Amp Up the Weirdness: An Interview with Scott McClanahan

Here’s an interview I did with Scott McClanahan in 2013 for a website that no longer exists. It was the first interview I ever did, and I kept Scott on the phone for way too long, something I felt bad about. I remember being so nervous I got absolutely tanked beforehand and did the whole thing lying on the floor in my bedroom with the lights out. But Scott was as gracious and kind on the phone as he is in his books. We talked until Scott graciously excused himself to go to bed and I realized I’d kept him on the phone for almost two hours. It was a pleasure.

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Scott McClanahan might be the best writer in the game. He’s certainly the best reader, at least as far as in person things go. Most writers will bore you to death in a miserable monotone, or else go for the try-hard standup comedy thing. When Scott reads, his stories become tales, anecdotes that stretch into myth and get to the truth about the whole deal. What we’re doing here, why anybody would ever bother falling in love, how you can find God (a god, some god) while passing a kidney stone in a gas station bathroom. Scott’s his own best narrator, and whether you encounter his books on print or online or hear him read them in the flesh, they are a wonder and a joy. Those stories will change you.

I love all of his books, from Stories I through V!, to the newly-released Crapalachia: A Biography of Place. The title is a riff on the Harry Crews classic, and it follows that tradition of a heartbroken memoir of the world, a landscape that seems impossible if it didn’t exist inside you, human being, same as it does in anyone. His upcoming novel Hill William is out in August on Tyrant Books.

Jimmy Cajoleas: So okay, well. How do I start this? Do I just ask a question.

Scott McClanahan: Jimmy, I think we already begun.

JC: Okay. Right. Yeah.  So here’s my first question: in a recent interview with the Oxford American, you said something along the lines of “I want to write a fucking two minute punk song….” Can you tell me a little what you meant by that?

SM: Okay, well, what can I say? I was drunk during that interview. I’m no longer a drinking man. I actually fell down a hill a half an hour after that interview was over. I was supposed to take something over to Sarah’s work—she worked across the street from me, my ex-wife—and I thought I could sneak over there. It was like an hour before she got off. And I mean I was DRUNK-drunk, and I put it in between her windshield and her windshield wiper blade. And as soon as I turned, there she was, coming on out. I guess she’d gotten off work early or something. And she goes, “Are you kidding me? Are you fucking kidding me?” because I guess she could tell I was drunk. So I tried to walk up the side of this hill which is next to the hospital where she works, and as she drove off I fell down the hill because you know it was a Friday evening, and the grass was sort of wet. And the interview happened before that.

I would elaborate on it. Man, how can I say this without sounding like an asshole? I guess that… and I think I’ve said this before. I don’t know, man. How can I?

JC: Just sound like an asshole. Go for it.

SM: Well, I’ll get there in a second. You can count on it. But let me give you a little parable first.

There’s a filmmaker I love, Alejandro Jodorowski. When he made Santa Sangre, he took his kid to this strip club. The kid was like twelve years old and he said, “Mom’s going to get mad.” And Jodorowski said, “It’s life, it’s life, you love this! It is the stink of life!” So he takes him to the club, and what Jodorowski didn’t understand was, it was a sex club. The woman wasn’t stripping on stage, she was having sex with this guy on stage. And the kid was fascinated by it, and his father was repulsed by it. He leaves the club frightened and horrified that he himself has witnessed these events that he set in motion. And of course at the end he has to give the kid money not to tell his mother that his father took him to a sex club where he watched two people copulating. So I guess anytime you say something like that, or try to do something like that, there’s always the opposite of it that twists back and bites you on the ass.

What I meant by that quote was that a story needs to be stripped back a little bit. I think there’s something bloated right now about American prose. I think with technology, language can compete with the image once again, where it couldn’t compete with the image in the 1960s and 1970s or even beforehand. I mean, you don’t get much better than Charlie Chaplin, even if you’re a real-deal writer. And hopefully my work has that feel to it, where there’s a quickness to it. I think people are trying too hard. That’s what I’m getting at. People are trying way too hard.

And not to say that there’s not a depth to my writing, because there is a depth to it, but it’s just right on your shoulder. I heard that on a episode of Oprah one time. Somebody, I think it was Sharon Stone, was talking about Death being right there on your shoulder, just constantly there. I guess the things that make you you, the stories that you tell, are always right there, right in front of you. I don’t mean the shit that’s in front of your eyes. Whatever makes you you is right there in your hands and your elbows and the backs of your knees. If you can tap into that, then there really is a depth to it, and that two minutes has as much complexity and contradictions and all the great things that make life life. Sometimes the two-minutes-thirty-second pop song gets really boring too.

JC: Part of what’s appealing about your stories is not just the brevity, but the intense energy going through the whole thing and how it feels like it could fall apart at any moment.

SM: Relationships are that way. You hope there’s an intensity there, that you’re risking something with another person rather than some la de da sort of thing that a lot of people have. Or maybe even it feels crazy.

