Born in Brooklyn, Joel Weishaus was a Junior Executive on Madison Avenue while still a teenager. He resigned soon after his 21st birthday and flew to California, where he began the peripatetic lifestyle of a writer. In 1971, Weishaus edited the Bolinas anthology, On the Mesa, for City Lights Books. The same year, Cranium Press published his book Oxherding: Reworking of the Zen Text. In the early 1980s, he moved to Albuquerque, becoming an adjunct curator at the University of New Mexico’s Art Museum and a photography critic for Artspace Magazine. In 2004, his book The Healing Spirit of Haiku, co-authored with David Rosen, was published by North Atlantic Books.

Weishaus now lives in Portland, Oregon, where he practices Digital Literary Art, a strong interest since the 1990s. In 1990-91 he produced The Deeds and Sufferings of Light, “begun on a typewriter, and concluded on my first computer,” and since then his creative work has often been designed for display on the Web rather than the printed page, incorporating sound effects, pop-ups, animated text, and animated graphics. Despite his experiments with HTML, however, his writing has always retained a strong connection with traditional literature. His latest work, “The Gateless Gate” (2009-2010), is deliberately simple and book-like in its construction; it takes the form of a series of “double-page spreads,” with text on the left and a processed photographic image on the right. The texts do not describe the images and the images do not illustrate the texts, but they do share the same thematic preoccupations—notably dream-imagery, the natural world, prehistory, and prehistoric psychology.

Edward Picot: I'd like to start by asking you what gave you the idea for The Gateless Gate, and why you decided to write it in the way that you did—in more of a "book" format, and with fewer new media effects than some of your previous projects?

Joel Weishaus: The title of this project refers to the Mumonkan [No-Gate-Barrier], an ancient collection of Zen koans—questions that can only be answered by expressing one’s self directly, without the barrier of the ego’s orientation. I’ve been studying various translations of this text for more than half my life, and decided to use it now, at least thematically, because, in view of the hypocrisy and superficiality many political, religious, and business leaders exhibit in their neurotic quest for power, it may be that the “crazy wisdom” the Mumonkan teaches is about as revolutionary a path that a contemporary artist can explore.

I chose a constrained format for the pleasure of fitting texts, which are in a sense prose poems, into a restrictive space; thus, considering every word and how they relate to one another in the sentence. This also applies to the flow and harmony of ideas. Then there are the images that face the texts; still images, as opposed to the animations I’ve done in some previous projects, as I wanted “The Gateless Gate” to be an traditional book, but one made to be viewed on a monitor; not an “e-text,” however, but a book designed in HTML code, with a cover, introduction, bibliography, etc. Which is say that there’s no reason an electronic book can’t be intellectually and aesthetically challenging.

EP: In your introduction, you use the word "palimpsest" to describe the way you construct your photographic images. Can I ask you to describe your working method—where you get your source images from, what software you use, and so forth?

JW: Although I’ve written photography critique, I didn’t take my own pictures until a few years ago, when I was able to afford a digital camera. My first pictures were “straight shots,” such as those in “Interdependency” and a few other projects. By the time I began “The Gateless Gate,” in February 2009, my interest, stemming from years of studies of the Upper Paleolithic painted caves in France and Spain, had turned to palimpsests. Most of the source images are from around the city of Portland, Oregon, to which I added transparencies, usually from pictures found on the Internet. Sometimes the superimposed images quickly made a picture I felt on a visceral level. Other times, I had to work for days before a picture that “dreams” appeared.

As for the software, I’d rather not say, for two reasons. One is that the software is commercial, and I don’t want to be a salesman for the companies. But I will say that I shuttled the pictures through three to four different programs. The second reason is that I think an artist should have some secrets, especially one who works in a medium that draws information as if from a bottomless well.

EP: It's interesting that you say you're trying to achieve a picture that “dreams.” Anyone who has looked at your work at all will have realized that dreams and the unconscious are enormously important to you. Can you say why this is, and how your interest in dreams has influenced both your writing and your pictures?

