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Authentically Inauthentic

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This appeared in 3:AM Magazine on 30 July 2009

Authentically Inauthentic

Gavin James Bower interviewed by Andrew Gallix.

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[Pic: Carl Wilkinson]

3:AM: In a way, you became a novelist as a result of the failure of all your other career options. You started off as an intern at Dazed & Confused, but instead of encouraging you to become a journalist, they introduced you to modelling. You were a model for the best part of 2 years and then packed it in because you hadn’t gone mega as you’d hoped (the “skinny-jeans-and-winklepickers ‘look’,” as you describe it, was no longer all the rage anyway). Then you worked for a production company — a job you enjoyed — but were made redundant. And that’s when you started writing Dazed & Aroused, right?

GJB: I like the idea of finding success through failure. There’s something bittersweet about it, as if I’d worked all my life in a factory and then, on the day I retired, won the lottery.

But, in truth, it feels more like I’ve come full circle — and all a bit by accident too. I first wanted to be a writer at uni and had some success as a journalist, but then didn’t really manage to get off the ground when I graduated. I kind of just fell into modelling as a way to get to London, which, being from a small town in the North, had this tremendous pull for me. I suppose I was going to figure it out as I went along. That was ‘the plan’ anyway.

When modelling didn’t work out, though, and after working a few media jobs for a while — and getting sucked into the whole 22 grand job thing — I ended up writing the novel I’d wanted to write since first arriving in London. I’d been working for a ‘green’ production company, but they’d spunked about eight million quid against a wall and made everyone redundant — so I had plenty of time on my hands over Christmas 2007. I’d been making notes on a novel for the two years I’d been in London, and was very clear on its premise. My writing’s very ideas-driven and not so reliant on plot, which probably makes it ‘literary fiction’ I suppose.

Anyway, that was all worked out — but I hadn’t dared to commit to the narrator’s own story. It was always going to be about alienation in the way Marx explained it in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, with the narrator being the personification of the capitalist social relation — an estranged individual who exploits others for personal gain, but refuses to connect to anyone or anything — but I’d been too cowardly to commit to creating his personality, and the world he inhabited day to day. I was stuck somewhere between a cynical office worker and a trustafarian — neither of which appealed to me as a writer.

I’d been very reluctant to write what for me was a ‘serious’ novel and set in the fashion world. With me losing my job, though, I just made a decision to sit down and write it. I had so much ammunition, and it just made sense.

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3:AM: I understand that writing was always your main ambition, though. Apart from Ellis (whom we’ll return to), which authors inspired you to become a writer yourself?

GJB: I’d say early Marx was a big influence, as was Jean-Paul Sartre, especially Nausea. I’d always read a lot of philosophy too, being a history graduate, and probably enjoyed that more than fiction.

When it comes to fiction, William S. Burroughs, Albert Camus, F. Scott Fitzgerald: these are all writers I admire.

One of the first people who really got me excited about being a writer myself, though, was Lee Taylor (editor of Flux magazine). My first published article was in FLUX. I emailed him to ask for some work experience with the mag, while I was still at uni. He didn’t want anyone but we ended up having a month-long email conversation, which then led to me just writing something. He published it and that was that.

3:AM: You’ve said that you like Richard Milward, Chris Killen, Joe Stretch, and Niven Govinden. Do you feel an affinity with them? I see strong parallels between your work and that of Christiana Spens and Joe Stretch in particular: do you agree?

GJB: I’m reading and loving The Wrecking Ball right now actually, and it’s incredible to see the parallels now my book’s been published. I’m not sure I’d have written it that way, though, had I read Spens beforehand — because I wouldn’t want to have felt like I was copying her. She’s a terrific writer, very talented.

Richard Milward, Joe Stretch and Chris Killen are all in their twenties, like me, and also Northern, like me. Beyond that, I don’t see that many parallels between us, as they each strike me as uniquely talented, idiosyncratic and a bit mad to be honest. It’s no bad thing, though, and is also quite flattering because I really do like their writing a lot.

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3:AM: In your book, there’s a scene in which a copy of We Are the New Romantics, Niven Govinden’s debut novel, appears. Now, a blurb by Govinden adorns the jacket of your own first novel (“Sharper than an Alexander McQueen cut”). This, I think, is a good example of the almost disquieting relationship between reality and fiction surrounding your work. I almost get the impression that you turned yourself into a character out of a Bret Easton Ellis book before writing one yourself. Take the internship at Dazed & Confused, for instance: you could have done an internship at a daily newspaper or a literary journal. You also used to write (and model for) Flux magazine, which appeals to a similar hipster constituency as Dazed, so the choice doesn’t seem totally innocent. Then there’s the fact that you can talk authentically about inauthenticity since you’ve experienced the model lifestyle from the inside. Do you reckon there’s an element of truth in all this?

GJB: I Iove the idea of being able to talk authentically about inauthenticity — I might nick that for when I next need a blurb.

If I could’ve landed an internship at a national newspaper, I’d have snapped it up. I didn’t get past a first interview for the graduate scheme at the Daily Express. True story. Looking back, I think I took the only internship going, but it’s no coincidence that I looked to magazines reflecting my interests and ended up at an arts-cum-style mag.

When I left university, I didn’t consider myself particularly ‘literary’, whatever that means. I wanted to be a journalist and was writing 500 words about installation art and hipster musicians, or bigger pieces on Surrealism. I seemed to call everyone and everything ‘bourgeois’ for a while. I think I needed to grow up as a person, as well as a writer, before being able to write a novel. Incidentally, my first and only attempt at novel writing prior to Dazed & Aroused was during uni. I was really only flirting with the idea of writing more than a page of anything, and it ended up being just a lot of sex — and not even good sex at that.

