Portland Oregonian/Book Spy: August, 1998
When did you first know that you wanted to be a writer?
When I discovered that it was something I could do more or less well. That was a first for me. As a teenager. I discovered I could do something that didn't destroy my spirit and yet broke no laws: also a first.
Do you feel that the writing you do now expresses the same issues/ideas
as the music that you created when you were active in the punk scene? Do
you see a connection between the two mediums, or do they fulfill different
needs for you?
I write across a wide spectrum, so yes and no. I am more conservative now, in some ways -- but I'm not a conservative. I'm just in favor of order (intelligent and tolerant order though) over chaos now. I think this is wisdom and not decay. See A Man Called Thursday by G. K. Chesterton, another book I'd re-read. I want to maximize freedom - but not at the expense of the environment, for example. On the other hand my lyrics as a punk writer gravitated toward an absurdist mockery of society and even existence itself, a mockery of anthropomorphic pretensions, a recognition of the ephemeral nature of all we hold dear, a demand for honesty and sexual freedom. These things you'll find resonating in my writing I suppose. On a good day.
What do you think about the present so-called punk scene? Are there musicians or other artists and writers who you think have stayed true to the original ideals?
I think Henry Rollins and Iggy Pop and Patti Smith are all great artists, still. Most new punk bands are very career oriented, are actually into the longview, thinking about agents and publishing rights even as they write songs. The older punk artists never expected to live long enough to collect royalties. There are some good bands
though in that rough sort of catchall area: The Sick, from the Bay Area, The Tilt, Monster Magnet, and, if they are still together, L7, the various riot grrrl bands. There are lots of enormously talented people out there, in rock. While he's got some theatrical talent, charisma, admirable guts and is enjoyable I do think that Marilyn Manson is, ironically, as calculated as the Moody Blues or the Wallflowers. Jakob Dylan does not have his father's edge and his version of Bowie's "Heroes" is embarrassingly middle of the road.
While reading your web site, I saw your fiction described as
"transcendental redemptive fiction." How do feel that the themes of
violence and redemption are connected in your writing?
I didn't call it that... If those themes are both in my writing it's because I'm trying to write past my own inner violence and sickness into a redemption; I'm trying to find hope in the hopeless. Since with just a jolt or two in the right part of the brain we are all violent -- you, anyone, could be induced, with the right neurological stimulus, to murder a roomful of innocent people, (at least it is so without God's grace) -- we have to try to see through the lower humanity to find the higher; we have to recognize our basest selves, in order to be free of them. "Know thyself". Reno tries to throw a street party and tourists become rioters; students in Florida tear another town apart every year; in the name of "God" and "freedom" terrorists blew up great numbers of innocent people in Africa. They are certain they are right and millions of people, somewhere in the world, agree with them. Japanese soldiers chopped living babies into several pieces, butchered hundreds of thousands of civilians in Nanking before WW2 ; ordinary people collaborated with Stalin and Hitler; Americans turned ships full of Jewish refugees away from our shores during the Holocaust; industrialists sell lethal pesticides banned here to the poor in the third world knowing full well it will cause birth defects and cancer. Should we pretend that isn't there? I could go on....
I also saw in your biography on your web site that you once lived in the
area of Portland, Oregon. How do you feel about returning to Portland for
this reading? Do you have any special affection for the city?
Sure I do. I lived there for years, I have friends there, I played there. I had my fans, when I sang with various bands, but I was not a "cool" punk, I wasn't fashionably young enough or fashionably sullen enough. But I liked the scene. I started, with Mark Sten, the first punk club in Portland, the Revenge Club. I read with Walt Curtis and friends at The Long Goodbye. I humped a Christmas tree around a room during a song at a Christmas rock show; during a probably-atrocious punk rendition of "Sympathy for the Devil" I leapt from stage onto a table in a nightclub where some girls where sitting and they recoiled as they were sprayed with my reeking sweat. Portland was very tolerant. Portland is open minded. People in Portland read. God bless them.
You have been called the creator of cyberpunk; now that there are other
writers active in the genre, do you read their writing? Does it influence
your writing?
Cyberpunk as a science fiction literary stream was the confluence of various people, working more or less simultaneously, like Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker and William Gibson and me. But I suppose City Come A-Walkin' and Transmaniacon were proto-cyberpunk and Gibson acknowledges their influence. I don't read science fiction anymore, I don't have time for much fiction at all. Mostly I read nonfiction. When I read fiction it's very very select or the occasional escapism -- but I don't escape into science fiction. Though I did re-read CS Lewis' Space Trilogy recently. Wonderful stuff. I'm sure there are grand writers writing sf now.
