Vermin on the Mount

ONE-QUIZTUNE INTERVIEW: NED VIZZINI

Photo by Sabra Embury

VOTM: What's the most unusual experience you've ever had at a reading?

VIZZINI: The most unusual experience I've ever had at a reading was when I did a reading in 2003 wearing a burlap sack. I explained to the people in the audience that I write about teenagers and sometimes, as you get older, you can lose track of the sense of helpless mortification that comes with being a teenager, but wearing the burlap sack helped keep me in touch with this essential worthlessness (like Jesus). Unfortunately the smoking ban had just been passed in New York so everyone was outside smoking when I made this announcement, and then when they were done smoking they just came in and saw me like this.

Come see what Ned Vizzini is wearing during Y.A. Author Night at Vermin on the Mount on Sunday, November 7 at 8pm. 

 

ONE-QUIZTUNE INTERVIEW: GOODLOE BYRON

 

Goodloe Byron answers the question: What's the most unusual experience you've ever had at a reading?
 
So, as far as readings go I don't ordinarily do them as it interferes with my lackadaisy and it takes some cerebral effort that I can't really summon. But a while back I was driving through Nevada and this fella from Baltimore emails me to ask if I would be on his talk show and I was very jazzed to do it. A week or two later it's October, I drive up into the Mt Vernon area of Baltimore and it's at this little storefront gallery place right on the street. I grab a box of books and loiter in the area trying to figure out what is going on with this thing exactly, there is a steady drip of disaffected youths heading into this gallery. So eventually I meet the fella, whose name is Ed Schrader and it seems like he and a bunch of his friends and the artists in Baltimore all get together and have a kind of do it yourself talk show every month or so. There are wailing musical interludes, eerie video installments an amazing beat boxer and stand-up comedy from the host. I didn't really know what to do, but eventually they told me to go sit on this couch, the host asked me some questions and I just kinda blathered and free associated, as is my wont. Even after the show ended a whole bunch of people stuck around and they formed a huge circle with the beat boxer in the center and people started doing insane dances, two people disrobed, and there was all sorts of carrying on. I just kicked back in the corner sitting on my box of books thinking “Wow, Baltimore is pretty interesting, I need to come here all the time!”

Come see Goodloe read at The Mountain Bar in L.A.'s Chinatown on Sunday, January 10 at 8pm.

ONE-QUIZTUNE INTERVIEW: VICKI FORMAN

Vicki Forman answers the question: What's the most unusual experience you've ever had at a reading?
 
I was in Squaw Valley, reading from a short selection of my memoir. In the selection, I'd been describing my family's efforts to find a suitable grave site for our daughter, who had been born very prematurely, and who died when we removed her from life support. Our daughter's ashes still remained in our bedroom, on a radiator. After the reading, a woman came up to me and said, "My daughter is in our closet. It's been three years and I still don't know what to do with her." Of course, I started to cry, and I hugged the woman and said, "It's okay."

Come see Vicki read at The Mountain Bar in L.A.'s Chinatown on Sunday, January 10 at 8pm.

CONVERMINSATION WITH ALLISON CARTER

The latest installment of Converminsations features hybrid forms specialist Allison Carter. Photo by Harold Abramowitz.

JIM RULAND: What are you going to read on June 14?

ALLISON CARTER: I plan on reading some work from my book, A Fixed, Formal Arrangement, and some work from the project I'm working on right now. The project might be called Ways For Going (Or For Making Go). It's a project of ghost poems – poems for and by ghosting subjectivities.

JR: That sounds really interesting. Can you tell me a bit more about “ghosting subjectivities?”

AC: I think of ghosting subjectivities as minds or parts of minds – or maybe 'wills' is the better word – that, for reasons beyond their control, flicker in and out of a situation, either by accident or on purpose. A will that can absent itself at will. That situation could be life.

JR: When you teach your class on hybrid forms, what do you tell your students they will be doing?

AC: Instead of focusing on the word “hybrid,” we tend to talk more about the idea of inventing new forms.

JR: Are they resistant? How do you make them comfortable?

AC: Because I have always taught this class in an art school with awesome students who are well-versed in traditions of experimentalism and interdisciplinarity, most of my students have been not just comfortable, but totally excited about the idea of discarding structures like “short story.” They find the class to be a useful venue in which to explore concerns they are pursuing in their native métiers (music, film, etc.) in another format, and many bring their sonic, performance and visual skills to the table, both as writers and as critics.