JW: We spend much of our lives dreaming, so how can one not be interested in dreams! Thus, my autobiography is titled “Reality Dreams.” There are different types of dreams, and different schools of psychology to elaborate them. Most psychotherapists are mainly interested in dreams that signify one’s daily life; they are paid well to help people adjust to the mundaneity of their existence. Jungians are more interested in “big dreams”—these have archetypal significance that connects us to mythologies our culture doesn’t propagate. This interests me, as it did the Surrealists, and some of the Abstract Expressionists.

Such dreams influence my writing because they are intimate without being oriented to the ego. When someone tells me that they are not creative, I reply, “You dream, don’t you?” In dreaming we are all naturally creative. Dreams are where the psyche runs feral.

As for the pictures I make, those I consider to be “art” are an expression of that same “collective unconscious.” This fascinates me, because to be a complete person means to be dynamically incomplete.

EP: Apart from your philosophical interest in dreams, it strikes me that there's a dreamlike quality in your style, both in your pictures and your writing—lots of things happening at once, one thing merging into another, associative transitions, and so on. And your writing, rather than taking us on a narrative journey leading toward a climax, feels more like waves lapping on a beach, with a gradual cumulative effect. I wonder if you'd like to comment on this?

JW: One of my favorite teaching stories is about a cart Picasso painted with all kinds of seemingly unrelated things in it. Someone asked him why he painted all those diverse objects into one cart. He replied, “So they can learn how to live together!” That story, which I’m probably misquoting, must have stayed in the back of my mind as my work developed over the years. So that, for example, if I want to do a project based on an archaeological subject, first I’ll read all the scholarly texts. Then I’ll research fields that indirectly deepen, enrich, and expand the subject: poetry, mythology, geology, philosophy, literary criticism, etc. I’ll take lots of notes, and begin writing between these notes—that is, between the thoughts of others.

The making of images is more instinctive, but they are made in the same eclectic spirit, giving it all, as you say, “a gradual cumulative effect.” Ultimately, what interests me is the transitional energies between information and images, be they linguistic or photographic, and the surprising opportunities for consciousness their mobility creates.

EP: That brings us nicely to the subject of “invagination,” which is one of the most characteristic techniques in your written work. For those who aren't familiar with the term, it basically means that from time to time you “interrupt” your own writing with a snippet from another writer. Can you describe when and why you first started to use this technique, and what purpose you think it serves in your work?

JW: My trope of invagination surfaced during the mid-1980s, from reading Derrida, Deleuze, Ulmer, Jabès, and others. The original idea was to interrupt a sentence by placing quote within quote, each one smaller and printed lighter, until they completely disappeared . . . then slowly emerged again, until the original sentence was able to continue. However, as you can imagine, that proved awkward. Yet the trope continued to be viable as single interruptions, or intrusions, within a paragraph.

Recently I read a book review of David Shields’s Reality Hunger: A Manfesto by Luc Sante, in which Sante wrote, “So what constitutes reality, then, as it affects culture? It can be as simple as a glitch, an interruption, a dropped beat, a foreign object that suddenly intrudes. Hence the potency of sampling in popular music, which forces open the space between the vocal and instrumental components. It is also a form of collage, which edits, alters and reapportions cultural commodities according to need or desire.” This, too, could be a definition of what I call “invagination.” In essence, it is a technique for questioning literal, or literary, reality.

EP: It's also a technique for allowing other voices besides your own into the text. In one way it follows the modernist tendency to use fragmentation as a stylistic device, but in another way I feel inclined to relate it to your Buddhist beliefs, and your desire to get beyond your own ego. There are plenty of direct references to Buddhism in your writing, but I think it's also present at a deeper level, influencing the structure of your work. When did you first get interested in Eastern philosophy, and how do you think it has influenced your development as an artist?

JW: One evening in the early 1960s, after having read Alan Watts’s book on Zen and some of D.T. Suzuki’s books, I went with a friend, who is now a prominent psychologist, to a basement apartment in downtown New York, where we attended a talk by a Japanese Zen monk. What we found were folding chairs and an altar with flowers on it. About twenty of us were served tea—hot water with a leaf floating in it—and an almond cookie. We listened to a brief, incomprehensible, talk by the shaven-headed monk, then left, laughing.

