This Week’s Column: SPIEGELMAN'S BURNING ... a MobyLives interview by Dennis Loy Johnson Continued ... D.J.: Obviously you're not worried about whether your novel becomes a mainstream success – but does this lack of concern indicate that you think there's something going on in the literary scene at the moment? I.S.: Honestly, I don't sense a change happening. I think there's a real problem with what literature is in America right now. And it's that, you look at any other medium, you look at movies or music, and they address these situations that almost every suburban and urban neighborhood is a war zone. The fact that no one in thirty years has grown up with parents to raise them. The fact that girls get date–raped every day. Babies get stolen and fucked every day. And that is what, to me, America is about right now. And then I read what is on the New York Time Bestseller List, and it's, well I'm a college professor and I'm having trouble with my wife. I'm a woman who's forty and I'm getting divorced. D.J.: But if they're on the bestseller list it means a lot of people want to read about it. I.S.: Yeah, but a best–selling novel in terms of numbers is garbage. I mean, what is that? A hundred thousand people bought your book? The best–selling album is seven million. A best–selling movie is, you know, ten million people went to see it opening day. And the movies are all of that. I mean, X–men — what is X–men? X–men is a bunch of fucking kids who are different and got fucked with and they're using their superpowers. And literature doesn't touch on any of that. It's the only place where prep–school kids are still allowed to be considered experts on anything. They have two things in literature right now. You have old men and middle–aged women writing about being divorced and college professors, and you have twenty–two–year–olds writing about their amazing adventures in college. Neither one of those are fit for publication, I mean, it's a world full of people who haven't lived or done anything. And more offensive is the younger part of it — these children with memoirs. D.J.: So you're suggesting literature can still change things? I.S.: Well, yeah, I mean, the problem is it's become such a boutique thing ever since, I've gotta say, DeLillo. I mean, I have to point out "White Noise" as being a meaningless exercise where a bunch of intellectuals got together and said, oh, this is what we should celebrate. Before that, it was at least still Vonnegut, where the average person would be like, did you read this crazy–ass fucking book with pictures of assholes in it? This is nuts! And things have been changing disgustingly for twenty, twenty–five years to where people whine about no one's reading books. They're reading fucking, you know, Crichton. It's the most tastefully decorated shit–house literature. It's a bunch of college kids writing about college. I look at Eggers and Moody and that whole gang that we're celebrating now, and I feel like there's a college professor somewhere that they're trying so hard to impress with their tricks.       I mean, I recently joined this lobbying group called protect.org that's trying to get stiffer child protection laws passed across the country. One thing they're trying to change, in almost every state, is if you rape your own child you'll do far less time than if you rape someone else's. It's this psychotic rule in almost every state that protects pedophiles who, the phrase is, 'grow their own' victims. I don't think I can know things like that and then read, much less write, some snippy little screed about perception in the media age. D.J.: You mentioned memoirs –– I.S.: Whoever decided that someone beneath the age of sixty should write a memoir should die. I mean, a memoir by its very nature can't be art. I mean, Eggers and James Frey — James Frey, it's a fact, it's out there that he tried to sell his book as a novel, and no one would buy it. So he sold it as a memoir. Eggers never even tried to write a novel, he sold it as a memoir. And what is the only reason for young men to sell a memoir? Because you're sitting there and you're swearing, oh it's true, it's true, you have to feel sorry for me. So you have this book that you can't even criticize from Eggers because, oh my god, both his parents died. And I'm like, you know what? You had two committed, responsible parents for twenty–two years, which is more than any American that I know ever got in terms of people my age, and you wanna cry about it, fine. But when you make it into a memoir, you're strapped into telling so–called truth. What I write, most of the time I'm writing fiction, it's like I have a whole ocean in front of me, and I can breathe under water. I don't have to obey any law. I don't have to tell anybody's truth. I can blow up the world on page five, and I can resurrect the world on page seven. I mean, so, I don't know how you think you're getting anywhere near art with a two–inch fucking alembic. There's no distillation. And you know what? That book is a best–seller, but in terms of what is a best–selling thing in America, it's a fucking nothing. I mean, fucking twenty million kids watch Buffy every week. Buffy makes me more emotional than anything I've read by living writers in ten years. It's, it's TV, and you wanna say it's shit, it's true, but it's at least about emotions. It's at least about imagination. D.J.: You don't think it's that we're not a society that reads, anymore, period? I.S.: It's that people don't want to read what you've given them. They don't wanna read a twenty–two–year–old's novel about his life at twenty–two. They don't want to read a college professor's problems being a college professor. There are real stories out there. America's full of them, I mean, this is the fucking land where every myth on earth came together at the same time. Yeah, I can go and have a fucking Norwegian tell me Odin myths, and I can go another block away and hear that Chupacabra is from Puerto Rico. This country is full of myth, and it's full of stories, but there's no one out there