JR: What kind of models do you use?

AC: This past year we started out by reading Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School. This book demonstrates over and over what kinds of formal inventions the class is intended to foster – the idea that with every character, story, concept or theory, there is an appropriate form that a writer/artist can derive from the materials they are dealing with. This kind of loose modeling, I think (hope!) makes experimentation safe, and demonstrates that experimentation can have a very definite purpose – that it doesn't have to be a negative act (non-conforming), it can instead be actively coming up with what, formally, needs to be done in order to accomplish a particular kind of communication/action.

JR: I think I already know the answer to this, but does it bother you when you see work labeled as “experimental” as if “experimental” is a genre unto itself with its own rules and tropes?

AC: Yes! CalArts put on a conference a few years ago in which I think it was Matias Viegner who proposed that we reconsider the idea of the experimental in terms of the scientific roots of the word. I like to think that a literary experiment is writing that, like a scientific experiment, combines new materials or speeds or sizes or methods to discover or demonstrate something integral to the fabric of the world.

JR: Is there a specific work that, for lack of a more precise phrase, gave you permission to experiment with form?

AC: The Autobiography of Red by Ann Carson. The way Carson uses lyric to compress and then explode her story was amazing to me when I first read it, and continues to amaze me every time I reread it. There is a strangeness, a simple strangeness to her writing. Her language works like an extraction - the nucleus from the cell - and then her storytelling becomes a series of nuclei bumping and ricocheting instead of just a man walking along. You still have the teleological movement of narrative, and the story-pleasure, but underneath that is this tension and, again, ricochet. It still blows my mind.

JR: I love how you use ambiguity, like how "Sometimes" in The Nests is used as a refrain. And in "Either/Or" you say "Either/or is not a holy construction but a human one." Is your work a response to this?

AC: To put it flatly, I think that the state of humanness is often characterized by a state of both-ness. I am interested in language that allows for a both-ness (again, a ricochet) and that still enables forward motion. For the last several years I think my writing has been struggling with a sense of an inward collapse of both-ness. In The Nests I try to consider the nature of the pull that draws people to stagnate -- how we can slowly lose a sense of inner tension, or freeze into the tension, like carefully placed magnets (an always-sometimes). With The Nests I am looking at domesticity, as I was in A Fixed, Formal Arrangement, an obvious, but I think still very important locus for questions of movement and freeze.

JR: It’s kind of ironic that domesticity is a trigger for the collapse of both-ness since it involves the union of two people. Or maybe it's not ironic at all...

AC: I think that domesticity is a perfect place to examine how hard it is to keep up two-ness. For some reason, for some people, the instinct is to collapse into one. It's not possible for two people to actually crawl inside each other (try drawing that!) but often we want to. You're left with two grownups sort of half sticking out of wombs/nests that they've fashioned out of their partners. Or one person made up of all eyes, and one who is all mouth and hand. And then what happens to desire? And movement or the potential for change - a necessary condition for desire?

JR: Western culture has been on an either/or track since at least Aristotle and its only speeded up with the integration of Boolean systems in our machines. It’s a binary world!

AC: In "Either/Or" – and in a lot of this new project (Ways For Going (Or For Making Go)) I am trying to look at how to balance a both-ness, a tension, a conflict, and still move, but not with the purpose of resolution. Ghosts are interesting to me for this reason - their desires that aren't bound by death.

JR: What's the strangest experience you've had at a reading?

AC: The release party for Maximus Kim's One Break, A Thousand Blows! featured fish being squeezed out of the inside of a paper box (Gina Clark) - and wrestling (Daiana Feuer & Gerard Olson). So far, when I've read, things have been pretty tame. Probably the strangest thing would have been a collaboration with Beth McNamara that involved fabricating a life-sized doll in front of an outdoor music festival audience in Eagle Rock. Maybe this reading will take the cake?

Come hear Allison read from her work on Sunday, June 14 at 8pm at the Mountain Bar.

CONVERMINSATION WITH OLGA GARCIA

 

The latest installation of Converminsations features Olga Garcia, and L.A. writer who works in multiple genres and languages.

JIM RULAND: What are you going to read on Sunday, June 14?