A few years later, in Donald M. Allen’s now classic anthology, The New American Poetry, I came across a section from Gary Snyder’s brilliant book Myths & Texts. The spirit of Snyder’s poems, and of his way of life, returned me to the study of Zen, and, in 1964, moving to San Francisco brought me to the actual practice. Then, I had the privilege of staying at a Zen Buddhist monastery in Japan, and later lived in a Zen Temple in my own country.

These days, I no longer participate in formal meditation groups, as I’ve come to see that every organized religion devolves into rituals, rites, and hierarchal power that has lost touch with the individuated creativity of its founders. However, I do still study lectures by ancient Zen Masters, as they keep me questioning and reshuffling, tuning and rethinking, how I perceive reality—and how I pass it along, in writing and imaging.

EP: You mention Gary Snyder, and you also regularly mention Bashō in your writings. Who would you count as your literary influences, and in what ways do you think they've helped to shape your work?

JW: Homer’s Odyssey was the first book I remember in school that drove me to the public library to read the whole thing. Serious literature that was moving! This is where my journey in search of creativity began. Then there was Henry Miller, who brilliantly combined Eros and Logos with Pathos. There was also the imaginative drive, if not heroism, of Kenneth Patchen’s love and anti-war poems, and the cool linguistic experiments of e.e. cummings. When I moved to the West Coast, Gary Snyder’s work had a deep influence, at least until around 1968, when he returned to settle in California and began writing to attract a larger audience for his public readings.

Like the philosopher Gaston Bachelard, I favor “the slow rhythm of written poetry (where) verbs recover their precise original movements.” Reading this, I thought back to the aesthetics of the Beat Poets, who composed the last popular movement in American Literature. One thing they had in common was a craving for the media, for fame, and so they developed a body of work that could be performed. Although I took a different path, some of these poets, now familiar names in most university English departments, accepted me into their midst, and instilled in that fledgling writer the ancient spirit of the bardic tradition.

These days, besides the iconic scholars, the writers who influence my work the most are those whose vision goes beyond the field they were trained to till. For example, the physicist David Peat, psychoanalyst Helene Shulman, archaeologists David Lewis-Williams and Christopher Tilley, phenomenologist Robert Romanyshyn, and post-Jungian literary critic Susan Rowland, to name a very few. My work is driven by my debt to others, which also includes what we call the “non-human world.” And this debt continues to grow.

EP: It's interesting that you declare a preference for written poetry, rather than poetry designed to be read aloud, and that your current influences are “iconic scholars” and people whose vision goes beyond their own field. Those remarks tally with some of the most characteristic aspects of your own work—it's often quite scholarly in tone, and it's always very “written”—yet at the same time it's very observational, especially of the natural world, and it moves very freely from one genre to another, in a quite unscholarly, perhaps even subversive way.

But staying with the question of influences for a moment, what was it that led you to start working online and to try your hand at digital literature, and were there any other writers or new media artists who particularly influenced your style when you first made the transition?

JW: During the mid-1980s, I was an Adjunct Curator at the University of New Mexico Art Museum. My expertise was Video Art, and this opened me to media work that was going on at the time. A stepchild of film and television, Video Art was the harbinger of something new that was developing on the horizon. Meanwhile, I was writing feature pieces on photography for Artspace, a quarterly magazine of Southwest Contemporary Art based in Albuquerque. Using a typewriter, I’d cut, paste, then photocopy sections of the manuscript, repeating this process many times. For the paragraphs were demanding to exchange places, realigning the sequence of ideas on the page.

The last piece I wrote for Artspace was on the nuclear photography of Patrick Nagatani, who had recently joined UNM’s faculty. After it was published, I asked him if he’d like to do a project together on New Mexico’s history with nuclear weapons and the extent of its present infrastructure. He agreed, and over the next two years this grew into “The Nuclear Enchantment of New Mexico,” consisting of forty photographs and forty texts that were exhibited at the Albuquerque Museum, in 1991. For my part, now titled “The Deeds and Sufferings of Light,” the museum needed a computer disk to blow the texts up to poster-size. My first computer was a slow, bulky PC with an amber monitor, for which I quickly had to learn basic DOS and a word processing program.

