Interview with Chris Killen: February 20th - August 4th, 2008

Chris Killen is an author from Machester, England. His award winning blog and upcoming novel with Canongate have catapulted him into the heart of the current literary scene in England and America. Over the past several months, we were able to talk about his band, The Miniature Swans, life as a possible filmmaker, and his upcoming release, The Bird Room. 

Pirooz Kalayeh: Alice has a past and freckles. Darren is a jock who smells like aftershave. They have thoughts that operate like text messages. In fact, you employ narrative transitions with Internet language quite frequently. There are the double clicks to delete people's faces, and the protagonist's internal dialogue mapped by Alice's freckles as lines made into trapezoids crisscross on the page like the naked back you help us see. It is quite refreshing. The jumps match my Internet mind's way of maneuvering through the world. It also echoes Richard Brautigan's use of metaphor, when the preposterous suddenly becomes unified with reality. In a sense, I can see how both your styles operate as simulacrums, where a reader can enter at will, and, like the Internet, from any direction.

How much was the Internet a factor in your choice of transitions and the non-linear path of The Bird Room? Were you hoping to reflect an experience similar to surfing, or were your choices simply a product of how love operates in leaps and illogical bounds?

Chris Killen: I like that you used the word 'illogical'. I'm interested in illogical and irrational acts and decisions. This novel went through a number of drafts. At first it was completely achronological – a series of disconnected 'scenes' which I expected the reader to try and piece together afterwards. It was supposed to be like thoughts – how thoughts and memories aren't chronological. But I didn't really think about whether it would be fun to read something like that, and when I showed early bits of the draft to people, most of them just felt confused. 

So I decided, by the second draft, that it was more important for the novel to be fun to read than it was to be 'clever', so I put the scenes in sort of chronological chunks; although the whole thing still isn't completely in order. But hopefully it at least makes some sense now.

You're right, there's a lot of internet stuff in there, and yes, I think that has been an influence on some of the language I've used, but as for the structuring, no, I think it would still be structured this way even if I didn't spend so much time online, or if there was no internet. The language might be different, but the structure would probably be the same.

PK: That's interesting that you proceeded in a very disparate fashion. Rikki Ducornet once advised me to follow the same route with my own work. From her perspective, the unmapped could lead to even more suspense for an audience, because an author proceeding in such a fashion would also be in a state of quandary as to what would happen next; thereby, allowing this truth to operate as a function of integrity as well. I would say this rings doubly true in your case, since you are interested in both your novel evolving from an unstructured perspective, as well as how the illogical and irrational acts of your characters will take shape. Would you say your interest in the irrational is for a hope to unveil how doubt itself is ever present in relationships and the human condition, or are you interested in revealing other truths in its exploration?

Chris Killen: The main thing I'm interested in – or at least the thing I was most interested in when I was writing The Bird Room – was the urge towards self-destruction. If I look at the novel now, and think about it for a while, that seems to be the element that stands out most: self-destruction, sometimes on a sub-conscious or unconscious level. 'Self-destruction' sounds kind of serious and over-the-top, though. I will try and explain a bit more … It's like the feeling of standing next to a river, and thinking 'I could just throw myself in,' or of having an important business meeting or something and thinking to yourself, 'I could just say something completely inappropriate here,' or, 'I could pick my glass of wine up and throw it in this person's face.' I think things like that a lot in my life. I think most people do. I don't act on them, but in my novel, the narrator at times acts on these urges. 

Also, I think people are sometimes motivated unconsciously towards things that will 'harm' them or 'worsen' their situations. Like a person being attracted to a 'bad' character type; they know they should be in a relationship with a 'nice' person, someone who treats them right, and they go out with a string of 'bad' people, who are cruel to them and mess them around. Why? I have no idea. Maybe they like the drama. Maybe they seek some kind of punishment. I don't want to ever completely answer these things, flat-out. To me, that would be too simplistic psychologically, and also kind of preachy and putting myself 'above' the characters. I think that people are often motivated by about five or six conflicting feelings and urges at the same time.

I like Knut Hamsun's early novels a lot. In Hunger, Mysteries, and Pan especially, the characters do things that don't always make sense. They follow urges and often – for no obvious reason – make their situations worse. When I first read Hamsun (I'm thinking, for example, of the scene in Pan where Lieutenant Glahn takes the shoe off Edvarda's foot and throws it in the lake) I felt very excited. I really felt like I understood the characters; they felt more 'psychologically complex' to me than other fictional characters I'd read previously. I hope I'm not just copying Knut Hamsun. I feel it's more like he proposed a new way of doing things, and people read him and went, 'Yes, that's true, that is how people are,' and then they went back to writing simplistically motivated characters and forgot about him. I would like to read more Hamsun-like characters in novels.

PK: You mention Hamsun's characters' break in logic as something that you would hope to see in the fiction you read. It is only natural then that you write according to those interests. In today's world of consumerism and demographics, this is a refreshing and brave venture. Have you always written for what you hope to read?

CK: Yes, I think I've always written the kind of thing I would like to read. I really didn't think I had much of a chance at getting The Bird Room published anywhere big when I was writing it. I thought maybe a really small press, if I was lucky. That a big independent publisher has taken a chance on it, I find really strange and good. I feel very lucky, and a bit precarious, and really have no idea how it will do. Personally, I don't think it's going to sell very many copies, but I like the idea of someone who is writing something that isn't a big 'blockbuster' novel maybe seeing my novel in a bookshop next year and thinking, 'Oh, okay. Maybe I do have a chance, after all.'

I don't think I could write any other kind of fiction, and it seems that the fiction I like to read (and write) is never the 'popular' or 'mainstream' kind. I would write a terrible thriller or traditional 'family saga' or something, I think.