Years later, when I sat down to write what became Dazed & Aroused, I felt ready. It was as if I was purging myself of Alex — a disconnected, almost two-dimensional individual incapable of empathising with people around him, only taking from them and never giving anything in return. I wasn’t ever really caught up in the modelling world the way Alex is in the novel, and my friends were all doing very different things. Even so, his viewpoint and estrangement is an expression of mine, and so it felt very cathartic ridding myself of that aspect of my own personality, which I think all fictional creations are in a sense, as well as turning something a bit negative — the modelling — into a positive. The funny thing is, though, now the book’s out and I’m single myself — and no longer a model — I feel more and more like him every day.

As for Niven, I read and enjoyed We Are The New Romantics before writing Dazed & Aroused. I name-dropped him because of the scene in which his book appears. The characters are trying to create a sense of romance by doing drugs and listening to Depeche Mode. I think this sense of futility when it comes to romance, to idealism, is kind of my generation’s ‘thing’ — and I certainly got that from reading Niven’s book.

After I finished mine, when I was looking for an agent, I approached him for advice on getting published. I’d found him on Facebook, as it happened, and he was really nice about it. I sent the manuscript to him when it was going to be published, to see if he could come up with anything and, being Niven, he gave me a killer line.

I like the ‘almost disquieting relationship between reality and fiction’ surrounding my work, so don’t want to say more. I wouldn’t want it any other way.

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3:AM: Ok, back to Ellis. The first paragraph of Dazed, with the advertising slogan, is a nod to the opening of American Psycho. We could also mention the name-dropping, the lists of brands, Natalie’s “cool trends”, the juxtaposition of glamour and squalor (the toilets covered in diarrhoea due to the laxatives models take) and the DJ who plays Bloc Party’s “Song for Clay (Disappear Here)”. Ellis really is a major influence, isn’t he?

GJB: I have no idea what you’re talking about…

Ok seriously, yes, he’s a major influence. He’s my favourite writer and Less Than Zero my favourite novel. The Bloc Party song is the only explicit nod to him and his work in my book, but the similarities stylistically are there, certainly. I really hadn’t considered that about the first paragraph, though, and thought I was being original. Oh well.

I would say, however, that the premise and point of Dazed & Aroused is, for me, very different to anything by Ellis. It puts the ‘social’ in anti-social. (Note to self: use that when asked to blurb for Stewart Home’s next book.) In all seriousness, though, I wrote it as an indictment of individualism, and think it’s very much a materialist work at heart. Also, it’s fundamentally anti-capitalist, which I don’t think Ellis is or ever has been. He’s far more of a satirist too — pointing out problems rather than proposing solutions — whereas I’ve always fancied myself as more than just a troublemaker.

3:AM: You were three years old when Less Than Zero came out. Has it achieved classic status for you? Is it part of literary history?

GJB: I’ve never been more affected by a book and so, for me, it’s a classic. In my opinion, Less Than Zero is the best book of its kind: a book about jaded youth, about the end of innocence, about embracing the abyss. What’s funny is, Less Than Zero defined a generation and yet, today, no book is more relevant to young people.

Apart from mine, of course…

3:AM: “Gen X was brought up with a sense of values that it saw collapsing, so we have a kind of nostalgia, I guess, for something a bit more solid, although we’re very suspicious of it”: what do you make of Ewan Morrison‘s take on Generation X? That tension between suspicion and nostalgia is present in Douglas Coupland‘s work but also, I think, in Ellis’s: can you identify with that although you belong to another generation?

GJB: I’m in Generation ZZZ…right?

On a bad day, I feel like we all just don’t give a shit about anything. And even the few who do — don’t really. We’re apolitical in the worst sense, because we don’t actively look for alternatives — say, to parliamentary democracy, to oil or, crucially, to capitalism. And what makes this all the more shoddy is, we all say the same things and then do nothing about it — including me.

I suppose we’re all on some level looking for something more solid, but what’s on offer is so beguiling — and the alternatives so unpalatable — that we’re stuck between one thing, the here and now, and what’s next. It’s probably Marx’s influence on me, but I’d say we’re all just waiting for the house of cards to collapse.

On a good day, though, I think there are loads of people who do care, and who are doing something about it in a million and one ways. When I feel like that I want to knock the house of cards over myself, and I don’t want to wait around for someone else to do it for me. On a good day…

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3:AM: I don’t know if you remember that early Toby Litt story in which the narrator says that “All of this intellect stuff is fine as a consolation” for not being a beautiful young hipster which, he argues, “is how it developed in the first place: Socrates not being Alcibiades”? Since you don’t have to compensate for “not being Alcibiades”, what motivates you to write?

GJB: I don’t agree with Toby Litt, but I will say this: I’m not pretty enough to be a top model, and am too pretty to be a serious writer. I have no consolation.

3:AM: Could you tell us about the (non-)relationship between Alex and his father?

GJB: Alex is part of a generation of men who’ve been let down by their fathers, and he refuses to let it go. Like a lot of men my age I suppose, Alex blames everyone else for his unhappiness, refusing to see that it’s his unwillingness to connect with people, to make any real decisions about his life and future, which leaves him isolated, alone and unable to feel anything by the end of the novel. His father, like Alex, is essentially selfish and, having left his family and revealed himself as fallible — as all fathers do when they leave home, I’d say — he suffers the consequences.

3:AM: Your book also seems to follow a kind of Alfie/Billy Liar, tumescent/detumescent pattern: cocky young hero comes a cropper…

GJB: I don’t think Alex is a dark character, but he’s certainly not a hero. His is a cautionary tale and, as a narrator, Alex is a vehicle for me to say that I don’t like capitalism and think we need something better — or else we’ll all end up alienated, miserable and ultimately alone.