Surprisingly, I took to the task enthusiastically, not knowing that my cutting and pasting technique had been preparing me for the aesthetics of this machine. Then a few years later, the university library’s catalog, with which I was so familiar in situ, appeared on my desk. It was an epiphany, a truly religious experience, as immediate, and soon to be infinite, packets of information arrived in my home. While exiled in New Mexico I entered a larger world.

As for direct influences, they were, and mainly remain, not so much digital or so-called New Media artists, but writers and visual artists extraneous to the genre in which I usually work. Rooted in books, I blossom electronically.

EP: I get a sense from that reply that your interest in digital literature has taken the form not so much of a deliberate transition from one genre to another as a natural expansion, a growth process which has allowed you to penetrate new areas without losing touch with the old ones—and I know that you've continued to publish in print as well as online. I suppose this begs a question about audiences, however. Do you think the same people read your online work and your work in print, or do you think people still tend to fall on either one side or the other of the divide?

JW: Well, let’s take for example Rain Taxi, as it is published in both paper and online editions. Fascinatingly, the content of each edition is unique. So when I write reviews for it, I consider in which medium I’d prefer it to appear, even though it’s the publisher’s decision. The Literary World, which includes universities and foundations, still gives more authenticity to paper publishing than to digital. However, online projects are cheaper to produce, and easier to distribute, especially worldwide. In addition, they are archived by search engines. But I don’t know if a study has been done as to how many readers Rain Taxi’s discrete editions ultimately reach.

The initial distribution of my digital projects is to a few hundred “undisclosed recipients.” Then there are four to six email lists, depending on a project’s subject, to which I send links. Later, when researchers ask for materials, it’s easy to link them to a specific project, as I eventually digitize the printed work, to save it in my online archive at the Center for Digital Discourse and Culture. Even much of The Healing Spirit of Haiku, which I co-authored with Jungian psychiatrist David Rosen, Google has put online. As far as I know, people who are interested in my work read books and use the Internet. The divide I see is not between books and computers, but between knowledge and information.

EP: This takes us back to a remark you made right at the beginning of the interview, where you said that you wanted “The Gateless Gate” to be “a traditional book, but one made to be viewed on a monitor . . . a book designed in HTML code.” One of the interesting things about “The Gateless Gate” is that it's emphatically booklike, and the fact that it's booklike works surprisingly well on-screen, but at the same time we might ask what's this doing on a monitor? Wouldn't it be better on a printed page? Or, if you look at it the other way round, it seems to be posing a challenge to other writers of digital literature—do you really need all that gimmickry? Shouldn't you just be concentrating on the writing? So, what do you think there is about “The Gateless Gate” which makes it belong more naturally on a screen than it would on a printed page, and how has the (technological) simplicity of this project affected your own feelings about digital literature?

JW: To simulate the pages of a book on a monitor, amidst all the hubbub about how the Internet threatens to replace books, is a visual pun. Indeed, “The Gateless Gate” is a digital version of a handmade book.

It also asks the question: What is a “book”? In The Book of Questions, Edmund Jabès interrogates just this conundrum. But instead of attempting to answer it, he weaves a work of art from it. So, one thing I’m suggesting is that, in the Digital Age, what a book is needs to be reimagined. It could be that the very future of our culture, and our system of education, depends on how we answer this.

So far, it has mainly been engineers electronically fabricating printed words, and commercial designers shaping plastics, neither of them understanding the eros of the book, who are receiving attention in the media.

As for “all that gimmickry,” this was certainly on my mind. Although I do enjoy, and learn from, artists who are brilliantly implementing the range of digital techniques available to them, and I’ve used a few myself, here I wanted to practice the writer’s, and photographer’s, craft. Perhaps this is because I have reached the age in which one tends to return to fundamentals, taking joy in sounding the depths, instead of unfurling the skein of the latest illumination. Which returns us to the Mumonkan, “The Gateless Gate.”

EP: Can I finish by asking you about your plans for future work? Have you already started a new project, or are you still thinking things over, or simply intending to take a rest for a while?

JW: The great Hokusai reportedly said on his deathbed, "If only I had another ten years, I could become a real artist." He was 89. So I’m planning another large Digital Literary Art project, which is now in the preliminary, notebook stage.