OLGA GARCIA: I'll be reading from my book Falling Angels – a couple of poems and a short excerpt from one of my stories. I would also like to share at least one of my newer unpublished pieces. Even when I do make selections prior to a reading, I like to feel out the audience and event once I'm there. Since I write in English, sometimes in Spanish, and mostly in Spanglish, language is always something to consider at readings. Many times I've made a careful selection and then completely changed it at the last minute because of the vibe and the audience.

JR: Do you think in Spanish and then translate as you write? What is this process like? Do you dream in Spanish as well? Are there times when the words just come to you in English?

OG: My parents are both immigrants from Mexico and because of this we grew up speaking mostly Spanish at home. Although Spanish was my mother tongue, English (heard and learned from TV, school, friends, the streets) was ever-present in my upbringing as well. Growing up, it wasn't uncommon for me to have conversations with my sisters or friends that began in English and ended in Spanish or vice versa. This is still true. And it isn't uncommon for my thoughts and dreams to be bilingual too. This braiding of languages is an integral part of who I am, so therefore it's inevitable that it ends up in my writing.

JR: Your book, Falling Angels, reflects this mish-mash of English and Spanish. Are you consciously making these choices in order to portray the multicultural scenes you're describing as accurately as possible?

OG: When I mix my languages in stories and poems, I'm doing it quite naturally, the way I hear it in my head or sometimes in my dreams. I have written some pieces entirely in Spanish, as in the monologue "Ana Leticia Armendariz: Matando Cucarachas," a piece about an immigrant woman obsessed with killing roaches. Writings that come to me entirely in Spanish are always gifts, as they are rare. I'm much more confident when writing English, since it's the language in which I received almost all of my formal education.

JR: So you don’t translate your work?

OG: I try not to. If something comes to me entirely in English, I want to let that be what it is. The same is true for the Spanglish. For me, it's been important to write in what Gloria Anzaldua called "our living languages," because ultimately languages are mirrors of who we are and where we come from. Having said this, I also don't want to pigeonhole myself. What I love most about language is that it is dynamic; it's in a constant state of flux and evolution. I feel blessed to have two languages to draw from when I write, and I look forward to seeing how my voice and my play with language continue to evolve.

JR: You write both poetry and prose. Do you have a preference?

OG: My true love is and always has been poetry. My prose is more accident than anything else; it's often been birthed from monstrous poems that got too long and out of control. A sure sign that I prefer poetry is that I'm usually thinking in images and rarely about something like plot. I like that poetry can capture moments or emotions (creative snapshots) without having to create an entire narrative. I also love the challenge of condensing an idea/emotion/story into a poem and playing with the line breaks.

JR: Is one more difficult than the other?

OG: I think writing prose and in particular a novel is extremely difficult. I'd much rather grapple with images and try to successfully express something in a haiku. The novel intrigues me, though. Every time I read a good novel I'm in awe and ask, "How did the author do that?" It's definitely inspiring.

JR: Does some material lend itself to one form over the other?

OG: Yes, definitely. Even though I prefer poetry, I have several poems that were just suffocating in their stanzas. No matter how much I edited or experimented, it just didn't work because the genre was all wrong. I play with form a lot when I write. In a way it's maddening because I will take something completely apart, put it back together differently, take it apart again, and then after many versions I often end up returning to the beginning. But it's because of this "playing" that several of my poems have morphed into stories and, on a couple of occasions, even plays. I've also had the opposite happen--a story taken apart and put back together again morphed into a poem.

JR: In one of your stories, "Assault with a Deadly Donut," you visually present a collage on the side of a truck. Was this challenging?

OG: It was actually a lot of fun and cathartic to write. All of the incidents of police brutality mentioned in the collage are taken from true events. What I really wanted to point out in this story is the ridiculousness of some of the justifications for police brutality. In the story, Turo, a donut maker and vendor, gets shot for holding a donut, thus the title "Assault with a Deadly Donut." The story is meant to be funny, but it also attempts to highlight injustice. Turo's story may seem far-fetched, but it is no more ridiculous than the real-life stories of a deaf man getting shot for holding a rake or a black woman getting shot for holding a screwdriver. Regarding the visual collage in the story, some of the incidents mentioned targeted immigrant Latinos, so those postings had to be written in Spanish. Other incidents involved African-Americans, so those were written in English. What was more challenging than the English/Spanish thing was working on creating different voices in both languages, so that each posting ended up sounding like a different person. Brent Beltran of Calaca Press gave me the idea of adding graphics to the collage and that took this portion of the story to another level. I was really happy with the end product because it became a page of testimonies that gave voice to the often voiceless.

