The Reality Break Interviews: Volume #0

by Dave Slusher

  DS: At least thematically, that's one where if you draw the line down the protagonist and the antagonist, the more sincere the person, the more closer they are in the protagonistic end of the spectrum. The people who choose to disavow these augmentations in the end, those are the good guys. The guys who sort of buy into this crazed exaggeration—those are sort of the bad guys.

  JL: Yeah, it's a bit of a corny story in that way. It's a real classic sports story. As a teenager I read a lot of kind of sports fiction for boys. There's an archetypal narrative that's also present in Ring Lardner's baseball fiction, where the narrator is this sort of undervalued player on the team and his best friend is the star. The story is ostensibly the narrator talking about the star, and somewhere in the course of it he discovers that he himself is very important to the team. I was echoing that kind of Ring Lardner “you know me, Al". Sports fiction is a hidden genre, and I'm as excited by those sort of tiny little fiction genres as I am by some of the big ones that I play with.

  DS: Your work has a lot of the feel and window dressing of America in the Thirties and Forties in it, doesn't it?

  JL: Well, it, it's something that snuck up on me. There's something thrilling to me, especially in post-war American culture. There's an energy, there's a kind of undermining of the traditional American male figure that really thrills me in the films of that period. You know, Jimmy Stewart's probably the key male figure in crisis in American film in the Fifties. Hitchcock and Anthony Mann put him through some really pretty tortuous paces in the thrillers and Westerns. Of course, I love a lot of hard-boiled fiction, too, and that's reflected in Gun With Occasional Music. In general, I think people in my generation are weirdly ahistorical. They've forgotten so much of the really vibrant stuff that just went before them in American culture. I guess Americans are pretty ahistorical. I shouldn't blame it on my generation. There are a lot of achievements that are lost, and suddenly, you've got to reinvent feminism, because we had an American feminism before. It's not a new thing, and there are a lot of epiphanies that are lost and then rediscovered. It's also just a sensibility thing. I'm in love with the tailoring of the suits in the Fifties. I'd like to live then, so, it's partly just fetishism.

  DS: Now, we're roughly the same age, and, and I know I'm fascinated with AMC (American Movie Classics.) If I'm not watching anything in particular, I leave AMC on. One of the things that fascinates me about it is, in its own way, the cultural context and the way the movies were made and the times they're describing—they're farther removed from me than science fiction, A lot of science fiction still has a possibility for me, and there's no way I could possibly ever recapture this time period.

  JL: Well, yes and no. What's always invisible is how mystical and rational and kind of time-bound and provincial the present is. The present always feels deceptively like it's very well realized and things have suddenly clarified and become modern at last. We're going to look awfully quaint and cute and bizarre and prejudiced and just strange. There are in films, for instance, there are actorly mannerisms that are characteristic of the 80's and 90's that are invisible to us. That looks like normal film acting and you watch AMC and you think, “Boy, those guys are mannered, and everything is so stylized.” There is contemporary stylizations; they're just invisible to you. So I'd argue that, in your way you're participating in a version of the kinds of things that you're saying you feel very distant from. I guess by going back and exploring some of the previous incarnations, I'm trying to get in touch with that. I'm trying to think about and feel and detect for myself the provincialisms and the stylizations in contemporary culture.

  DS: Now, a lot of the current press nowadays talks about the same point that you're making about how a-historical people from their twenties to, say, early thirties are. Are we any more a-historical than anyone else has been, or is this a particular disjunction in our cultural history where we just no longer care about looking backwards?

  JL: Oh boy, I don't know. I'm just not a historian. I'm winging it here, but I think Americans have a pretty strong ahistorical bent. It's a weird moment right now. It's kind of an area of opportunity for creative people. I think there's a lot of really radical retrieval projects out there to be done. Modernism is a great, weirdly kind of abandoned mansion that's really ripe to be retrieved and refurbished. We so frantically abandoned it in this postmodern—god I hate that word—there's a strange way in which historical consciousness is like a radical gesture right now. It's one of the more avant-garde things you can do, to be grounded in your cultural context.

  DS: Now, at the point where you got the idea for, and you began working on, Gun With Occasional Music, what prompted the peculiar mix of the hard-boiled P.I., sort of dystopic—not necessarily dystopic future, but dystopic sideways present and past?

  JL: Well, Gun With Occasional Music is typical of my work, and typical of some of the writers I admire. I'm obsessively literal. I'm always taking things that are under the surface and making them painfully specific and literal and prominent. I basically just exaggerated the classic hard-boiled novel into into a cartoon of itself. You know, Chandler's already a dystopian writer. Chandler's detective is a man out of time. He's a tarnished knight from a previous era walking through a modern California landscape that is kind of a 1984 dystopia. What I did was just turned around that corner where he's literally a man out of time, he's literally a time-traveler. Chandler was already writing dystopian fiction and I just created a cartoon version where all the subtlety has leeched out of it. You're forced to see those elements. People talk about science fiction writers like Gibson being “hard-boiled", and in a sense they are. I felt that there remained to be done a dystopian novel. You know, a really genuinely Chandlerian voice. There's a line of descent from Chandler, Ross MacDonald, James Crumley, that classic hard-boiled voice and the similes and the wisecracks. It is a living sub-sub-sub-genre, and I wanted to make an entry in the sub-genre. I wanted to write one of those. I didn't really think it had been done with a marriage to dystopian fiction, so I grabbed onto the available turf.