I don’t know if this is part of the answer. Maybe it is. We’ll see.

You know that surrealist Marcel Duchamp? My girlfriend was reading this to me from a Wikipedia article. I like Duchamp and I didn’t know this story. He brought home a geometry textbook, and he hung it out his third-story apartment window, so that he could teach the elements—like the wind and the sunlight—the fucking facts of life. So I think if you could dangle that geometry textbook out the window and teach something to the rain, then you’re probably okay.

JC: How do you feel about St. Francis preaching to the birds?

SM: Ah, see I think that’s wonderful. Francis is the only Catholic I think I like. Wait, that’s not true. I like tons of Catholics. They’re some of the craziest. Talk about a great faith. Catholicism. If you can kill that many people, and also convert that many people, and also help create western civilization. Wow. That’s something else.

JC: The Catholics will be there for you. I mean, they won’t give you condoms, but they’re on the front lines, taking care of your babies.

SM: The new pope—Francis, right?—is walking through the favelas, a day or two ago,  without the Pope Mobile, among a bunch of poor people, among a bunch of drug addicts. Yet at the same time, you have all these backwards ideas about things. That’s the reason why to be religious. To hate something. Or to think about one thing in a progressive way and be three thousand years backwards in something else.

JC: I think a lot of it—the hate stuff—is wanting to be a part of team, you know? I understand that. I like a lot of teams.

SM: I will tell you a part of Hill William. I once drank a whole container of grape juice when I was twelve. We were Church of Christ, and I seriously thought if I could drink that much grape juice I wouldn’t have to come to church for a year. I could get all my communions taken care of in an hour and a half. But if you drink that much grape juice you’re just going to get horrible bowel problems, you’re not going to get out of anything.

JC: Church of Christ is no music, right? No instruments, just singing?

SM: Yeah, it’s all acapella. It’s not even like sacred harp singing. What’s wonderful is when you get a full building together at a Church of Christ, it’s almost like Schoenberg, or Stravinsky. You feel the movement of the song but there’s this counterbeat that’s also happening, and some voices are catching up to other voices, and then the other voices are already ahead, and then you have the echoes bouncing around the room.

JC: And the tempos are slow as hell, right? Supposed to be slower than a heartbeat?

SM: Yeah, there’s this song we always sang for communion called “He Arose.” And it’s slow as can be. Want me to do it for you?

[sings] Low in the grave, Jesus my Savoir—now people are falling asleep—He tore the bars away. Jesus my Lord. Then it stops and it goes all jaunty. Up from the grave He rose! Then it goes lightspeed. It’s like a weird accumulation of songs that don’t even go together.

JC: What do you think about Jesus? You into that guy?

SM: Oh god, I don’t even know. In some ways I am. I have a good joke.

Okay, so Jesus is on the cross and Peter’s down there. Well, Peter’s already taken off by that point, so the joke makes no sense, but for the sake of the joke let’s just say that Peter’s there. So Jesus is on the cross and he looks out and he says, “Peter come here. Come here my son.” So Peter crawls up, and the centurions beat the shit out of Peter and he crawls back into the crowd. And then like ten minutes later Jesus says, “Seriously Peter, I really need to talk to you. I have a few things that we need to discuss.” So Peter comes back up, he wipes the blood from his face, he’s like, “Yes, Lord, yes, what is it?” And the centurions chop off Peter’s arms and throw him back to the crowd. Hell, why don’t we chop off his legs too just to make the joke go quicker? Jesus says one last time, “Peter please, please come up here. I have something to tell you.” And Peter crawls up using his chin to push his body up to the cross, and he says, “Yes, Lord, yes what is it?” And Jesus goes, “Peter, I can see your house from up here.”

It’s not even a funny joke. But that feels like religion to me. That feels like Jesus to me. But I guess that’s why he’s so fascinating. Like he’s angry, and he throws fits, and talk about mother issues, whew. We could go on and on.

I think I like Jesus better as a comedian. If you interpret some of those lines, like “I build my church and Peter is the rock.” Even the whole, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” Like if that’s a joke, then he’s more like Coyote, the American Indian trickster god, or Zarathustra, or something like that.

I love Jesus though, too. Don’t get me wrong.

JC: Yeah, guess that was a weird question. Always wanted to ask you that, reading your stuff. If you’re from the South like me, church put some kind of a permanent dent in your personality.

SM: Yeah, but what people don’t get is this. My dad’s a song leader at our church. Like if I were to go to church tomorrow, I know I would openly be emotional about those traditions and those people I grew up with. People who were fucking old when I was ten years old, and they’re still ten years old and they look just the same. I think that is what that stuff’s about. That’s the beauty of it. And that’s why you can’t kill religion if you try to chop off its head with a shovel. There’s nothing worse than an atheist, nothing worse than that, militant atheism. That bores the hell out of me. It bores the hell out of me as much as the whole right wing Christian Right bullshit. Or even your basic everyday normal so-called Christianity.

JC: I have noticed a tendency of Christians to pray loudly in coffeeshops.

