Mark Leyner INTERVIEW BY LARRY MCCAFFERY

MONDO 2000: Were the basic writing methods in your new book,
My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, any different from what you used
in your earlier one, I Smell Esther Williams?

MARK LEYNER: The methods were basically the same. In fact the
process hasn't changed much since I was about seventeen or eighteen,
when I first began developing this way of writing. 

M2: Discovering a methodology that seems to work at age l7 or l8 is
obviously very rare. Where did this aesthetic spring forth from-the
forehead of Zeus, a hit of acid, Jimi Hendrix voodoo or what?

ML: All of the above-plus Keith Richards' nasty guitar licks. The
most powerful early experience I had aesthetically (if that word is
meaningful in this context) was when I saw the Beatles on the Ed
Sullivan Show. I seven or eight and was sitting in a house at the New
Jersey Shore, near Asbury Park, and when the Beatles came on I was
so absolutely transfixed that the ice cream cone I was eating melted
down my arm. I was still a pre-adolescent, mind you, but after that I
knew I wanted to be an artist in some way like the Beatles were.

M2: How were the Beatles able to produce such a powerful reaction
in American kids at that particular juncture?

ML: In my case, it was this very proto-sexual experience I was having.
From the male perspective, a lot of this had to do with seeing these
little girls in the audience react to them in that way. All that squealing
and jumping around does something to you. And naturally one of my
first reactions to this was, "Wouldn't it be great to have people scream
over something you did?" Even to this day, the Beatles' sound is
remarkable, it affects you neurologically or something. It's the sound
of McCartney's and Lennon's voice together, something unique,
unduplicatable. Frankly demagogues always interested me in some
way-I was excited by them, attracted to people in front of huge crowds
who can whip everyone into a frenzy. This probably seems especially
strange since, like everyone else in my neighborhood, I went to
Hebrew School, which was always showing us films about Nazi
Germany, the Leni Riefenstahl type of film. It was an incredible
miscalculation to show us that kind of footage because adolescent
boys are just going to get turned on by the Nazi aesthetic-all those
shiny boots, the sheer energy and power and excitement. I know I got
turned on. It was the same thing with baseball players. I was
mesmerized by reading about people who had a powerful emotional
effect on people by performing. And when the Beatles came along I
intuitively knew they were doing something that somehow was
connecting with all that excitement, creating such a stir on the news
and what not. They were making everything different, at least for a
moment. I knew I wanted to do something that could have that effect.
Obviously at that age-eight or nine-I couldn't get a band together, and
I couldn't make movies, but there was always pen and paper around.
I suppose if I had unlimited resources-terribly wealthy parents who
could buy me all the equipment I needed-maybe I would have done
something else. But writing was something where the tools were right
there, available to me whenever I wanted.

M2: Were you exposed to certain writers when early on who might
have pushed you in certain directions, influenced your sensibility?

ML: Even though I have some sense of what sorts of things made a
big impression on me, aesthetically-like the Beatles or Keith
Richards-in a very basic way I don't know what started me writing
fiction this way. I don't think I've ever been powerfully influenced by
other writers. At Brandeis I began writing fiction partly by accident
but it didn't take me long to develop a style or a methodology that is
essentially what I'm doing now, though it took me a couple of years
to feel confident with it.

M2: One of the things that I would say characterizes your writing is
a kind of wild, comic boldness that is undifferentiated and
unrelenting-the sense that any sentence may yield something
absolutely startling. What was it that excited you about fiction so
immediately? What could you do with fiction, say, as opposed to
poetry?

ML: I was always squeamish about how precious poetry can seem
sometimes, which was a turnoff. I was interested in fucking around
with another medium, wanting to be a trouble maker, and feeling I
had an idea of how to do this in fiction. I looked around at all the
people I knew and what was being written, and I felt I could make a
lot of trouble by making every sentence astonish, grab people by the
balls or whatever, irrespective of the usual bullshit fictional contexts.
I always had this notion that I want my work to be written in such a
way that you could toss up all the pages of a piece of mine, throw a
dart at the pages while they're in the air, and no matter where that
dart lands the line is going to be an audacious, really interesting line.
No matter where you pick up in a piece of mine there's not going to
be a single slack verbal moment, no empty transitional phrase or
routine expository sentence anywhere. I've had this conviction or goal
for a long time, and it's really at the center of what I want my fiction
to do. The first compliment I got that made me feel good was at
Brandeis when someone said that one of my pieces really blew their
mind. Mind blowing is still what I want. And I won't settle for
anything less that maximum, flat-out drug overkill, the misuse of
power.

