Rivka Galchen,
Hari Kunzru,
& Rachel Kushner
WITH MÓNICA DE LA TORRE
MÓNICA DE LA TORRE
I wanted to start by asking you about your experience of temporal shifts in the writing process. Can you speak about your work when it’s in the incubation process?
HARI KUNZRU
At the moment, I’m doing some screenwriting, and you’re forced to talk about everything all the time with people who don’t seem to share very much with you. And so you’re always trying to reach your idea across a table. There seems to be an increasing amount of that in the fiction-publishing industry as well. I started something, and was kind of happy to talk about it, but I am now feeling that I hollowed it out in some way by doing that. Now I started something else and I’m not talking about that, and it feels good, it feels precious.
MÓNICA DE LA TORRE
You’d rather not to talk about something that’s in its early stages because you feel that you might jinx it?
HARI KUNZRU
A novel certainly takes so long that it has to be a project that you can live inside for a period of years, at least a couple. It has to be a machine that can somehow process all of your stuff, your experiences during that time, even if it’s in a very oblique and coded way. I think with oversharing you risk that it doesn’t function. I’m quite interested in privacy.
RACHEL KUSHNER
After you finish a book for a publisher you’re still inside a pretty endless process of copyediting and proofreading, etc. So I feel like I was with Flamethrowers in a continual way basically until it came out, at which point I had to begin to talk about it. You have to create a sort of discourse that then you utilize over and over again, as you’re asked questions. But that only happens through experience. Having done it before for a first book didn’t at all prepare me for the second. Writers construct in writing. It’s hard to improvise. With a book, even though all of the ideas in the book are mine, and I had total control over the novel, there are so many different things that go into writing a novel at different moments, and the temporality of it is protracted, the writing of it. When it’s time to give an encapsulation of all your different thematic interests and the materials that were important to the book, I forget sometimes what inspired me. I have to make cheat sheets. Eventually you learn how to talk about your own book, but the frightening thing about this is that then you can go on autopilot. Right now I’m on a book tour and I feel like I could accidentally sell myself a pair of overpriced shoes or something.
HARI KUNZRU
Isn’t that the purpose of the book tour? To alienate you so much from the thing that you’ve written that you feel forced to write something else, in order to feel good about yourself again?
RACHEL KUSHNER
When I talk about a book, it’s already long written and I’ve already moved on to the next, which I wouldn’t talk about. I’ve looked at what other novelists have done, and I read authors saying, “I’m not talking about that.” It’s either because it’s bad luck, or it deflates some of the penumbra or whatever of the idea to leak it out. I don’t know if that’s the reason why I don’t.
RIVKA GALCHEN
Often it seems like you’re choosing between being true and accurate to what you’re doing, and being a nice person, answering people’s questions. It’s a tension. I imagine you start feeling like you have a bit of a shtick, but the shtick is the friendly thing to do. So, it’s a little bit of a bind.
HARI KUNZRU
I really admire writers who cannot go along with that. I’m dreadfully prone to taking whatever stupid question it is, and trying to make something out of it. You end up feeling terrible.
MÓNICA DE LA TORRE
My next question is about repurposing skills that you’ve learned in other environments, in order perhaps to add realism to a novel. For instance, Rachel, you are also an art critic and your descriptions in Flamethrowers, not only of artworks, but also of particular scenes, are so realistic and so believable that I often found myself wondering if it wasn’t a roman à clef. I wondered if you weren’t disguising actual artists under different names. Maybe you’ve done it, too, Hari, you were a music editor, you wrote about technology. In your case, Rivka, you’re an M.D. in psychiatry. So, I wanted to ask you all, is it deliberate that you bring those skills to the novel? Does it feel slightly subversive, perhaps, that you’re taking what belongs in the realm of your day job and bringing it into the realm of fiction?
HARI KUNZRU
I wanted to be a fiction writer before I wanted to do anything else, like write journalism. It was very accidental that I wrote about technology. At a certain point, in my early twenties, it turned out that my only marketable skill was knowing about the Internet. I was working for Wired at the point when it was a sort of Day-Glo-orange cult based in San Francisco. They would send me off to talk to people who would tell me that the future was being physically instantiated somewhere in the Valley, these extraordinary characters, who were very alien to my way of thinking. I remember asking my boss that we were always writing about these wealthy people who are making the future, or so they told us, but what about everybody else? I was told very sternly that there are no have-nots, only have-laters. I realized that everybody was insane, and I needed to write a novel about it. I was given a lot of material from that, by accident, really, but there’s a fairly easy flow for me across the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. I like doing journalism partly because it gets me out of the house. It’s quite a relief not to be inside my head. And, yes, you get a little window onto other kinds of life.