SM: Then they even read the book then. You’re supposed to go to pray in the closet. That’s the act itself. It’s supposed to be very humble. It’s not a show. But with all religion, it is the opiate. What we don’t want to admit about ourselves is we want to worship stuff, maybe more so than we want to be worshipped ourselves. We want to bow down before whatever sort of idol, whether it’s Wal Mart or Big Mac. And I love that stuff. I would bow down before a Big Mac right now.

JC: They are delicious.

SM: You could have a Christian experience with a Big Mac for sure.

JC: You play in a band, right?

SM: Yeah, me and Chris Oxley are in a band called the Holler Boys. We played the Empty Glass in Charleston. That’s where Hasil Adkins—you ever heard of Hasil Adkins?—always played. He got ran over by a four-wheeler. That’s how he died. Under mysterious circumstances. I think if you get run over by a four-wheeler it’s already mysterious circumstances. But maybe not in Boone County. And then we played at Square Books in Oxford two years ago and made it a part of the reading.

JC: There’s a lot of music in your work, and you use a lot of musical metaphors and examples when you talk about writing, so I wondered about that.

SM: I think it’s the same thing. You ever heard that record label From Dust to Digital? They put out that Goodbye, Babylon compilation a few years ago.

JC: That’s the one with the cotton in it. Fucking rules.

SM: Yeah, yeah! And they include the sermons alongside the songs themselves, because they’re just as musical. You know there’s nothing more musical than the goddamn human voice, your mommy singing you a lullaby to get you to sleep, or hell, just talking to you.

JC: You have said before that you work really hard to make your stories sound conversational, and it pisses you off when people act like you don’t try hard on them. That reminded me of people like the Replacements, who can write the best songs ever and practice really hard, so that whatever mistakes or little errors they make come across as nuance, as something I love. And that comes from being a great band. I was talking about this recently to a writer who is much older, and better, and smarter than me, and he said you can’t do that in writing, the spontaneous thing. That you’re supposed to revise and revise and revise in writing. How do you keep your energy, the whole reckless rock and roll thing, that you have in your stories?

SM: See, I would disagree with the revise, revise, revise thing. Barry Hannah, right? He’s one of your Mississippi greats. He said if you start on a short story and it’s not working and you keep revising it, you’re fucking wasting your time. It’s a stupid ass short story. What are you doing? I think people work way too much from the time they draft a story to the time they publish it. They should probably work a hell of a lot more on their life leading up to when they sit down to draft the story and then maybe the story would have a little bit more energy to it. I think modernism has kind of sucked the life out of most literature that I’ve come across. A lot of it sounds like it was recorded at MCA or Mercury in 1983 and has that cocaine sound to production, where the life is gone. They don’t accept the echo. They don’t understand that kind of Sam Phillips idea where you have to let the Devil in the room with you. Or you fail. And the mistake is probably going to be a hell of a lot more interesting than the revision that you’ve come up with. A lot of the people now that are doing this alt lit or indie lit or whatever term is given to it, I think that mistake is being accepted more.

I was listening to Lou Reed’s demos from Transformer today. And I like a lot of the demos almost better than the album, even though I love the album. We don’t have that in literature. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard, there’s a Youtube clip of all of John Lennon’s “Strawberry Fields” demos. A lot of stuff not even included on the anthology series. So it’s twelve minutes of him just fucking up a song. The excitement is in, oh fuck he found it! He went there and got that chord! He found it! Isn’t that fascinating! We sit around tables and take potshots at one another when we present our demos to each other, without realizing how beautiful and magical they are. Then we decide to bring in the backup singers and the Eddie Van Halen guitar—not that I don’t love Eddie Van Halen like the next redneck—and take all the weirdness out of it.

I mean, you listen to people talk about writing and it’s like they’re talking about their jobs or something.  I have a theory—we can go back to the Catholic church on this one—you know, it’s the reason why the Reformation happened. You had your first son that you give the property to, you have your second son that you send off to law school, and then what do you do with the third son, who just likes to get drunk and fuck? Well, you make him a priest. And he could care less about Jesus or the Church, right? That’s kind of how I feel when I run across folks that—you know, they’ll even bring up their CV for you. You know, this crap that doesn’t even matter.

There’s this great book that the University of Alabama Press released a couple of years ago about Billy Sherrill and George Jones and the making of “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” It’s a book written entirely about the making of that song. And in that, one of their major problems is that Jones was in the middle of cocaine psychosis—he was simply taking cocaine in order to continue to drink around the clock—and he had decided that he was a duck. I swear to god, you can look this up. And he called him Doodiddle Duck and he sounded like Donald Duck. Jones wanted to release all of his songs from that point on in the voice of that duck. Supposedly there’s footage of him and Waylon Jennings on a Ralph Emory local Nashville show where Jennings is fucking with him and Jones starts talking like Doodiddle Duck. That sounds amazing. I want to hear “He Stopped Loving Her Today” from the voice of Doodiddle Duck. I mean the voice we have is perfect, but it would be nice to amp up the weirdness.