JR: What's the most unusual experience you've had at a reading?

OG: I guess being invited to a reading and not reading is somewhat unusual. This past week I was invited to read at the Leimert Park Village Book Fair. I was supposed to read at 1:30 and I was very excited about sharing my work there. Yet when I got there it was obvious the book fair had a life of its own. My slot to read never arrived, but I did very much enjoy the deep fried catfish and the band that was singing, "We Want the Funk! Gotta Have the Funk!"

Come hear Olga read on Sunday, June 14 at the Mountain Bar in Chinatown with Amy Wallen and Allison Carter.

CONVERMINSATION WITH AMY WALLEN

 
The latest installation of Converminsations features San Diego writer Amy Wallen who has very good reason to be excited about tonight's American Idol results.

JIM RULAND: What are you going to read on June 14?

AMY WALLEN: Since I'm not sure what I'm working on novel-wise right now, I have about three things in the works, and since I’m so focused on DimeStories, I thought I might promote that by reading a couple of those.

JR: How did you become the worldwide leader in 3-minute stories?

AW: Five years ago San Diego Writers, Ink asked me to host a prose open mic. I said sure, BUT I wasn't going to have a featured reader, and I wasn't going to have a situation where you had to sit through someone reading for 45 minutes about their horrific childhood. (Boy will I be embarrassed if the other readers at Vermin on the Mount are reading about their horrific childhoods.) The SDWInk folks said it wouldn't work. I said give me three months and if it doesn't work I'll do it your way. Five years later, not only are there multitudes flocking to the abusive and cruel 3-minute rule open mic, but we now have Dime-Offs and showcases and podcasts are in the works. I'm not saying I was right, I'm just saying.

JR: Is DimeStories five-year anniversary coming up?

AW: Our fifth anniversary is October 2 at Swedenborg Hall!

JR: You have a reputation for being quite strict with the time limit. What are some of the more extreme measures you've taken to enforce this rule?

AW: Oy, the worst was when I had a couple of blue-haired ladies in their Rockports accost me one night. But I didn't back down. This was early on. One of them wanted to read their entire short story (I'm sure it was 45 minutes of their horrific childhood) and so they needed more than 3 minutes. Sorry, I said, that's the rule. Well, they put their little nubby wrinkly faces right up to mine and started telling me how the story wouldn't fit in three minutes and I said they'd have to find another venue. Then one of them stomped their rubber-soled shoe on my instep and waggled their uvula at my nose as she screamed that her friend had to read her entire story. Go someplace else, I said, or just find an excerpt. At this point I was backed up against the wall of mirrors at The Grove, but I wasn't going to be softhearted just because they only had about seven more years left to live. “You don't understand!” the stomper yelled. “No, YOU don't understand,” I said back (I, of course, never raised my voice because I'm telling my side and that's how I remember it.) “Then we're leaving!” they shouted. "Happy editing!" I said sweetly as their Rockports skidded out the door.

JR: That sounds pretty awful.

AW: Another time I had a woman reading a story that she had won a Pulitzer for. The timer went off and she kept reading. So after about 30 seconds I beeped the timer again and sidled up closer to her on stage. She kept reading. After another 30 seconds I got closer and closer. She kept reading, but held her hand up to me as if to say, "Just hold on!" At 5 minutes and the audience glaring at me, I stood right next to her and whispered your time is up. She nodded but kept reading. Finally she finished. So when she stepped down the audience would hardly applaud. I said, "I guess when you win a Pulitzer you don't have to pay attention to time."

JR: Most people seem to welcome the rule...

AW: We rarely have many folks go over time anymore. I've earned the moniker, "Time Dominatrix." And they are the Time Submitters, because they return month after month for more abuse and they bring their friends and family to endure.

JR: I'm curious to know if you're up for talking about the whole American Idol thing.

AW: If I can't exploit this whole American Idol thing then it has been a complete waste of my integrity. I like to think of myself as having that cushy seat on the inside that I could watch the whole thing, but I wasn't so involved that I was blinded by the starlight. So, ask me anything and everything and I'll give you the National Enquirer truth.