M2: But if your aim is to make every single sentence "intense", then
you're precluded from doing certain things-you can't create
"characters" and "plots" in any usual sense, for example. Was it
difficult for you, as a fiction writer, to ignore these things, or did it just
seem natural?

ML: It's not as if I went through an aesthetic crisis in deciding not to
write narratives. There were other influences that probably influenced
this notion-music, for example, or tv-but from the beginning my prose
style and my impulse towards narrative disunity came from that desire
for maximal input at the level of each sentence rather than from any
sense of wanting to rebel against realism.  Not being able to do those
realistic things has never bothered me. I never had to go through all
the shit that postmodernists like Ron Sukenick and Steve Katz and
Ray Federman had to go through back in the 60s. I never had the
sense of having this traditional baggage that I needed to jettison or
work myself through. That's a big advantage because it saved me a lot
of time and effort. I came from the fictional womb like I am-the
postmodern battles had already been fought and won. It simply never
occurred to me to write traditional, mimetic, plotted narratives. It
never interested me at all. And if you're trying to do what I said I am,
then you can't create characters and plotted narratives and that other
stuff.  If you have to supply backgrounds, and then have characters
walking into rooms and then sitting down and then starting to talk,
there's going to be lulls while you're getting the reader from one place
to the next. Well, I don't want those lulls-or any lulls.

M2: It's the difference between someone like Little Richard or Hüsker
Dü or Sonic Youth-where everything is jacked up to this incredibly
fast paced, high energy level- versus someone like Springsteen, who
uses pauses and varies his tempos to create his kind of effect. Another
analogy would be Stevie Ray Vaughn's approach to the blues, where
every moment is maximally intense, as opposed to other blues
musicians who want to slow things down and build up to a specific
kind of climax.

ML: Right: and my aesthetic impulse is towards the Stevie Ray
Vaughn-meets-Suicidal Tendencies approach. The fast burst that
never stops. I had a band in high school and I was a Rolling Stones
fanatic (or more precisely, I was a Keith Richards fanatic, which is a
sub-genre of being a Rolling Stones fan). There's a guitar solo
Richards did that I use, consciously or unconsciously (it's hard to tell
at this point), as a model of what my work should be like, from
moment to moment. It's the guitar solo he does in "Sympathy for the
Devil," where Richards creates this sharp, shiny, incredible, nasty
violent burst of raw sounds. There's no leading up to it, it's just
suddenly there, like rain or razors. 

M2: This foregrounding of language itself rather than narrative or
character-doesn't this have more in common with what we normally
think of as poetry rather than fiction?

ML: I'd say that there isn't much of a difference between my work and
poetry. The main differences are probably those of attitude. I avoid
the kind of smug, precious quality that poetry can have because poets
so often end up isolating their lines in the middle of the page without
having any justification for sticking them there-except that they are
writing "poetry."  I never wanted to do that. I figured that if I was
going to have an 8"X11" page, I should fill up the whole page. Why
use just one inch of the page? I want each page I write to be like a page
of blotter acid my readers are ingesting. A huge page of blotter acid,
with no white spaces but with this overload of impressions that would
eventually do something to the readers after they're a couple of pages
into it.

M2: Were there other non-literary forms that might have influenced
your sensibility while you were starting out as a writer?

ML: The first year I was at Brandeis I took a course in American
painting from a guy named Karl Bells, who had also written a book
on rock 'n' roll. That course had an impact on me, particularly seeing
Pollack's work and de Kooning's, and then a little later, some of the
work that Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns had done. I was especially
intrigued by Pollack. He was sort of a rock 'n' roll painter in that he
was after maximum intensity, using the entire canvas, having a center
everywhere. 