You’re right, though. The final line could easily be: ‘What’s it all about, Alex?’

3:AM: To what extent is Dazed autobiographical?

GJB: I reckon that all writing is autobiographical because, as a writer, you’re interpreting life and then projecting your prejudices on to the page. The key is, not to pretend otherwise.

I’ve just written a second book — about growing up in the North and wanting to escape — which I think is far more autobiographical and even personal than Dazed & Aroused. London, and modelling, is such a small part of my life.

Even so, a lot of what happens peripherally in Dazed & Aroused — aside from the central relationships, which is pure fiction — is based on something I experienced first-hand and then changed beyond recognition. I never related to anything in the book the way Alex does. I was either not there or, if I was, thinking something completely different.

So, to answer your question, to no extent is Dazed & Aroused autobiographical, in the sense that I am not Alex and none of it happened anyway. Apart from a lot of it.

3:AM: Apparently, you approached some 40 publishers before your manuscript was finally accepted, by Quartet Books. Did any of them give you any explanations or advice?

GJB: I think I approached 40 agents before getting one (Annabel at PFD). I don’t know how many publishers read my manuscript, but it was probably a lot. My agent only showed me the first few rejections — none of which were nasty — and then decided that this wasn’t a very good idea. I do seem to recall one of them saying that Alex reminded them of Holden Caulfield, but wasn’t as much of an ‘everyman’ character. Which was nice. In a way. I suppose.

3:AM: Things seem to have gone really fast since then: according to your blog, you signed your contract in March (2009) and the book came out in July. How long did you spend writing it? Were you writing full time, or did you have a day job? I think your novel went though 3 different drafts: was the first one very different from the finished product?

GJB: The book took around eight weeks to write, broken up by Christmas in the middle. I was writing full-time during this first draft, and then temped during the re-drafting and submission stage.

The three drafts were very similar: I really just refined it with the help of close friends and my brother. And weirdly, since being accepted by my agent last summer, it’s barely been edited. I don’t know whether that’s a ‘good thing’.

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3:AM: Who is this Kim van der Pols and how did she end up being the cover girl?

GJB: My friend Carl Davis designed the cover, based on an image taken by a photographer called Rebecca Parkes. Kim Van Der Pols was the model in the original, and is a very beautiful and sweet girl. I couldn’t be happier with it. I think it looks brilliant, very seductive and alluring, and perfectly captures Alex’s infatuation with all things ephemeral.

3:AM: How did the Stewart Home blurb come about? Are you a fan?

GJB: I’m a fan, yes. I interviewed him when I was writing for Flux, back in 2003, and we kept in touch.

He didn’t read it, though, unlike the others who gave blurbs (cross my heart). He told me not to take the industry too seriously, and asked me to come up with something for him instead. All my ideas were a bit shit, to be honest, so he suggested: ‘Fashion will never be the same…’. Appropriately, given that he didn’t read it, it’s as ambiguous as you can get — but I think it’s pretty cool all the same.

3:AM: You are currently adapting Dazed into a screenplay, aren’t you?

GJB: I think Dazed & Aroused would work well as a film. I might even play Alex myself. (Um, I’m joking. I think.)

I’ll be working with a friend on it, once book two is promoted and I can forget about it, and I’ve finished book two, which is one draft away from completion. I’ve never written a screenplay but, then again, I’d never written a novel…

3:AM: Your next novel, Made in Britain, focuses on three 16-year-olds growing up in the North. From what I’ve seen, the structure seems a little reminiscent of The Informers but I get the feeling this one’s going to be more gritty and less glamorous than your debut.

GJB: Each chapter is going to comprise three viewpoints, and the book will move chronologically from there. I’d not even thought about The Informers as an influence to be honest, and I don’t think it’ll feel like that to people because that’s so loosely connected without any clear narrative, while this has a strong narrative and clear plotline, and is written in the vernacular.

The book’s about growing up in provincial Britain and what it feels like when hope turns to despair. It’s the result of my love-hate relationship with where I was born and grew up [Burnley]. I’m very ambitious as a writer so, once I’d got the modelling out of my system, I wanted to write something far more personal. I was up North last winter and thought, why haven’t I written about being working class and from the North? So that’s what I did.

Interview With Chris Killen

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This interview was published in 3:AM Magazine on 7 June 2009:

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Chris Killen interviewed by Andrew Gallix.

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3:AM: I know that you started writing when you were 18 (you’re now 27) — what attracted you in the first place?

CK: After finding a few writers that I really liked, that I wanted to read everything I could find — J.D. Salinger, Charles Bukowski, John Fante, Richard Brautigan, etc. — it seemed natural to also start writing things of my own.

3:AM: I was surprised when I read The Bird Room because I was expecting something far more pared down given some of your influences, but your similes, for instance, are to die for (one of the female characters “has a voice like a nail file, one which smoothes away anything rough or unnecessary”). How many drafts did you go through?

CK: There were three main drafts. There was an original 30,000 word one. Then I edited it down to just under 20,000 words. Then, the final draft, probably where I inserted all those similes and things that you liked, brought it back up to about 35,000 words.

But I also edit as I’m writing. I can’t do that thing where you just write a draft straight through and then go back at the end and clean it up. I do a kind of ‘cyclic’ thing where I loop back and edit after about every six sentences or so.

3:AM: On the subject of influences, are you a fan of Dan Rhodes? I think William — the narrator — embodies a very Rhodesque kind of pessimistic and slightly masochistic masculinity…

CK: I am definitely a fan of Dan Rhodes, the person. I have only met him once and emailed a few times, but he seems very nice and genuine. I wouldn’t say he was an influence on my writing, though, because I’ve only read a couple of his books — Gold and Anthropology — and both well after I’d finished The Bird Room. I do like what I’ve read, though.