I’m also continuing Poetica, writing in the void where I’m most comfortable: floating between the standards of academia and experimental art. My primary interest here is in reviewing books of poetry in which the genre is used to expand and deepen other fields. I began with Frances Presley’s, Lines of Sight, as its focus is the archaeology of Megalithic stone formations at Exmoor, England.

In all cases, we’ll see what happens!

Click here to purchase The Healing Spirit of Haiku at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010

Brian Conn’s first novel, The Fixed Stars: Thirty-Seven Emblems for the Perilous Season, was published by FC2 in the spring of 2010. An intricate, innovative, and beautifully realized book about a far-future society contending with mysterious plagues and its own violent customs, The Fixed Stars is speculative fiction at once challenging and deeply rewarding, alive with a kind of mythic strangeness.

Conn teaches writing at the University of Rhode Island and, with Joanna Ruocco, co-edits Birkensnake, an “imperfectly bound” journal of fiction. He agreed to discuss the process of writing his book, touching upon such topics as toothpick models, the language of mathematics, and why he doesn’t like The Grapes of Wrath.

 

Jedediah Berry: What were the practical circumstances of writing The Fixed Stars? Were you enrolled in an MFA program the entire time you were working on it? What was your process like, on a day-to-day level?

Brian Conn: The answer to this question is actually complicated and strange, but here are the concrete parameters. In spring of 2007 I was in my first year of the Brown MFA program and happened to write what would later become Sections 1.1 and 1.3 of The Fixed Stars. I brought them to our workshop as a single piece, and everyone said, “Yes, but where is the long story that is obviously supposed to follow these incidents?” So I wrote a little more, but still no one was satisfied.

As I was wondering what to do, my dad, who lives in Hawaii, invited me to come stay there. He owned this small condo in Hilo that he was converting to a “vacation rental” (many residences in Hawaii are “vacation rentals”—it’s a common term to describe what a structure is, like “warehouse” or “retail space”), and as it was unoccupied for the summer, I went to Hawaii to write in the summer of 2007. Hilo has a comfortable, post-apocalyptic feel, close to the early 20th-century colonial feel that you find in Somerset Maugham—it’s hot and dusty and buildings are being swallowed before your eyes by vines. I knew nobody in town (my dad and his wife live farther up the coast) and had no Internet access and only a prepaid cell phone, so I had very little contact with people and would go for days without speaking. I had an old laptop on which to write; I had access to the Hilo Public Library; and I had brought alongGrimm’s Fairy Tales and The Viking Portable Shakespeare. I walked around a lot, but I forgot that if you’re going to walk in flip-flops you first have to develop calluses, and before I did I accidentally walked about three miles to the nearest beach, then three miles back with pieces of my feet held together with duct tape. (I don’t know where I got the duct tape, but for some reason I had it.) I ate white pineapples and had dreams about giant insects. There was a dictionary in the condo that included not only entries for words but also entries for certain historical persons and concepts, and it was from this dictionary that I learned about “blue mass,” which was an actual medical remedy of the 19th century, a wad of mercury that you’d swallow to sort of shovel out your gut.

Some of the sections got mixed up later on, but I ended up writing most of Chapters 3 and 4 in Hawaii, about half of Chapter 1, and a good bit of Chapter 5—in all, about half the book. After I finished a section I would wander around for several days trying to think of some event or voice or revelation that would, in some poorly comprehended yet very particular way, contradict everything that I’d already written. I’d discard idea after idea, and then at some point I’d think of an idea and laugh out loud, suddenly and involuntarily, and this idea would be the basis of the next section.

I now think of that summer as a time of intoxicating creativity, and simultaneously of terrifying confusion and despair. I’m sure these two impressions are closely related. I can see the causality flowing in either direction: maybe creativity is actually deeply terrifying, maybe confusion and despair forced me to abandon my usual thinking and reach for something new. Maybe both.

I more or less finished the book in Providence, during the second year of my MFA program. At this time it became important to me to be in a different physical setting while writing each section: I had to keep writing in different places in the city, or at different times of day. Section 6.1 was written late at night in a darkened and deserted office in Brown’s Literary Arts Department; 3.6 was written over winter break, also late and in the dark, on nights when I’d been reading Dickens all day.

