Finally, if you could invite anyone to supper (living or dead) who would they be and why?
‘There are too many choices. I’ve been reading a biography on Benjamin Franklin a fascinatingly eclectic, true Renaissance man who was also downto-earth. Surely good dinner party company. I’d be old enough to be safe from his roving, groping hands, although I understand he was pretty indiscriminate in his amorous inclinations and he liked older women too – though I don’t yet think of myself as older yet, I must say! I was recently reminded about D.H. Lawrence’s hatchet job on Franklin, in his Studies of American Literature. (I loathed Women in Love but The Rainbow and Sons and Lovers had an enormous influence on me; I don’t care so much for the poems, but I can appreciate their intent…sort of.) So, maybe I could be a notquite-silent third party at an event which involved sparring between these two men, punctuated by my occasional pithy and perhaps surprising contribution or rejoinder. Afterwards, these two gentlemen would no doubt withdraw during the Ball, since I can’t imagine that they’d be real keen on dancing, unlike Queen Elizabeth 1st, whom I could join, dancing a jig or hornpipe. She wrote poetry too and I wonder what she’d make of mine. In advance, she’d have to know that I had no designs whatsoever on the monarchy; some contemporary English literati might need to be reminded of the same. What I want mostly is the time to write what I need to write. Wouldn’t that be nice”.
ARCHIVE: The Monster Inside 1941-2004
Andrew wrote about the death of Spalding Gray throughout 2004 citing him as, ‘A major influence in my desire first to get into experimental theatre and then to start writing monologues. This was a man who wrote monologues on procrastination, the act of aging and the death of his mother. They were often humourous, painful and above all honest, making a direct contact with reader and audience. I was sad, but not suprised, to read of Spalding’s suicide. The greatest shame was that he was never as well known in the UK as he should have been. You can see his influence in UK comedy and theatre’.
Spalding Gray: The Monster Inside 1941-2004. Article by Andrew Oldham & Interview by Jeanne Carstensen (kindly reproduced here with permision of the authors)
The monologue, Monster In A Box begins with the line, “You see in 1967, while I was trying to take my first vacation, my mother killed herself.”
This is the perfect moment and explosive force in Spalding Gray’s life, from this he ran and in the arms of it he created and bore most of his work, and in the end he returned to it. Gray repeated his personal history on a cold New York Winter’s night and walked into fiction and speculation.
Gray would have revelled in the mystery of his own disappearance, would have loved the run he had in the New York press and those who crept out of his past to tell tales that were an equal mixture of truth and faith. For three months, countless articles dug up his past, his upbringing and the inevitable end. His remaining family, his wife and children became subjects for the press and police. The facts and fears of that cold night manifested themselves in the discovery of a body in the East River three months later. The monster in Gray had finally surfaced; it was the inevitable end for it, suicide.
Spalding Gray was a unique writer, whose brand of neurotic witty monologues revealed an ever-increasing fear of the modern world and his role within it. Gray transformed the drama world and the delivery of the monologue into a modern, open-ended means of self-expression. Even Gray’s attempts at suicide, there had been a few dry runs before 2004, had resulted in series of development workshops in late 2002. This touching, hilarious look at his own attempt at suicide, was impinged on more and more by his Mother’s suicide, now frequently surfacing in his own life. In Gray’s words, about the night he jumped from the Staten Island ferry, he was searching for “the perfect moment”. Gray seemed forever to be looking for his Mother and share in the moment he had lost her. His fascination with suicide stemmed from this. In his 1992 book, Impossible Vacation, Gray lists a suicidal moment during his teens, when he considered jumping out of a window. “I figured I’d just break a leg or something, and end up in a cast for the rest of the summer … Then I also realised that mom wouldn’t be able to give me any attention, because she was cracking up and needed all of it for herself.”
Spalding Gray was raised in Providence, Rhode Island, as a Christian scientist, he was diagnosed with dyslexia at an early age (he was held back for two years at a boarding school and was further segregated to the edges of his own life). In the sixties he attended the Alley theatre, in Houston; there he learnt and crafted his skills as actor, here he gravitated towards avant-garde theatre of the New York scene. Spalding Gray was a founding member of the Wooster Group. A keen observer of life, he wove monologues out of improvisation, starting with Sex And Death To The Age Of 14 (1979), but his breakthrough as an actor came after a minor role, as the US consul in The Killing Fields (1984), which yielded the monologue Swimming To Cambodia, later filmed by Jonathan Demme. The play focused on the behind the scenes events on the set of The Killing Fields, but ruthlessly explored USA’s responsibility for the ravages in Cambodia. It also showed how Gray saw his life, his failures and his darkest personal secrets, bore out the fact that he was comfortable on the edges of his own life. Other monologues followed, Terrors Of Pleasure (1988), Monster In A Box (1992) and Gray’s Anatomy (1996). All of them were made in to films.
