Current mood:	confused
Current music:	U2, "Zoo Station"

Chuck Palahniuk transcript and a moral dilemma
First, for monanotlisa, filmnoirmemoir, and anyone else who is interested, here is the transcript of my interview with Chuck Palahniuk. I mostly took myself out of it, because I am boring.

***

Every book is about something that I can’t resolve and I can’t deal with. My way of dealing with something horrible until it no longer hurts is to turn it into a book, turn it into some sort of metaphor, completely explore it, research-wise, write about it in every way possible and sort of exhaust my dramatic reaction to it.

It’s sort of like a purge, but it’s also more like what most psychologists call flooding, where, if you were afraid of snakes, the psychologists would put you in a room full of snakes until you were so freaked out that you had totally exhausted your dramatic reaction to snakes. So, every single book has been some issue.

Diary is sort of about how Portland, like so many cities is just really getting filled up with rich people, who are gentrifying it and driving the locals into a service economy. Locals can no longer afford to buy houses, certainly not houses like their parents had. And the locals certainly don’t have the enormous amount of wealth that mostly retired wealthy people have coming into the city and creating this new status quo. And they’re really, I don’t want to say destroying, but changing these really small previously sort of intimate places. And then suddenly you have these millionaires moving in and taking over. So how can a place fight back against that, prevent that, maybe even benefit from that. So that’s what Diary is.

Fugitives was really, I just wanted to document part of the culture that always pisses me off when I go to the historical society that there’s nothing documented. The sex industry has never been documented but Portland has always had one. the heroin industry has never been documented. Ghost stories. It’s entirely an oral tradition. So I wanted to document the part of the culture that has never been officially put down. And the people. The people that will never be sort of officially recognized.

My style is entirely ripped off from a woman named Amy Hemel. She’s probably my favorite living writer. And Amy Hemel has this wonderful staccato style where her books almost read more like a list of details. I used to call them laundry list stories because every story is almost paragraph by paragraph a list of really concrete detail with no transitioning device between them, they’re just sort of butted up against each other. And I’ve developed choruses as my transitional device when I really really need one. Whenever I change the subject abruptly I put in a chorus. You know, “Sorry, Mom, sorry God,” “I am Joe’s fuzzy nipples.” So it completes the pervious thought and notifies the reader that we’re moving on to a slightly different thought.

[Next non-fiction essay collection, then book short story collection]

Have you heard what’s happening on this tour? This is a blast, this is so evil. I’m reading a short story from this collection and people are passing out, they’re blacking out during the story. It happened the first night; I’d never read this piece out loud before. Two people fell to the floor. The next day at Borders, two people. The next day at Microsoft, a giant corporate event. These big guys are sitting there in these little crooked chairs - BOOM! They black out. And everybody jumps up, they crowd around: “Are you okay? Are you okay?” “Everybody get back!” And they revive the person and the person has no memory of falling. Booksmith a couple nights ago, a Santa Cruz book store last night three people blacked out. One woman ran for the bathroom, made it halfway, threw up on the floor. Another woman burst into tears and ran out the door. Booksmith was so sweet because the one woman who [fainted], I was looking straight at her as I was reading and she just...

[He drops suddenly to the floor]

And it was a wood floor and it made such a huge thud and the whole room went and gathered around, like “Is she okay? Is she okay?” And I wasn’t sure whether I should finish the story if I should continue it, and I hear this little plaintive voice, “keep reading...” It’s the woman on the floor and she’s laying there, and she’s going “Keep reading, please finish the story...”

It’s about 2/3 of the way through. It’s really funny. People just really laughed through the first 2/3. And I think what may be happening is what they call blood alchadosis? alchalosis? In cults they get people to chant really fast, like the “ha ha” exercise - where people just go “ha ha HA HA HA!” They want you to hyperventilate so your blood becomes alcholai instead of acid, and you pass out, you become light-headed. I think people are laughing so much through the first 2/3 that when the boom comes down, when the twist happens, they black out. So it’s just a joy to watch. I’ve been reading from it everywhere I go. Until somebody gets hurt I’m going to read this piece. It’s just so amazing. Afterwards, people are just euphoric that they’ve seen a story do that.

[Record: 3; Tally: 13]

[How much research? “Tons.”]

I could have made Diary a whole book about handwriting analysis because I had done so much research. But you just want to put in enough to establish your authority. If people believe that you’re telling the truth about this one thing, then they’ll believe the big, big twist later on. I reference all these renaissance painters that when they were going to paint something miraculous, like the ascension of Christ, they would really focus on getting the plants botanically perfect because they thought that if people could see their everyday lives in the plants, see the things that they know around them depicted realistically, then they would believe the larger illusion. So I was focusing on getting the little tiny niggling things right so that people will give me authority by the time the big thing happens and they’ll believe that.