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3:AM: Could you tell us about the role Steven Hall has played in the publication of The Bird Room?

CK: Steven was instrumental in my deal with Canongate. I met him a couple of times when I was working at Waterstone’s — once at an event for The Raw Shark Texts and once over the counter on a Saturday afternoon. We’d chatted a bit about books we liked, online writing, etc. I mentioned that I had finished a novel (at that point I was on the second draft, the 19,000 word version) and Steven asked if he could read it. He gave me his email address, I sent it to him, and then he passed the first chapter and my email onto his editor, Francis, at Canongate.

3:AM: Gwendoline Riley, Joe Stretch, HP Tinker…there seems to be a thriving literary scene in Manchester — or is this a false impression? Is a scene coalescing around your monthly reading night (No Point in Not Being Friends)?

CK: Both true and false, I think. There are definitely a lot of good, interesting writers in Manchester, but I don’t think they all hang out together all the time. Or if they do, I’m not invited.

I have met lots of nice people through the No Point nights, and there are people who come back again and again and who read regularly. But that’s kind of a worry for me, though, if anything — the idea of a pronounced ‘scene’. To me, that implies that it’s become too cliquey and incestuous to be attractive to nervous outsiders.

3:AM: Do you feel an affinity with other authors writing today?

CK: In terms of other ‘young, British authors’ or something, maybe Richard Milward and Joe Stretch. Not so much in writing style, but in terms of ‘situation’ and meeting them a few times and hanging out and them being nice.

I feel affinity mostly with ‘internet’ writers. I say ‘internet’, but a lot of the people whose blogs I follow — Shane Jones, Sam Pink, Blake Butler, Brandon Scott Gorrell, etc. — are also publishing or have published books this year. Which is great.

I feel a particular affinity with Brandon Scott Gorrell. I have talked to him on gmail chat, corresponded by email, read his blog, his poems, his currently unpublished novel (“My Hair Will Defeat You”), and seen short films he has made. Occasionally I feel like Brandon Scott Gorrell is a more ‘hip’, American version of me or something.

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3:AM: You’re going to be the Writing Fellow at the University of Manchester. Are you looking forward to that?

CK: That’s happening right now. I’m here for one semester, until July, I think. It’s really good — I have my own room to sit in and write. I’m on hand to give extra feedback to the MA and Phd writing students. And due to a sequence of unforeseen events, I am also teaching undergraduate creative writing one day a week.

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3:AM: Do your musical and film activities tie in with your writing?

CK: I don’t know. Not as much as I’d like. I think of the music and film things I’ve done as just sort of ‘making a mess’. Being silly. And then I think of my writing — or at least The Bird Room and current novel-in-progress — as more ‘serious’ somehow. I would like there to be less distinction between the two. I would like to make films that were slightly more ‘serious’ and also not write thinking, ‘No, that’s too stupid, I can’t write that …’ I admire people with a ‘solid, overall aesthetic’ but don’t think I’ve achieved that, or if I ever will.

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3:AM: Moving on to the novel itself… The first paragraph ends with “Oh god, I should start again somewhere else”: had you planned out the structure right from the start?

CK: Not really. The original draft was even more fragmentary. It was just presented as short disconnected scenes, the only real structure or plan being that certain scenes seemed to ‘work’ better next to each other. The idea was that in presenting disconnected scenes it would seem like memories, that when you think about events, you hardly ever do so in a chronological or ‘novelistic’ way. Or at least I don’t.

But that was also pretty impossible to read — I got good early reactions to the writing itself, but no one had a clue what the story was. I settled on a good ‘halfway house’ — the middle/beginning/end structure — by the third big draft.

3:AM: William is a first-person narrator while in the Helen chapters you resort to omniscient, third-person narration. Why the difference between the two? Is it because you can empathise with William and find it more difficult to inhabit a female character’s mind? And is there any significance — a loss of autonomy? — in William’s move from first-person to third-person narration?

CK: That might be true — that I felt less confident in writing a female character first-person. But I also wanted the tone to be different for the Helen sections, and I wasn’t sure that would be as effective with a stylistically different first-person narration, for instance. I don’t tend to like books with lots of different first person voices in them, I don’t know why. Because the William sections are so confined to his viewpoint, somewhat ‘claustrophobic’ I think, it felt good to write the Helen parts third-person — to have more ‘room’ or ‘space’ in them, maybe.

I’m not sure what you mean about William’s shifts into third-person? There’s a moment when he moves into second-person: the ‘wanking scene’. That was supposed to imply a level of ‘removal’; originally a thing I wanted to do with his character was imply a yearning for distance from himself, somehow, and to explore the different ways he tries to achieve this, and how those could be presented. I don’t know.

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3:AM: William is a Billy Liar-style character who lives, to a great extent, in his imagination and in many cases it’s difficult to tell for sure whether what he is describing is fact or fiction. The choice of such an unreliable first-person narrator was deliberate, right? Is he a figure of the writer?

CK: People have commented a lot about the ‘unreliability’ of William. I’m not so sure. I mean, yeah, obviously, he is not a ‘normal’ ‘everyday bloke’ — he is very neurotic and … Oh, I don’t know. I can’t answer this question properly for some reason. Sorry.

3:AM: The Mishima epigraph (“At the same time as looking, I must subject myself to being thoroughly looked at”) is key, isn’t it?