I like to think of fiction writing and reading as a conversation. I will read something I really like, and then parts of that writer's style, small elements of it, might go into my stuff in the future. It's not even a conscious decision, usually. I will just notice things, afterwards. I feel like I'm always learning new things about writing by reading other people. But I don't think I have ever read anything that has all the things I like in other writers' stuff, all in one place – so I guess that is what I try and do when I write something. I sort of try to amuse myself, and also to write something that has all the things I like in it. Those things keep changing. I have made myself sound like a bit of a rip-off merchant, maybe, but I think it's just a different way of saying, 'I am influenced by _____ and _____.'

PK: Does your process ever pull you into other art forms for? Do you ever listen to a piece of music or check out a movie and think how the elements could be translated into writing? Anything recently?

CK: I think maybe a few films have influenced me a bit, but not as much as other people's writing. I did go through a 'Godard phase' around the same time I was thinking of writing The Bird Room as achronological and a 'punishing experience' for the reader. Then I got over myself.

Films I like are usually quite 'novelistic', or at least there's a strong feeling that one person is in charge. I like writer/directors a lot. Same with music; I usually seem to gravitate towards bands where one person is writing the songs and singing them.

I like Woody Allen and Hal Hartley films. I have been going through (another) David Lynch phase at the moment. I just watched Inland Empire again, and I feel really excited about it. I admire David Lynch's bravery a lot. But I don't know if anything from it will 'translate' into my writing or anything.

PK: That's a diverse array of auteurs. I figure if none of them had an influence on your writing, then they probably didn't have a lot to do with the flash shorts you've been making on Day of Mustaches. Are you fiddling with Flash in hopes of making quick shorts, or is there something longer in the works? 

CK: I'm still learning Flash. I got a 'dodgy' copy and taught myself how to use it by following some youtube tutorials. It's just something to mess around with, when I don't feel like writing. I have no big plans. Just more silly stuff, I think. I'm making a music video on it for the Bruce Springsteen song 'Badlands' at the moment. I guess, with the flash stuff, I was a bit inspired by David Shrigley. I also really like the episodes of Dumbland by David Lynch that I've managed to find on the internet.

I want to try and make 'proper' short films too, eventually. And one day I would like to make a 'feature'. At the moment I keep having the unreasonable daydream of writing a screenplay of my novel and then being given some money to direct it. I honestly think I could do a good job with 'financial backing'. I don't know.

PK: I think a script of your novel would be a great project, especially if you directed it. You seem to have an eye for the visual, and I would love to see what coalesces. That brings up an interesting side-note. We have spoken previously about our common interest in the works of Richard Brautigan. Up to this point, no films have been made about the author or his works; even though Brautigan, himself, was interested in making films at the end of his career. Have you ever thought about writing a screenplay of one of his novels? If so, which would you choose?

CK: Wow. I don't know. I've always thought In Watermelon Sugar would make a good cartoon, but I wouldn't want to write it. My two favourite Brautigans are Sombrero Fallout and An Unfortunate Woman. I am going to say Sombrero Fallout. I think it would be funny: half of it very small, low budget, indie -- just an 'American humorist' walking around his flat crying -- and the other half really over the top and big-budget. Like Die Hard or something. Guns. Old women. Massacre. Norman Mailer. Isn't there an air disaster in it, too? I can't remember. I think that would be fun to write and make.

How about you?

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(Click here if you are interested in hearing the musical version of this interview.)

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Yes, I am even more serious about writing and making The Bird Room than I was when I answered your last question. I'm going to have a go. I downloaded a dodgy copy of Final Draft the other day, and so far I've written about 10mins. My 'pitch' to prospective financiers would be something like "Lars Von Trier meets Peep Show". Have you seen Peep Show? It's a very good British comedy. Brandon Scott Gorrell sort of mentions it but not really in 'Night Owl'. 

PK: I haven't ever seen Peep Show. I will try and see it when I get back to the states in July.

I think Sombrero Fallout would be a fun Brautigan novel to adapt. Personally, I like the story from Revenge of the Lawn - I think it's from there - about a couple poor kids making Kool Aid in their backyard. That seems like my kind of story. It's realistic and it's got kids. For some reason, a movie with kids just coming of age seems like something I'd have the patience to make - you don't really know if the kids will be able to pull it off, and you still got the adventure of going through the story and making it long enough for a feature. I like projects with risks.

You ever feel like that? 

CK: I know I wanted to say something about 'controlled risks'. I think I like the idea of a project where there are restrictions, or where there is a 'framework' or something, but then within that you can take more risks because they are related to the original framework. Like you set yourself rules in order to break them. And that could be a film or a novel or whatever. I'm not sure if that makes sense. I'm not sure if i can make it make sense. Sorry.

I don't think I would like to work with children. Maybe CGI ones. I don't know.

Please make a full length Brautigan movie. I want to see one. I don't care which one.

I don't think Peep Show is on in America. It's British. You might be able to order it in though, or something.

PK: Recently, you've been recording songs under the moniker, The Miniature Swans. What were the controlled risks involved in this project? 

CK: Yes. The Miniature Swans. This was an attempt to do 'actual' songs, with the idea of eventually getting some other people in to help me play them and, you know, change them round and write new ones. I'm still in the process of recruiting some more swans, though. I want two or three other swans.

As far as controlled risks go, I think the 'framework' was: sing in a kind of monotone so you don't embarrass yourself too much, write words or phrases that are not normally sung in songs, try and write songs that will make two or three specific people you know smile a bit when they hear them but maybe also think, 'okay, these aren't just silly, they're actually alright as songs too.' I don't know how well I've succeeded so far. I don't know how many risks I've taken, either. It feels a bit tame still. When there are more swans involved, I like the idea of it sounding like a band falling apart, but just about hanging together. Like if people saw us, half the spectacle would be a kind of secret worry from the audience that we don't know what the fuck we're doing, and each time we get to the end of a song, there's a collective mild feeling of relief and euphoria that we didn't stop halfway through or completely mess up or fall over or something.