I sort of identify the theme. And the themes sort of line up, like in Choke, the theme was sort of things that are not what they seem to be. And so I went out looking for coded security announcements for public places. And everywhere, everyone I came in contact with I asked them, “have you ever worked in schools, restaurants, airports, hospitals, any place where they have those coded announcements for real emergencies. And, because the big twist is somebody who is not what she appears to be, everybody is not who they appear to be, everything is an illusion. And that’s sort of the theme of minimalism, to portray a theme as many ways as possible.

My characters are mostly sort of unisex, about the most sort of sexual thing about them is their name. They don’t really obsess about their anatomies. So it makes it really easy, I just write a character, I try to write a human being. And whether it’s a man or a woman is probably just based more on the name than anything else. But some stories just sort of lend themselves to a female more than a male. Invisible Monsters was a reverse-Cinderella story and so that’s effectively told with a female narrative. Diary was basically arbitrarily just for change. You know, I wanted to do a change, and just to contrast it as well as possible with the last book.

Diary is about acknowledging that things that we’re used by so that we’re no longer used by them. And not being ashamed to say, “yeah, I really like pretty twinkly things. So kill me. I like really kitchy things that we’re trained not to like because they’re not tasteful, but dammit, they’re pretty.” It’s about acknowledging these things that we’re not supposed to admit that we like but we actually do like. Because unless we can acknowledge that, we’ll always be used by that liking, we’ll always be attracted back to those things.

First and foremost, every single book is just about bring people back to reading. You know, my generation, we always heard “kids aren’t reading anymore, kids are just so lazy.” But I’ve always thought, “books are so fucking boring.” Books are failing kids. Kids would be reading if books were serving kids better. And I’d almost quit reading, and I thought, you know before I quit altogether, I should take some responsibility and write the kind of book I would like to read and make it sort of a mission to bring people back to reading the way I used to love reading. Anything that brings people back to reading is, I think, my biggest goal.

Beyond that, I don’t necessarily believe everything that my narrators or my characters are saying but I think a character should say something, should have a world view. And he should make a case for it, a really good case for it. And it’s more interesting to write a character whose world view isn’t necessarily your own. Because then you have to build a case for something that you don’t believe in. That’s a lot more fun, that’s a lot more interesting. Like arguing for the landholders in “The Grapes of Wrath.” That’s always a lot less sympathetic and a lot less knee-jerk. And you really have to put some thought into it. So I don’t think that politically I’m really expousing any agenda other than I want people to be reading, I want books to be fun. I think characters should be outrageous, and make a really good case for whatever they believe in.

I’m not my characters. My characters are my friends, ask them. I could introduce you to Tyler Durden, you could talk to him. He lives in Bend, Oregon, he’s a carpenter now.

I bought my first house, a little shack of a house, and I got all of my stuff moved into it, it was 300 sq. ft., and then I plugged in the TV and turned it on and found out that there was no TV reception. And it was so isolated that the cable company would not bring cable out, and it was situated such that you couldn’t even put up a dish. I was never going to have TV as long as I lived there. And I still live there, and I still don’t have TV, and that was 15 years ago, and that’s when I got real desperate for books. I started finding that there were no books that I really wanted to read, so that’s really what got me writing.

I wrote, like in 5th grade. I really liked writing and my 5th grade teacher really encouraged me to write, but beyond that I never wrote. I was a journalism major at college, and I worked as a reporter for six months after college but boy, the pay coupled with the kinds of things I had to cover like city council meetings, school board meetings - no. That just killed that.

I joined a writers workshop led by a man named Tom Spanbower (?) who was teaching minimalism because he had been taught minimalism by Gordon Lish at Columbia. And Gordon Lish is sort of the man credited with inventing minimalism. Lish was a book editor at Knoph and he was fiction editor at Esquire Magazine for decades. And he taught minimalism to writers I like like Amy Hemel and Mark Bichard (?). And Tom really focuses on short stories, so each of us really focused on getting short stories perfect. Eventually I had several short stories that all seemed to share common characters and they all seemed to be different plot points. And I found that it took very little to sort of unite them and bridge them and make those short stories just from random things into a larger novel. So every time I think I have enough short stories for a collection, it turns out it’s just a novel.

