(interviews undertaken for 3:AM Magazine, Dogmatika, The Quietus, Bookmunch & Verbal Magazine in reverse chronology)
– Deborah Levy (author of Swimming Home, Beautiful Mutants and Swallowing Geography, playwright and poet)
‘I can’t understand why everyone isn’t attracted to modernism. How can we disagree with the idea that there is subjective as well as chronological time? One of the things that really fascinates me about the novels of Anita Brookner is that I regard her male and female characters as 18th century characters living in the 20th century. This is not a dig at a skilled writer — it genuinely interests me. How can anyone who is engaged with literature be arrogant and dumb enough to dismiss the writing of (in no particular order) Whitman, Baudelaire, Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Pound, Stein, Eliot, Genet, Beckett, Woolf, and Mansfield as an irrelevant experiment? I was born into a world that was utterly changed by modernism. Modernism is the soft typewriter of the womb that made me. How can point of view not be multi-angled? Don’t they have to blinker horses with a leather blind to stop them from having a multi-angled point of view?’
– Sergio De La Pava (author of A Naked Singularity and Personae)
‘If A Naked Singularity is full of digressions what are they digressing from. If you answer “from the story” then I think you and I just have a vastly different conception of what a long story that would feel genuine simply is. Because if your life is a form of story then surely it’s digressive as hell, to its very core. The restraint comes from the fact that we don’t go to novels to see a perfect mimicry of life. After all, if you find quotidian life so compellingly instructive you can simply stand still and have it rush at you in blissful unrelenting waves. No, we want the novel to perform an artful distillation for us; we don’t want to see every play, just the highlight reel. So if I’m charged with that curatorial activity, including everything would be a form of abdication and precisely the kind that results in bad art. Same for letting the thing write itself, which is just another way of saying that aesthetic standards have been abandoned. I’m old fashioned, man. If the ship goes down, I’m sinking with it.’
– Kevin Williamson (poet, polemicist, founder of Rebel Inc and writer/performer of Robert Burns: Not In My Name)
‘What has been marginalised is the fact that Burns was an important 18thC political radical and thinker, a seditious revolutionary and a staunch republican. In the last four years of his life he came within a baw hair of being jailed or deported for anti-government activities. Therein lies a tale… Interpreting Burns’s poetry, and making it sound both contemporary and authentic, is a challenge, which I think most sensible poets would back away from, but the verse lends itself to perfomance so the bulk of the work is done for me. I’ve tried to interpret these poems they way I believe Burns MAY have performed them if he was alive today. Burns was so streetwise I’m pretty sure he’d try and make his radical verse pack an explosive punch. More John Lydon than Harry Lauder…’
– Will Stone (poet, author of Drawing In Ash, Glaciations & translator of Stefan Zweig, Charles Baudelaire & Georg Trakl amongst others)
‘I think Zweig was extremely sensitive to loss and the sense that human beings are unaware of how what they are doing in the present impacts on the future. He exhibits certain prophetic qualities in this regard and although he has no idea of the ferocity and barbarism that is to come, he is aware instinctively of the light slowly fading. I think he is, as a traveller, seeing places and making comparisons, between different visits, at different times… which enable him to make judgements, and over the whole collection this fans the flames of anxiety regarding the way the world is slowly de-spiritualised, so to speak, by the commercial and the totalitarian. So, yes this book is a memento mori of a past utterly vanished, which was vanishing even as it was recorded, something which cannot be regained, and it was this that Zweig was so sensitive to, that terrible realisation…’
– Paul Stubbs (poet, author of The Theological Museum, The Icon Maker & Ex Nihilo, co-editor of The Black Herald Press)
‘Whether the ‘German Expressionists’ or the best of ‘The Beats’, John Donne or Georg Trakl, we are always drawn towards language and poets who both explore and by-pass the traditions into which they were born and from which they have evolved. All ‘isms’ after all have been born of the first proto-language, the pre-historical tongue-root that needs to be ink-watered and allowed to grow in a natural, primordial and syntactical way.’
– Lee Rourke (author of The Canal & Everyday)
‘It’s basically a new phenomenon – only about 200 hundred years old. Boredom is inextricably linked to modernity. It is a modern thing. This has to be linked to technology, the fact that technology is leaving us behind, waiting for us to use it. This must be the reason we are becoming increasingly more bored… boredom reveals to us the gaping void we are so afraid of. Now that God is dead all we have is technology. Technology once afforded us the privilege of becoming God ourselves, but now technology has surpassed us. We are left paralysed, motionless and lost. No amount of gadgets, holidays, recreational drugs and spiritual awakenings with help to alleviate this underpinning fact. We seriously don’t know what to do with ourselves. This is the crippling nature of boredom: it reveals to us our finite, limited, meaningless lives – and we can’t handle that… I suppose it’s how we choose to look at this that is the important thing. I would rather try to embrace boredom full-on than try to fill my life with things in order to keep it at bay.’