PK: That sounds like a fun project. Will The Miniature Swans be performing at your reading series in Manchester, No Point in Not Being Friends?

CK: Yes, I hope so. I would like the Miniature Swans to implode in front of a room full of people at one of the No Point in Not Being Friends nights, and make everyone feel embarrassed and uncomfortable for a bit. That would be fun. We'll see. Things with the band are going very slowly, though. At the moment it's just talk, and some keyboards I bought off eBay.

Chris Killen was born in 1981, and is currently living in Manchester, England. His first novel, The Bird Room, is to be published by Canongate Books, January 2009. He was also recently appointed a writing fellow at the University of Manchester. He has published a lot of short things online, which are linked to on his blog: www.dayofmoustaches.blogspot.com

Interview with Aram Saroyan: October 5th - November 10th, 2007

ARAM SAROYAN is an internationally known poet, novelist, biographer, memoirist and playwright. His most recent publication with Ugly Duckling Presse, Complete Minimal Poems, includes the entire contents of Aram Saroyan (Random House, 1968), Pages (Random House, 1969), The Rest (Telegraph, 1971), as well as Saroyan’s contribution, “Electric Poems,” to the anthology All Stars (Goliard-Grossman, 1972), and a sequence, “Short Poems,” which hasn’t appeared previously.

For the past couple weeks, we were able to chat about CMP, and some of the other works he has completed throughout his career. Of course, it wasn't done in a typical interview format. I didn't really know where we would end up, when Aram said to frame our discussion with several cartoon captions from The New Yorker. I just figured it'd be fun. I think that's what I love about Aram the most. Everything he does is about play, but it's also about the play inside that play - a place he is searching for as well - that gets you turned in an opposite direction from where you thought you'd be. It's all about that journey. Something Aram takes us through in his poetry, plays, fiction, or even interviews, that turns the light on right from the word go.


PK: I just burned some white sage. I got it from the Farmer's Market in Hollywood. One little bushel of the stuff has lasted me an entire year out here in Korea. I burn it now and again in the morning.

(I would replace this caption with "Naked Lunch Meets Jungle Fever." Kafka could play the role of Denzel Washington. You could be the guy that brings him some bug spray. I would be the woman in bed with Kafka. I would complain in a supportive way. Then we would have a wedding in the third act. Kafka would quit the bug spray business. This caption would be a still from the last scene in the movie. I would go to snuggle with Kafka, but he would be dead. He needed something to live for. Life just wasn't worth living without a corporation.)

Words can change our experience with a visual image. In your poems, the word and image are simultaneously united. This blend creates an interesting shift in perception. In a sense, it requires a different way of looking, and that, for me, is a different way of being. I am often attracted to art that brings me such a moment of connection. Thank you for that.

I remember looking at a Jackson Pollock painting, and feeling a similar way. For one brief instant, there was a lack of thought. In that space, was the experience itself. It was akin to a "What's that smell?" moment. Of course, the "smell" was simply my previous conception of "looking" being dropped for some actual face-time with that moment.

Is this what you hope to achieve with your pieces? If so, how do you go about a poem's conception with such an intention in mind?

Aram Saroyan: I remember when I was a teenager my dad took me to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and I saw a work by Franz Kline for the first time, and I thought, this guy has really gone out of his way to make something ugly. The ugliness is probably what shifts the way you think, or the way you are, for a moment—I think that’s what you’re talking about. The poems by me you refer to are probably the ones in Complete Minimal Poems and they’re now forty years old. When the book came out I read it through from cover to cover a couple of times and had a number of different ideas about it. One was, it’s about a young man in his room and at the door of his room.

I didn’t have any particular conception I wanted to get across when I wrote or when I write today. I think artists think with their work, not before they go to work. After I finish a piece, I always wonder, does this work.

Eventually, after many years (or maybe it was just a couple of years), I realized that Franz Kline’s work was the height of elegance. So it changed and/or I changed.

PK: I hear you. Franz Kline. I never went deep into his work. I remember seeing a couple pieces at the MOMA and The Philadelphia Museum of Art. I remembered that Jean Michel Basquiat cited him as a big influence on his work. I didn't stop long enough to stick with him though. I was busy checking out Cy Twombly. I didn't really like it, but I didn't dislike it either. I think seeing his pieces made me feel that kind of "ugly" you are referencing. I don't know though. I tend to see pretty in ugly and ugly in pretty. I don't know. I get so confused sometimes. It's not a bad confused, but simply a blending I suppose.

Were there any other visual artists that changed on you?

AS: I always loved Warhol. And Donald Judd. When I saw the first Eric Fischel at a Whitney Biennial in the 80s I thought, oh, that’s ugly. I didn’t like it. And then, sure enough, of all the painters of that epoch like Salle, Schnabel, etc., I started to like his work the most. I think Schnabel’s movies, especially Basquiat, are wonderful.

Warhol was such a great colorist, so inventive and elegant. I think I picked that up at an unconscious level. Later on you realize what it was that got you. His protégé, Basquiat, is also an extraordinary colorist. And sometimes he does great things with words. Like he has the word milk with a little copyright sign beside it. Exactly how insane our global corporate rigamarole has gotten.

When you live in New York, as I did, minimalism like Donald Judd’s work is terribly appealing. It balances the environment. I think I had to get out of New York to write differently. The environment is transgressive. Either that or I’m just a natural born country boy.

PK: Genesis Angels: The Saga of Lew Welch and the Beat Generation is a fascinating book. It reads very much like fiction. In fact, there were several times where I wasn't quite sure. In fact, it almost reads like an autobiography. Why did you decide to write in this style? Was it to capture Lew in a way that a traditional biography couldn't?