This is my problem with these—I don’t know, we call them “diploma mills”—and they always hate when you talk about them. I don’t know they, probably do some people a world of good, and god bless them. Some of my favorite writers have done those. I think it would be much better if somebody learned how to be a chemist and started to write, or if someone learned how to be an architect and then decided to write. I could go on and on and on. Because then it’s going to be something that is a little bit more “you.” And I know, the whole postmodern “who is you?” Well fuck I know who I am. You don’t tell me who you is. That’s me. I know what makes me up. It’s about forty different messed up things. I’m in touch with them enough. I don’t even know what the hell I’m talking about there.

JC: You were ripping on MFA programs.

SM: Hell, I love MFA programs. I do think they are an excuse to meet people who have interests like your own and hook up with them. Most of the time in college you’re hooking up with people who don’t have common interest.

This is my thing, this is the story I wanted to tell to explain this. You hear all these people that say, “I needed to make connections” or “I needed to find other people doing what I did.” There’s this story about John Cassevetes—it’s not about him, it’s about one of his producer friends—and this kid got up and he was real nervous, and he said, “Hello, Mr. So and So, would you tell me what John Cassevetes did to become the person he became and the artist he became?” The producer friend said—and of course, this was years after Cassavetes’ death— “First off, John Cassavetes wouldn’t stand up and ask a fucking question like that. He would just go and be John Cassavetes.” And I think if you go and be who you are and I go be who I am, whatever the hell that means, then we’ll all just be a lot better off. With everything.

Do you want to hear a T.E. Lawrence poem?

JC: Sure.

SM: Now, I’m talking about T.E. Lawrence, not D.H. Lawrence or Lawrence Stern or T.S. Eliot, but T.E. Lawrence, as in Lawrence of Arabia.  Shit, I’m going to fuck it up now. It goes like this:

“All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that all was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did.”

Now it’s a shit poem, and it’s a bad poem, and it would be broken apart in an MFA workshop, right? And your crappy language teacher who says that poems mean nothing, or whatever it is that poets say. Poems mean fucking everything, they don’t mean nothing. Poems mean nothing because they mean everything. But there’s something about that that I like. And I like Lawrence of Arabia. That’s the one thing that I want to get out of this interview. My film recommendation. Robert Bolt’s screenplay, David Lean’s Academy Award winning, Lawrence of Arabia. With music by Maurice Jarre.

JC: You’ve been recommending a few things now. I’m making a McClanahan viewing list. That’s awesome.

Okay, another question. As much as your work hits the dark stuff, the bad stuff of life, especially in Crapalachia, it’s not ever mean, or really cynical. You never write about a dead world. And that’s something that is really compelling. How do you keep that? All the hope there?

SM: I guess, maybe it goes back to some of these music things we were talking about. I had a girlfriend one time, who was like, “Why do you like this shit?” I think we were listening to Jimmie Rodgers or something. And I was like, “Well, he’s singing it because he has to.” And I know that’s kind of clichéd, but a lot of people are singing and writing for various reasons. I’m just doing what I would be doing anyway if I was just hanging out on the porch. I don’t go to bars. People mention that all the time and it pisses me off. I can’t stand bars and I can’t stand drunks. I drink by myself. But there’s that, and I have no freaking clue. There’s always a duality to it. The dude who is sitting alone at a restaurant, eating. On one hand it’s wonderful that he has food, that he’s not starving to death, that he can feed his body full of protein and sugars and carbohydrates that keep his body functioning. But on the flipside too, that guy is alone, and you wonder why he’s alone. Well, maybe he wants to be, I’m not sure.

It’s the same thing with parents. I just fought a three-year-old girl to get to bed for half an hour. You bring these things into the world and you fill them with death. I’ve filled her life with a lot of pain. Now hopefully she’s going to be able to understand the joy in things, fall in love, make love, have kids, go see a goddamn movie. You know when fall time comes and you wake up in the morning and the shadows are different, and you’re like, “Holy shit it’s fall! Isn’t this amazing?” I hope she’ll be able to have that. But at the same time, she’s going to get picked on like everybody, she’s going to feel unsure of herself, maybe she’s going to have an upset stomach from feeling unsure about herself. And that’s just the nature of things, that’s the way things work.

It’s the Shelley poem, “Ozymandias.” Shit, I don’t need to be reciting all these poems.

JC: I’m having a wonderful time.

SM: I met a traveler…I think there’s a boundless in there too. It’s a good goddamn poem. It means a couple of different things, and one of them is that Ozymandias is talking shit, from his perspective. “Look at me, I’m badass.” But his words mean something completely different a couple of centuries later. His words mean, “Look at this shit.” We have a senator here in West Virginia, Robert Carlyle Byrd. A great senator for us. And we have a saying here too, “Thank God for Mississippi.” Like whenever there’s a national poll, we always say, “Thank God for Mississippi” because we’re always forty-ninth and you’re fiftieth. We’re always flipflopping. It’ll be neck-and-neck and then those Arkansas kids will get dumb for a few years and then you thank God for Arkansas from the both of our states.