One result of all this, at least for me, is that every section in the book has its own special flavor. None of them quite seem to belong with any of the others in the same book. This is something I like, and it makes me glad I did it that way.

JB: Can you describe the stages by which you came to know the setting of the novel? While reading it, I found myself wondering how much you knew about this world and its people when you began work on the book, and whether your ideas changed significantly during the writing process. Were there important discoveries you made along the way?

BC: The setting actually emerged naturally from the voices. When I wrote the first section, the old man’s speech, I didn’t know what I was doing, I just let him talk, but the way he talks already implies most of the key features of the world: the people are scared of certain things, like heat and hierarchies, and they have particular ways of talking or not talking about those things, and a certain relationship to the past, and so on. The next two sections, the one in which Molly and her mother first visit the bathhouse and the one in which two children discover Molly’s abandoned wagon, are also, for me, driven by voice—they’re ways of responding to and maybe denying the old man’s voice—and they come with their own implications about the world. Those three sections stake out the broad limits. After them it became a matter of introducing new voices that would expand or complicate the world without breaking it.

A lot of details I made up ad hoc. If I wanted to talk about a certain kind of object, or a certain kind of action, I blithely invented technologies and customs to facilitate that. I remember being worried that those details would end up stepping on each other’s toes, and thinking I’d have to go back and do some painful reconciliation, but as it turned out everything got along pretty well. I think because the voices are, at least in some way, in harmony with each other, the setting that they generated is naturally fairly consistent.

There are a few things that took me a long time to work out, and that I had to think about more analytically. The crèche system, and the way the children arrive and mature and take to the road—that took a long time, and most of what I settled on didn’t end up in the book, or is there only in passing. I remember lying awake late at night staring at the ceiling and thinking abnormal things about reproduction. I didn’t figure out what to do about sex and gender until very near the end, and had to go back and make some careful changes.

I should add that I did grow up in a sort of odd mountain community, and I had a girlfriend a few years ago who worked in a Waldorf school, where children are conceptualized in unusual ways. I’m sure those memories got activated as I was writing. But for me the voices controlled when and how they got activated.

Here’s another way of thinking about it: I recently read Georges Perec’s A Void, which is written without the letter e. It’s a bit of a stunt, but it brings you to face to face with a fact that is obvious but also easy to forget, namely that stories are made out of language; things you do to the language affect the story, and vice versa. Because there are no e’s in A Void, there are many objects that can never appear in the story, and many acts the characters cannot perform. In The Fixed Stars I didn’t spend much time thinking about setting as such, but I spent a lot of time thinking about language, and I still think of many decisions as language decisions even though they could also be understood as setting decisions. The setting consists of the things the characters like to talk about. One of the last changes I made, a line edit on the page proofs, was in Section 2.2, where Hector is talking to the builder; Hector described the builder’s silence as “the silence of the tomb,” but I changed it to “the silence of death.” You can see this as a setting decision—these people don’t build tombs, the idea of a structure for dead people would be offensive to them—but it presented itself to me as a language decision: the word “tomb” is not in Hector’s vocabulary. Maybe that clarifies a bit.

JB: It does, and it brings to mind the fact that the adult characters in the book are never referred to by name, but rather by the work they do, or by some object with which they’re associated. So we have “the woman who grew nutritive moss,” “the builder,” “the woman who nurtured spiders.” In that sense, people are linked to words and language, and also to things. Could you talk a bit about this? What are the implications of this structure?

BC: Yes, that’s right, children have names but adults are usually described by what they do. I don’t know when it occurred to me that this should be the case, but it was early on, and as soon as I thought of it I never doubted. There are a few exceptions or complications: during the John’s Day festival adults seem to have different, largely food-based kinds of names; some adults are described only as “the young woman” or “the old man”; and one, the man like a bear, is described according to how he looks instead of what he does (although at times it seems like that’s also what he does—acts like a bear). And maybe the small doctor should also be mentioned here.

