Dear Brian Evenson,
You feel the first rumblings a little after lunch. You couldn’t help but feel there was something inexplicable about the sourness of the sauce, and now it has you worried. On your way to the office, you stop in your tracks as a whole-body shivver grips you and squeezes.
In the middle of class, you suddenly break out into a slimy, chilly sweat. The lights seem brighter, the noises unbearably crisp. The student’s faces seem like naked worm-apes’s faces, and their blemishes and asymetricality are impossible to ignore. You excuse yourself for a moment.
In front of the bathroom mirror, it happens. It starts in your toes, a numbness, a tingling. The backs of your arms become sensitive. The pressure changes in your ears. Your nose itches. You’re getting dizzy, dizzy . . . dizzy. And then total focus, total attention, because here it comes, here it is . . .
THIS IS YOUR APOSTROPHE CAST INTERVIEW
This email interview will not be edited. Only the questions you choose not to answer will not be published.
1) Realistically speaking, knowing what you know about the world and the universe, what do you think the worst case scenario for the afterlife is?
Well, the basic Christian afterlife scenario is none too pretty, consisting as it does of highly stratified divisions of people within what’s basically an outdated feudal system, but there are a lot of alternatives that are worse. I suppose the best I can hope for would be a life that roughly continued like it does now but with all the bugs and badnesses worked out of it, and with all the people who irritate me living on the opposite side of the universe. Worst case would be more like being in an overheated gym you could never leave filled with lawyers, accountants, Republican politicians and Nazis, all of them speaking loudly, while you’re forced to exercise in itchy woolen underwear and then perform karaoke to songs you though you’d successfully sequestered in the deepest level of your subconscious, over and over again. There are probably worse afterlives than that, but that’s the first one that springs to mind.
2) Who was the strangest person you encountered while living in Oklahoma?
I knew someone who had been electrocuted and lost his sense of smell, and who also owned an iguana. I also knew someone who had a blind dog who only ate raw potatoes. I knew someone who was obsessive compulsive and who once, when he was arrested for being drunk and disorderly, had the compulsion to say Walt Whitman’s name over and over again (which did not go over well). There was also an ex-husband of one of the graduate students who showed up in her new boyfriend’s bedroom with a knife, wanting to talk. In addition, I met a lot of highly religious people, some bearable and some not, most of whom I’ve blocked out.
3) Do you read about psychology? If so, which psychologists do you read? Do you read about any other sciences?
I’ve taught bits of Freud from time to time, and have read a lot of his and Lacan’s work. I read Jung when I was young, had a period where I was very interested in Ferenczi’s work (probably because of Lacan), read Melanie Klein, R.D. Laing, etc. I read extensively in philosophy, but I don’t systematically read in the other other sciences, though I’ve become interested in Thomas Metzinger’s work, especially Being No One, which crosses several discplinary boundaries.
4) Have you ever appeared on a local news station? Why? If not, have you ever been written about in a News Paper for a story unrelated to your writing?
Yes, I was on TV because of controversy over my writing in Utah, after my first book was published. Also, when I was in sixth grade I made an extremely brief appearance in a new story about the Honolulu Boy’s Choir, which I was part of (I sang soprano).
5) What is your favorite folk-tale or ghost story? Have you ever consciously attempted to use elements of the this story in your work?
I like a lot of the Grimm tales. There’s a folk-tale called “Dapplegrim” that I’m fond of and that I’m supposed to be writing a contemporary version of for an anthology, but I haven’t done it yet.
6) Are there any movies you love that don’t get enough respect/attention?
My favorite movie is probably Fritz Lang’s The Testament of Doctor Mabuse. It’s gotten a lot of attention but I think it should get even more. I’m also a very big fan of the original Norwegian version of Insomnia, which I think is a terrific movie, very nicely acted and very bleak in ways I really admire—but whenever I mention it, most people I talk to have only seen the American remake. My favorite movie from last year was probably Let the Right One In, which I felt could be described as how Ingmar Bergman might have done a vampire film.
7) Have you observed more or less explicit sexual content being published in works of literary fiction over the past, say, ten years? Why do you think that is?
It’s been a strain in some literary fiction for some time and I don’t think it’s necessarily become more extreme in the last ten years. The most shocking books I read are more than ten years old… In fact, I think that except for work being done for deliberately bizarro presses (much of which isn’t very good) that the literary scene is tamer and more prudish now than it was ten or twenty years ago.
8) Would you ever write a character based on an enemy into a work of fiction specifically in order to do something terrible to that character?
I doubt it. When I wrote my Aliens novel, I had characters in it who names were twisted versions of friends of mine and who all met hideous deaths. That was fun, but partly fun because the friends were in on it and happy to be memorialized dying traumatically. I think it’d be unsatisfying to kill an enemy in a work of fiction, partly because as you start to write characters they take on a life of their own and it’s hard not to like them despite their flaws.
9) What was the first car you bought and how long did you have it?
The first car I bought was a used Honda that I got when I got married. We had it for a few years and then the engine basically blew up. We had the car fixed but it was never the same. Later, I bought a suburban with 300,000 miles on it for $25. It lasted another 50,000 miles. Now I own a Prius.
10) What book would you give to a friend who is wondering if they will ever amount to anything?
I would give him Attila Bartis’s Tranquility. It’s an excellently written, intense, neurotic book, and I think by the time the friend finished it he would think “No matter what my life is like, it’s better than that”…
Thank you,
GBB
Brian Evenson reads “Younger” from his latest collection, Fugue State, for Apostrophe Cast–Listen here.
Buy your copy of Fugue State from Coffee House Press, here.
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