But Byrd was an orphan, and he was adopted, and rises to the chair of the House Appropriations Committee, Ways and Means Committee. Essentially the piggy bank of the United States Government. He named everything in this state after himself. And if he wasn’t naming it after himself, he was naming it after his wife, Irma. He’s dead now. He’s freaking dead. Forty years from now are you still going to have Robert C. Byrd when I drive a little and take my laundry to the Laundromat? Well no, because probably the road’s going to be going in a different place. And he’s Ozymandias and I’m Ozymandias, and you’re Ozymandias. I guess there’s a freedom in that. I don’t think it’s a sad thought, I think it’s like, “Holy shit, yes!”

Good god, wouldn’t it be miserable to last forever? To see all the people you love get old and die? You wouldn’t get to enjoy it either. Immortality is such an empty concept. I’d like to enjoy a little bit of it now. Give me a couple of hookers and eight balls. At least Eddie Van Halen can say he has been able to enjoy that success, whether it proved fruitful for himself or not. I don’t know if that immortality idea is that wonderful.

JC: I don’t know what I would do. I don’t know if I want to be myself for that long. I get pretty tired of myself.

SM: It’s like, “Shit! I’m still here.”

It’s like the birthdays. I wish for a thousand birthdays. And the gods answered my prayers. Foolishly I did not ask that they would be days of youth. I mean, you’re going to have hemorrhoids.

There’s a great book by Sam Kashner about the Beats there at the Naropa Institute in Colorado. It’s the Beats as old men. Burrows is cranky, complaining about his hemorrhoids, how is ass always bleeds and he has to sit on a Maxi pad. And Ginsberg, all he cares about is filing his letters in a particular way so that when they’re sold to NYU or Columbia or wherever so he’ll get x number of dollars. And they brought in this yogi master—well, no, he’s like a Buddhist. And he’s a pervert, all he wants to do is fuck. Maybe that’s very Zen-like, I’m not sure. And Ginsberg’s trying to deal with him, and make sure they still get their accreditation.

So that’s what that old age would be like. Just disappointment. I say give me the now. Let me at least try to enjoy it as much as I possibly can.

JC: I hope you’re right.

SM: I think it’s going to be like The Wizard of Oz. I think that if there is an afterlife, I hope it’s one where we all get tormented for our own stupidity in our lives. And you’re going to be Dorothy and you’re going to wake up, and you were there and you were there… You were in Oz the whole damn time you were in Kansas, you just didn’t fucking see it, Dorothy, you spoiled brat. I at least hope there’s some comeuppance for ourselves. I at least believe in a god of vengeance. But again that’s back to my religious idea that I don’t think you should believe in a god who isn’t vengeful towards your enemies.

JC: I used to be pretty hippie about all that stuff. God is love, all is love, love is cool! But then I grew up a little and realized that love is mean, and love is jealous, and love snatches and takes things.

SM: Think of any given relationship that you’re in. I’m in love right now, I’m in love. But in any relationship, there’s always the element of being human. You know, like “What is he really thinking?” Or the secret thoughts, the secret little ideas that you have, which makes you you, which makes you human. It’s interesting, love, that whole emotion. It’s much different than the bullshit way that we treat it.

JC: Love involves a lot of forgiveness. There’s also a part of forgiveness that doesn’t require you to change, because you can’t. I’m not saying you should go on being a shithead all your life, but there’s a part of you that’s just never going to change.

SM: You know what Franco the Spanish dictator said? “Give me a child until he is six, and he’s mine forever.” I think that’s true. Your selfishness and all the things that screw up a relationship are right there present when you’re five years old. Like those Michael Apted 7 Up sequels. I think he’s up to fifty-six now. Those little kids are essentially kind of the same as they were. There’s a few of them that aren’t.

JC: They do seem to be getting happier, at least. I do like that.

SM: Yeah, but is it because you’re aging and you just get more dumb?

JC: I don’t know! I’m just glad it’s true! Maybe you just figure out that you’re not going to change and you just stop trying to make yourself a different person all the time.

SM: My mother talks about this all the time. She says, “After awhile you just don’t care anymore.” Which I think is a nice way to be. Just, what the hell, whatever. I wish I could have been more like that when I was twenty-two or twenty-three. I wish I had enjoyed the present a little bit more.

JC: You’re telling me.

SM: I read a lot of Aleister Crowley, you know, the Satanist? I don’t know why, but I find him fascinating. He kind of goes through the same process. When he’s thirty, he’s having disciples eat cat feces in the middle of orgies, all that stuff, on behalf of Satan. By the time he’s an old man, he’s married to a woman, he’s no longer a drug addict, he has a child who he’s fairly close to. But there’s also that duality thing, like does he realize though in his last days—because he’s broke, he’s been chased from country to country, he’s the “wickedest man on earth”—does he get it then? On one hand, his life must have seemed like a big failure, like everything that could have went wrong went wrong. But then on the other side, think of how that individual influenced the second half of the twentieth century, whether we’re talking about popular culture, or “Do what thou wilt.” Shit, that’s the philosophy of America now. That’s Capitalism 101. It all comes back to Satan.