AS: There’s a first draft of that book, a more traditional, rather academic biography, which I reread recently. There’s a lot of direct quotation from Lew Welch—interviews and correspondence mostly—and that’s the best part of it. After I reread it I took some of the Lew Welch parts and made a solo performance play of it. It would be great I think for someone like Liev Schrieber or Joseph Fienes. But that first draft was, the Lew Welch quotes aside, a bit dull. So I rewrote it as a sort of Kerouac novel. Some of it is novelistic and/or autobiographical: I was trying to capture the spirit of Lew and the people around him, the Beats.

PK: You say a Kerouac novel, and I definitely feel that. There is that mad rush. At the same time, it's still very much you. I don't see Kerouac's long dash in continual use. You also vary the speed of your sentences by throwing in the occasional one or two-word sentence. Was this an intentional move? Was there a reason that you stayed away from the long dash continually and non-stop as Kerouac did?

AS: Kerouac was a writer I felt I had to come to terms with, and Genesis Angels was my moment of reckoning, so to speak. The book was written a chapter a day and not greatly edited by James Landis, my editor at Morrow. I suppose my technique is a little different, but the idea was to let go and write what came to mind. I started it right after my wife Gailyn gave me the verdict that the first draft was a tad dull. We were living in Bolinas and it was a beautiful day. I was crestfallen, but somehow energized too. As I walked back into the house to start the book again, I looked up the sky and thought to myself, “Just this blue” [meaning the color of the sky]. It’s interesting because the second draft written quickly in my version of Kerouac’s “spontaneous bop prosody,” told a more complex story than my first draft, which was ostensibly more reflective and took much longer to write. Probably I was laying the foundation, familiarizing myself with the story, so that I could then take off.


PK: You mention "Just this blue". That reminds me of Zen Master Seung Sahn. In his book, "Only Don't Know", he speaks of the clarity of one's moment being as simple as "Just like this".

http://www.kwanumzen.com/dssn/

Was your recognition of the sky on that day linked to your experience or knowledge of Buddhism? If so, how has your experience with Zen informed your writing? Has it changed over time?

AS: I love that, “only don’t know.” It reminds me of one of my favorite words: though. Not too much baggage. As though you just turned a corner and encountered a new vista.

I’m an amateur, or really just a fan of Zen Buddhism. I was very impressed by “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind,” especially the part where he returns to his monastery after 25 years and discovers there are tears in his eyes.

PK: Zen is definitely interesting. I spoke to a monk who was one of Seung Sahn's students. He asked me why I write and to answer without words. "No words," he said. I knew that typically one answers those types of questions in the Zen tradition by pounding on the floor or what have you, but I felt like it would be a cop out, so I just said, "I don't know." I guess I could have followed Allen Ginsberg's "first thought, best thought" model, but I figured I could sit with the question a bit longer. That was when I asked him why he meditates. "For you," he said. I thought that was interesting. The whole "live for others" mentality. At the same time, he answered with words. Who knows where it all stands in the end? I could just end with a big, "I like questions though" and leave it at that.


How often do the questions you ask lead you into the work that you do? Do you find yourself trying to break a convention, or having a particular model before you begin something? Is it just a sentence? Or is it more like the "It's snowing" concept that you mention in your essay, This Is It?

AS: I’m not sure about questions. Nor about breaking a convention. As a model, I suppose the mind is full of them and picking and choosing may take place at some pre-conscious level. But for me it begins with a word or a phrase or a sentence that has some generative dimension so that it begets another word or phrase or sentence, and on (or off) from there.

If you can try to locate Ted Berrigan’s Interview with John Cage (reprinted in the American Literary Anthology 1)--it’s made up, a pastiche from many different sources (Cage, Warhol, Burroughs) as well as Berrigan himself, and it has some funny stuff about Zen. “Somebody should have kicked that monk’s butt”--or the equivalent.

PK: "Make love to the police. We need highly trained squads of lovemakers to go everywhere and make love."

That is very funny and so true! I remember walking through the streets of New York after 9-11. There was that same paranoia. I thought the same thought - not actually making love to New York's finest, but some sort of kindness to change things. I don't know. I guess I was feeling paranoia too. Maybe, we need an entire squadron of ass kickers and lovemakers side by side, kicking ass and making love, depending on how badly they want one or the other; and, of course, always providing the opposite of the desire, so that the lovemakers and hate mongers actually get a beating and a kiss, respectively, as well. I don't know. I am really as clueless as the monk who needs his ass kicked. Like, the other day, I was looking around my room. I saw everything in a particular order, and yet, at the same time there seemed to be a continual disorder going along as well. I don't know if this is because I spent the night reading The Complete Minimalist Poems, or just because I find myself confused in each moment. It's like there's a new person everyday. I wake up. I look in the mirror and I have no idea. That's what I see: No idea. I wonder if writing is often "just like that." Like there's no writing as much as there is that building that " begets another word or phrase or sentence..." as you said; and how that building is very similar to acting - that moment where you piece together a character and see it push forward through the body, and then BOOM - there you are - outside and inside yourself, and you still don't know what happened.

I don't know if I make much sense. I like acting though. It is one of my favorite things to do; even though I have no idea what I'm doing when I do it.

Do you like acting?

AS: I’m a playwright, so I depend on people to love acting and to act, and I think you’re right: I learned that an actor has a process when my play “At the Beach House” was done in Los Angeles recently. It was a six week limited run, and the performances kept getting better and better as it went along. A certain moment in the play got illuminated by something two actors did together quite far into the run. It wasn’t in the text; it was them. I’d had staged readings of all my plays before but never a full production, and it’s very different. For a staged reading there are only a couple of rehearsals and then the performance with the actors holding their scripts. They don’t memorize the lines and go through the process of connecting the dots and having a character coalesce. It’s funny, certain actors would come in hot—seem to know everything from the beginning—but it might not deepen from there. Others might be that way, a quick study, and still keep building. I love the theater: if I were 30 years younger it would be my life. Now I must depend on others to do the heavy lifting I did for that first production, where I was in essence the line producer. Too much work! However, when it works I don’t think it gets any better for a writer.