Spalding Gray was haunted by his past, hemmed in by his Mother’s suicide and his own neurotic fears. Gray he played his life’s foibles, pit falls and highs out before audiences, blending fact with fiction, he actively sought out the bizarre underbelly of society, the peripheral groups, the minority fears, the UFO chasers, the Native American rituals, the Thailand Doctors, the quacks and shrinks, the scientists and Christians. Gray created a cut and paste life in his performances, art was life and life was art. He likened his unpleasant experience smoking marijuana in Thailand, to being trapped in “a demented Wallace Stevens poem, with food poisoning”.
It’s a testimony to Gray that he survived his childhood and later life. His personality was constantly raw, childlike and on the edge. His stage style ranged from throwaway to hysteria. And in the end his pasted together existence, his ability to hold back depression and the memory of his mother, just gave way.
The following interview with Spalding Gray was originally published in January 1998 on SFGate.com; the interview was with Jeanne Carstensen. It is kindly reproduced here with the permission of Jeanne Carstensen and SFGAte.com
Is it true that you’re claustrophobic? I’ve heard that. So I thought, my god, I’m going to put him in this little room…
“I’ve had attacks of claustrophobia, but this room wouldn’t bring one on. This is still a big room to me. I’ve probably had two or three of them in my life”.
Are you planning on going skiing while you’re here?
“I’m leaving from here for Aspen, Colorado, to do a workshop called “The Magic of Skiing.” I’m being sent there by Snow Country Magazine to write an article about it. I’m very pleased because I’m being hired as a writer to write about skiing as a result of this monologue, ‘It’s a Slippery Slope.’ We get up at 7 a.m. and do our centring exercises. It’s a six-day workshop. Then we do whatever. I’ll find out and write about it. I’ll probably try to ski 40 days this year”.
So you’ve really become a big skier.
“I have my moments. If I ski 14 days in a row, on the 7th day I’m skiing well”.
Is skiing where you’re finding your “perfect moment” now?
“I think looking for the perfect moment is deadly, or craving them, because they’re always surprises. But I’ve had some really great moments on the slopes that keep bringing me back. Moments I’d call getting into the flow that I’ve never had before in my life. One in particular in Vail, being way out on outer Mongolia and having to get down to ski school to pick up my son or they’d treat him like a delinquent truant. And just getting into one of these flow situations where I was at the top of the mountain at the bottom and I really couldn’t tell you how it all happened. Very mystical for me. Skiing is better than sex actually, because for me a good round of sex might be seven minutes. Skiing you can do for seven hours”.
I was at the show last night and I loved the line near the end, “I see landscape. No mirror. No story.”
“You know, that’s one of my favourite lines. It’s about the breakdown of the narrative and just taking in the awesomeness of nature. I rarely use the word ‘awesome’ but I just did. I’m very selective with it because it’s overused. But of all the audiences I’ve played it to, this audience last night responded to that line. I could feel it go through the house. That line is a powerful and threatening line because it’s saying I have nothing more to say. I have run out of words because I’m so taken with this moment of being in the landscape. It’s a nice moment, both there and in the monologue. You know, I say that I can’t make anything up. I think of myself as a collage artist. I’m cutting and pasting memories of my life. And I say, I have to live a life in order to tell a life. I would prefer to tell it because telling you’re always in control, you’re like God. But that’s a tangent”
What are the parts of your life that you won’t tell. Obviously you’re not telling everything, but you’re telling some very intimate things.
“I’m 56 years old, and the monologues are an hour and a half, so look what’s been left out. Here’s what happened in the case of ‘It’s a Slippery Slope.’ It was almost five years ago, I guess, since my son is 5 now … I didn’t think I was going to make it through, whatever that means. I was down to 152 pounds. The therapist that I was seeing was forcing me to see her. I was bouncing between the East Coast and West Coast flying back and forth and involved in all sorts of shenanigans down in Santa Cruz. Going back and trying to see my son and his mom back there and also breaking up with Renee. Also shattering inside and eating a lot of drugs and drinking a lot. I was in therapy in a very touch-and-go way and she really didn’t think I’d make it through this summer, which was the summer my mother killed herself at 52 — and I had just turned 52. I finally settled on the East Coast with my son and his mother to have regular therapy sessions once a week with Martha. Martha was very good to work with because she was a woman my age who I was attracted to but wasn’t sleeping with, so we could move that sexual energy in a different way. We always worked together in the office; we never did phoners. We had this rapport and she became my friend and everything was available and we could, or I could, select what might be appropriate as a narrative. So a lot of stuff was left on the cutting room floor of the therapist’s office. I’m very grateful for that process. What happened before with Renee, who I was with for 13 years and broke up with, is that everything would be dumped in her lap, which was inappropriate. She’d say, ‘Save that for your therapist’ or ‘That’s guy talk,’ but at the same time she was saying that she was hearing it. So it was important to break up that relationship and have Kathie be the woman I was with and to have Martha the one I was dumping on. I’ve gotten better at not dumping. That was a very good process for me, but I have a lot to unload”.