Let me ask you, Jimmy, do you like Satan?

JC: I think I forgot to ask you any actual questions. Not any that I meant to, anyhow.

SM: Good! That means we’re talking. But you should ask me a question.

JC: I’m from Mississippi. Do you ever get people thinking that because you’re from the South you’re either lyrical or an idiot?

SM: I had a girlfriend one time and her mother asked me if I grew up on a dirt floor. She was from Huntington Bay, Long Island. But she was a very sweet woman and I don’t think she meant it bad. Well, maybe she did. There’s a lot of baggage with that. I used to have a law professor who told this great story. He was a member of a jury, the jury foreman. The guy was obviously innocent. So when they got back to do the deliberation, he decided, just for the sake of argument, as a law professor, on the first vote to say “guilty,” and therefore the argument would begin and they would go through the whole process of what a jury needs to do. Well, when it came time, he votes “guilty,” and everybody else had voted guilty too. 12-0 guilty, bam! It was a small little criminal matter, just a misdemeanor, but still.

People who have already talked themselves into something, you’re not going to talk them out of it, no matter what you do. And even when you say lyrical. Yeah, I am lyrical at times. Not necessarily my writing, but I think I’m going try to get there, because I love some of that stuff. Ignorant or dumb? I mean I am a lot of times. I hate the flipside of that too, which is self-protection, having some kind of chip on your shoulder.

For instance, I was at a party the other night. There were two former governors, very nice men who have done wonderful things for the state. One of them is a current United States Senator. It’s kind of one of the big things where, you know, if somebody’s knocking West Virginia, whether it’s Buck Wild or any sort of show like that, we’re going to stand up for the state. That kind of bothers me too, trying to protect some sort of image that doesn’t even exist anywhere. You know, there’s poor people everywhere. There’s dumb people everywhere. There’s angels everywhere. Shit, I’m sounding like a bad country song now.

I guess what angers me is people’s lack of… um, you know Gogol? Nicolai Gogol, the great Russian writer? He’s from the fucking provinces, man. You don’t get any moderner or creepier or crazier than Gogol. Isaac Babel, the short story writer. He’s from the Black Sea area, he’s from the provinces. Rimbaud. Can you get a more modern individual? You know, he walks to Paris. That’s the only thing that bothers me. People’s lack of perspective. I mean, Memphis, Tennessee. Is there a more backward, ridiculous place than Memphis, Tennessee? And that fucking place invented the 20^th century for us.

A bunch of fucking hicks, a bunch of goddamn hicks and black folks invented the fucking 20^th century for us, led by a manic depressive. I find that fascinating, that people don’t realize that.

Even when we talk about literature. New York. I don’t really know very many writers who are from New York or who write about New York that I read that often, or are going to be read. Not to say that that’s not part of it. Not to say that Thomas Wolfe doesn’t go to the city in Of Time and the River. That’s a book that’s never read anymore, right? It’s a great-ass book. But it’s easy for writers to shit on all the time. It’s supposed to be a seventeen-year-old-boy book that you’re supposed to read. Classic American literature? There’s not a damn thing in there really about New York. Except for Gatsby, and that’s not even about New York, it’s about Long Island society culture. That’s a very different world than the city. The world of prep school. And it’s written by a writer by the way who is from fucking Minnesota. I mean you can’t get more out from nowhere than Minnesota, except maybe West Virginia or Jackson, Mississippi.

JC: Jackson’s a weird-ass place.

SM: And God bless that weird. Let’s stay weird as long as we can. It’s in like Ecclesiastes or something I think.

JC: Stay weird as long as you can?

SM: Yeah. “With more weirdness there’s more wisdom.” But then of course that’s the horrible thing with Solomon too, you know. “With wisdom there’s always pain.” Flipside to everything.

JC: Wisdom is incredibly unfashionable in literature right now. Wise isn’t cool.

SM: It’s like Aesop’s fables. I love those things. Give me the moral. I want the moral lesson. This whole entire—shit, I’m trying to think of the goddamn sculptor—you know, art has no functionality whatsoever. We’ve supposedly moved away from a representational art where nobody playing a guitar is trying to sound like a train or trying to sound like a woman or a man moaning or trying to sound like a bird flying.

Well, I beg to differ. I disagree. If it doesn’t have a point then what’s the fucking point of anything? So yeah, even if it’s just simple entertainment. Jack London was entertaining. Goddamn Jack London. You know what people are going to be shocked by? I would like to see their faces if two hundred, three hundred years from now, people could come back and see. Goddamn Jack London is still going to be around, with his tubercular drunk groin full of syphilis or whatever the hell he’s suffering from. And then a lot of this stuff that we feel is more important isn’t. That’s a lot of what modernism has done. I mean, from my perspective, it’s extended the anecdote. It’s no longer the anecdote. Take the overture section in Proust. You take a single moment and write fifty pages about that single moment. The French still doing the same shit in the 60s and 70s.