  DS: I want to ask about one of the ideas that was in Gun, which is the idea of the sort of government-supplies drug state—state in the sense of the “pharmocracy". Where did that idea come from?

  JL: You have to make a nod to Huxley, in Brave New World. I think with the drugs in that book I was actually writing as much about television as anything else. I don't really mean it to seem imposed by a malicious, tyrannical external government. The point of the book—and it's certainly my perception of the kinds of enslavements we live under in contemporary America—is that they're consensual, voluntary enslavements. We all invite the television into our homes, turn it on and willingly sit there. It's more than just a passive acceptance, it's a yearning for this kind of I.V. drip garbage supply. In another way I think I was thinking of alcohol. You know, the degree to which drunkenness is woven into everyday American life while other kinds of drug experiences are denounced and vilified is pretty damn bizarre. Any chance I can get to, I just poke a little fun at that.

  DS: And you had mentioned raising the literalism was the forgetol basically, the P.I. trope of drinking to forget, without raising it to that level.

  JL: Right. It's a tick almost at the level of like a Tourette's Syndrome where I can't leave something metaphorical. I've got to exaggerate it into the cartoon. The classic hard-boiled detective has been damaged by some woman in some psychic way. My hard-boiled detective literally had his manhood lopped off by the woman who burned him. The classic detective is tortured and attempts to forget. My detective literally takes a drug that erases his memory. Pretty much it's all traceable to the same instinct—to exaggerate into literalness the metaphoric or thematic subliminal elements.

  DS: Now I want to ask you about something that you do with Wired magazine. Now clarify your role. Are you the host of the “Headspace"?

  JL: Well, I should say first of all that I just quit that job. I founded a weekly talk show—if talk's the right wo
rd for it—online for Wired magazine. It was called “Headspace” and, basically, it was an hour every Tuesday night where I interviewed my buddies or writers I admired or people who I wanted to meet. The guests and I and anyone else who wanted to show up would sit at home at their keyboards and type in entries and they would appear in real time on the screen. It was a great and bizarre experience in that I felt almost like Ernie Kovacs. I was there at the founding of a new medium, and I was absolutely free to play because there were no rules and there were no precedents. It was also an awfully clunky and obtrusive medium and the technical deficiencies were mind-bendingly annoying. There were lots of shows where the program just crashed. It's certainly at this point so inconvenient that I think only a very hard core kind of computer fetishist would bother with it. But it was sort of thrilling to get to dabble in a medium that's just barely being born. I think some day it'll be looked on as the kind of comical founding days, the way the early days of television were sort of all weird pratfalls.

  Transcribed by l.j. anderson, laurie@ecology.uga.edu

  James Morrow Introduction

  Elsewhere in this book, I discuss reading Michael Bishop's Brittle Innings and how much I liked that book. I had much the same reaction reading James Morrow's Towing Jehovah. I had the realization of its brilliance and marvelling at my fortune to be able to talk to the author. Moreover, these were two consecutive interviews in the spring of 1994. I realized then, and still realize, how damn lucking I am to be reading these books and talking to the authors.

  I knew from the phone calls setting things up that James Morrow was a very nice guy. When the time came to actually do the interview, I was less nervous than I usually am. This was done in the era where I used two telephones to record the phone call. With one I would plug the handset cord into the tape deck, and on the other I would replace the handset mouthpiece with this crazy thing that screwed on the phone and made it a professional mike. This meant that the WREK studios would be a mess of phone wires as I ran an office phone across the joint into the small production studio. Despite the above ordinary level of technical troubles, knowing I would be shortly talking to James Morrow kept me calm. This didn't often happen, but my wife, Darlene, happened to be in this tiny room with me on this day. So that she could hear, I juryrigged a second set of headphones. I recall her being quite amused by Morrow's dry wit. She smiled a lot and tried not to laugh out loud. It was a fun afternoon.

  A lot of what I liked about Towing Jehovah was the complexity of the characters. There was not one or two views on the death of God, but a dozen or more. Being apostate myself, I could appreciate the ambiguity and bittersweet feelings of realizing that a faith you have turned from was in fact the correct bet in the heavenly horse race. However, the horse came up lame and the race has been cancelled. I can't speak for the reactions of others, but this hit me right square where I live.

  James Morrow has a very nice web page. The reference section for this interview has a link to it. He has the distinction of being the first author to link his web page to mine (as best I can tell such things.) When I first set up the Reality Break web pages in late 1994, the estimated size of the web was in the 50,000 page region. I scoured very hard looking for web resources for my guests so that I would have something to link to. At that time I had two links, a Robert Jordan fan page and Tom Maddox’ gopher site. Imagine my surprise when I found later that this very nice web page devoted to this very good writer was linking to one of my little pages. That's a good feeling.