RACHEL KUSHNER
Every writer is different, but for me the novel is a challenge that requires every single part of myself. Therefore, every single thing that I know about the world is going to be summoned in some way by whatever I’m working on. I think a lot of writers are like that, and I think across genre, too. It’s like Anne Carson, by no accident, will write about Monica Vitti, or about Sappho. Well, she’s a classicist, not that Monica Vitti has to do with classicism. But I was just thinking about different things she’s interested in and that she’ll incorporate into her poetry. I’m not at all comparing myself with Anne Carson, she’s legitimately a classicist; I am not legitimately anything, really, except for a fiction writer. I do write about art on occasion, and have done so for many years now, but I don’t really consider myself an art critic, like a taste-maker type of person, and nor am I an art historian, because I’m not trained that way. Still, I’m interested in contemporary art and culture, it’s a knowledge that I got in a semi-autodidactic but organic fashion, after having been assigned various pieces.
When it came time to write this novel, it was no accident that I wanted to write a book that was partly set in the art world of downtown New York in the seventies. It was something that I’d picked up a few ideas about just along the way. But it’s definitely not a roman à clef. The characters are fictional, entirely constructed. I do like the cameo, it’s fun to place a real person in a scene—like John Chamberlain, drunkenly moving through the room. It could just give a tiny reminder for the reader that they’re in a real space.
But I tried to downplay the art world in Flamethrowers. I don’t like to read novels about the art world where there are long descriptions about the character’s conceptual artwork. You can tell that the writer is making it up and kind of getting lost inside of the writing of the fictional stuff that the character makes. It comes across to me as precious. So I just tried to signify that these people make works, but did not go too in-depth into what they made. For me, part of the great fun and the challenge is that writing summons everything you know. Still, you do not want to be a Little Miss Know-It-All.
RIVKA GALCHEN
What were some of the images that were important to you while you were working?
RACHEL KUSHNER
I collected a lot of images while I was working on Flamethrowers. The book is about the seventies, but I’m also interested in futurism and its relationship to war, and I’m interested in motorcycles and technology and the way that speed was introduced via war. One of the first images that I put up was of a soldier from World War I riding a motorcycle with a really crazy sidecar contraption on it that was shaped like a bullet. There was another guy in the sidecar who looked like he was kind of his amanuensis. He had a typing machine and was taking notes. That sounds kind of precious! I found the picture online and just put it up in my office. I did that with several others. The image that’s on the cover of my book was another one. You can print things out on a black-and-white printer and it somehow looks okay. I had all kinds of images up on the wall while I was writing. Stills from films, like the last by Guy Debord, In girum imus nochte et consumimur igni, with all of those different pictures that he used, and the subtitle comments that he made over the images. That right there is a kind of crystallization of language and image that he put together. Debord was a real master at combining words and images. A lot of that film is just still after still, with his commentary over it.
There’s a whole range of things that I worked with. Sometimes an image for me is just an image in my mind. For example, I was thinking about the blackout in New York City in 1977, and the hostility in the press to the looting and criminality that went on. Then I was thinking about a march in Rome earlier that year, on March 12th, 1977. I thought about crowds that fill up the street, following a certain logic, but in an unexpected manner. In New York no one knew that the electricity was going to go off, and in Rome no one knew a student was going to be killed by the police in Bologna the day before, which is what precipitated the outpouring of people to the streets, who came from all over Italy. I thought about those two events, and to me those were images, in a way. They have some similarity.
HARI KUNZRU
I often have several things that I know go together, but don’t rationally go together. For example, in my last novel I did not know why computer modeling and the stock market should have anything to do with the Mojave Desert, but they had. I then had to write to find out what that connection was.
RACHEL KUSHNER
Did you look at images while you were writing about those cult followers who lived in the desert?
HARI KUNZRU
There’s a good book called Spaced Out. It’s about utopian architecture in the 1960s, and it has a lot of visual references to western United States communes. I also have a friend in San Francisco whose art practice revolves around that, so she’s always finding things online and sending me pictures of people at Morning Star, looking like they hadn’t had a bath.
RACHEL KUSHNER
Did you print them out, too, and put them up in your office?