How do you envision the Internet expanding in the next years? Is the
Internet a topic that you're interested in exploring in your writing? How
do you feel it affects the act of writing, and of finding an audience for a
writer's work
I envision it expanding with tireless tiresomeness. I don't see much harm in it -- except that I think that people should not assume that because some alleged "fact" is "published" (and that word should be used very advisedly in this context) on the Net, that it has any factual validity. There's a huge amount of disinformation there, there are vast numbers of con artists there, predators in that digital sea; people will assert things there that, for no good reason, are believed when they would not be believed in other media. I think we should beware of this. We should use it selectively.
But I think overall it'll do more good than harm: it is an expedient method for cross cultural infusion of ideas and perspectives. It is fertile soil for ideas, for the seeds of freedom, and -- since so far it is non-national, transcending boundaries -- hopefully it will work against that destructive, ruinous force, nationalism. It's another point of contact with the world. I have reached some readers there through the Web site and it is, of course, valuable for selling books.
But people can get lost in the Internet, floundering like drunks through its shallows (rather than surfing), and it's a mistake to spend too much time there, or to expect too much of it.
It's just another medium. Also people are beginning to use it excessively for "research" which leads to shallow and often porous results. People need to embrace new technologies but not mindlessly -- and not necessarily every one that comes. Too many of them -- like the phone-menu thing in lieu of human beings when you call a business -- are force fed to us. If a technology restricts our contact with human beings - like the new voice response systems we are about to be force fed -- it dehumanizes us. We have to interrogate technology, and insist that it serve us and not the inverse.
What are you reading now?
I am alternating between The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy --part of his admirable border trilogy about the American Southwest and Mexico and the unusual people there who, unlike people in Los Angeles and many other places, actually feel and experience life -- and The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant, the Christ and Caeser volume Story of Civilization is a vast work, monumental, yet written for lightweights like me, the relatively educated layman interested in history, and is surprisingly readable and even entertaining), and Life is Real Only Then, When I Am by G. I. Gurdjieff which is a book of esoteric ideas, for lack of a better explanation in brief.
What do you want to read that you haven't read yet?
I picture a kind of infinitely regressing nautilus shell spiral of books when you ask that. The Yellow Admiral by Patrick O'Brian and the few other books by this brilliant yet eminently readable author I haven't read. About 40% of that much-denigrated 100 best books list. The rest of Cormac McCarthy. Don DeLilo. James Ellroy. Have neglected most of those two authors. Katherine Dunn's new book when she finally writes it.
Are there books that you are embarrassed to admit you
have read or want to read? Do you have a secret passion that no
one would ever expect you to have?
I think of that passage in C. S. Lewis' wonderful The Screwtape Letters in which one demon berates another for allowing his "patient" to read a book purely for the pleasure of it even though the book is not edifying. The thing to do, the demon says, in so many words, is to keep them reading the fashionable books, the "right" books, the chic books, the intellectually important books of the day. But if they read things they like, it's disastrous for their demons. It's too nourishing....Hell, I don't know, Larry McMurtry? I tend to read the latest Spencer novels by Parker, though they are very uneven...I admired a recent pot-boiler -- but a good one -- by Mitchell Smith. I might secretly read a Michael Moorcock fantasy sometime.
Do you highlight books or write notes to yourself in the
margins?
Only in nonfiction and not often. This is very self involved and neurotic in people, I find, but maybe that's too judgmental. No.
The infamous desert island question: if you were shipped off to a desert
island and were only allowed three books, which ones would they be?
Let's see...Annie Sprinkle's diary? Oh I suppose then I'd pick some books I don't really want to read (despite Lewis) but have been putting off reading and ought to like The Columbia History of the World, Gurdjieff's Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, and The Collected Works of...Shakespeare? Dostoyevsky? The Vedas? Collected works of Suzuki on Zen? But if I wanted to be kind to myself I'd probably pick a large book of 19th century poetry, a volume of sixteen Aubrey/Maturin Patrick O'Brian books improbably collected in one volume, and The Worm Oroborousby E. R. Eddison.
What are you obsessing about these days? What's been on your mind?
Denial: how we're all in denial about the state of the world, about death, about our possibility for making a life after death, about slipping the noose of responsibility and the role Denial plays in that. About the inevitability and ultimate (unpopular viewpoint here) desirability of a world government -- a benevolent world government, yes it's possible. Because a world government is inevitable, in the next century, and if we don't construct one -- one that protects freedom, paradoxically -- we will have one forced on us willy nilly: A monstrous one.
(© 1998 The Portland Oregonian)