M2: I know that your work has a fairly slow gestation period. Could
you describe what is going on in your work habits, on a day-by-day
basis, that allows you to pull together all this disparate materials. The
scenes and words and images seem to be coming from everywhere
from National Enquirer to obscure technical manuals.

ML: My works evolves mostly by a constant process of accumulating
information or language. These come from many sources, including
stuff that is purely imagined, but there is no hierarchy in my mind that
places imaginary materials above things I find. I'm always writing
things down that I come across on the radio or television, so materials
are accumulating every day. I became fascinated with Duchamp
(another hero of mine) in college. I read everything about him I could
find. I liked the idea that he would have this piece he was working on
that he let dust collect on for several months-and then he'd let the
formation of the dust become part of the piece. That's basically the
way I proceed with my work. I don't really have to work at it that
much-if I'm driving in the car and I'm not listening to the radio, I'll
usually think of three-quarters of a page worth of stuff that I
memorize and then write down when I get wherever I'm going. It's as
if there's this constant static or white noise around me that I can tap
into. I'm a fanatic about having external things going on around me.
I love having the television on. I have it on when I fall asleep. The first
thing I do when I get into a hotel room is check to make sure the
television is working. When I'm working I always have the television
going, even with the sound off-just so it's flickering away there on the
edges of perception. And I'll have a few magazines spread out in front
of me, and the newspaper, and whatever I'm reading, The Iliad or a
cyberpunk novel. I love the feeling of having all that information
around me. I feel that way completely aside from being a writer.
Having all this access to information and sources of mental
stimulation makes me feel very comfortable.  This seems to be my
nature. I guess I'm a child of the media age. Some people like trees and
lakes. Well, sensory overload is my environment. This is what makes
me feel serene. 

M2: One of the features usually ascribed to postmodern art has to do
with what you just mentioned about your own work-the
non-hierarchical nature of your materials and manner of presentation,
your refusal to distinguish between pop cultural sources and "serious"
ones.

ML: That distinction is something I always hated. I despise the
contemptuous attitude so many professors seem to have, for example,
about television , rock and roll, and certain kinds of movies.
Personally I could never see the difference between Popeye and
Thackeray. Part of this attitude is motivated by my hatred of any kind
of authority figures, especially academics, professors. One of the
things I liked about my work, once I realized what I was actually
doing, was that it was so elegantly written that it would be impossible
for these academic-types to criticize or dismiss as being "only pop
culture."  "Electrified," "elegant," "hard-core," "beautiful"-all these
adjectives can apply to my work simultaneously. The sense of
hierarchy that says they couldn't co-exist seemed like something worth
demolishing.  And there's been this sense of perverse glee in knowing
I've found a way to do this . . .

That's one of the reasons I've always felt so drawn to Duchamp.
Duchamp personally was very elegant-he was very handsome and
smoked his cigars in a beautiful manner and he played chess and wrote
about chess. And meanwhile he was making these radically audacious
objects-and making them so well. The beauty and precision of the way
the screws were set into his constructions. So even though his works
were formally daring and funny and bizarre, they were also
unassailable because he had done them so well. He wasn't just some
freaky weirdo throwing a bunch of shoddy stuff into a museum, and
so his work was profoundly troubling, even to people who hated what
he was doing, because its beauty and elegance couldn't be denied. And
that's the kind of response I want my work to have. 

M2: Your generation of writers seem to have a different relationship
to pop culture than, say, the earlier generation of writers, like Coover,
and Sukenick and Federman- it's simply part of your milieu . 

ML: I think early nearly everybody in my literary generation feels this
way-the cyberpunks and the new "minimalist" writers and so on. I
think that earlier generation felt somehow outside this pop culture
arena. They feel like they're able to look at pop culture and comment
upon it, but from the outside. Whereas I am totally inside it. I'm
literally made of it. It is me.  The other day I was reading some T'ang
poets, Li Po and Tu Fu, and I thought to myself, "I'm in the Tang
dynasty'"-you know, as in people who have grown up drinking Tang,
this simulated, completely artificial orange juice product. That's as
much a part of me as the color of my eyes, so it's not like I'm making
a choice about whether or not to acknowledge it or comment on it. It's
in my genes.

M2: For instance, since you don't use the usual devices of plot and
character to organize your writing, how do you know when a given
section is finished-or is this mostly an arbitrary decision?