I wrote a really rough draft of Monsters and Tom Spanbower who taught the workshop asked me to send it to his agent, and so I did that and the agent took me on, so that’s how I got an agent. And the manuscript went around to a dozen publishing houses that all said they wanted to buy it, but none of them eventually bought it because their marketing departments said that it was too unlike anything else on the market. It would be too hard to market it because they couldn’t compare it, couldn’t market it in association with something else. “It’s a Chicano ‘Joy Luck Club.’” They wanted an identity based on existing identities and they didn’t feel they could do that. And this was after a whole bunch of really promising meetings and back and forth and by the whole thing just sort of crapped out, I was really pissed off. I was really disillusioned and angry, wondering if it was really worth it doing this writing thing. And I thought, “I’m going to do it one more time,” and I have a choice, I can either write really nice like they say or just write really dark and punish them. I thought, they’re never going to forget this book. They may not publish it, but they’re never going to forget it. And I wrote Fight Club, and sent it off, and within three days the agent had sold it. And the movie rights sold within a month of that, while it was still manuscript.

[having fight club made into a movie] Wasn’t that exciting, because it was all based on stuff my friends and I had done, or I had done, or my friends told me about doing themselves. So in a way it was like seeing an old scrapbook - it was very nostalgic for us. I included them, took them down to the filming, took them to all the screenings and we all sort of laughed at it together because they were saying things that we had said, doing things that we had done. And so it had a sort of it had a very sweet, almost sort of sad quality to it for us.

I’m the witness. When I do cacophony of society events, like the Santa rampage [from F&G], it’s really more I’m the Santa with the notebook taking notes and I never really occur as a character because I’m too busy documenting what the other characters are doing and putting it together afterwards. That’s what my character is, I’m the organizer that you don’t really see at all.

The people who made “Requiem for a Dream,” they bought the rights to Choke, and they’ve got a really good second draft on the screenplay, so they’re going to start casting it. Invisible Monsters is in development for a movie, and Diary, we’re negotiating with the people who made “American Beauty.” So they’re really excited about buying Diary.

[Says that he just turned down an offer to do a film with Spike Jonze. Asks that I take this story off the record.]

I don’t think about it as [fooling] people, first I end up doing it to myself because I always want to be surprised by where the book eventually goes, because I never know the twist until I get to it. And second of all, it’s always about surprising my editor Jerry, because if I can write something that really freaks out my editor, then that’s all I’m really interested in. He has asthma, and I always measure the laugh factor or the freak factor by how many times he has to get his inhaler out. So after he reads something of mind, I always call his assistant and ask “How many times did Jerry have to get his inhaler out?” I’ve got him up to five times.

Fugitives was the most fun to do because it was just going out and finding people who devoted their lives to the most amazing bizarre things. Because I find those people really empowering. I think that if someone can devote their life to collecting gas station memorabilia, I can pretty much do anything with my life. And it was being with people. Because I never wrote until I made writing a social thing, and I started writing in workshop, and I started using writing as a way to go to parties. I have never been to so many parties as when I wrote Fight Club. Every time I came up with an idea I would go to a party and say, “Who here has worked in food service and done stuff to food?” And I would plant these themes at parties and get people talking about their stories, and then I would just throw the idea out and harvest the best ideas that came back. You get people talking about just what they really know best and you learn just terrific things. And so you’re almost never alone. Your imagination is pretty fucking limited. My experience is really limited. And that’s why I rely on talking to thousands of people for every book.

It breaks my heart to see people studying writing before they’ve lived a really exciting life. It’s why when you’re young you need to have those adventures and you need to make those mistakes. Later, in your ‘30s, you’re going to lose that energy and you’re really going to need a store of stories and details to fall back on and write about for the rest of your life. So to have a lot of adventures and make a lot of mistakes and not be afraid of the things that hurt because those are the things that you’re going to laugh about later. It’s all material, it’s all just material.

Tell as many people as possible what you’re going to do so that they can either encourage you or berate you. I had friends that were like, [really sarcastic voice] “So, how’s that writing thing going?” They would just torture me, they were just assholes. But in a way that was its own support. I was like, “Fuck, now I gotta write because I told those assholes I was going to be a writer.”

If I could, in any way, be part of a new sort of renaissance in fiction; people who are reading my stuff sort of becoming a new generation of really extraordinary writers that make books really extraordinary - I would like to be part of that. Because the greatest compliment is when someone reads your work and it inspires them to work.

***

And now, the moral dilemma:

dizzyditz and lordelessar were going to go see Eddie Izzard tonight. Now lordelessar is sick. I've been offered his ticket. One the one hand, I want to go see Eddie! On the other hand, I feel really bad for preying on a guy with strep throat. And then, on the other hand, Eddie!

Okay, so to be honest, there really isn't a question of whether or not I'm going. I am. I'd just like someone to make me feel like less of a horrible person because of it...