Interview Update: January 1999
Q: It's been a year since we updated this thing, Shirley. I think it has been a pretty good year for you. The Blue Öyster Cult CD, Heaven Forbid came out, Black Butterflies was published to rave reviews then later in the year it was named as a "Best Book of 1998" by Publishers Weekly. Showtime aired Twists of Terror and it got some notice. You made some other screenplay deals. We made deals for a mass market paperback of Wetbones which will be out this spring and new editions of the A Song Called Youth trilogy -- the first one Eclipse will be out soon. And you put together this huge mother of a book called Really Really Really Really Weird Stories -- three dozen stories, ten of 'em new, cover by Alan M. Clark...so tell us about the book and reflect on where you are.
I don't think anyone can get weirder than those stories, frankly -- you can get more violent, or more "sick" (I once saw an underground comic strip in which a guy fucks the soft spots in baby's heads), and you can get more "wild" in the sense of disorganized. But coherent weirdness -- that is, weirdness that never the less has internal logic and internal believability -- I don't see how you could go any farther. But weirdness was never really the point -- the point was to write stories in a new way; almost inside-out, yet with internal integrity. Many of these stories are as different from conventional stories as cubism is from the Dutch Masters (no not the cigars, wise guy). Yet they're readable -- I hope -- and they cover a wide spectrum. Many of them don't start out seeming "bizarre" -- they hopefully take you places. Sometimes all I want to do is come from outside the circle of firelight, and take someone huddled by the campfire, and lead them through the dark cold places to the top of the hill, and show them what's on the other side, because I want someone else to know it's there. You can see it in the moonlight.
Q: This March you'll be a guest of honor at the World Horror Convention. You going to perform?
A:That's the plan. I'll read a story aloud, too, of course, which is very performance oriented, and we're now organizing a back up band so I can do some of my musical material. But I can't confirm that yet. It's for now just probable. Some part of me is only fed, only warmed, when I have live rock musicians around me, and we're in that altered state (purely musically-induced, non-narcotic) of eerie communion. I'm doing some of my own songs, like "I Like to See You in Black (it makes me feel like your husband's dead)", but also a number of covers, for example Velvet Underground's "Venus in Furs", Sisters of Mercy's "Vision Thing", Rolling Stones' "Dancin With Mr D." I do a professional performance; I've been in lots of bands. It ain't no amateur thing. Right now, I'm looking for new musicians in the Bay Area for a concept band I have in mind. Especially stand-up bass, electric piano, and proficient guitar.
Q: What do you expect us to be talking about here in another year, in the year [cue eerie music] 2000?
A: There may be some commentary on the strange doings of our sleepwalking, zombified culture, but mostly I don't think things will be much different -- no more different than the "arc of change" would make them anyway, and it mostly doesn't have anything to do with the purely arbitrary 'year 2000' date. Millennial fever is a lot of horseshit. A big waste of energy. Time has no units, and life does not organize itself in decades or centuries. For me, the 60s didn't start till the 70s. Y2K will be problematic, but not radically; there will be no famine as a result of a possible temporary shutdown of computerized food distribution services for example. It'll just require resilience, adaptability, and lots of phone calls. And phone service will mostly be uninterrupted. There will be major terrorism in the early 21st century sometime. We may even lose a major city, or two, to nuclear or biological terrorism. There will be a struggle to control the consequences of the genetic engineering revolution in the first and second decades of the 21st century -- but that's already begun. The only consequence of the year 2000 will be self-fulfilling prophecies caused by jackasses, like these irritating dimwits from Denver going to Jerusalem to watch Jesus return. If Jesus does come back he'll shake his head sadly over these chuckleheads screwing up their children's lives by dragging them off in millennial hysteria as they follow their Supreme Chucklehead. People like that, those who survive their own stupidity, will be trying to live down the embarrassment for the first quarter of the 21st century. Mostly there'll be hiccups, bumps in the road, and the collective sound of millions of people slapping their foreheads at the idiocy of a few hundred thousand superstitious dumbfucks and gullible UFO cultists. That's not to say there won't be great spiritual doings in the 21st century. The Holy Spirit, as it comes to Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs, Sufis, and others, will move some to evolve to greater wakefulness and this will have some social significance. But it has nothing to do with arbitrary calenders and won't happen according to anyone's foolish schedule. For anyone who has struggled to awaken, to be more conscious, to be more of service to what is higher in us, any given day may be the dawn of a new epoch.
©1999 Paula Guran
Original Interview: January 1996
Interview Update: December 1996
Interview Update: January 1998
A: Really Really Really Really Weird Stories is an oversized, over-amped collection of my stories selected for their weirdness, and arranged in the book in order of relative weirdness (in accordance with my subjective whim). Theoretically the book gets weirder as it goes. On the whole I'm sure it does. Weirder and weirder. The book has a glib, whimsical title which acknowledges that it is an exercise in something that is not likely to be a big critical priority among literary pundits and academic soothsayers. It acknowledges that there's a big element of pure fun in the concept. However, some of the stories are probably disturbing, especially taken one after another, thirtysome of them, and that -- along with what I feel is the genuine art to be found in them -- takes the book into a realm beyond whim, beyond a "ride," I hope. No one before, so far as I know, has published a collection where the stories are arranged consecutively according to a ramping up, an increase of a quality of this sort - -weirdness, or even horrifyingness, or fantasticality. So, at least it's unique. It's also a sort of statement for me -- "I have done this...this is the gallery of this particular thing I have done...read 'em and weep". It's sort of putting it behind me, that way, so I can move onto something else.
