Interview with Barbara Baer

This is one of a series of interviews with the authors whose work is collected in Wreckage of Reason, an anthology of experimental short fiction by women. To read the other interviews, click "Wreckage of Reason" at the bottom of this post.

1. This is the first piece of fiction that I have encountered that uses MySpace and other technological media as its setting. Do you know of others? why did you choose it? what possibilities did it open for you?

I suppose there must be others using it but I just got the idea because of hearing about it used so much, especially Second Life. Of course it opened possibilities, as it does for people who communicate and create personas there.

2. Is the title a play on 'girl germs'?

No, it is a play on jeans as well as being about genes.

3. I assume you consider this a satire. What do you consider are the objects of your satire? Why do you want to make fun of them?

Yes, satire or fantasy. My intent wasn't to make fun of them as much as enter into a possible world with them where I'd hope a reader would feel sadness, despite the grotesque nature of their afflictions.

4. What is your view on medical experimentation and so-called medical 'progress'?

Very dark. I'm glad people are helped by medical intervention, would hope the same for myself, but I envision all sorts of cloning. I used to be a reader of sci fi. Who can see Blade Runner and not feel the likelihood andthe tragedy of the mutants?

5. This story is in a tradition that goes back at least as far as MaryShelley's "Frankenstein" -- one that bears witness to the dangers of scientific experimentation. Did this tradition affect your writing at all? That is to say, did you feel stymied because of it, supported by it, or didyou not even sense it while writing?

As a former sci fi reaader, one interested in the fantastical, of course Shelley comes to mind. It's all out there, from the mutant movies to what seems very poppular on mainstream tv, all the alien and mutant shows, people with special powers. But to me there's always been the dark side. The human brain came up with nuclear fission and we can blow up everything. I've always felt that the thanatopic side would hold sway in the end, with a few survivors. Obviously others think this way, or want to immunize themselves from believing it will happen by creating horror stories. I once wrote an essay (Commonweal, but I don't remember date, cover story) about the differences between male and female apocalyptic scenarios, so the subject has fascinated me, probably most of all to try to understand what would be last-moment, last-moment-on-earth, strategies and sensations.

Tetsumi Kudo and Pierre Huyghe at the Walker Art Center

The Walker Art Center here in Minneapolis is one of the country's leading Contemporary Art Venues. It features live performances and films in addition to visual art. This Saturday, Nov. 15th, I had the pleasure of visiting it for three reasons: 1. a reading by Samuel Delaney, 2. a film by Pierre Huyghe, and 3. the first major solo exhibit by Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo.

The Delaney reading was delightful, but I feel that I have little insight to offer. He speaks in a clear, crisp voice and is, of course, an incredible intellect. See him if you get the chance. He has long since transcended any narrow definition of him as merely a science fiction writer.  

 The film by Pierre Huyghe was extraordinary: it is "a room-size film installation entitled A Journey That Wasn’t (2006), which premiered at the 2006 Whitney Biennial and was acquired jointly by the Walker and the Whitney Museum of American Art." It juxtaposes visions of an Antarctica trip with nighttime shots of the Manhattan skyline and of a crowd listening to an orchestra in Central Park playing avant-garde classical music. Sometimes, the crowd looks like penguins. Sometimes the buildings of Manhattan look like Antarctica.  

The film begins by showing a man dressed in heavy outdoor gear in the dark trying to hold onto a large piece of plastic. The wind keeps billowing it outward and up an icy and snowy hill. Behind the man, open water laps inches from his heels. At his right is a lamp with a bulbous 'shade': the wind blows it over. Another man comes to pick it up.   Then a voice-over tells us that this film is about an effort to find a singularity (i.e. an albino penguin living alone on a deserted island off Antarctica) and then to resist the urge to bring it back, to instead just leave it there, as it was. 

He says that it ends in tragedy: what he means by this, I am not entirely sure, but I suspect it has less to do with 'capturing' the penguin in any conventional way, and more with capturing it on film. The attempt to film the penguin brings with it large, intrusive lights, people in bulky beige suits walking the ice, ships and small boats offshore.   In one particularly telling shot, Huyghe juxtaposes a shot of the bare masts of the ship poking up toward the grey sky with the New York skyline. In spite of our efforts to appreciate nature, we can only do so by transforming it to some extent, even in such a forbidding climate as Antarctica. New York can and does come to Antarctica.   

It is a paradox: as soon as wilderness is defined as such, it ceases to be wilderness.   

The shots of Central Park get more and more disquieting as the film progresses. The crowd's faces become less and less distinct, only to finally become indistinguishable from their surroundings. Strange, dark sculptures, which bare a resemblance to the rock outcroppings in Antarctica, are strewn about in the park. There is a lake nearby.   Huyghe continues to darken his shots.   

At one point I thought I was looking at a penguin, only upon closer inspection to learn that it was a bass clarinet. Another time I was watching a number of basses, until Huyghe gradually shifted them into a nondescript whole, which then turned into rocks and penguins.   