One of the reasons why William desperately tries to track down the home porn movie Alice once featured in is directly linked to the epigraph: “I want to see her without her seeing me”. Being watched is either depicted as painful or shameful. When Alice (who works “in eyes” and wears contact lenses not because she needs to but simply because she enjoys “putting things in [her] eyes”) sleeps with William for the first time, her eyes keep widening until her partner becomes “painfully aware” that he is (or thinks he is) being scrutinised. The bartender who watches Alice getting frisky leads William to feel that “everyone in the bar — everyone in the world — is looking”. The same feeling recurs when the taxi driver winks at William in the rear-view mirror as Alice is about to fellate him. When Alice goes off with William’s mate, he immediately imagines them having shameless sex in public: “She’s out with him again. They’re in public somewhere, fucking. Market Square, probably. A crowd has gathered. Someone is handing out balloons and commemorative plates. A group of tourists is clapping and taking photographs”. When Helen (whose new identity involves wearing coloured contacts) feels she is about to throw up at the hairdresser’s, what she fears most is having “to watch herself do it in the mirror”. The most important scene is probably the one in which William objects to the presence of the bathroom mirror: “Pissing and shitting and being an animal should be enough without having to watch yourself as you do it”. He then carries the mirror outside and leans it against a wall: “Let nature have its stupid cock reflected back at it. See how the leaves and slugs and bottle tops like it for a change”.

Could you talk to us about this central theme? How conscious were you of its importance when you were in the process of writing the book?

CK: Yes, the ‘looking vs. being looked at’ theme is very important. I’m glad you picked up on it. It found it strange, when I was reading some of the reviews of The Bird Room, that they damned it as being very ‘lightweight’ and ‘flimsy’, when I was worried initially if I wasn’t being too ‘heavy’ with that theme.

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I was very conscious of those elements when writing the novel. I wanted to explore feelings of detachment, and the idea that when someone looks at you, they kind of ‘take you away’ with them — the images of you, that they sort of ‘record’ you. So for someone like William, who is so uncomfortable with himself that he occasionally wishes he didn’t exist, the idea of being ‘recorded’/remembered by others is particularly unattractive. I guess that’s where the porn elements come in — for him, porn (and in particular the clip of Alice) is a way in which he can watch others without them seeing him; he can truly express himself and his ‘desires’.

3:AM: Some of the funniest and saddest scenes in The Bird Room are those in which William is totally ignored by his former girlfriend. Throughout the book he seems torn between the desire to disappear and be visible (“I look at my reflection in the back-door window. I’m still here. I still exist”). Is this correct, and is there a correlation between the two?

CK: Yes there is. The feelings I described above — William’s desires to disappear, be ignored, to not have people looking at him/recording him, to not have to live in the world and make mistakes and hurt or influence others… Those work at odds against his other ‘human’ desires; you know: to be loved, to form a relationship (however idealised he has made it in his head), to be wanted, etc. The tension comes from his swings between the two, I think, and how it is pretty much impossible to reconcile two such polar needs or desires.

3:AM: There are two Williams who seem to embody two radically opposed versions of masculinity. The narrator is described by Helen as William or Will as if they were two different personae. Clair has reinvented herself as Helen (who is officially an actress) and has an imaginary sister. At one point, she impersonates her housemate and ekes out a living by embodying men’s sexual fantasies. The two protagonists are very much divided selves, aren’t they?

CK: Absolutely. I think it’s more pronounced and obvious with William and Will — I mean, personally I think of them as two separate characters, so in the ‘world’ of the novel, they are different people. But the idea, when writing them, was to sort of polarise my own personality — my more ‘outgoing’ gregarious side, and my more insular, neurotic side — and turn them into separate people and really ‘go further’ with them. I guess, meaning, I don’t think in real life I am either quite as insecure and neurotic as William or vacant and twattish as Will. But, you know, I am both of those things a bit, sometimes.

With Helen/Clair, that was more about looking at how someone would reconstruct their own identity, if they had decided that they didn’t like who they were anymore.

But yes, then she sort of ‘bleeds’ into Alice towards the end. I know it doesn’t make complete sense; I didn’t want or intend it to be explained in that way, like there is a ‘secret code’ to work out or anything. I like how in fiction you can do things and those things don’t have to make sense like they would in the real world. I am going to stop trying to explain it now, as I feel like I am doing more damage to it rather than helping/justifying it.

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3:AM: In the restaurant scene, William imagines that he is double-clicking on Alice’s head “until she falls in love with [him] again”. He also double-clicks on his rival: “I select and delete him”. In another passage, William imagines Alice with an ex: “Her skin sends something like a text message to her brain…”. Are you highlighting the dangers of living in a kind of virtual reality?

CK: No, I certainly wasn’t setting out to ‘satirise’ the current ‘information age’ or even to say, ‘I think it is dangerous’. I just thought it was a good way to explore those feelings of detachment / ways of becoming a different person / etc. The internet is very much a part of my life and the people I was writing about also use it a lot. William, for instance, uses it so much, as a way of hiding from the real world that it has infiltrated his thought process. That has happened to me in the past. I have thought thoughts with internet words in them, and then gone, ‘Oh’.

3:AM: Please tell us a bit more about the novel’s ornithological theme (not only the title, William’s paintings but also some similes like “Your luck has turned around on itself like an owl’s head”…)

CK: Some of the bird references were just for ‘tone’. But the title, and the main sort of ‘symbolic’ bird episode — Will’s anecdote about biting the head of his sister’s budgie for a dare, and not seeing the influence of that in his own work — that was a possibly heavy-handed way of me saying, ‘There are lots of subconscious factors influencing and determining our lives. Maybe. In my opinion.’