About your room: my father always told me to keep my room clean and neat, and after a while I took his lesson to heart. But other people don’t mind a bit of (fertile) chaos, and actually he proved to be a packrat, so go figure.

PK: Yes, my room and mind go in waves of cleanliness and disruption. My latest coffee/computer mishap definitely put that to the test, as papers piled around the empty shell of what my computer once was. Of course, I could have taken a nap through the experience. Sometimes I find that's the best thing to do when the body is just plain tired. In fact, doing so, may have prevented the "coffee spill" in the first place. Who knows?

AS: That’s interesting about the nap. When I had a crisis in the production of the play—and they occurred regularly—if it was close to bed time I would have a choice between going crazy with being upset or going to sleep. My age definitely helped here. I would opt for going to sleep. And often in the meantime the theatrical team that had been assembled would solve the problem. That old saw about how the show must go on is really an ethic of a kind among certain show biz veterans, thank God.

I once spilled ink on a new desk (bought with part of my $500 NEA award for poetry back in the sixties). A friend had been doing drawings on the desk and left an open bottle of ink under some papers I was summarily cleaning up, the neatnik. So it can cut two ways.

PK: I really love the first act of At the Beach House (that's all I could get online). It's got a quick pace. It's also radically different from your poetry or fiction, and, strikingly similar. There's the blend between fiction and reality again. It's almost as if you are pulling as much from real life, as you are the fictional transgressions that your writing voice might have carried you too.

AS: I’m so glad you like the play. It was such a kick to see it fully staged. It was like giving a party for six weeks. Writers don’t have that kind of good time very often I don’t think. As for real life and make believe, it’s a mix, a creative amalgam. These are people and circumstances I know but the chronology and the setting are different. And it all has a magnetic field of its own once it kicks in. The people talk and something happens because that’s the next thing that the nervous system of the writer wants to happen. “First thought, best thought,” as Allen Ginsberg told us.

PK: It also captures L.A. really well. I have been to those beach houses, and I have seen those young upstarts trying to manuever into a possible conversation with the famous.

As far as drug habits, I have seen my share of that lifestyle as well.

Was "At the Beach House" based on your family or an amalgamation of several you've encountered? Did the moment between the two actors blend fiction and reality to bring it to a point of confusion as to what was real or not from your perspective? Is this what you are talking about in that moment of coalescence for the players?

AS: It was a piece of business. In the second act Angela, the drug addict, throws a brick at her brother, Nick, who’s trying to get her into rehab. It turns out it’s a rubber brick, but Nick and the audience don’t know that until it bounces off Nick. It’s an emotional turning point in the play, although I had no idea of it until I actually got a rubber brick and the actors did it on stage. Nick is so startled that his mood changes—from fear into a kind of tender regression: as if the two of them were little kids playing while they take a bath together. Past the middle of the run, I saw the play again and when Nick gets hit by the brick he gets up from a chair and grabs Angela and pins her to the ground and growls “I’m still bigger than you are.” Then he gently helps her to her feet and she leans against him and in that moment the whole brother/sister debacle is beautifully illuminated. The actors invented the rough-housing—a perfect touch.


PK: Wow. I love that move from the actors. It sounds like you gave them a lot of room to go places. That is a really wonderful thing in a production. I have been part of shows where the same liberties were not necessarily as forthcoming. Directors can sometimes be dictatorial for what they want to happen.

AS: The director was Marcia Rodd, who starred with Elliott Gould in “Little Murders,” an actress as well as a veteran director, so she allowed plenty of room and encouraged the actors to be in process, and understood all about it. Which I didn’t. I could never have directed the piece, although at some early stage I probably imagined that I could have. Writers and actors are different. But then you get Sam Shepard. And a lot of Mamet is riffing on the “repeating game,” which is a Sanford Meisner acting exercise.

PK: Did you ever step in for guidance? How did you balance your need to say something with the urge to hang back and see what would evolve? Was this difficult as it was your writing?

AS: Marcia very rightly wanted me to appear only at intervals to check in with notes. She didn’t want me around the actors while they let the roles sink in, which can be a chaotic process. In the end I grew to respect the very different process that evolved because of the results involved. And of course what a kick it is, to see your play take shape with a good cast and director.

PK: Playing music is often like theater for me. Back when I was touring regularly, some of the groups that I played with, would get caught up in the lifestyle or in how many CD sales were being generated, etc. It would quickly make the song writing process pulling teeth in so many ways. Someone would want their chord progression to be part of a song, or another would feel slighted that we had not used theirs. It was a real sense of balance on my part at times.


AS: Ego can so easily get in front of the process. Suddenly for reasons unknown an actor will start saying lines too slowly, taking up more time than is necessary—and I’m not talking about James Dean or Brando. There’s some psychological snafu that can derail an evening.

PK: Nowadays, I find it easier when I collaborate with others, whether it's music, writing, or film, to leave room for the unexpected. Those accidental happenings can be so much more powerful than anything pre-meditated. I have even heard that the jam band, Phish, often rehearsed in the dark, to try and sync up their transition skills, and I assume, to leave more room for the happy accidents that may have occurred.

AS: Playing in the dark, great! I remember writing certain poems in the dark in the middle of the night, having woken up with a line or two. It’s easier to keep track of a sound when the lights are out.


PK: Do you have any exercises that you take your actors through to bring them closer as an assemblage? How about yourself as a writer? Are there ways you have found to allow yourself to be more free with the writing of a play that is different from poems or fiction?