What does it mean to "shoot" film? to "take" a picture? to "aim" a camera? It is telling that the verbs we use to discuss film are all appropriative and / or violent. To what extent did having lights and cameras and bulky looking people on its island cause trauma for the penguin? could it even have been fatal? 

Watching this film put me in mind of a show I saw on the History channel last week. It explored how the earth would change if human beings were to suddenly become extinguish and all else was to remain the same. It showed the decay and destruction that would occur in the first 40 years, 100 years, 500, and a thousand. At some point, even Manhattan would revert to the way it looked when Native Americans lived there.    

Antarctica, as metaphor for wilderness, would come to Manhattan.

This film seems to show, in a more trenchant and emotionally devastating way, that humanity's stamp is both profound and quite light. We have redefined almost the entire earth according to our lights.   But no definition is definitive, if you will allow the pun.   

The film ends by placing a grid of various geometric shapes on top of a shot of the skyline: we see immediately that geometry and rock outcroppings are not only similar, but perhaps related. Humans may have derived geometry from the shapes of nature, only to later impose them on nature.    Such imposition is, of course, profound. But it is not forever changed. 

As the film drew toward a close, the shots became darker and more and more undifferentiated. 

And this brings us to the Tetsumi Kudo exhibit: Garden of Metamorphosis. One of the leading post-war Japanese artists, Kudo, who died in 1990, worked in an incredible number of media: string, computers, cages, paint on cloth, manikins (perhaps), manufactured skulls, and phallus after phallus after phallus, together with, later in his career, flowers (perhaps the feminine counterpoint to the phalli?) However, he seemed also fascinated about the border between human beings and the rest of life, between death and creativity, between liberation and being caged.     

For me, some of his most effective works were a series of birdcages that he worked with in the 1960's and 70's. He usually painted them a bright color — yellow or blue, for instance — and inside often placed either blobs that seemed to represent birds, or sculpted human hands that were knitting.They occasioned in me a fascinating meditation on the tension between creativity and captivity. To create, as Samuel Delaney reminded us during a question and answer period, is to be within the bubble of your own creation, thereby being unable to evaluate it or to believe anyone else's evaluation.   And not only are creators within the very terms of their creation, but they also need to be working within some sort of tradition or traditions in order to make any sort of sense. In that sense, we are caged. Like Rilke's tiger, we cannot see beyond the bars of the trajectories of the traditions we are within. To do so would be to render oneself incomprehensible.   

Is this what happened to Herman Melville, when he was thought to have gone crazy because of the types of novels he was writing (including Moby Dick)? Perhaps Melville had to wait for another cage to recontextualize his work. It happened about 40 years after his death. Could it have just as easily been 200 years?   

I can't answer that question. I am in a cage.   

It is important, however, to note that these cages are both sites of imprisonment and sites of liberatory creativity. The birds in these sculptures often seem quite chippy. The hands are making something of colorful yarn.  

There is much more to see in this exhibit, but the cages fascinated me the most: Not one had an open door.  

 

Interview with Kass Fleisher

This is the third in a continuing series of interviews with the short story writers anthologized in Wreckage of Reason, a collection of experimental short fiction by women writers. To see the other interviews, click Wreckage of Reason at the end of this post.

"Generation" by Kass Fleisher is an uproarishly funny, but also complexly layered story. In it, she collages questions about standard grammar, quotations from an academic paper, and a narrative about an upset women on psychotropic drugs that make peeing and reaching an orgasm difficult.

1. The story is built around eight questions about standard grammar (subject, verb, dependent clause, etc.). In your afterword you mention "offensive advice about sentences." With this comment, are you referring only to these questions, or to other aspects of the story as well?

I find texts in the strangest places-and in this instance I was standing in a classroom waiting for students to finish some small-group work, and I found this awful old grammar book on the shelf. I suppose that if you truly can't communicate in writing because your grammatical practices deviate *that* much from the standard, then that might be a helpful book to read. But how does telling writers what not to do actually teach them how to mimic the standard? Doesn't it just intimidate people further? And if readers internalize these vicious little rules to the point that they're incapable of reading anything else-the play that exists in language just dies. What institutionalization does to us is: kill the joy we took in Dr. Seuss. So many possibilities are eliminated. And then too what I loved about this book-sorry I have no memory of the title; I think we've all seen them-the body of each chapter is composed in imperatives, but the chapter titles are questions. "How can a run-on sentence be corrected?" Well, why should it be? And so this piece of mine contains many of those (although not necessarily run-ons in the technical sense of that word). What does it mean to "correct" "error"? What social and institutional impulses are at work in that? To me it feels kind of scary, and puts me in mind of Chomsky's famous nogrammatical sentence, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." Kind of a nice line of poetry, that. What does the standardized reader do when confronted with artistic "error"?

This is an over statement, but I put all of that together with "I have seen the best minds of my..."; and the title is "Generation," so: "Howl." (See below for where, but I'll finish this point here.) No, minds aren't being laid waste by standardized grammar, but those sorts of institutionalized controls are doing some serious damage. We have fond memories of Dr. Seuss but can't read Beckett. Culturally, we're a bunch of languaging robots.