JR: Okay, so let’s get this out of the way: What is your relationship to Adam Lambert?

AW: I'm two apostrophes away: Adam's Dad's girlfriend. Or, as I prefer to say, I sleep with Adam Lambert's dad.
 


Amy offers some helpful instruction to Adam's police escort.  

JR: How is American Idol different than a Dime-Off?

AW: Great question! Our DimeStories judges don't slice the reader open and smear their entrails across the stage and backdrop. Although I do occasionally pistol whip the reader with my timer if they go over three minutes.

JR: Authors often comment on how weird it is when their characters go out in the world and take on a life of your own. What's it like to see someone close to you go out achieve super stardom?

AW: Mostly it pisses me off. I'm the jealous sort. But then I think, “How the hell can I exploit this?” Seriously, I love Adam and I get giddy seeing how well he's done. He has always said he wanted to be a rock star, and I just had a hunch that if anyone could figure out how to do it, he would. Watching how the show works from the inside, how the songs are chosen and taken away and reassigned, Adam's been a big inspiration for me. I watch him and I think, "He knows exactly who he is with every song, no matter if it was his choice or not, he makes it his." At 27, that's amazing. At 45, I have no idea who I am from week to week, story to story.

JR: Evaluate Ryan Seacrest as a host.

AW: Annoying. But I also see that he's in some way a good friend of Simon's and I have the greatest respect for Simon. Simon is always stick-to-his-guns on how it's about the talent and not the frivolity. Ryan's a little milquetoast for me. And having seen his jokes posted on the teleprompter for him, and him not really using much imagination, I'm disappointed. Then again, someone else is writing those jokes, so I shouldn't blame the empty cartridge.

JR: What’s the strangest thing you’ve seen at American Idol?

AW: Simon walks around the dark backstage with a very tall young gofer right behind him holding a flashlight over Simon's head so that he can see in the dark.

JR: What’s the strangest thing you’ve seen at DimeStories?

AW: At an anniversary party about two years ago I looked up from the lectern and in the audience two men had wrestled one of the audience members to the ground and they were dragging him out the doors of the building. The show must go on! So, I called the next reader and we kept going even though the sirens wailed when the police arrived, and then again when the ambulance arrived. Turned out the guy whose reading had been more a rant than a reading had been about to go ballistic and the "bouncer" guys decided to take him out before he took us out. We had to get a restraining order. But we never stopped reading!

Come see Amy read an all-star selection of DimeStories from her celebrated series at The Mountain on June 14.

CONVERMINSATION WITH GARY AMDAHL

Gary Amdahl and his pet squirrel, Dr. Sugerman, reflect on the current crisis in book publishing.

Welcome to Converminasations, the first of what I hope will become a regular feature of Vermin on the Mount: conversations with future Vermin performers and members of the Legion of Vermin. The first guest is Gary Amdahl, a transplant to Southern California from the Midwest. In 2006. Amdahl's short story collection Visigoth won the Milkween National Fiction Prize. He followed that up in 2008 with I Am Death, also from Milkweed, a "collection" of two very unusual novellas. As you'll soon see, he's been keeping busy...

JIM RULAND: What are you going to be reading for us on April 5?

GARY AMDAHL: I thought I’d read seven or eight explosive pages jam-packed with family fun from “Peasants,” which is the other novella in the I Am Death collection. Here’s why: I get to use my award-winning southern accent in the service of a character who’s a crazy entrepreneur, grandson of a Huey Long style politico, and an outright genius who can’t keep his shit together or his ass out of mental institutions. He’s got nearly total recall of the complete works of every philosopher sociologist theologian psychologist since Erasmus and he cannot shut up. Lives with a hair dresser in a trailer in Orlando and calls up my main character (tellingly named Rasmussen, isn’t literature fun) to lecture him on Emerson and Jungian heroes, such as Rasmussen’s boss, who is secretly channeling big money to the crazy genius, who in turn seems to have a Svengali-like hold on this dopey but undeniably effective funding mechanism, and “the collapse of the consciousness into sensitivity,” which is how he refers to shit murderously hitting the fan. It’s not something you hear on The Office or in any office, but I did in mine. Got it all on tape. But it’s not a documentary: more like The Office as if written by Henry James who is also a womanizing alcoholic.