What’s it like still telling this story five years later? There’s some painful stuff here…
“It’s very hard. I was so nervous yesterday. I was a mess. I couldn’t be around the children. I’m with all three children here: my stepdaughter who is 11, Forrest who is 5, and Theo is almost 1 year. I couldn’t rest, I couldn’t sleep; I was so agitated. I was trying to listen to an old tape of the monologue: I couldn’t stand myself; get out of my body, out of my head. We’re staying at a nice suite at the Pan Pacific; I guess they upgraded us: we can go from room to room; it’s a joy. I went and hung out with the children. Forrest was watching ‘Men in Black’ on TV and I watched that and then played with Theo, and that really helped me get out of myself because it’s a beast to perform. I’m so glad it’s almost over. It’ll be 4 years old in August and I’m ready to lay it to rest”.
Were you a natural-born storyteller?
“No, I wasn’t. I was very withdrawn as a child. I can remember when, my mom told me this: My Cocker Spaniel died of distemper when I was maybe 6 years old; my mother said I didn’t speak for almost a year. And they were thinking of taking me to a therapist, which would have been very unusual in Rhode Island at that time. It wasn’t until I got to Emerson College that I began using storytelling to shape my day. I was working on a garbage truck and scraping dishes and I would tell stories of my day to the chefs there and other workers, and that continued and got most intense when I moved to NYC in 1967 and was living with Elizabeth LeConte. We had no television and I would come back from walking the streets of New York. I was collecting unemployment from Texas, and I would shape my day at the end of every day and the ritual of that was extremely satisfying. I took a free workshop with the Open Theatre in 1969. Joyce Aaron was running it, and everybody was encouraged to bring in short autobiographic tales and to tell them in a theatrical way; and if you had a moment of blocking, the Open Theatre had a technique called ‘jamming’ in which you’d repeat the word over and over like a musician, like ‘I fell and I fell and I fell and I fell and I fell and I fell.’ I stood up and did one day in my life with no jamming. I just flowed. And afterwards Joyce said, ‘Who wrote that monologue for you?’ And then I knew I had something. But that was ’69 and that was the big era of Grotowski and theatre of the body and deconstruction of text, so it never occurred to me that would be appropriate to use as an art form until years later. You know, I’m really influenced by the American autobiographic movement. I am more influenced by writers than I am by theatre. I was reading Thomas Wolfe and Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell and even Ramblin’ Jack Elliot. And Baba Ram Dass, for that matter, when he came back from India and did those first tapes, which were oral reports of his experiences in India, which he later published as a book. I didn’t graduate from boarding school until I was 20. I failed 7th grade and 9th grade, and my senior year I was in the senior play and was also writing very well, and I couldn’t figure out whether I wanted to write or act, and all my life I think I was trying to figure out how to get the two together and finally I did”.
And since you started doing that, of course, this has become a new theatrical genre. Why do you think this kind of autobiographical performance has become so popular in the last two decades?
“I think it’s a reaction to the virtual. I think it’s the simpleness of it, the presence of it, the minimalness of it in the face of not just the virtual but the extravaganza – Titanic, Speed II, Cats – the huge megaproduction of life. And it’s going back to a very simple form. I grew up with radio. I didn’t see a television in our home until I was 11. And radio allowed me to have my own imagination. So Ozzie and Harriet’s house was internalised, personalised. Television stripped that and literalised that and put it outside of me and stole it from me. Now we don’t have a television. We have a monitor and the children rent videos. But they’re also forced to be within themselves in relationship to reality”.
Speaking of virtual, what do you think about the Web?
“First of all, I have an allergy to computer screens. They remind me of electronic jello. The substance of the computer screen doesn’t hold my attention or my eye”.
You mean the low resolution, the way it flickers?