ML: It's definitely not arbitrary, but it's "not arbitrary" in a certain
way that's difficult to talk about.  What I call "finishing" involves
achieving a certain manipulation of the energy of the piece that I feel
comfortable with. There is a sense of closure in my pieces that has
nothing to do with plot dénouement or plot development but which
I'm very aware of when I've arrived at it.  There are certain formal
concerns of various sorts in a given piece that you won't find in the
next, and it's working through these concerns that partially produces
my sense that a piece is finished. For instance, I was very aware of
"Gone with the Mind" being a liturgical piece, so that when I read it
I feel like a preacher.

M2: Does what appears in the final, published version of your stories
pretty much follow the chronological sequence involved in your
writing it ?

ML: Not at all. There is a certain point I arrive at when I have been
gathering materials (and I am always gathering materials, this is just
part of my life) where I decide to enter a new stage.  It's almost like
I'm now entering the text, this information, bodily-I dive into it and
begin to metabolize the stuff. I dance in it, play around in it, like I was
in a pool. And then certain things start happen, I start to see certain
relationships and rhetorical possibilities.

M2: What seems to lead you to enter that next stage-have you just
reached a kind of saturation point in terms of accumulation, where
you sense that it's time to stop accumulating and start dancing with it?

ML: A lot of times it's a sense of despair or boredom that sets me off.
Writing can become very depressing to me. It's a very difficult process.
I'll be accumulating all this stuff and worrying about it and not seeing
what is interesting about it anymore, and usually just even at the
absolute nadir of those feelings I'll decide to do something, perhaps
for audacity's sake alone. It's like having a huge painted white wall in
front of me and suddenly deciding I want to have an elegant, exotic
obscenity painting on it. So I'll plunge into all this accumulated
verbiage and find a line to start something with, like "Gather the
10,000 americans in 

irreversible comas." It's like suddenly I've found that guitar solo to
open with: POW! Let's give the people their money's worth.

M2: One of the motifs that seems to appear in a lot of the stories in
My Cousin is violence. 

ML: Personally I'm obsessed with violence. Obviously, I'm not happy
with all the violence you find in our society, but I think about it all the
time, maybe especially because where I live is an extremely violent
area. And my wife Arlene, who's a psychotherapist, deals with it
everyday in her work. But in terms of my writing, I'm interested in
violence only to the extent that violence is so pervasive a part of our
public discourse.

M2: Have you been surprised by the commercial success and
popularity of My Cousin?

ML: Ron Sukenick game me some extremely valuable advice once
while I was at Boulder.  He told me, "Think of yourself as a poet
rather than as a fiction writer in terms of the commercial success
you're likely to get." That made a lot of sense to me, so I never had the
same expectations about popularity that people like Ray Federman
and Steve Katz (and even Ron himself) have had. Those expectations
were fostered back in the 1960's, when people like Warhol made it
seem like you could really make it big no matter how far out your
work was.  Well, that might have been true for a few people, like
Vonnegut and Brautigan, but overall it was mainly just a myth that
probably made a lot of writers either feel betrayed when the public
didn't respond to what they were doing or wind up compromising the
integrity of their work in the hopes that if they made it "just a little bit
less weird" that maybe people would buy it.

But having said that, I also must say that I always wanted something
more than to just be a literary eccentric who was writing these very
brilliant but unreadable books for an audience of a selected few. I
think every writer must always want more people reading their work.
I wasn't expecting a big commercial breakthrough while I was writing
My Cousin , so there was never any question about my compromising
my work, toning things down or whatever. I just wrote the way I
always have-the way I have to write. But I always felt there was an
appeal in my work that I had never tapped into. 

M2: In both Esther Williams and My Cousin you occasionally refer
to "Mark" and to "Arlene" (your wife). So when all is said and done,
can we read your work as being a kind of autobiography? 