All the Latest

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Inés Martin Rodrigo has published an in-depth article on the Offbeats in top Spanish daily ABC in which I — “el Rimbaud de la Red”! — am quoted at length:

Inés Martin Rodrigo, “‘Se lo que sea, estoy contra ello,” ABC 16 February 2009

Es el lema de un nuevo grupo de escritores anglosajones con sede en Internet que está revolucionando la industria editorial. No tienen reglas ni manifiestos, pero la Generación Offbeat reclama su lugar en la escena literaria

La industria editorial es aburrida, está embotada y estreñida, desprende un cierto tufillo rancio y amenaza con eliminar todo fragmento de imaginación que aún quede en la mente del lector menos conformista. No es una sentencia categórica de un crítico cabreado con el ultimo best seller que ha llegado a sus manos, ni siquiera la reflexión concienzuda de un intelectual con complejo de Nostradamus. Es el pensamiento y la bandera literario revolucionaria de un nuevo grupo de escritores con sede en la Web y que se (auto)definen como Generación Offbeat.

Qué menos se podía esperar de los potenciales sucesores de Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs y compañía. Autores todos ellos enraizados en la libertad y el compromiso con ser fiel a uno mismo, filosofía de la que dieron buena cuenta en sus años de lucha literaria con las armas de las que disponían. Las armas de la razón hecha palabra y empleada en defensa de la paz, en contra de la Guerra de Vietnam o como sagaz discurso contra el recalcitrante conformismo de la sociedad de la época.

Una generación pegada a los libros

Los años han transcurrido y el discurso se ha transformado, al igual que las armas para evocarlo y defenderlo. Pero la raíz prendió con fuerza en una generación de jóvenes que creció leyendo el “Junky” de Burroughs, “uno de los mayores trabajos literarios sobre el mundo de la droga, al lograr algo que muchos libros que le siguieron fueron incapaces: habló del modo de vivir de un drogadicto”, en palabras de Tony O’Neill, escritor offbeat por excelencia. Y es que Burroughs describió el oscuro laberinto de la drogadicción sin ejercer de falso predicador para el lector, sin miedo a llamar a cada cosa por su nombre. Porque, le pese a quien le pese, un heroinómano no será nunca un pervertido al que adoctrinar. Así, llamando a las cosas por su nombre y leyendo, sobre todo leyendo, empapándose de los popes del movimiento beat fue como este grupo de autores fue regando su propio discurso.

Un discurso que se vertebra en un nuevo y excitante trabajo de ficción, que corre riesgos y que, cada vez con más intensidad, empieza a generar demanda en cuantos lectores se topan con él casi sin pretenderlo. Y es que, demasiado ácidos, diferentes y afilados para la industria editorial tradicional, la generación offbeat se esconde (de momento, aunque cada vez menos) en los amplios (y libres) márgenes de la Web y en alguna que otra editorial independiente.

El origen del movimiento

El primero en usar el término offbeat (y por tanto quien lo acuñó) fue Andrew Gallix, redactor jefe y responsable de la revista literaria online 3:AM Magazine (puestos a hacer comparaciones, valdría decir que sería algo así como el New Yorker de los offbeats). De eso hace ya casi tres años aunque, como el propio Andrew reconoce, “el movimiento llevaba bastante tiempo emergiendo. Es un poco lo que pasó con el punk o los nuevos románticos, al principio no tenían nombre por lo que mucha gente desconocía su existencia”.

Un desconocimiento que se fue disipando a medida que los grupos fueron proliferando en el ciberespacio. Eran escritores, guionistas, periodistas, bloggers, artistas… con un interés común por la literatura pura (sin artificios), que empezaron a gravitar alrededor de 3:AM y a organizar lecturas, conciertos e incluso festivales. “Fue en esos eventos donde comenzaron a establecerse las relaciones –explica Gallix-. La primera vez que fui consciente de que había aparecido un nuevo movimiento fue en el baño de Filthy Macnasty’s (uno de los pubs londinenses preferidos por Pete Doherty), cuando Lee Rourke (escritor y a la postre integrante de la Generación Offbeat) se abalanzó sobre mi y empezó a hablar de la enorme revolución literaria que habíamos iniciado. Aquello fue realmente el comienzo de todo”.

Un inicio virtualmente surrealista para un movimiento con integrantes de carne y hueso. Son muchos los offbeats que, incluso sin saberlo, engrosan la lista de esta generación pero, si hubiera que etiquetar al movimiento como tal cabría decir que se caracteriza por la variedad de voces y estilos y la ausencia de reglas (aquí no hay manifiestos). “A pesar de la diversidad, muchos escritores offbeat comparten características. La mayoría son británicos, treintañeros y creen que la escritura es mucho más que un mero entretenimiento”, enfatiza Gallix. Y sienten la música como elemento catalizador y de equilibrio.

Una lista repleta de talento

La lista es interminable y suena francamente bien. Noah Cicero (novelista estadounidense a medio camino entre Samuel Beckett y The Clash), Ben Myers (autor inglés mezcla de Richard Brautigan con Lester Bangs), Adelle Stripe (poeta londinense heredera del cinematográfico “realismo de fregadero” de Sidney Lumet), el propio Andrew Gallix (el Rimbaud de la Red), Tom McCarthy (novelista estadounidense afanado en la deconstrucción de una nueva idea de novela), HP Tinker (joven inglés al que comparan con Pynchon y Barthelme), Tao Lin (el aventajado protegido de Miranda July –a quien pronto veremos publicada en nuestro país gracias a Seix Barral-, con todo lo que eso supone hoy en día) y los primeros (parece que las grandes editoriales empiezan a tomar apuntes) que aterrizarán en España: Chris Killen, cuya novela “The Bird Room” será publicada este año por Alfabia, y Heidi James y Tony O’Neill, ambos con la editorial El Tercer Nombre.