To me, having a name is a bit secretive—people have to refer to you without actually saying anything about you—and children seem to have more secrets than adults. There’s a lot in the book about the secrets language keeps, and a tension between what’s being said and what actually seems to be going on in the world of the story. In the first section the old man refuses to say words like “fire” and “city” but is obsessed with these concepts, so that his whole speech is one long circumlocution and the very words that don’t appear in it are the things it’s most about. Sometimes the characters’ biological sexes seem not to correspond with the genders of the pronouns that are being used to refer to them. And then you have scenes where multiple characters do the same work, so that, in Section 5.2, “the man who scrubbed stones” refers to two different individuals; likewise, a single individual might do different things at different times, and so be named differently. And in 6.4 and 6.5 three children decide to become one, and are addressed thereafter as a single individual named Miriam. The point is that if you’re focusing on that gap between language and reality, names form a subset of language that seems even more arbitrary and bizarre than normal language, and so it makes sense to think about names.

I find the crèche and the children’s society frightening. Some people I’ve talked to find the whole book frightening, but I don’t—only the children. They seem to exist in parallel to the society proper, and do not follow its rules. For example, it’s possible to discern a very definite hierarchy among the children; the adults would never permit this. And naming becomes important here too, because names allow the children to have stable identities in a way that adults don’t, and that allows a hierarchy to be established. The central tension in the book, for me, is between coming together and drawing apart: the adults are pushing to live entirely in community, to efface all the differences between themselves and become one thing, and so they’ve given up everything that might be theirs individually, including their names. But the children do things differently.

JB: I wonder if you could say a bit more about the language of the book. For me, the long, rolling sentences—always precise and often lofty in tone—recall scripture. Is there anything to that? Can you identify any major influences on your prose style?

BC: Other people have also said scripture, and I see where that comes from. I’ve actually read very little scripture, and when I think of scripture-like language I think of The Grapes of Wrath; I had to read it in high school, and I recall my teacher repeatedly saying, “the rhythms of the King James Bible.” I have a very low opinion of The Grapes of Wrath. On the other hand, I read P. G. Wodehouse a lot—probably more often than I read any other writer. And there’s a certain way that scripture and Shakespeare and other Western-canon texts come into Wodehouse sometimes, where they’ll be reasonably apt but also somehow alienated. “I retired to an arm-chair and put my feet up, sipping the mixture with carefree enjoyment, rather like Caesar having one in his tent the day he overcame the Nervii” (from Right Ho, Jeeves).

But I think of the language of The Fixed Stars primarily as a language of circumlocution, a way to be simultaneously precise and obscure. In that sense it owes a lot to the language of mathematics. If you’ve taken a calculus class you probably learned about “limits.” The concept of a limit is pretty simple, and can be explained clearly in a few minutes with a piece of paper and a pencil; but the formal definition of a limit is much more difficult, so that once you see it you have to think about it for a long time to figure out what it means, and then for an even longer time to convince yourself that it actually corresponds to the simple intuitive notion that was so easy to understand with the help of the paper and the pencil. And there are many other mathematical concepts that suffer this same schism between concept and definition. It’s not unusual, in a math textbook, to come across some statement like “We’re going to introduce a new concept now, but its definition is so esoteric that we’re first going to spend several chapters describing the concept and even developing theorems based on it, and only then give the formal definition”—a definition, the book does not state but everyone knows, that you may not really understand until you have used the concept every day for twenty years. But the definition is of course formulated to be perfectly precise, so one arrives at the conclusion that precision is sometimes at odds with clarity.

Here’s an example from Euclid:

If a straight line be bisected and a straight line be added to it in a straight line, the rectangle contained by the whole with the added straight line and the added straight line together with the square on the half is equal to the square on the straight line made up of the half and the added straight line.

Right? Well, maybe it’s clearer in Greek. But the real issue is that he’s trying to express in natural language an idea that is not native to natural language; the theorem above gets much easier to understand if you draw a picture, and easier still if you reduce it to algebra. To me, part of the job of fiction is to express things that are real but that somehow fall in the shadows or interstices of everyday language, so that we don’t quite know how to think about them; in The Fixed Stars I attempt to draw explicit attention to those shadows or interstices, to use a language that is precise and expressive but that nevertheless leaves us in the dark about the things that are most important.