ML: Absolutely! Really, there is nothing in My Cousin that hasn't
happened, in one way or another. Now admittedly, by the time I've
gotten around to writing "Mark" or "Arlene" down on the page, those
pronouns have come a long way from me. Still, there is something
interesting about the trace of that designation. Obviously readers are
going to look at a book written by a person named "Mark" and they
are going to see a Mark in the book-which is going to change the
resonance of that rhetoric. That resonance interests me. It also
interests me to try to make a ludicrous, mythic presentation out of my
banal life. I'm very interested in Homer, for instance. With Homer
you see a kind of writing where you can't find a sentence that is not
about some sort of gigantic, larger-than-life event. Talk about not
having transitional sentences! Today we don't have that kind of
subject matter so much, which is why it interests me to project it into
my work. 

This relates to why I've become so interested in body building. Body
building is finally a really adolescent thing (maybe I think my real
audience is eventually teenage boys). I'm fascinated in things that
display some kind of arrested development. I'm interested in becoming
this big god, picking people up and talking to them. On a very
personal level I'm conscious of being immersed in all this adolescent,
macho heroic fantasy stuff-kung fu movies and TV boy stuff (??). You
can see this very clearly in something like "i was an infinitely hot and
dense dot," which is about this person who literally is getting bigger
and bigger. A "hot, dense dot" is how a black hole is described.

M2: And it's also how the beginning of the universe is described.

ML: Right. Or the beginning of the first stroke on the page. This small
thing that bursts into this gigantic thing. It's a pretty simple parallel.
But that's what I mean about these pieces all having happened to me-I
really have always empathized and fantasized a lot about growing and
expanding into this all powerful being.

M2: The title My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist seems to carry with
it the suggestion that this is going to be a book about the "inner" you.

ML: Exactly. Have you ever had a colonoscopic examination? That's
where they snake this fiber optic tube up through your intestines. It
doesn't hurt (they give you demerol and valium in an IV) and it's
absolutely fascinating. They've got this very advanced technology to
do all of this-they can put a video camera on the end of this snake so
you can watch the whole thing. It's a weird experience, lying there,
high on demerol and valium, watching this tv screen of your
intestines-probably the most introspective view of yourself you'll ever
have. No kidding, you should have one done even if you don't need
one. 

Anyway, I wanted My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist to be like a
colonoscopic examination of my insides-and of the insides of this body
of information I've been swimming in. That's why I maintained this
interest in the gastrointestinal metaphor the whole time I was working
on the book. I had originally planned to use one of my lower GI
x-rays for the cover of the book (I doubt if that had ever been done
before)-that seemed like a great way to get across this sense of an
author exposing himself. Just before I finished the book, I had this
idea in the 

shower of how the book could end: this guy, through the use of these
growth hormones and his weight lifting, was going to become
galactically immense, so in order to do this macrocosmic look of his
insides, they had to perform the colonoscopic operation by snaking
the optic tube through one of those large observatory telescopes. I
wound up not using that image to close the book, but I still like it. 

M2: One of the things you do fairly frequently in My Cousin is to
create these wonderfully ludicrous juxtapositions by describing
something utterly mundane or grotesque-but with these highly
technical terms. Like that scene in the bar (in "i was an infinitely hot
and dense dot") where the guy starts jerking off and "shoots a glob of
dehydrogenated ethylbenzene 3,900 miles towards the Arctic
archipelago." Do you actually "research" any of this-would any of
these technical terms actually "fit" these situations, or are you purely
playing with the sound of things?

ML: Mostly I'm playing. In the case of all those chemical I use to
describe that guy's sperm and the stuff he uses to rub on the woman's
clitoris, well, I had an idea about what some of those things actually
do, because I got them out of an issue of a chemical engineering
magazine, so I knew that they were at least liquids. But as to what
they would do on contact with actual human skin , I have no idea.
What interests me in creating a passage like that isn't  the reality of
what I'm describing but what it feels like to read language like that.
Using that elevated, exotic jargon creates an interesting opportunity
to use rhetoric in a way you don't usually encounter.  When I say this
hunk swaggers into the bar and he's got a dick made out of
"corrosion-resistant nickel-based alloy" that can ejaculate "herbicides,
sulfuric acid, tar glue" and so on, I mean, just the sound of that
rhetoric lets you know this guy is one mean motherfucker! It's this
collision of different kinds of rhetoric-phallic rhetoric and the rhetoric
of technology-that both produce this bogus sense of power and
authority.  They're really not that different in a way (or their effect
isn't much different)-this sort of hard-boiled, tough guy lingo and
scientific prose that's all no-nonsense and knows exactly what it is
talking about.  And when you have these things intersecting so that
you see them together, it's very funny.