JR: It’s been nine months since I Am Death was published. How do you feel about it?

GA: I Am Death is simply a book that has not gotten its due. Oprah has repeatedly denied she knows anything about it, even though it’s a Negative New York Times Bestseller that hasn’t sold many thousands more copies in thirty languages around the world. This is a book that friends have moved proactively on, helping friends steer clear of it. I offered free copies to my students and only got a couple takers. No, this book, this green island, this I Am Death is not dead, and I am going to prove it by reading the mad scene from it, along with the death of Ophelia. And I haven’t even begun to speak of the prescient splendor of the pre-Sopranos Chicago mafia novella…

JR: Where did that story come from?

GA: A friend of mine, Jack Hayes, was a reporter for the City News Bureau in Chicago in the late 80s. One of the “capo di tutti capi,” died, and there was a scramble for ascendancy. Jack started to work on a story about it, then got a job as Midwest Correspondent for Life Magazine. He said, “Maybe you can make a novel out of this,” and gave me a pile of raw material, background stuff, deep research, transcripts (some of which in the novella are real, some of which are not). Raw isn’t the word: rich, and for me, incredibly provocative. I had a pretty limited understanding of the mafia: bad TV shows and Coppola’s great movies. Scorsese’s Goodfellas came out in 1990, and it was both revolutionary, generally speaking, and perfectly timed, specifically for me. Nicholas Pileggi adapted his book for the screenplay, and he was somebody Jack had talked to. Two things happened for me: I began to see Mafiosi as ordinary men (old hat, I know, in a post-Sopranos world, but this was circa 1988-1992) and their “criminality” as just one end of the spectrum of ways in which human beings govern themselves. Chicago’s municipal government was particularly saturated in that way, and it was easy for me imagine a couple of smart, powerful, deluded, abusive men thinking they could go legit in a big way, that they could move from coercion to actual governance. (Blagojevich and Burris are just another couple chapters, fairly banal in my view). I was really eager to write a fable along those lines because my jaw was still hanging on the ground over “Iran/Contra” and the way an explicitly illegal government had slipped in place behind our legal government. I was also browsing in early American economic history, and was interested in the way the ethics of the local marketplace had been shattered when technological revolutions in transportation and communication made marketplaces effectively ungoverned by a local, human-scale sense of right and wrong: violence is inherent in commerce, and the mafia seemed like a completely natural extension of business.

JR: I'm curious about the novella format. You can do more things in a novella than you can in a short story, but you get your resolution much faster than you would in a novel. They seem like an accidental medium and are viewed as short stories that went long or novels that ran out of steam. Do you agree? Did you set out to write novellas?

GA: Yes, I set out to write novellas. The misunderstanding of them (I agree with you, either stories that are too long or novels that aren’t long enough) is tragic, a vicious circle of categorization and commodification and uniformity of product that no longer makes sense to anybody but which we can’t break free of. I hear people talking about wanting to make an investment of time, I guess, and a minimal kind of attention, in a story when they buy a book, and the novella, I dunno, makes them feel like they’re not getting full value on their entertainment dollar. It’s horrifying and stupid. Imagine a gang of Russian financial wizards (bright boy bankers and slavically suicidal hedge funders, with “an interest in the arts,” telling Tolstoy that “The Death of Ivan Illych” is, at 40-45 pp., neither fish nor fowl and therefore unpublishable: pad it, Leo old man, or gut it—all stories can benefit from cutting, da? Or the learned playboys who sold out to the world media congloms (exception: the late great James Laughlin and New Directions) straightening Saul Bellow’s lapels, “Saulie, Seize the Day looks so…I dunno, slender propped up next to Augie March, I mean, come on, fella, you see what we’re saying…we want a man’s book. Novellas are for women’s magazines.” And anyone suggesting Joyce’s “The Dead” is too long or too short ought to be sentenced to live without that masterpiece for ten years. It’s all categorizing (a means of escaping the thing itself by naming it) and marketing (“Readers don’t want to buy novellas, sorry.” WELL WHY THE FUCK WOULD PEOPLE DRAW THE LINE THERE??? “I don’t care how good it is, seventy-five pages leaves me feeling uneasy….”

JR: For a while, it seemed like novellas anchored short story collections either to give the collection more gravitas or to showcase the writer's potential as a novelist. What is the role of the novella? Does it have a future?