2. I have heard of a distinction between "collage" and "montage," in which the former refers to putting together unlike things, while the latter refers to collaging with an evident point in mind. Is this a useful distinction to use in thinking about your piece?

It's lovely of you to ask this question, and my answer is that I have no fucking idea. I would suspect collage, since I don't see  within this piece the sort of narrative progression with which montage is typically associated. I hope that the book as a whole (The Adventurous, from which this is an excerpt) sees the fragments come together, so to speak, in a point at the end. No fair asking me what the point is, though!

3. In your afterword, you make mention of using Ginsberg's "Howl" in writing this story. I wasn't able to find any places where you lifted directly from the poem. Did I miss something? Or do you use him in a nonliteral fashion?

Yes, I know, I was horribly clever-it's buried in the eight subtitles. I just couldn't bear to use the word "sentence" in reciting the questions raised by the source text, so it goes: 1. How can [I] fragments be eliminated? 2. What are the major errors in [have] structure? 3. How can a wordy [seen] be improved? Writers should be shot for being so clever.

4. You cross off words and phrases, mostly when you are working with the "Distant Intellectual" discourse that you quote. What is your aim?

I wanted to look at the notion of "grammar" as exacted by the expectations for literary scholarship and oppose that with the rant-based syntax of this nutty woman who can't pee. The source text is an actual essay in a book written by my partner Joe Amato; he and I edit each other's work, and we can be fairly cruel about it-at least, I suspect, to people who don't know that this is just how we deal with writing. We're brutal, but we're each fine with that (mostly). And I had been reading his paper and making these comments and thecontent of his paper was actually relevant to what I was trying to achieve: "outsider moves" becoming "insider strategem," etc. So it was another one of those accidents, and I have a lot of problems with his prose style-he's a great poet; I would never touch a line-but prose-wise he can be inscrutable. So there I was with my authoritarian red pen telling him (in marginalia) that he's "driving me fucking nuts!!!" What kind of hypocrite am I, right? So I put the whole thing in there; his original, the edits I made, and my comments. I found the final affect to be entirely disruptive; I don't know how readers experience the piece, but that aspect of found text was just a mess, in my view, typographically and otherwise, which I hope makes the point that editing is intrusive, destructive-much as we all seem to love the phrase "constructive criticism." (What does that mean???)  And, what we have here is a plain-terms rant juxtaposed with a rant disguised as literary scholarship. Each grammar is extensive, but to different affect.

5. A character in the story who has taken psychotropic drugs for "anger" is having difficulty peeing and achieving orgasm. It seems that the academic and scientific (drugs) discourses can oppress and even possess the body.

Fuckin-A. And what I love is how PISSED she is about that, tee hee. There's just no one she's not mad at-the poor woman in the next stall, the people in line, the drugs, and herself for being so angry that she has to be on them. She even gets mad at the feds: Rocky Mountain National Park enjoys the highest day traffic of any of the Parks, because of its proximity to Denver, and only two years ago they built a respectably-sized rest room. Unbelievable. More below, but before moving on: I wanted to bring the female body into a variety of grammars that just don't recognize it. You could argue that no sort of body is permitted, unless you view serial assertion as phallic, which I do (sue me). I far prefer questions to answers, circularity to penetration (I'll stop there). But here's a truth: Joe and I do a lot of hiking, and above treeline he can just yank a zipper and whiz away. Me, not so much; and guide books don't typically include information about toilets, even when they exist. So clearly, the shy-bladder female is not welcome at 12,000'. That PISSES me off.

6. The woman who is having this difficulty gets angry with other women who are peeing and shitting around her. She even calls them "cunts" and "bitches." Does the scientific and intellectual use of language not only entrap women, but even turn them against one another?

Yes, it's all of that, and the way vernacular purportedly re-empowers women (and other Others) in the face of this strictly restrictive language standard (although vernacular doesn't actually empower anyone; it's a practice like any other that will shift with societal dynamics-some day the word "cunt" will possess zero power). Ultimately I wanted the woman to find ecstasy both in what some would call angry language and in orgasm (anger and orgasm, chemically, being not unrelated). That the lovers edit each other's language-and the tongue (doubled in meaning) is the basis for ecstasy-well, I'm not sure I want to mystify this too much. Perhaps the piece says that language will set you free-not sure. What I would say is that in the final analysis, what entraps women is patriarchal oppression, which is reflected by standardized grammars (masculinist), by the discourse practices of scholarship (masculinist), and yes, by a science that wants to numb both a woman's anger and her capacity to experience sexual pleasure (definitely masculinist!).

Sundays at the Blake School Reading Series -- Minneapolis

Poet and spoken word artist J. Otis Powell will be giving a reading at The Blake School in Minneapolis on Sunday, November 16, at 2 p.m. It will take place at the Northrop Campus (The Upper School), located at 511 Kenwood Parkway, two blocks west of the sculpture garden.

The reading is free and open to the public. Following it, there will be a short reception.

A writer, performer, educator, curator, producer, consultant, and arts administrator, J. Otis Powell, in his own words, "lives and works in a jazz aesthetic while calling attention to the improviser in us all."

Contact: Jefferson Hansen, jpha@earthlink.net