Todos ellos influidos por el particular lirismo de Tom Waits, Lou Reed, Scott Walker o David Bowie, de la misma manera que estos sintieron la influencia de los autores de los que la Generación Offbeat es heredera. Aunque también están los que prefieren huir de las comparaciones. Tal es el caso de Heidi James, para quien la comparación es un poco “perezosa, basada en el hecho de que evitamos formar parte de la corriente principal”. Esta joven autora británica, que en marzo publicará su primera novela en España (“Carbono”, Ed. El Tercer Nombre) y que se confiesa fascinada por Lynne Tillman, Clarice Lispector, Marie Darrieussecq, Angela Carter o Virginia Woolf, es dueña de su propia editorial en Reino Unido, Social Disease. Con ella, que debe su nombre a la famosa frase de Andy Warhol -“Tengo una enfermedad social. Tengo que salir todas las noches”-, Heidi se ha convertido en uno de los estandartes de la Generación Offbeat al publicar “literatura única y genuina al margen de su valor en el mercado”.

Un movimiento coordinado

La propia Heidi James, en una prueba evidente de que el movimiento está coordinado y sabe hacia dónde se dirige, ha publicado en Reino Unido a autores como HP Tinker o Lee Rourke pero, sobre todo, a Tony O’Neill, el máximo exponente de los offbeats. Este joven neoyorquino, devoto de Bukowski, responsable de una prosa brutalmente descarnada, ex heroinómano, miembro de bandas como The Brian Jonestown Massacre, ha publicado ya cuatro novelas (la última, “Colgados en Murder Mile”, llegará a España en primavera) y se erige en líder (sin pretenderlo) del movimiento con ansias de seguir reclutando adeptos.

Como su propio nombre (offbeat) indica, una generación extraña e inusual de escritores, para los que la Red es su campo de acción, con espíritu punk y ganas de comerse la industria literaria tal y como ahora está concebida. El mundo anglosajón ya ha sido testigo de los primeros bocados. En España está al caer, ¡y ni siquiera es una generación! Que tiemble Zafón.

Dead Philosophers Society

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Here is my interview with philosopher Simon Critchley, published in 3:AM Magazine on 26 June 2008:

Dead Philosophers Society: An Interview With Simon Critchley

3:AM: Did the idea for The Book of Dead Philosophers come from the Montaigne quote you use as an epigraph? Was that the first spark?

SC: It was one of the first sparks. As so often happens in writing, it was a coincidence: a close friend sent me that quotation from Montaigne just as I was rereading the latter’s “To philosophie is to learne how to die” in Florio’s florid translation. Montaigne is really the hero of the book and I love his suspicion of suspicion, his skepticism and the deeply personal quality of his prose, which is never narcissistic. It is ourselves that we find in Montaigne, not him. But I suppose that’s a narcissistic thing to say.

3:AM: Commenting on another passage from Montaigne, you state that “The denial of death is self-hatred”. This reminded me of Dostoevsky’s Kirilov who attempts to defeat God by committing suicide. His rationale is that, in order to negate transcendence, Man must learn to love himself for what he is and must therefore embrace his own finitude — desire his own death. (One could wonder if the espousal of death isn’t a form of self-love?) Your own conclusion — “Accepting one’s mortality…means accepting one’s limitation” — isn’t that far removed from Kirilov’s way of thinking, is it?

SC: It is very similar to Kirilov and you are right to point that out. I think I wrote about Kirilov somewhere, maybe in Very Little…Almost Nothing. If the denial of death is self-hatred, as it is to deny our freedom and live in fear of death (which is to say, to live in a form of bondage), then the acceptance and affirmation of death is indeed a form of self-love. But I’d want to make a distinction between a form of self-love which is essential to what it means to be human, and a narcissism of self-regard, like Rousseau’s distinction between amour de soi and amour propre, self-love and pride.

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3:AM: You remind us that Socrates’ last words “articulate the view that death is the cure for life”. This idea that life is a kind of disease to be cured through extinction is key to the likes of Schopenhauer, Leopardi, Beckett and Cioran. Do you agree that there’s a kind of lineage here?

SC: I am hugely attracted to the idea of life as a mistake, as a kind of natural error for which we try and find some metaphysical assurance or consolation. This is the core of Schopenhauer’s dark comic genius. It attracts me because it is based on the idea of life as rooted in an experience of contingency, physical contingency, which we forget and convert into various forms of necessity. I do see a lineage from forms of ancient skepticism and cynicism through Schopenhauer and into figures like Beckett and Cioran. One of the peculiar features of The Book of Dead Philosophers is that I simultaneously play on a number of different and contradictory tendencies in the history of the last few thousand years: cynicism, skepticism, Epicureanism, primitive Christianity, occasionalism, rationalism. The fragmentary form of the book allows me to move across and through a number of different philosophical registers. It is so ridiculous to limit oneself to one version of the truth.

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3:AM: I’ve always felt that the rise of the writer/artist as alter deus that accompanied the secularisation of many European countries led to the spread of a kind of death wish in literature and the arts (culminating with people like Arthur Cravan and Jacques Rigaut). My theory is that many writers/artists believed the hype and were so frustrated when they realised that godlike, ex nihilo creation eluded them that they turned to destruction. Is (to paraphrase Bakunin) the urge to destroy also a creative one (or, as Larkin put it: “Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs”)?

SC: I completely agree: one of the outcomes of Romanticism for me is the idea of the writer as imago dei without a deus where art becomes a Promethean creation ex nihilo. I think this tradition also inspired a related Promethean tendency in politics, from the ‘nihilism’ of Nechaev, through to Lenin’s Bolshevism and Marinetti’s futurism. It’s the tradition of what I call “active nihilism“. I criticize this tradition heavily in a number of places, but only because it is so compelling.