AS: My dad once said that getting ready is 80 or 90 percent. For a writer that can mean to “loaf and invite the soul,” as Whitman says. Really, in our media-centric society, it seems to mean turning down the volume on all the noise so that you can hear “the single, small voice”--that’s Doris Lessing I think—that’s your own. I really enjoyed writing plays. It was like I imagine composing music might be like. Instead of instruments, you have these different voices going on inside you, high and low notes, etc. I wrote five of them in a row over a two and a half year period. The form seemed to be a good fit for me right then.

PK: What notes are you hearing now?

AS: My work of forty years ago, Complete Minimal Poems, is in print, as well as a facsimile edition of Coffee Coffee, published during the same time by Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer’s 0 to 9 Press. It’s a nice affirmation. Complete Minimal Poems is #4 this month on the Small Press Distribution poetry best seller list almost six months after it was published, and the buzz about it, as well as serious and lengthy reviews of it are on the web, not in the print media for the most part. There’s a paradigm shift. And for me it’s like coming full circle. What most interests me at the moment is the theater. I like getting out of my room.

ARAM SAROYAN is an internationally known poet, novelist, biographer, memoirist and playwright. His poetry has been widely anthologized and appears in many textbooks. Among the collections of his poetry are Aram Saroyan and Pages (both Random House). His largest collection, Day and Night: Bolinas Poems, was published by Black Sparrow Press in 1999. Saroyan's prose books include Genesis Angels: The Saga of Lew Welch and the Beat Generation; Last Rites, a book about the death of his father, the playwright and short story writer William Saroyan; Trio: Portrait of an Intimate Friendship; The Romantic, a novel that was a Los Angeles Times Book Review Critics' Choice selection; a memoir, Friends in the World: The Education of a Writer; and the true crime Literary Guild selection Rancho Mirage: An American Tragedy of Manners, Madness and Murder. Selected essays, Starting Out in the Sixties, appeared in 2001, and Artists in Trouble: New Stories in early 2002.

The recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts poetry awards (one of them for his controversial one-word poem "lighght"). Saroyan is a past president of PEN USA West and a current faculty member of the Masters of Professional Writing Program at USC. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the painter Gailyn Saroyan.

Interview with Noah Cicero: June 15 - July 27

Noah Cicero is a writer of points and the pointlessness between them. He makes stands often to refute them, or simply put them into a spin to see what can be excavated. In this way, he is much more an experiential writer, who looks at an emotional state as an entry point to filtering other questions. These barbaric yawps can bring a world into chaos or standstill. Regardless of the movement, it is a single intention, to see the ground in front of him that makes Noah such a gift as a writer. If we look hard enough, we just might see reality. Then we can shake our fists, make a choice, or ask why all over again.

Noah is the author of The Human War (Fugue State Press, 2003), The Condemned (Six Gallery Press, 2006), The Living and the Dead (Bear Parade), and Treatise (Noah Cicero, 2007). Recently, we were able to chat about The Human War , hell, and distant planets. I didn't expect to like hell so much. It's a pretty nice place. I might open a Denny's. People get hungry. They might even read Noah Cicero.

Pirooz Kalayeh: I like THE HUMAN WAR. I like the relationship with Kendra. I like Denny's too. I also like how the book reads like a poem. It reminds me of Allen Ginsberg's Howl. It also reminds me of Walt Whitman. The dialogue makes me think of Quentin Tarantino.

Noah Cicero: Your references to Walt Whitman and Ginsberg are accurate in this way: I was watching a show on Whitman and they talked about how he tried to imitate the sounds of an orchestra, and one day I was drunk and reading Leaves of Grass out loud to some girl and I noticed that as you read Whitman your voice kept getting louder and louder, faster and faster, it had crescendos and refrains and low and high points. And Whitman could control this through the strategic use of periods and commas and starting new lines.

That a writer could use commas, periods, and where new lines start to make the reader see the passage into music, and this music gives a higher level of meaning to the writing.

But I was not thinking about orchestra music when I wrote it. When I write the music, I usually try to imitate Jimi Hendrix's Machine Gun, Led Zeppelin's Achilles Last Stand, and Metallica's Orion, 10-minute rock songs that resemble orchestra music. All three start off slow, and eventually lead to total chaos, they aren't chaos, because the musicians know exactly what they are doing, and have planned and are carrying it out. But it gives the sensation of chaos, of a person going totally mad under the pressure of this world.



I want THE HUMAN WAR to pick up speed as it goes on, and gets going very fast until the reader starts feeling the chaos, starts feeling really confused, starts going a little mad themselves. Then it slows down, and it comes back, repeated several times.

Because on that night, a lot of us felt very confused, very chaotic inside, and well a lot of us feel this all the time.

Pirooz Kalayeh: Do you really care if people get this book or not? Is that important to you?

Noah Cicero: People get several things from the book, the people that don't like it call the characters adolescent: I wouldn't call the characters adolescent, the characters in the book are what Nietzsche called, The Last Men. They are people lying around doing nothing, living for no reason, going on, they don't truly believe or truly not believe in anything. Foer writes a book about a 9 year old because he is at the mental stage of a nine-year-old but isn't conscious of it. The difference is, when I write, I don't write about 9 year olds, I write about people in their twenties acting like nine year olds. But they aren't really acting like 9 year olds; they are acting like Nietzsche's version of The Last Man.

I would also classify the characters in Tao Lin's EEEE EEE EEEE as The Last Men.

To add a little to this: De Beauvoir says basically that the adolescent feeling is that of feeling worthless, of feeling worthless and powerless to the world - of not really caring about anything because they are conscious if they want to say it or not, that it is pointless to care about anything, because they are always faced with their needless place in the modern world. The Last Man feels needless and worthless also, but they don't cut themselves or listen to Good Charlotte. They go to work like zombies, lay around watching television, beat their kids and spouses, hate themselves, march to their death with their head down, tears falling our of their eyes, seducing themselves with painkillers, beer, drugs and silly bourgeois notions that life is worthwhile when everything they do is saying silently to the world, "I feel worthless."