I think there’s a lot of good books embedded in that tradition too, like The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas where Gertrude Stein says, “Okay, I’ve done all this other stuff, but isn’t it wonderful to include a bunch of gossip in a book?” I mean is there anything more holy than gossip? Is there anything more entertaining than an individual woman or an old man that really knows how to gossip? Who is really nasty and beautiful and horrible and tender at the same time about that stuff?

I think maybe the internet is going to bring us back to some of those things, that Ancien Régime. Vasari’s Lives of the Artist. You find yourself in a tradition, and I think that’s the nature of families and the nature of the world and I think that’s always been the nature of art. That’s not to say that the avant garde stuff is not amazing. But you know what? You usually have to have a middle class established, or an upper-middle class established, before you can even... You know, if I would have gone up to my father and told him I was going off to Carnegie Mellon to become an experimental filmmaker, he would laugh in my fucking face, when I was eighteen years old. Not to say that there’s anything wrong with that, but you have to have a certain view of the world in order to even say that kind of thing to yourself when you’re eighteen. And to have your parents even accept it.

JC: There’s also not really a climate for that right now. When Un Chien Andalou debuted, people went downstairs and ripped up paintings with knives. That’ll never happen right now. People are just going to tweet about it. There’s nobody really to piss off right now, and even if you do, it’s going to make a bunch of assholes happy.

SM: I still love people trying to piss off people. But I just wish they’d keep their eyes open a little more.

Like my kid, his name’s Samuel, named after Sam Pink. I think I got the only kid named after Sam Pink. He’s my good friend, Samuel Joseph Pink. Anyway, my kid likes to hang upside down all the time. That’s what he likes to do. He just turned one year old. And the other day, my father, who is the guy who hangs him upside down, and we’re talking like thirty minutes at a time sometimes. I’m like, “Cut it out, guys. Sam’s been upside down for like twenty minutes and it’s time to take a nap.” He’s laughing his head off, his face is completely red because all the blood has rushed to his head, it’s probably getting him high somehow. I hear my dad go, “Okay, Samuel, you need to understand you can’t live your life upside down.”

It was ridiculous to hear my father say that out loud to somebody. Like he’s giving him words of wisdom, which is, you can’t live upside down. You got to live upright. But if you really start kind of breaking that down, it almost feels like a haiku to me, a piece of poetry like Hajin. Little frog jumps into pond. Big splash, then it’s heard no more. Actually that’s Basho. Shit, maybe I made it up.

I guess my point is that life is a hell of a lot more interesting than a lot of this crap we go on about. It goes back to the two-minute pop song. Maybe we just need to realize it again. There it is, bam!, right in front of you, bam! You don’t know how to play? Who the fuck cares? That’s the fun of it, figuring it out. You don’t know who you are? Well, figure it out! You’re going to. Rather than this kind of rote… I think there is a clash of what’s happening here. Some people say that these things need to be bridged, that whole entire New York Publishing thing.

Real quick, I’m going to say this: it is dead. It is dead, it is gone, it is dying, and you’re going to watch it with flames all over it. And that whole Amazon argument, which I understand but you know what? I wouldn’t have had access to all these books if it wasn’t for that place. “Why don’t you support your local independent bookstore?” Well you know what? I would have to drive a fucking hour to get to Books-A-Million. I would have to drive three hours to get to Barnes and Noble, much less an independent bookstore.

So I think that the two minute thing is there. I think people need to quit making money and just believe in each other and go after it and see what the hell happens. Have some fun with it. 

I’m getting all koombaiya here at the end.

JC: We’ll you’re living it. You’ve done a really good job of getting your stuff out there, primarily through readings and word of mouth. It’s not like you get paid to go read somewhere.

SM: I’m in debt because of that shit. That shit’s ruined my life in so many ways. I lost my goddamn wife over this a year or two ago. I live in a goddamn apartment all by myself. I finally meet a woman and she lives all the way across the country in goddamn San Diego. That’s just the way it is.

JC: Well, that’s the great part about your readings. There is a performance aspect to it, but it doesn’t come across as contrived, or boring, or fake edgy.

SM: I hate those readers. Those readers I can’t stand.  I think people waste a hell of a lot of time trying to get accepted by folks or worrying about presses or shit like that. Look, if you’re going after it and you’re doing it, after awhile things are going to happen for you. That’s just the way things are. It’s like being in a band. We’ve all been involved in things where it’s fun for awhile, but then you realize it isn’t going to go anywhere.

I read an interview with Elvis Costello from NME in like ’80 or ’81. Elvis Costello is at the peak of his goddamn fame and he owes the record company close to a million dollars. Think about that! It’s the same way with anybody you talk to. That’s the world.