3:AM: Wouldn’t you agree that the “fantasies of infantile omnipotence” you hope will disappear through an acceptance of our “limitedness” are often at the root of great art and literature?

SC: Sure. Much of literature in what we might call its rigorously Hegeliano-Sadist development is about the dream of infantile omnipotence which is rooted in the idea that the artist is like Adam in the Garden of Eden, baptizing things into existence through nomination. I don’t think that this tradition can simply be eliminated or overcome, but it should be contrasted with what Blanchot calls “the second slope” of literature, which is concerned with allowing things to be in their irreducible materiality. This is what I think of as the Levinasiano-Stevensian (if that’s an adjective) succession. This is the sort of materialism that Tom McCarthy and I have experimented with in the writing we have done together on Joyce, Shakespeare and others.

3:AM: Some think that art and literature are predicated on what Eluard called “le dur désir de durer” (the painful desire to last) — a desire you don’t seem too keen on…

SC: No, I am perfectly happy with the idea of literature as le dur désir de durer and would want to put the virtue of endurance at the core of much that I think about. But that is not the same as denying one’s mortality. On the contrary, I think.

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3:AM: The Book of Dead Philosophers has lofty ambitions. You set out to write “a history of philosophers” as opposed to “a history of philosophy” in the teleological mould. In effect, you are defending a specific conception of philosophy against another…

SC: Yes, I am against the idea of the history of philosophy as a history of systems that can be arranged in a certain logical and historical order, such as one finds in Hegel or Heidegger. It is one of the many aspects of being deluded by the idea of progress (Hegel) or even the idea of regress (Heidegger). I am opposing it with an idea of the history of philosophy as a history of philosophers, that is, a history of mortal, fragile and limited creatures like you and I. I am against the idea of clean, clearly distinct epochs in the history of philosophy or indeed in anything else. I think that history is always messy, contingent, plural and material. I am against the constant revenge of idealism in how we think about history.

3:AM: You praise the “ideal of the philosophical death”: what exactly do you mean by that?

SC: The idea of the philosophical death is the core teaching of philosophy in antiquity from Socrates and Epicurus onwards: we can go to our death freely and without fear having given up the consolation of any belief in an afterlife. As Wittgenstein says, is some problem solved by the idea of my living forever? Of course not. It is, however, difficult to fully and completely renounce any idea of the afterlife.

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3:AM: You write that “Death is the last great taboo” and question the unthinking belief in ever-increasing longevity: are we turning into a race of Struldbruggs?

SC: Absolutely. I think we are turning into a world of Struldbruggs. That is all I saw last year in Los Angeles last year when writing the book: bloody botoxed suntanned Struldbruggs. To that extent, I completely agree with Swift. The flip-side of his seeming misanthropy is an affirmation of virtue.

3:AM: Your book also has a self-help quality (to “begin to enable us to face the reality of our death”) — aren’t you afraid of being accused of having done an Alain de Botton?

SC: No comment. My problem with self-help is that I don’t think there is a self to help. The self is something that we become through a series of acts.

3:AM: Don’t you think your attempt to bring philosophers closer to us (“It is in the odd details of a philosopher’s life that they become accessible to us”) runs the risk of being seen as a little reactionary — the equivalent of basing an interpretation of a novel on its author’s life?

SC: It is profoundly reactionary. Absolutely. I’ve turned into some sort of dreadful cultural conservative. No, but seriously, I am not engaging in some sort of biographical reductionism and I loathe such tendencies in relation to literature. I am reacting – and perhaps over-reacting – to an allergy to biography in relation to philosophy and philosophers. Also, much of the biographical information in the book is highly dubious and all the more interesting for that reason.

3:AM: In The Guardian you were recently described as having “found a vocation in teaching philosophy, although [your] passions still lie in music, poetry and politics”. Are you less passionate about philosophy? And how did you end up at university by “complete accident”?

SC: Yes, I don’t know where The Guardian found that stuff, but maybe I said something similar in another interview. The truth is actually much worse and would have to include sob stories about years at catering college, working in factories, a series of industrial accidents and even a year and a half as a lifeguard. I did not mean to suggest that I am less passionate about philosophy than I was. On the contrary, I have an immense childish enthusiasm for the history of philosophy and for what is going on right now and remain stupidly optimistic. The thing is that after leaving school with one ‘O’ level, I played in bands for some years, then became a poet before going to an FE college in Stevenage where someone said that I should apply to university. The thought had never previously crossed my mind. Something to do with social class, no doubt.

3:AM: On the subject of music, please tell us about the “large number of punk bands” you played in. Does that period still resonate as it does with so many of us?

SC: Punk was the crucible out of which my paltry subjectivity was formed. My years watching bands and performing in bands allowed me the imaginative space to try and conceive of a life a little different from what I was meant to do. It was a relentlessly affirmative nihilism. Of course, this was sheer luck. I was born in 1960, and so I was 16 when punk began to happen just down the road in London. Suddenly I found myself at the edge of the world’s centre. And it was because of punk that I began reading Burroughs, Bataille and the Situationists. It was also the time when I became politicized through Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League. My bands had silly names: The Social Class Five, Panic, The Fur Coughs (who became The Bleach Boys*, I thought of that name) and The Good Blokes. I still mess around with music and have done a lot of work with my oldest friend, John Simmons. I think it is somewhere on YouTube.

[* See their current website]

Uncrap Books

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My interview with Sam Jordison was published in 3:AM Magazine today:

“Being something of a klutz myself, always prone to dropping things — both of a physical and verbal clanger nature — I guess I sympathise with life’s losers. I share their pain and that makes it all the more piquant and funny for me. I also hope I show they often have some kind of dignity in defeat. And that there’s a much finer line between spectacular success and humiliation than is often supposed.”