working, who's famous, who knows anything about that. D.J.: Let me ask you this, Mr. Page Six Columnist: Do we need to separate the idea of fame from writing? Has writing gone too much into that whole system? I.S.: Yeah. We have to stop celebrating authors rather than their work. I mean — D.J.: Are you a part of that at Page Six? IS: I don't think I've ever written a positive story about an author ... ever. D.J.: You wrote a positive story about a Melville House writer, B.R. Myers. I.S.: Oh yeah, no, no, no. He's different. Oh no, Myers is underground, and he's making a point that I wanted everyone to see. Like I wanted everyone to read that book. I wanted to change things. Unfortunately, he's up against huge, huge, huge resistance on every level. But I am not part of what celebrates J.T. LeRoy or anyone else. I mean, J.T. LeRoy will call Page Six and tell us, "I've impregnated Asia Argento." And we're like, I know you didn't, you're gay. You didn't have sex with her. And he's like "Well, just write it, just write it." He's one of those tortured kids, I mean. I wish he gave himself more time to be a better writer, but I still have sympathy for what he's about. But I feel very bad for him because I can see his pathologies hanging out all over the place. It's like, he wants to be friends with famous people. He thinks that'll fix it. And it seems almost like he doesn't want to write anymore. He just wants to make a safe place for himself to hide in, because he's a survivor and he thinks that what he's doing now is going to help him survive. But it's not. I hope he figures it out because making friends with famous people will never, ever pay off for anybody. So, am I part of the celebration of these jerks? No. I'm not. D.J.: Well, you do give as much regular coverage to the ULA — The Underground Literary Alliance — as you do to the New Yorker. I.S.: I just wish that my choice wasn't between the New Yorker and ULA. I feel like there has to be another option for people. ULA wants, you know, real writing, but I think if they get their way, it's all going to be tough–guy James Elroy stuff, and that shit makes me puke. D.J.: The ULA actually staged a disturbance at a New Yorker reading a few months ago. Someone was reading a story about a tree, and they thought it should be about, I'm not sure, manual labor, I think. What do you think of those kind of tactics? I.S.: The question is, is it okay to just write about whatever you want? And I say, oh yes. Write whatever the fuck you want to write. Write about a mousetrap. Write about your first girlfriend. Write about a shoe. I don't give a fuck about your subject matter if you can grow an emotional response out of it, then good. If you can't, you're a failure, go away, and don't write another one of those stories. And that's the problem with what drives someone to write a story about a tree is he's doing his academic, collegiate homework, and he's not in college anymore. And there's no room in the world for that. There are people living real lives with real problems, with real existential issues and dudes are writing about trees and pieces of paper and paper clips and shoelaces, and these might be my favorite things, but if you can't pull an emotion out of that stuff, then fuck you, suck it up, drop dead, is my opinion. D.J.: Wanna do that last part again? I.S.: Fuck you, suck it up, drop dead. I mean — I don't believe in, in an entire book that's just riffing on literature, like "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," which underneath it all is just soppy sad story, but it is geared as this thing that he meant to sell a million copies. And he used every trick you can use. He used Italo Calvino's I–am–writing–a–book thing, you know. He uses Kurt Vonnegut's whole like, stop, listen, you're in this book with me. And it's to lame effect, in Eggers, but all of that is a good thing, all of these are good things to do if underneath there's a real story that you care about. I'm digressing, but I'll get back to the point, but when I think of him, and when I think of, like, Moody, and when I think of some of the others that have come along, especially Saffron Fouer, I think of like, imagine we were Vikings and we sat down at the long house after a day of pillaging and fighting, and we sit down around the fire, and we're like, what are our lives about? And the storyteller comes up to tell us this story about Odin, and how he made the world from his blood. And that is what's going to, for that night, attach us to each other, make us a community, give us this little bit of closer proximity to our souls. And imagine this storyteller sits down and he tells us, I'm going to tell you about Odin, and how he made the world from his blood. But first I'm going to tell you about how hard it is to tell you about Odin, and that talking about Odin is strange for me, and that this other guy tried to talk about Odin and that was strange for him too. And that's riffing. And that's all Eggers is doing. He never gets down to the Odin story. He never gets down to what makes me feel my soul, what makes me feel connected to you or the reader or anyone. He just riffs and tells me about how a thousand other people have told the Odin story. D.J.: How do you account for the popularity of someone like Eggers? His book sold even in the millions, I think. I.S.: Yeah, well, it came out in '99, it came out during this whole hipster thing, when hipsterism was at its height. When it happened, I was there, I was in media. I was covering it. I know that his success wasn't natural. I know it was not what like he says now, or what he's put in the book — I know it was so, so many planted items. D.J.: Planted by who? I.S.: Planted by Eggers and his people. Mysterious girls calling up, oh, did you see this. He built a system of hipster doofuses that don't have, as far as I can tell, real emotions to build up. They're into wearing knit caps in July at bars. They're into telling people they read Iceberg Slim novels when they never have. And they've never read, for example, Moby