Like the other day, my mom said, “Well I just hope you don’t get sued.”

And I’m like, “Mom, the first rule of success is you’re not successful unless somebody is suing you.”

It’s like the absence of logic when you’re dealing with these things. But doing the same thing as everyone else is the wrong thing.

Like there’s this great writer, Juliet Escoria. She’s been doing these little videos for these stories she has coming out for this press next year, which I think is a great-ass idea. But these videos aren’t just her saying shit into a camera. They kind of go along with the stories. Or even like Sam Pink. Sam Pink’s blog was a piece of art, even before Sam Pink’s books started coming out. You know Barry Graham put out that book of his years ago, and the blog thing was slightly different than what everyone else was doing. He was thinking of it in a different way. He was going to put visual art along with the poetry so it had a look to go along with it. Same way Tao’s stuff had a look to go along with it. I think there’s a way with all this technology stuff to even go beyond the writing. I think it’s an interesting idea to try to do that.

JC: You have a particular gift for that though, with your readings and the videos that come up on the internet. I used to show this one video in particular, the one where you’re reading “Kidney Stones” in Atlanta, to a comp class I used to teach. About halfway through you’d just see heads popping up, like little fucking gophers, as you would catch their interest. I don’t know if it was the repetitions or just the gospel quality of your voice. Whatever it is, it works. They couldn’t take their eyes (or ears) off you.

SM: Well, thank you. Sometimes the reading thing bothers me, that whole kind of jokey, comedy club thing. I hate those readings. I’ve always looked at readings like it should be a spell, like you’re trying to cast something on somebody. Seducing an audience, you know, that’s what it is. You’re trying to take the clothes off and connect with them on that level. When really you’re not connecting with them at all. Now that’s something cynical to say. They may feel that connection. I feel when I can go left or right, that I can control what’s happening in the room, but I never feel any sort of emotional connection on that level. The reading thing is weird.

JC: But that’s why people show up, to get something from you, and you give them something good. I think I’m defending your readings. I think there’s something real to them.

SM: There’s great essay called “Friending, Ancient or Otherwise” by Alex Wright, about how internet culture is kind of going back to a term they use called “orality,” that it’s become an oral culture online, rather than a written or technological culture. Therefore the art form of the future will be just looking at someone’s face and having them read something to you. It goes back to tribal cultures and ancient traditions.

I got an agent now, finally. My agent wrote me an email congratulating me on some review I got in one of the big papers. And I was overly emotional in writing her back and saying I don’t care about that! That book was years ago! I’m doing something else now. I just hope we’re not treating this like the minor leagues and therefore now we’re welcomed into the Random House, we’re welcomed into the Knopf room, we’re welcomed into the Farrar, Strauss and Giroux room. Because I think that something interesting’s happening and I want people to push it as far as they can.

Now, I’m not naïve. I know you don’t get to be Bob Dylan without Albert Grossman. But there’s a flipside to that. Sometimes you fuck up by getting Colonel Tom Parker. Sometimes you screw yourself over by going to RCA. I hope, I hope, I hope that it’s not that Robert Frost conservative and old thing, where some of these guys and girls are going to be editing Reader’s Digest online in thirty years when they should have kept doing what they were having fun with rather than trying to write some goddamn book so they can get a couple of thousand dollars. Because there’s no money there anyway.

Art money, music money, all that money’s posthumous money. That means you’re dead. If you’re any good they’re going to chop you up and sell you like bologna one day. But you know what? It’s going to be probably after you’re dead. You’re not going to be able to enjoy it. So I just hope people keep pushing the fun aspect of it and the energy aspect of it and just go after it.

JC: Okay, last question. Rilke had angels. Blake had visions. You ever get any angels or visions?

SM: Oh yeah, all the time.  When I was a kid I saw a foot ghost. I was six years old and family went up to Flint, Michigan, to visit an uncle I had there. I was sitting down, watching Fraggle Rock in the morning, and that was a big deal because we didn’t have HBO and I never got to watch Fraggle Rock. But there I am, watching Fraggle Rock, the real deal television show’s right in front of me, and all of a sudden I look over and there’s this disembodied foot bouncing across the floor. And we found out that that foot has made appearances in that area. Turns out some kid lost his foot in a piece of farm machinery somewhere.

JC: A foot?

SM: A foot ghost.

JC: Damn. You got anything else for me? I know I’ve taken up a lot of your time. I do appreciate it.

SM: Well, I do kind of need to get to bed by eleven. I got to get up early because Iris, my daughter, she only lets me comb her hair in the mornings and she’s going to church with Mom and Dad, so I’ll have to get up with them.

JC: Cool. Thanks for talking with me. It was a real pleasure.

SM: I appreciate it. I mean it. It feels weird, you know? I’ve only had a cell phone now for six months. To be outside my parents’ house, talking to somebody on a cell phone about stories I wrote, many of which I wrote inside that house many years ago… it’s a strange sort of feeling.

JC: A good one though?

SM: Yeah, a good one.