M2: Talking about the ways for a writer to devise structures that allow
you to move freely from moment to moment sounds very theoretical,
abstract. But there's a sense in which I'd say this approach is very
much grounded in the world I live in

ML: I'd say my work presents the world the way people like you and
me actually live in it, the way we receive and perceive it. That myth of
narrative life, with all that implies, is something you would think
would have been jettisoned a long time ago by now. We live from
minute to minute, with things constantly changing, kaleidoscopic. Our
cultural matrix intensifies the whole natural process of things
appearing in front of us and then disappearing. So you see these huge
headlines in the New York Post and Daily News announcing these
portentous things that you think everyone in the world must be
reading about. But then they're gone the next day. Or you get get in
the morning after having this strange dream (it could have been about
anything), and then you're facing some pink and white tile in your
bathroom. And then you go eat some strange breakfast cereal and you
read the back of the cereal box, while the tv is blaring out some other
text and maybe you're children are telling you some other kind of
story. And all the while this white noise is filtering in from outside
your window. The point is that our days are very fragmented, with a
million things happening, effecting our perceptions, that have
completely arbitrary relationships to one another.

M2: You'd think that these sorts of experiences would encourage
people to stop thinking about their lives as if they were living in an
18th century empiricist novel- relativity and quantum mechanics (just
to name two obvious examples) are such revolutionary ways of
looking at how things operate that they should have changed the
nature of the kind of narratives we see ourselves existing in. 

ML: They would have changed our narratives, if they had affected the
way we think, or the structure of our thought and the language we use
in any profound way. But they haven't had that affect, which is why
people still read Robert Ludlum and Tama Janowitz instead of
Sukenick and Coover. But things will change.  I'm not sure literature
as such is going to keep being an area that artists will go into because
I'm not sure how much that books are going to last. People are going
to be doing other things that are just too interesting to put down in
order to read something. And that won't be because people are going
to be stupider or less intellectually inclined but because the other art
forms or sources of information are going to be offering people more
input, more stimulation.

M2: Wouldn't you say, though, there there is something about the
intimacy and nuanced, aesthetic complexity that can exist in the
reading of a great book that you don't feel in other art forms? 

ML: I don't feel that way. I don't think we have developed other art
forms yet that can give you all those things at once. But I think there
will be art forms to come that will do everything books do for us-and
more. I don't think the novel is ever going to disappear no matter
what other art forms appear. People are going to keep writing books.
Whether or not it's going to be fair anymore to condemn people for
not being interested in those books, though, is another story. One
reason I do what I do is because I feel it has to be the writers'
responsibility to make fiction a viable alternative to these other art
forms that are out there now. If it's not a viable alternative, then it's
the writers who have let us down. It's not the readers' fault that
they're turning on the television or buying tickets to see the Butthole
Surfers instead of curling up with a nice book at night.

M2: I also think that there's a misapprehension that whenever you
introduce technology into something-like the arts, for instance-that
you automatically wind up "dehumanizing" it. That just isn't
necessarily the case. If you take an art form like the blues the way it
was originally, where the voice and instruments aren't amplified
electrically, and compare it to the post electric blues, it's not matter of
one being more "human" (or even more "natural") than the other.
Eventually you're going to have a genius like Jimi Hendrix come along
who recognizes that technology gives a blues musician a whole series
of fascinating new options, and who can add those possibilities to
what is still the blues and do something different. But it's still the
blues-and just as human as what Robert Johnson or Blind Lemon
Jefferson were doing.

ML: I've certainly never seen technology as not being human. The
Japanese, apparently, are much more comfortable than we are with
the idea of technology being an extension of human activity of some
sort; so there's not this split between nature and technology built into
their system of perceiving things and evaluating them. But in fact, as
I said before, the information output of technology is a kind of nature
to me; it's the natural environment I've grown up in. 

So I don't see technology as being something alien or unnatural that
people have to keep under control and resist. Interacting with
technology seems like a very natural, human activity to me.