Dick. They've never read Winesburg, Ohio. They've never read anything. When you read Dave Eggers book, there's no clue that anything he's ever read is an influence before 1980. I mean, fuck you, Eggers, if you don't know the intrinsic value of Don Quixote, if you don't know the natural–born power of Moby Dick, if you don't know Romeo & Juliet, if you don't know the poems of Blake... If you don't know that, you're done, man, you have nothing to say. I mean, his whole riff of post–modern pop culture — that isn't the stuff of literature. People don't die for that. People don't lose their lives over Schoolhouse Rock. You know, literature is five thousand years of history and religions fighting it out. Eggers is to literature what Scientology is to religion. And for me, bad writing is bad philosophy is bad religion. And so that's why I get, like, mad about it. You're propagating bad religion in my world while I'm alive, I'll stop you. I will do what I can to hurt you. If you try to make my girlfriend join a cult, I'll hurt you. If you try to make my girlfriend stop reading things that will nourish her soul and awaken her for the magic that exists in the universe in favor of wow, I saw a really good episode of Good Times, I will crush you. D.J.: How did pop literature become so irrelevant? I.S.: I think the problem with what we have now for literature, is that there's no one out there that's emotional. The whole modus operandi at the New Yorker is detachment and that's been the way for twenty years, and that's the way people think literature should be, but the fact is it's never been that way before. It's always been get emotional, do whatever you can to connect the reader with the emotion of the book or the scene in the book. And with this so–called ironic detachment, there's no emotion in that. It's looked down upon that you might actually need someone, that you might actually write something or create a situation in which they feel scared or sad enough to cry or happy enough to laugh. Once that's missing, it's no wonder to me that me and all my friends are seeing X–men 2, and we're not buying the latest New Yorker book. D.J.: You wrote a difficult book, I think for mainstream publishers to deal with, particularly because of the sex. What was your experience like? I.S.: I got my ass kicked all over town. We got rejected for seven months. We got rejected by twenty–five publishers. D.J.: These were the big houses? I.S.: They were all big names from publishers. And it was very frustrating because it wasn't just rejection, it was like — at one house, I can't say which one, but at one house, one editor really went for it, and so she showed it to the editorial director of that house. Editorial director — this is one of the major ones — stood up at the meeting, said we have to buy this book. He was shouted down by the editor–in–chief. She was like, a married woman, about forty–five years old –– D.J.: Because it offended her sensibilities? I.S.: Yes, because it offended her sensibilities. Another thing that happened, at another mainstream press that you would have thought was a shoe–in — Oh fuck it, I'm just going to say it. It was Grove. An editor there really liked it, was really behind it all the way. And when it came down to it, Morgan Entreken was interested in publishing, you know, Nick McDonnell's book or whatever, that twenty–year–old kid, you know, whose brother was his godson. And I only name it because I hope that Morgan burns for what he did, I really do. I think he made his bones picking out the best and the strangest and people with nowhere else to publish, and by the time I got to him, he was about Cold Mountain. He was about his best friend's son's shit book. And he was about to publish a twenty–year–old who doesn't know anything about anything. And his whole publishing house was laughing at him as he published that book. And it sold a lot of copies, I'm sure he's happy. But you know what? He's done.       And that's why the fact that Villard picked it up, I was so psyched. I couldn't believe it. This dude Bruce Tracey, he's the editorial director at Villard ... I actually had to go and meet him and talk to him about it and convince him and still, the very last day — I woke up that morning, and I was so nervous I started drinking at eight in the morning. And by the time the call came in that Villard had bought it, I was passed out and missed the phone call by four hours. I had written this massive drunken e–mail, saying what are you in this business for don't you want to publish books you believe in? Like, would you please just believe in this book and buy it? D.J.: You actually sent the e–mail? I.S.: I actually sent it. It was the stupidest thing I ever did, but it worked, I mean. He actually signed it. But the whole process... I can only say it was horrifying, and I was so scared for so long. D.J.: Are you still? I.S.: Yeah, I'm still terrified of it. D.J.: About what? The response? Getting coverage? I.S.: I never got into writing the book to say, oh, I'm going to sell a bunch of books. I wrote a book knowing it was an underground thing. I wrote a chapter on eating a girl's ass. I know when I wrote that, this isn't for everyone. Funny anecdote, in terms of getting coverage — I got an e–mail two weeks ago from an editor at Men's Health who had the book who read it who said, "We really like this book. We really want to cover it, but this is a family magazine, and I can't open up a page of this book where someone's not getting raped at a funeral." And I'm like... D.J.: And the problem is? I.S.: Exactly. I'm like, there's only one scene where someone gets raped at a funeral. I'm getting a lot of that type of feedback, though, like it's too dark for us to cover. It's a real fucking struggle. There's no little kid story behind it. It's about adults and it's about real trouble that human beings have. Part One: The fine line between fiction and gossip ... Part Two: Writing about sex nowadays ... ©2003 Dennis Loy Johnson Home

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