The people who do get the book understand because they understand it themselves. That we are lost, confused, our minds are chaos, and we are faced against an absurd system of politics, media, and economics completely powerless to do anything about it. All I tried to do was write that feeling out, give language to that feeling.

It is my belief, my philosophy that the writer's job is to translate the feelings we all have into words, so the reader can better understand their own situation in life. The readers of the world are plumbers, truck drivers, doctors, engineers, schoolteachers, servers, etc. They have a job to do, they don't have the time to go off by themselves and dwell on the personal hell of mankind. They don't have the time to sit and study Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Sartre. That is the writer's job. The writer's job is to collect information, study reality under a microscope, and then write it out. Then the reader hopefully can read it and understand their own reality better.

Pirooz Kalayeh: Imagine I am from the planet, Gliese 876 b. I am about 15 light years away. You have just told me about THE HUMAN WAR. You have mentioned THE LAST MEN and Tao Lin's EEEEE EEE EEEE. I am curious about mankind's personal hell. I am unclear about the concept of hell. What is it? Why do people need to think about it? How can people identify it? Is it just like Gliese 876 c or d?

Noah Cicero: Mankind is condemned to several things:

1. Everyone is born with The Will to Power. Now this power can take many forms. One person might choose to exert power by creating art, by writing, painting, making television shows, cooking, playing sports, singing, having an awesome myspace page, breast implants etc. Other might people might manifest this need for power by becoming head managers of restaurants and terrorizing the staff, becoming a politician, a 4th grade teacher, etc.

A lot of people choose to have children and exert power over them. This can take many forms, one parent can be a teacher to a child, another parent might want to ruin the child like they have been ruined.

Which leads to the next thing.

2. Humans are born into what can be called Solitary Confinement with two Gods. This solitary confinement is commonly called, "Childhood." A human baby is born nothing, a blank nothing, then the world forces it to believe it is something, that it is a certain race, certain religion, from a certain country, that it IS something, when really it is nothing.

The nothing baby has no choice in the matter. The baby is defenseless because of its size against the world. The child learns that those who have more physical force control them. That those with authority must be obeyed. This is not true, but through regular beatings, being stuck in the corner and constant yelling at the child they succumb to this rational.

It can be called Solitary Confinement because a child can go nowhere, learn nothing, do anything, unless the Gods called parents allow it to happen.

3. The brain of a human is simple but complex. A human enters a situation and the stimulants cause behaviors that occurred in previous situations that they have done or seen shoot up into their head and they choose one to deal with the situation. How they deal with the situation is called, "Behavior." One would think and many have thought this could be easy to analyze and make great humans with: But it isn't because everyone living human has had a different life, with different situations, so everyone enters every certain situation with a slightly to largely different perception on it.

One human might get kicked in the face and cry and call the police, one human might get kicked in the face, go get a gun and shoot the attacker, one person might get kicked in the face and feel some kind of sexual excitement from it.

4. Humans are condemned to choose. A lot of humans do not like choosing. So they adopt very strict identities. There are many identities among humans, but they can be existentially put on a scale. It is obvious the more fearful one is of choice, the more strict identity they try to have. The less fearful one is of choosing, the less they care about having a strict identity.

5. Mankind generally is terrified of their nothingness. To admit they are nothing and can totally choose their actions terrifies them. They feel safe hiding behind race, gender, nationality, political party, favorite bands and authors, behind clothes, how expensive the things they own are, what car they drive, where they live, who is beneath and who is above, they hide behind false pretenses make-believing that their lives mean something more than they are, they do not like to admit that they are just bodies of meat walking the earth one day to die like the plants and animals that surround them.

6. The human is a terrified creature. A human lives on a planet adrift on the cosmos, a cosmos much larger than Hollywood and even Britney Spears new haircut. They are condemned to live on this rock with no reason for the rock even being there. Let alone them being there. They are forced to know everyday that when they die they will be replaced, that they are needless. The universe shows each human their needlessness without remorse.

There are more things that cause hell, but they concern one's era and geographical location. These inescapable six things have always been with mankind and it doesn't seem like at any point in my lifetime one of these six will be able to be erased from humanity.

PK: Let me see if I hear you right. Mankind is condemned to exert power over other people; solitary confinement, otherwise known as childhood, where they have no choice in keeping their nothingness, because power is being exerted over them; different complex, behaviors; choice; nothingness; and that they will die needlessly, because there is no point in them being on this rock, known as Earth, because there is no point for this rock's existence either.

How do you know for sure? Is it possible you don't know with absolute certainty whether there is no point in being on this rock? And if we eradicate either possibility, regardless of certainty or otherwise, aren't we left with not knowing? What if we didn't know at all? What would you say from this space of not knowing about hell? Is hell even hell anymore? What is it if it's not hell?

Noah Cicero: This is really a question of "points." The sun will engulf the earth someday and then this will not matter, to people on a planet 700 billion light years away. If there is a God or astral plane or whatever, It doesn't obviously mess with our world. But there are points in the world, a lot of points. We have our own points, each individual pointing their bodies in certain directions to achieve goals, if it is to be a lawyer or carpenter to pay the bills or to get some oxies, all points. There are even more points. The point of the American to the Iraqi insurgent is that the American has killed their families and blown up their houses and therefore their point is to kill them. The Hutu's point is to kill Tusi, and at the same time to the Hutu the Tusi's point is to kill them. And the same to the Tusi.

The point of the telephone is make calls on it. But telephones have several times been used to murder people, so for some people, the point of the phone was to kill people. A computer has several points, to communicate with people, to learn things, to watch music videos, and to get sexual enjoyment. The point of cigarettes to me is to relieve stress, to another the point of cigarettes is the thing that murdered grandpa.