“The whole composition of the screen. The quality. I just finished working with the singer James Taylor, editing a version of ‘It’s a Slippery Slope’ for Mercury Records. And we were doing 12 and 14 hour days in which we were looking at ProTools. And they were literally carving the image on the screen. So you have the sound, a representation of my voice physicalised on the screen, and you’re taking the mouse and you’re shaving and shaping the sound. Fascinating, but not of any interest to me at all. James really got into it. I didn’t. I sat in the back and basically daydreamed and had sex fantasies and waited to be asked to listen to something. I don’t type. I’m extremely dyslexic. I write longhand when I write, and I rarely do write. I compose all of my monologues orally. I refer to myself as an unconscious Luddite, but I’m not against it. I have friends’ access information for me. What you get is a lot of opinions. You have to spend a lot of time sorting through it. What I’m worried about is the ecology of information versus feeling. How much information can you feel anything about? I live a very minimal life in Sag Harbor, Long Island. Population in the winter: 2009. I have all I can deal with just in terms of the library. I love to go into the Sag Harbor library and not look at the computer. I can’t call up anything on the computer. I like to wander in the shelves and look at the books and actually pull one out and look at it”.
The tactile experience.
“Yes, because I’m very disconnected. It takes me a lot to ground. I’m a very airy Gemini. Part of why I live in NYC is that it’s a real city. The children help ground me. I have to have that physicalisation for me”.
Was there anything special about the audience or the performance last night?
“I tried to tell myself: ‘Don’t worry, don’t have great expectations,’ because I played this show in Berkeley as a work in progress. I had always said that the Bay Area was one of my favourite audiences, but after the experience in Berkeley I began to think again about it because I thought I detected a lag in there. They were checking on SC: spiritually correct; and PC, politically correct. Like when they put a lag in a radio broadcast to make sure there’s no bad language going out over the air. The audience was thinking if it was proper to laugh at or not, a bit self-conscious. So I tried to prepare myself for that last night, and we started out and there were a few pockets of laughter here and there and I thought, OK, I’m just going to play it for myself and we’ll see where it goes. So I got into a real nice neutral place, and right at the beginning when I said, ‘I did my first monologue in 1979 called ‘Sex and Death to the Age 14′; nothing too traumatic, basically masturbation and the death of goldfish.’ Boom, they were in. Not to say that laughter is the only thing it’s about. It’s a humorous piece. But it’s one of the ways that the audience signals to me about their involvement. It’s very erotic. I don’t laugh a lot. But if I can make people laugh it’s like being a good lover. From then on out it was a great house. And a big house, and hard to play. And it was so good that I gave all my material, so it turned out to be 1 hour and 49 minutes last night. It was supposed to only be an hour and a half”.
So it’s not totally memorized?
“It’s not memorised at all because I don’t memorise. It’s visualised. So I’m speaking memory. But it’s organically memorised because there’s no text to memorise. It’s what I call ‘bushwhacking.’ An actor or an actress memorises lines and then they have to pretend they don’t remember them so they’re fresh. But there’s a track there. I’m running up a different trail every time and eventually one gets set through tramping in the same space so many times”.
I understand you’re working on a new monologue called “Morning, Noon and Night.” How’s the development process going?
“It’s a very healing, positive piece, not that ‘It’s a Slippery Slope’ wasn’t, but it’s a monologue that reflects the comfort zone and it’s still funny and it’s still working. It’s one day in my life in Sag Harbor in Eastern Long Island from the time I wake up to the time I go to sleep. So it’s my ‘Ulysses,’ my ‘Under Milkwood,’ my ‘Our Town.’ In fact, I’m listening to Donald Donaldson read all of ‘Ulysses’ when I have insomnia: it’s 42 hours unabridged and that’s my meditation for the one day. I’m workshopping it now at PS 122 in New York. I just finished doing Mondays. This works well because the audiences are very used to that process there and come in open. Morning, Noon and Night is one day and I’m up to 3 in the afternoon and it’s already an hour and a half. I will bring it back in the fall and try and develop the whole piece there before I take it out on the road. I’m not in a rush to get it out. I’m not in a rush to turn my children into characters before they’re people”.
But they will be characters if it’s a day in your current life.
“Forrest is a very central character. The dialogues with him are incredibly funny”.
Has fatherhood changed your work at all? You seem to be turning toward the positive, letting go.
“It’s not sentimental, but it’s extremely human and grounded and less ironic and less cynical and trusting those other emotions to surface in a sincere way that are also fun, and play well. Most of all it changes me as a person and it’s going to change me as a performer. It’s extremely humbling and a very strong event for me to be in a situation where the other’s need is larger than mine and I can accept it. With a woman it would be very hard to do that because of what I went through with my mom. Her need devoured her – it was so big, and I’m sure it smothered me as a child. So suddenly, that I’m able to deal with it with a child is a big surprise. Also, in the relationship with Kathie, who I’m not married to but live with: we’re not in that claustrophobic one-on-one thing because the children are an enormous filter system or other point of reference. Maybe we’ll have to keep having them. I say in the new monologue: I understood once I held a baby in my arms, why some people have the need to keep having them. Whoa, what an anchor”.
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