HARI KUNZRU
I’m trying to remember what I had up at that point. I’ve moved around a lot in the last few years, but I definitely had that thing of papering my walls with my sort of projection of my book. Now, for the last two years the only thing I’ve had up in my writing space—it’s a sort of gag—is one of Mao’s speeches. It’s published as a Peking Press pamphlet with the cream covers, and it’s called “Oppose Book Worship.” It just says “oppose book worship” above my screen. And that feels like a useful thing to remind myself.
RIVKA GALCHEN
I wonder about this methodology of not really being in control, where you have a couple of interests that just seem to sit on the surgical table together, whatever it is, the sewing machine and the umbrella. What is that like in the composition process? It sounds like both of you feel most in control if you are not in control. If you don’t know why you’re interested in Italy in the seventies and New York in the seventies, or machines, what does that make your daily process like?
RACHEL KUSHNER
To me, the work of the novel is to not be in control, and to be moving at a patient pace towards a future that is not a foregone conclusion. I want there to be a certain quotient of mystery always, when I’m writing. Maybe halfway through the book I know how it’s going to end, and it’s a matter of getting there, but there are still things that are going to happen that I haven’t foreseen. For me, the process of the novel and the challenge of it is partly to figure out how these two realms are related. I did not want things to overrelate in a very reducible, clean, and very symphonic way. Like, “Oh, it turns out that she’s the cousin of the man who …” I don’t mean to denigrate that, but it’s not my style as a thinker or reader or writer. I want things to be more open, and to think about cities, and history, and events, and have one person who kind of just moves through these landscapes. I wanted the registration of how they echo one another to take place in the mind of the reader, not so much in the page.
For me it’s just time, too. You have a few years to figure these things out. I’ll work on one small part, and then another. It’s like moving tanks to the front lines. You can’t get there in one day when you’re moving provisions.
HARI KUNZRU
I like the image of you as General Rommel.
RACHEL KUSHNER
But it is like that! The blackout in New York and the march in Italy in 1977 were two crowd scenes, it was a set of images around which some ideas revolved, and then it resulted in this novel. I recently visited the rare book and manuscript library at Yale, the Beinecke Library. There is a curator there who has collected every bit of ephemera from the autonomous movement in Italy that he could find, and he put out all of these papers. At the end of one of the tables was this enormous broadsheet that these people in Italy had made of the blackout in New York City. It had King Kong on top of the Empire State Building, and all of these epithets in Italian reveling in the criminality of this one night in New York. I’ve kept asking myself about the similarities between these two events and it was all right there, in this one image. That felt kind of vindicating, it goes back to Rivka’s question about the many years where you don’t really know how two things are related.
HARI KUNZRU
When I was digging around in the seventies political ephemera in London, I went to the British Library. What they had, had largely been stolen or had been badly defaced. Nobody was paying any attention to this. I ended up having a lot more luck with eBay than I did with libraries. Nobody wants to read tedious Maoist tracts from 1973 other than me, and it was a great work-displacement activity as well. I’m actually working, but I’m really into this eBay auction. Now I have a little collection that I made myself. I should probably donate it.
RACHEL KUSHNER
But that is work, too, don’t you think? You’re doing something for the book, like you’re giving glow or mystification to the lost.
HARI KUNZRU
There was something about handling these materials that felt important. I also felt I was betraying them in a certain way. Because, of course, when you are treating these things as a collector you’re absolutely defusing them of any kind of the political importance that its authors had hoped that they would have. So, actually, you’re right. It was quite useful, while I was writing, to think about my own impulses around these materials.
RACHEL KUSHNER
How did you get interested in King Mob initially?
HARI KUNZRU
King Mob was a sort of offshoot of the Situationist International—
there were a bunch of people in West London, around Notting Hill, in the late sixties, early seventies, who had contact with the SI and with the Up Against the Wall Motherfucker people here in New York. In fact, I think they were kicked out of the SI because they supported the Motherfuckers in a row with Raoul Vaneigem. There were these two brothers called the Wise brothers, who were at the center of King Mob.
There was a piece of graffiti that lasted from whenever they did it, sometime around the 1970s, until well into the 1990s. That’s how I first knew about the group. There was this huge long wall that went round by the Tube line as you were going towards Ladbroke Grove, overground, on the Overland, and it said, “Same thing day after day—tube—work—dinner—work—tube—armchair—TV—sleep—tube—work—how much more can you take? One in ten go mad, one in five crack up.” As a kid I would always wonder, what’s the difference between going mad and cracking up? This graffiti was part of my childhood life. Then I realized that these guys had done it, and that it was part of this campaign that they had of writing slogans up, Poetry will be made by all, not by one. That sort of thing.