GA: Hard to say what has a future in the book biz. I mean, maybe even books don’t have a future in the book biz. But I gotta believe there are cycles and swings of the pendulum like everywhere else. Stories will be judged as either good or bad or somewhere in between, not as fictitious or non-fictitious, as a novel or a novella, as true or false. Actually: the distinction will be made, must be made, between true and false, just not along the lines of the current “fake memoir” scandals. There are truthful novels and fraudulent memoirs. Bullshit is bullshit. Tastes will change and markets will follow or vice versa, or they won’t. Maybe we’ve got decades of suffering ahead. I luckily consider myself primarily a reader, a reader of old and forgotten books, so unless they are burned or quarantined, I’ll be okay. As a reader. As a writer…? Murky period ahead of x-rated infantilism. I will have to create a new marketing niche, “Old Adult,” or just go all Emily Dickinson on everybody.

JR: Well it's not like mainstream publishing is all that receptive to short story collections either. I suspect it's all driven my marketing, which needs to be able to describe a book in seven words or less, like a freeway billboard. They can't sell it if they don't know what it is.

GA: It’s true. Editors and Publicity Directors get two minutes to pitch each book in their catalog. It’s worse than Hollywood. In Hollywood, you can say picture this and it’s actually meaningful. Book biz, you just throw your best seven words at the center of the room and hope somebody hears it. Mainstream publishing is receptive to maximized profit, like every other (short-sighted) corporation currently dragging the USA down the toilet. Used to be an extremely low-overhead biz, with profit margins at 1½-3%. If a book sold well, you had a steady, slow, small profit stream (Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered is one of the greatest books I have ever read.); if it didn’t sell well or sold outright awfully, like Moby-Dick, say, you took a small one-time loss. Now, in the wake of the global media empires thinking for a horrifying moment that books could profitable just like every other kind of entertainment, we have huge overheads that must be fed with profit margins beyond 15%! As much as 20% or christ, who knows what the top is. We know what the bottom is: it doesn’t work and mainstream publishers are being handed their asses like automobile-makers. But the worst part is: to get maximal profit, you have to be able to predict your biz. To predict, you need to standardize your product and streamline its manufacture. You, for instance, enter into agreements with large chain bookstores: they will feature your books if you can guarantee minimum sales and bigger discounts than you give to independent stores. The chains begin their horrifying lives having virtually every book currently in print, on their shelves, waiting for eager readers, luring them in, we’ve got it all, step right up, everyone’s a winner, bargain’s galore. Once they’ve established what kind of book sells best…the rest are disappeared. Just like dissenters in any fascist state.

JR: I think one of the misperceptions people have about writers with more than one book published is they think the writer's got it all figured out, they know the lay of the land. But publishing is like the Grand Canyon. When you're standing at the edge you can appreciate its majesty. Hell, you can almost see the other side. But once you go down into the canyon it really starts to open up. It's bigger, stranger, and much more baffling than you realized.

GA: Unless you’re a corporate entertainment product specialist who pumps out the same bullshit book after book—because, don’t get me wrong, I’m not blaming the writers, who are just trying to make a living, nothing wrong with that, because people eat bullshit up like it’s mashed potatoes and gravy. Real writers do not know from one sentence to the next, much less from one book to the next, how things are going to shape up. Real writing is about finding out what comes next, not recording predictable fluctuations in the plot as per previous analyses, not taking dictation from Bozo the Clown at Random House.

JR: Is it true that you were once a motorcycle racer? Did you have to dress like those guys in the A-Ha video?

GA: It’s true that I intended to. I went from a nearly straight-A student to a nearly straight-F student, and was in real danger of not graduating from high school. I was working in a warehouse so I could a buy a van to cart my motorcycles around and enough speed to keep my tongue raw and my eyes bugging out. I had an Ossa shortracker and a primitive Suzuki motocrosser, stock, but a racing machine. I had them long enough to feel real speed and to learn that I was not nearly as dedicated or capable a mechanic as would be necessary to be even competitive as a back-marker. I had zero aptitude for the hard work of racing. I was, as Mark Van Doren said of the Shakespeare who animated Macbeth, into “sensation and catastrophe” (a theme, by the way, of AMBBB). Wasn’t exactly clumsy with tools, but not what I would call competent either. Haven’t seen the A-Ha video. Am I very much not sophisticated? Very old? I had authentic “motocross socks” made by Hang Ten, which I think was mainly a surfer biz….