– Adelle Stripe (poet, Brutalist and underground icon, author of Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid & Cigarettes In Bed)
‘My Grandma gave me these weird Watchtower books with all the bible stories in them, re-written with a fundamentalist Jehovah Witness bent. The JW artists create pictures of heaven, hell, paradise, sin, damnation – perfect families living perfect lives and a world free of disease. I know for a fact that some of the artists started subverting the medium and pictures appeared in Awake where in the foreground a lion would be lying down with a lamb and in the background – if you squinted – you could see a man jacking off in the bushes… They really are completely nuts. It’s a glorified Apocalypse Cult. I knew from a really early age that it was all a load of codswallop, but I was totally enchanted by the art… Those pictures pretty much sold the idea of sin to me. Sin looked like a right laugh. Paradise looked fucking depressing…’
– Paul O’Connell (comic genius behind The Sound of Drowning)
‘I’m afraid I think of superheroes as a bit like the colourful and sometimes vaguely entertaining population of a retirement-home cum psycho-geriatric ward. So that’s probably where I’d put them all, losing their marbles and fighting incontinence. Nothing would ever really happen beyond an endless routine of feeding, washing and toileting. It wouldn’t be very interesting or meaningful but then I reckon that’s pretty much keeping things true to the genre. When people start talking about superheroes in any depth it’s like a part of my soul freezes over…’
– Patrick deWitt (author of Ablutions)
‘I’ve found [the drinkers’] reasons to be unique, though usually stemming from one type of loneliness or another, the need to share space and time with other people. More specifically: some wanted to be entertained, some wanted to be the entertainers; some wanted sex, some wanted violence; some wanted to lie, some wanted to be lied to; and some simply wanted to become drunken without the interruptions or interferences of home. I felt a good many were hoping to re-create an environment of group friendship, and though this was largely false, it was similar enough to satisfy the urge.’
– Rennie Sparks (The Handsome Family, author of Evil)
‘That kind of thinking drives me crazy. It shows a complete lack of understanding regarding the purpose and possibilities of art in general. Murder ballads are nothing like real murder. They are rituals to celebrate the fleeting beauty of all things.’
– John Wray (author of Lowboy, The Right Hand of Sleep & Canaan’s Tongue)
‘In much the same way that Canaan’s Tongue was an exorcism of my anger at the American military-industrial apparatus, Lowboy was begun in the hope of channeling my anxiety about climate change into something outside of myself, and thereby loosening its grip on me somewhat. I was having recurring nightmares about it at the time that I began the book, and they did, in fact, grow steadily less frequent as I worked. During daylight hours I’m still shitting my pants, however.’
– Chris Killen (author of The Bird Room)
‘The Bird Room is released and is so successful a range of toy action models are made of Christopher Killen. The merchandising department wish to know what your superpower is or would be?’
CK: “Social Awkwardness Man.”
I have the following abilities:
* To stop a conversation dead.
* To accidentally alienate myself/others/everyone.
* To sense that someone within a 100-mile radius is either not being included in a conversation, or being spoken about, within earshot, in a derogatory manner (however I don’t the ability to do anything about it except cringe).
– James Kelman (Booker-Prize winning author of Kieron Smith, Boy, The Busconductor Hines, A Disaffection, You Have To Be Careful in the Land of the Free and How late it was, how late)
‘The distinction between battles and wars: people mistake battles for wars. Questions around language and imperialism have been to the fore for hundreds of years. My work still suffers in this respect, the new novel notwithstanding. The forces of reaction are what they are, they don’t go away.’
– Nicholas Hogg (author of Show Me The Sky & The Hummingbird and the Bear)
‘Rebellion and survival may often be the same act. Particularly when attempting to maintain your identity. And in a time where intrusion into who you are is the norm, whether this is CCTV, Facebook profiles, a mobile phone and its twenty four hour connection, a rejection of modernity is one way of defining the line of self more clearly. And as ‘self’ is not only you, but the people around you, your environment, vanishing can be refuge from the bombardment of living – especially for a globally famous rock star scrutinised by press and fans.’
– The Brutalists (Tony O’Neill, Adelle Stripe & Ben Myers)
‘Our critics think we are misogynists, idiots, uneducated, uncouth, and guttural. But that’s okay with me, because every poetry movement in history has had exactly the same problem with the poetry establishment.’
– Bernard MacLaverty (author of Cal, Lamb & Grace Notes) [pdf]
‘With regard to the Troubles it was impossible to stay silent. A writer writes about the world and the people around him, their concerns, their lives. To have been reared in Northern Ireland and for it to slide into chaos at the age of twenty-six – at an age when you are trying to write – how could you not say something? But it took a long time to gestate. The first attempt was Lamb a metaphor of something destroyed through misguided love. Then the second novel Cal attempted to deal directly with violence. But in such situations the sword is always mightier than the pen. The pen has to wait.’
– David Bishop (author & former editor of 2000AD – the man who was Tharg)
Finding great new writers is so much harder. It’s much harder for writers to introduce their talent, their voice. Artists can go to life drawing classes, but writers just have to write. They need to produce so much material before they produce anything worth publishing, but where are they going to do that? British comics have unearthed one great new writer a year for the past thirty years, if that. There’s a limited amount of work around and you’re up against the likes of John Wagner or Pat Mills, men with shelves laden with awards and thirty years experience. It’s a problem not easily solved. The best thing would-be writers can do is hook up with an artist and self publish, get some material under their belt before approaching the likes of 2000AD. Learn the craft, learn to walk before running to Tharg for a job.
– various old interviews with writers to follow…