I would not say living on earth is pointless. There are a million points in reality. To try to live by a philosophy of meaninglessness is absurd, if a person truly thought everything had no point, then they couldn't even operate a computer or use a telephone. The fact that they do, gives reality Meaning. But at the same time the stars, ancient ruins, rock formations made millions of years ago, the ocean notify mankind of their needlessness. But on a small microcosmic scale man has meaning if he wants it or not. Because even if you are a hermit, the point of your genitals, is to shit piss and fuck.

Concerning if we know, we can know everything. Someone said, I can't remember who, "The world is true." Wittgenstein said, "The world is all that is the case." If it happened in the universe we can figure it out. That is one of the main things that causes these conservativisms today. Before science, mankind did not know a lot of things. Now as each day passes we know more and more. Mankind likes mysticism, mysticism has hierarchy, it allows for racism, for snobbery, for one man to be born rich and another to be poor, it makes religion and nationality true, it makes women below man, black below white, etc. Mankind must accept and many have, that everything can be found out, that there is truth behind everything, But the truth is mostly horrible, it tells the talentless lazy man that he is talentless and lazy and that there is no race below them and they have no right to oppress women. It tells the person that gets their self-worth from nationality that nationality is an accident, mere chance and means nothing. It tells the poor person that wants there to be a God to send them to heaven and punish their oppressors, that at the end there will be no heaven and no punishment for their oppressors. It tells the Middle-Class Christian Republican that they are murderers and not People of God.

But they already know these things, because you can't lie to yourself about something if you don't already know what you are lying about.

PK: Yes, there are a lot of points in the world. Some people make their points into swords, machine guns, or a billboard campaign on 95 South. Some go to Denny's, a strip club, or Crapiokie. Some even write books, post on a blog, or conduct an interview. I hear you.

The characters in Human War live with many different points. Kendra has the potential to be anything, but prefers working at Pizza Hut. Jimmy is outraged at the Iraq War, but can't change that reality, so he placates himself with a boner. Marc wages between outrage, resistance, and brief moments of acceptance in what is happening around him.

The writing of novels is also an act of resistance. We set up lies to counter other lies, when we know the truth, or are in the process of finding it by writing amidst our own. In the end, reality is the final truth. We have to shit, piss, and fuck. We are living in our respective lives. We continue to see more lies. People make points to counter these, and we keep living until we don't.

I find life to be a constant check of when I am lying to myself about reality. When I accept the truth, I can actually see the choices in front of me. If I'm really clear about reality, the choices don't seem like choices. They just are what they are. My boss says, "Work harder!" I work harder. My mother says, "You need to get married." I ask, "Is that true? What's reality?" "No," I realize. "I don't have too. I could. Who knows?" Then I laugh. Things aren't that serious anymore. It's just another person with a story. It's not necessarily mine and I don't have to live it.

Politics are just another story. I can make many choices to help the world. In the United States, I can join rallies. I can speak at engagements. I can vote for candidates. I can give money to organizations. I can also help other artists. I can create my own art. Whatever it is. There are lots of possibilities.

What makes you laugh these days?

Noah Cicero: A lot of things make me laugh. I think you asked that, because maybe I seem from my writing that I wouldn't laugh. That I'm really depressed all the time. But that isn't true. When I write I'm alone, and I only write when the mood comes. My writing is like a violent outburst, or when someone finally tells someone or some people what they truly think about them. That's why my books aren't very long, because they are really just little outbursts of emotion. Like pent up shit, and suddenly it floods out.

To be honest I think I am happier than 99 percent of the population. Even though I'm a dishwasher and I don't have much, I think I get a lot more enjoyment out of life than most people with a lot more. I've been told many times that I was the happiest person people have ever met.

But the word isn't "happy", it is enjoyment. One isn't "happy" or in a "state of happiness." There is nothing happy about paying bills or washing the clothes, it really depends on how you get enjoyment out of the little events of life

I'm not sure, it seems like a lot of people don't get much enjoyment out of life. And enjoyment is subjective, and beyond language, so I'll stop there.

PK: You said it, brother. It's the little things. A nice night of lovemaking, the way I dance at a club in Itaehwon, Christina Aguilera singing "Beautiful", reading The Human War while some Korean vendor shouts in the streets below me, having the opportunity to talk to you and possibly kick it in the city. Man, that's what life's all about - the little things.

So what's the latest in Ohio? You going to stick with this dishwasher gig, or are you going to hit up something else? Any moves for the future? Books in the works? Music projects?

Noah Cicero: I'm probably going to stick with the dishwasher gig. It doesn't remotely tax my mind. And I would rather think about writing than any stupid job I might get. I like to dish wash and cook and work in kitchens. It is fun and easy. I like how there are different people there everyday. A lot of jobs have the same assholes there everyday. Restaurants have like 80 workers and only thirty are needed a day, so like different people are there and if you hate some people you work with, ALL the people you hate aren't there all at once. Cause I hate like five people I work with, but only like two are ever there at once, which I find good.

I like where I work too, because there are high schoolers, kids in votecs, kids in college to become lawyers, 50 year ex crack heads, people who go to jail all the time etc. Restaurants are strange, they are one of the few jobs that can have so many different kinds of people working and having to deal with each other in a small confined environment. You work at a factory, you have all the same kinds of blue-collar people, you work in an office, you have all white-collar office workers, you have janitors but you don't have to deal with them. But a restaurant is like a little microcosm of America as a whole. I don't know, it inspires me in a way; I've always done my best work while working at restaurants.

I just completed a book called The Insurgent. Hopefully someone will publish it and I'm planning on submitting Burning Babies again.

No music plans besides listening to Party Like A Rock Star over and over and over again.
Noah Cicero is the author of The Human War (Fugue State Press, 2003), The Condemned (Six Gallery Press, 2006), The Living and the Dead (Bear Parade), and Treatise (Noah Cicero, 2007). His blog is The Outsider.