JR: How is writing more dangerous than riding a motorcycle?

GA: Riding a motorcycle, you generally hurt only yourself—and that’s when things go wrong. When you write, you hurt people near and dear to you, without meaning to, without wanting to, and even in some cases without even knowing it—and that’s when things are going well. The damage I may or may have not done, may yet do, to myself honestly doesn’t register in me. I feel like my psyche, my soul, is there to be put in jeopardy, to go, as the Buddhists say, to the places that scare it—if of course the pursuit is of truth and beauty! Then I am quite sure there will be some serenity, in the end. If I trash my mental health in hopes of becoming rich and famous, well, I deserve mental disease. But my loved ones…? The pursuit of truth and beauty sometimes strikes me as pitiless, remorseless, and mean….

JR: What are you pursuing these days?

GA: I am publishing a novella called “Across My Big Brass Bed” in Agni Review this spring, which will cover my sex life from 6-12, when I get it on (this is 1968) with my social studies teacher. I am continuing the story and making it a full-blown (heh) novel, featuring in part two adolescent love-life and motorcycle-racing which culminates in me murdering—accidentally—some gal’s estranged husband; and then moves on, part three, adult love-life as a street bandoneón player attempting to arrange and perform all of Bach’s cantatas on bandoneón, flute, guitar, with occasional singing. I read a piece of it to the Creative Writing and English faculty and their students, out here at U Redlands, where I live, and I stupefied them all with the length and complexity of the sentences. They’re good sentences, man, don’t get me wrong, I stand by them—they’re just not right for a saloon reading series…you know, I’ve got my cock in my social studies teacher’s mouth, and in another part of the sentence I’m rhapsodizing about Karl Popper’s great pre-hippie book, The Open Society and Its Enemies. Hard to follow. I could rehearse but I think it’s still going to be a slog.

JR: I wasn't aware that 6-year-olds have a sex life.

GA: That’s GOOD. Keep thinking that.

JR: Do you have another novel in the pipeline?

GA: Across My Big Brass Bed joins another novel, The Daredevils, which I thought was done but is being revised, and they make up the first two parts of my “Anarchism Trilogy.” The third novel is called The Treaties and is set mainly on an Indian reserve in northwestern Ontario, Grassy Narrows. There are no character or plot carry-overs, but I just realized that all three are about people trying to live free of coercion: good coercion bad coercion indifferent coercion, the whole system. Better to dream and wander, and starve if that’s what it comes to, but do not under any circumstances command or obey.

JR: What's The Daredevils about?

GA: Set in San Francisco and Minnesota just before and after the U.S. entry into WWI. Main characters are a “mill girl” from Thread City, Willimantic, Connecticut, somewhat along the lines of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn in her precocious intelligence and personal charisma, who starts a stampede strike more or less accidentally and gets taken up by IWW organizers on their way to the big strikes in Lawrence, MA (wool-workers), and Paterson, New Jersey (silk-workers), who meets a motorcycle racer (1912-1916 was the hey-day of steeply banked board tracks) via the radical crowd centered around Mabel Dodge, John Reed, Big Bill Haywood, Max Eastman, etc. They leave New York, set up shop in San Francisco, and meet a young aristocrat—easiest reference would be to the Kennedy family, who wants to be—is—an actor. Acting is not necessarily incompatible with politics, but our aristo is honest. He wants to be an honest actor. With greasepaint and footlights and rehearsed lines and hammy gestures. Despises even the Progressive Bull Moose politics of his family (and his father’s friend T. Roosevelt), falls in love with the mill girl as the motorcycle racer slowly succumbs to the quite horrible physical beating he has taken as a daredevil and consequent addiction to…yes! Morphine! After the Preparedness Day Parade bombing in San Francisco (patriotic prelude to US entry into the war, blamed on “anarchists” (read: labor organizers) Tom Mooney and the less reputable but equally innocent Warren Billings, they all end up in Minnesota, which a shadowy but fully-sanctioned “watchdog” group turns the state into a fascist playground in the name of…? Yes: homeland security.

JR: What's the most unusual reaction you've gotten at a reading?

GA: Applause.

 
Don't miss Gary Amdahl at The Mountain Bar, Sunday April 5 at 8pm.