  James Morrow

  This interview was recorded via telephone with James Morrow at his home in Pennsylvania in April 1994.

  DS: Tell us a little about the book Towing Jehovah. The premise is such that I doubt I could do it justice. I'll allow you to have the honors.

  JM: [laughs] Well, I guess this is what Hollywood would call high concept. It arrived in my mind as a very vivid image. I was casting around for an idea for a new novel and I saw the corpse of God, this gigantic dead body I guess out of death of God theology of the sort that's been around for the last couple decades. I saw this enormous body hooked up to a supertanker and I realized I had a unique variety of sea adventure here. This would be in the tradition of philosophical nautical sagas, but with a supertanker instead of a steamer or a sailing ship. This is probably the first science fiction novel to use God's corpse as its main prop and also is in that rare category of science fiction sea sagas.

  DS: Where exactly did you come up with the nautical knowledge? Do you have any nautical background yourself?

  JM: I grew up not too far from the Jersey shore and while my parents never had any money, they always seemed to have friends with cabin cruisers so I've had nautical summers and I'm sure there is an autobiographical element to the story. As I was writing it I also boned up by looking at Hollywood forays into this genre like Mutiny on the Bounty and Lord Jim. It's essentially, in some ways you could think of the novel as a remake of Conrad's Lord Jim. The captain of my supertanker is given an opportunity to redeem himself. There are parallels with the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska. My captain caused a horrendous spill in the Gulf of Mexico. An angel appears to him in the New York cloisters with the news that God is dead and he, Anthony van Horn—the captain, has been assigned to the burial detail, as it were. It's his job to transport this corpse out of the sea lane and up to the Arctic where it can have a respectful burial. When this occurs, the captain leaps upon the opportunity to redeem himself for the environmental disaster that he caused. Before we know it, we're on the ship, the Valparaso, and God's body is hooked to the stern and we are having this sea adventure, trying to get God to his tomb, trying to get God inside this enormous iceberg, out of which a crypt has been hollowed.

  DS: You mentioned the parallel to the Exxon Valdez disaster. I've noticed that in basically every review, everyone has to mention that. Do you think that easy comparison hinder the story or help it by giving people a good jumping on place?

  JM: I like to think that it anchors the book in reality. It's just a very overt swipe of the sort that Orson Welles did when he filmed Hearst's life as Citizen Kane. I just liked being able to play so explicitly off of this very famous disaster. I'm not pretending that it's original. In all of my novels, I've found it important to play the wild premise and the crazy fantasy elements off of factual detail. I do a lot of research into the nitty gritty of the subject. I think it's the only way to get away with the fantasy element, is if the technical things ring true. I did a lot of research into supertankers. A good friend of mine here in Pennsylvania has been an able bodied seaman on this big oil carriers and she was able to give me a lot of inside information. A number of books were coming out about the Valdez at the time that I was writing Towing Jehovah, so that was very convenient. Inadvertently, they dropped a lot of details that I was able to exploit about how these ships work and what it's like to be inside one of the actual tanks that's intended to hold the oil. I have a couple of characters cleaning one of those tanks out at one point in the story, and it figures in the plot.

  DS: One of the things that this genre is very concerned with is the whole idea of the sense of wonder. From your book, I got the feeling that when you've got a ship like this, this ultra large crude carrier, you don't need a science fictional element to get the sense of wonder. These things are huge and magnificent.

  JM: Exactly. I was amazed and pleasantly surprised by the fit between the agenda of science fiction and supertankers. I don't think there's been a previous science fiction supertanker story, but maybe I can start a new subgenre. On another level, it's really a spaceship, and then as Ray Bradbury has pointed out, that spaceships are really cities. That's part of the appeal of the huge space ark convention of so much SF, it's a microcosm of all of society. As with Moby Dick, not to elevate the book with too lofty a comparison , my supertanker becomes the whole world, in a sense. It becomes human society and the problems on the ship are the problems that humanity, in general, faces or would face if confronted w
ith the fact of God's death.

  DS: In another sense the book, as it deals with adventure epic part of towing the body up there, it has the hard SF structure as everyone deals with the engineering problems and the mechanics of towing God.

  JM: It took me a while to figure out exactly what the logistics would be, and some of the readers of the manuscript said “Oh, you don't need to go into that. Just say, ‘they hooked chains to God and then they were off!'” My instinct was to take it in the other direction, and to be very explicit about how you would accomplish this tow. I ended up with the captain retrofitting some huge winches to the back of the ship and chains are wound around the drums and there are anchors on the ends of the chains and these anchors are hauled underwater by scuba divers out to God's ears and they swim inside the ears, because the ears are submerged a little, and they find the tiny bones inside anyone's ears, and of course these are God scale bones so this huge anchor hooks over one of the bones. I had to learn a little bit of anatomy and a fair amount of supertanker lore.

  DS: Let's talk about the range of characters in the book. The various people who actually make it on to the ship have a large variety of religious viewpoints, from the priests and van Horn to a former Rabbinical student and so on.