As for other specific language influences, I should mention Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics, one of my favorite books and one that was often in my mind as I was writing. Beckett, of course. Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and other oral literature that has been translated awkwardly into written literature. Plus many writers whose influence is mainly restricted to one section; for example, I owe Section 3.6 to Marie Redonnet, 3.2 to Elaine Kraf.

JB: I’m glad you brought up mathematics, because I wanted to ask about your background in that field, and whether it influenced the structure of the book, which seems to have a carefully considered architecture to it. There is also some imagery, much of it having to do with physical structures (the bathhouse, a crescent-shaped building), that suggests a kind of mathematical logic. Did you sketch out any of these structures? There’s such care put into the descriptions, I was sometimes left with the impression of maps and blueprints.

BC: I actually made a 3-D model of the bathhouse out of toothpicks and a kind of flour-water-salt paste. Not with actual rooms or anything like that, but just to get an idea of how the space worked. My formal background in math is actually pretty minimal. I was into it in high school (I am the co-founder of the Los Gatos High School Math Club), and then did a lot at first in college, but ended up moving away from it. Then I took a math class as part of my MFA program at Brown, which is exactly the kind of unexpected and useful thing you can do in the MFA program at Brown. Last fall I enrolled in a graduate program in math at the University of Rhode Island, where I teach writing; it was going pretty well, but it turned out they couldn’t support me financially, and I was seeing some bleak years ahead, so I left during the first semester. So my academic record just shows a few courses, but it’s something I’m always thinking about and sometimes reading about.

It was while I was in that program at URI that FC2 asked me for a bio, which is why The Fixed Starssays, “Brian Conn studies mathematics in southern Rhode Island.” It stopped being true a few weeks after I sent it to them, but I rather like that this relatively permanent description of me is stuck in what turned out to be a brief period in my life.

I agree that a mathematical way of thinking often finds its way into my writing. It just makes sense to me, in The Fixed Stars, that there should be complex internal rules about which words can and can’t occur in which sections, and how many objects of certain kinds there should be in each section, and so on. I couldn’t even articulate those rules now, but of course I knew them well at the time. Come to think of it, maybe that isn’t math but occultism. I guess the two fields are related.

JB: Questions of genre are often reductive, but there are parts of the novel that seem like conscious explorations of genre fiction elements. Did you have this in mind while you were writing? Are there particular works of speculative fiction that served as inspiration for The Fixed Stars?

BC: The genre question seems like it should be a fertile one, but I guess it’s something I’ve thought about for so long that I no longer have much to say about it. I do read speculative fiction, not predominantly, but significantly. While I was writing The Fixed Stars I definitely read works by Gene Wolfe, Kelly Link, John Crowley, Octavia Butler, Philip K. Dick, probably others; elements of those might have found their way in. Of course the book is set in the far future and full of fairy tales, and those two features alone are enough to give it a strong speculative feel.

The Fixed Stars also has a vampire fixation, which comes not from fairy tales or from genre fiction but from Rhode Island history: the last person to be publicly exhumed as a vampire in North America was Mercy Brown of Exeter, Rhode Island, in 1892. It seems they used to confuse tuberculosis with vampirism: Mercy got TB and died, then her brother Edwin got sick, and they blamed Mercy—so they dug up her corpse and burned her heart and Edwin had to eat the ashes. He too died shortly thereafter. Today people occasionally leave weird things on her grave in Exeter, and the headstone is in this sort of concrete and steel brace to keep people from stealing it or whatever. I read about this and visited the grave around the time I was starting the book—which accounts not only for the vampire focus, but also for the disease focus and for the way the two sometimes get conflated.

There is also a kind of space opera going on in Section 4.2 (the play), which is a result of certain confusions that the people in the time of The Fixed Stars suffer when trying to reconstruct our own time. Science fiction was a big part of the 20th century, and a lot of real-world choices made in the ’60s and ’70s seem to have come out of a kind of science-fictional mindset; think for example of the Space Needle in Seattle. And we do in fact have spaceships these days, and it seems entirely possible that we’ll have more of them in the future, in one form or another. So it’s understandable that people looking back on limited evidence of our time might not be able to tell which discourses were real and which were imaginary.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010