As an adult I fell into this milieu in London where there were the sort of remnants of SI-affiliated things and various kinds of currents of utopian anarchism. There were these people called the Association of Autonomous Astronauts who I used to know. They thought that space travel should be for all and that we should start making a bottom-up plan to go to space. There were meetings and publications, and people would give papers on how we might get to space and what we might do in space if we got there. Would we have a rave? Would we have sex? What were the possibilities of space? I did not realize at the time, but all of these people were part of this tradition that led back to King Mob and beyond.
MÓNICA DE LA TORRE
If writing a novel is slowly moving the trucks toward the frontline, what is writing a short story like? I am curious about Rivka’s process, because you’ve written a novel and now you’re writing short stories.
RIVKA GALCHEN
The trucks thing is nice. I always forget that “avant-garde” is a military term, which isn’t an accident. You always have to call up some enemies to make sure there’s someone to meet you on the other side. I think of the same analogy but from the other side. Maybe something about short story writing puts you in a smaller state of mind. I think of it as if you’re trying to grow mushrooms, but you can’t plant mushrooms. Still, you want to grow them. That’s how I feel about the short story process: You know that if you came up with it, it can’t be that good, because it fits in your head. You hope that it can be like sprout, a little bit on paper, or with the help of time and paper and chance intersection with old interests you didn’t know you have, or old memories that pop up. This involves a lot of waiting. Because there are no seeds to plant, you have to wait for some spore to show up, and then think about what kind of temperature would make it slightly more interested in landing. I’m not sure that’s so different from a novel, or it wasn’t for me.
MÓNICA DE LA TORRE
It would seem that at some point you do have a sense of direction in a novel. What you’re describing seems to be the opposite. You distrust a sense of direction.
RIVKA GALCHEN
A novel is so big that the possible ways keep shrinking. With the first word you still have like a bazillion words that might be the second word, but by the time you’re on the thirty-five thousandth word there are only like a million words that might be the next one. It just starts to contract a little bit.
HARI KUNZRU
It’s a very melancholic part of writing a novel, isn’t it? At the beginning you have an almost infinite sense of how great this thing is going to be, and then it narrows down to what you’ve actually done.
RACHEL KUSHNER
To me, there’s a kind of horror in the infinite.
HARI KUNZRU
Have you ever had writer’s block, felt some panic when confronting the blank page?
RACHEL KUSHNER
I hear about that a lot. The blank page. I don’t know if I’ve ever had writer’s block or not. That’s sort of like, “Am I a neurotic or just a normal human being?”
When I start a book, that infinite possibility is more challenging. You think you can just include everything, but then you can’t. Once I know what I’m doing, it’s much more pleasurable.
HARI KUNZRU
Is that what happened to you with Telex from Cuba? The amount of research you did was insane, wasn’t it? You worked for years.
RACHEL KUSHNER
I did. It was my first novel, it was a learning process, and I did a lot of research because it was a time and a place I didn’t know anything about. Everything had happened before I was born and in a place I’d never lived. I felt I had to metabolize the whole long baroque history of Cuban politics leading up to and through the revolution, in order to be able to write. Now I don’t do things that way anymore. I didn’t do any research for my new book because I was writing about realms that I felt I had some kind of handle on, which is why I chose to move towards them. Still, there was a full array of possibilities. I get an idea, there’s a set of things that could happen, and then as I start to write it’s the narrative itself that closes down the other possibilities. But the closing down for me is very reassuring, because once I’m on a specific track, and I know who the characters are, and what kinds of things I want to happen, I have a much better sense of what I’m doing. I want to get to a point where I’m writing sentences that can reassure the reader that they’re in good hands, and until I’m to that point I’m just not sure. Things could open out and open out, and I don’t want the novel to be arbitrary. That’s the thing. And, as a reader, I don’t like it when I encounter something that seems arbitrary to me. So that’s my fantasy—to create a book that doesn’t have any arbitrary components.
HARI KUNZRU
As a reader I, too, have a problem with certain sorts of absurdism and postmodernism, where you realize that the next thing could be completely arbitrary. My interest drains away at that point, even if in an abstract, intellectual way I admire the structure that is being proposed.
RIVKA GALCHEN
You want that mix where it feels like a surprise, hopefully even to the writer, and inevitable. You want a logic, even if you want it to be complicated enough that you couldn’t have seen through to the end of it. It’s that Alice in Wonderland thing, where you think every turn seems very unexpected, and absolutely logical. Like it couldn’t have been something else.
MÓNICA DE LA TORRE
This reminds me of something that César Aira talks about when he describes his writing process. He goes forward and is open to arbitrary occurrences. Anything random is likely to be included in the novel.
RACHEL KUSHNER
He’s way more productive than anyone sitting up here.
MÓNICA DE LA TORRE
He’s written like a hundred books, if not more.
RIVKA GALCHEN
He is describing a methodology, not a product. He’s written plenty of books and some of them are amazing and some of them are slightly less amazing. But I feel that’s a bit like jazz. There is a methodology with a deep logic running through it, and it’s using the fuel of chance in order to push itself. In a sense, the product is not arbitrary because the method is so rigorous.
HARI KUNZRU
It’s not totally dissimilar to Raymond Roussel making a method out of puns, and then forcing the story on through that.
RACHEL KUSHNER
It’s also like those painters, a sort of old-fashioned AbEx modality where they say, “You know, I just throw something up on the canvas, and then I respond, and then I put something else up on the canvas, and I respond to that.” I’m not belittling that. But there are so many ways of making a painting, right? It’s the end product really that matters. You can bring the same kind of process to every single painting and end up with different results.
HARI KUNZRU
I saw a Gutai show at the Guggenheim and it’s exactly that. They’re attempting not to control the materials. One guy is painting with his feet because he has less control. Other people are using drips and responding in various ways to the kinds of materials that they’re using, that they can only kind of nudge rather than completely control top-down.
MÓNICA DE LA TORRE
You’re ventriloquizing an AbEx painter. Some people even refer to that as ventriloquism in a way. It’s like this dialogue with the material. You’re throwing your voice onto this thing that you’re creating, and it speaks back to you, and tells you what it needs.
HARI KUNZRU
That’s like when writers say that their characters just started talking.
RACHEL KUSHNER
Yes, that’s shit.
HARI KUNZRU
That’s such nonsense, isn’t it? Let’s just call time on that particular lie that writers tell.
MÓNICA DE LA TORRE
I wanted to ask you all about world literature. How do you see it as being different and distinct from American fiction? Rachel, you wrote about Clarice Lispector.
RACHEL KUSHNER
I’ve always been interested in literature not for any ethical or ideological reason. The phrase “literature in translation” gets bandied around as though, well, I’m a literature-in-translation person. For me it’s just a fact that a lot of writers that I’ve always read are people who are not American. I’m not quite sure why that is. I like a lot of French writers and Lispector, and others who are even less well known than she is. It may have something to do with the exposure I had, relatively early. When I first moved to New York, and I was finishing at Columbia, I worked at Grand Street. I learned about many interesting writers through there. Jean Stein had great taste, but she also just listened to a lot of other people, like Barbara Epler from New Directions, and all of these people who would call her and recommend things. They were the first people to publish Roberto Bolaño in English. With Lispector, I got asked to review all of the new translations of five of her books. I have friends who read everything by so-and-so, and I’m more of a dabbler than a completist. But in this case she’s such a uniquely dense and strange writer that I thought it would be really cool to totally immerse myself in her work, and then try to say something about it. That work is very intense. There’s a richness or strangeness and heaviness to that material, but I revere it.
HARI KUNZRU
Right now I’d quite like to be a Spanish writer I just discovered. I read Montano’s Malady by Enrique Vila-Matas, and that’s a very good novel. And I’ve been reading Javier Marías, and he’s playing havoc with my own writing at the moment, because he has such a peculiar style. I’m always embarrassed by how little contemporary British fiction I want to read. And Indian fiction, actually. People assume I’ll have this strong engagement with some sort of postcolonial version of Indian fiction, and I actually run screaming from a lot of that. It’s a box that people tried to put me in earlier in my career. I thought I had to get out of it by not talking about that stuff and talking about other things.
MÓNICA DE LA TORRE
Did you pay a price for escaping that box?
HARI KUNZRU
I think certain people would be happier if I just carried on writing books with elephants in them, and the spice market.
RIVKA GALCHEN
We all feel guilty about what we are or aren’t interested in. I was thirty before I took an interest in any American writers, which I feel like is totally capricious and not appropriate. For some reason, I assumed that if it was in translation it just seemed much better, and if they were from Japan even better, and maybe if it was by someone from Germany … It’s not actually true, but it’s not something that you need to resist. I was not surprised to find out that Denis Johnson and John Cheever were amazing writers. Of course they were, but because I knew they were, or I knew that I was supposed to really get excited by them, they were at the bottom. I got accidentally tricked into reading them.
HARI KUNZRU
My wife is also a novelist, Katie Kitamura. She has recently taken to saying that her idea for her prose is to make it sound as if it’s been translated out of something else into English.
RIVKA GALCHEN
That’s the dream, of writing like Aleksandar Hemon. You just think, “Why is English my first language? What a curse!” It is a great constraint for every word to be off-key a little bit.
HARI KUNZRU
But that sort of ambition to make language strange, which is clearly at the core of every artistic use of language—that’s something to do with that. Aleksandar Hemon clearly has that, in a very direct way in those early stories before his English was absolutely spot-on, he accidentally made the language new. There’s this sort of uncanny quality, there’s a flatness that comes with a certain sort of tone that a translated piece sometimes has, something that’s not there on the page that you’re stretching towards. And that’s quite an interesting tone in itself—the gap between what’s there and the possibly completely imagined hinterland to that language. The flatter it is on the surface the weirder it is, too.
RACHEL KUSHNER
Another reason I read a lot of writers who don’t write originally in English is because I sort of want to educate myself under the spirit of a conversation that (and I hate to say it) is taking place in Europe. It starts with Baudelaire, or even before him, with Chateaubriand, and then Benjamin takes them all up and kind of theorizes about them. Sartre and Deleuze write beautifully about these people. There are all of these French writers that are part of a bigger conversation that’s partly taking place not just between writers, but among their critical and philosophical champions. I’m interested to know what Lacan was reading, and he incorporates certain people into his lectures. That to me is sort of like a mysterious world. For me it’s less about language being translated than about these people being part of a kind of world that I imagine, I want to learn more about, and I pursue.
HARI KUNZRU
There is a danger in the nostalgia for the twentieth century avant-garde, though, isn’t there? There’s a lot of avant-garde posturing that goes on and it’s not functional now. I am interested in that feeling of belatedness that a lot of writers, especially white writers, adopt, a kind of nostalgia for a time when stakes were higher and everybody was listened to, and everyone was in the café. There’s something dead about that to me. But that’s not the same as saying let’s abandon modernism. There’s something very urgent about the utopian currents of modernism in particular right now. It feels like the culture is kind of trying to close those currents down because they are subversive, and are still potentially disruptive and dangerous.
RACHEL KUSHNER
I wanted to talk about people who take up one another’s work even across time. I wasn’t that interested in Fitzgerald and Malcolm Lowry until I read Deleuze’s essay about those two writers. I like thinking about the ways in which writers traverse the cultural imaginary into other realms.
HARI KUNZRU
There’s a particular sort of British position with regards to that. There’s a generation who grew up in the particularly gray, austerity, postwar world, and they were looking at cars with fins and movie stars. They saw America as a magical world of consumer promise. I am thinking about people like Martin Amis, who are absolutely enslaved to a notion of America as bigger and more colorful. Now, with the globalization of pop culture, that doesn’t function in the same way. But in the eighties and nineties in London there was a publication whose motto was high culture for lowbrows, or low culture for highbrows, something like that. They would write long essays about Baudrillard and Schwarzenegger. It was a very cool thing to do, at that particular moment. Irony took over and no one was allowed to be serious about anything. But now look at the mess we’re in.
RIVKA GALCHEN
I feel like it’s a writer instinct or just a thinker instinct to be out of place. You want to displace yourself, maybe in time or geography, or whatever it is. You think, “When I’m comfortable and I know what’s going on, I’m pretty stupid.” And then, “When I’m uncomfortable and I’m aware that I’m not really keyed in and I’m not the expert, I’m in a better position.” It’s that instinct to mess it up a little less, by being dislocated in some way.
RACHEL KUSHNER
I totally agree. Part of being a writer is looking for this way in which you are entering some new realm, or you have to navigate it in some way. I’ve never really written any pop culture into fiction, but I want to now. There’s a lot to be done with pop culture. I wanted to write a novel about a female version of Riff Raff. And then James Franco played him in the movie Spring Breakers. When I saw it I felt like it had a transcendent and amazing, lyrical, almost biblical treatment of what’s considered to be very low American pop culture. It really blew my mind. I saw more possibility for myself with using hot bodies in Florida. Just kidding.