a HFR Interview
by Nick Cato
D. HARLAN WILSON
A few years ago, D. Harlan Wilson sent me his collection PSEUDO CITY for review. Before I was halfway through it I had become a fan--a BIG fan. Wilson continues to be one of the most outspoken, intelligent, unique, and funny bizarro writers on the scene today. He recently offered to let us pick his brain for the Horror Fiction Review...strap yourself in...
HORROR FICTION REVIEW: Congrats on Peckinpah: An Ultraviolent Romance (I read it in one manic sitting). Give us a brief history as to what led to this unusual collection.
D. HARLAN WILSON: By collection, I assume you mean how the structure is a schizophrenic montage. It’s not a collection of short stories. It’s a short novel, although I can see how it might be misconstrued.
Peckinpah is a critifiction that combines my experience living in a small Midwestern town and a study of the ultraviolent films of Sam Peckinpah. The setting is fictional—a place called Dreamfield, Indiana—but it’s a caricatured version of where I live now in northwestern Ohio, which is basically constituted by the same thing as greater Indiana: rednecks, cornfields, flatness, republicanism, churches, fatasses, etc. I spend the first part of Peckinpah characterizing the absurd social and physical landscape of Dreamfield. By degrees I introduce my protagonist and antagonist and a plotline begins to unfold. Interspersed within this plotline are short essays, meditations, descriptive and analytical passages that engage the filmography of Sam Peckinpah. The action is increasingly ultraviolent in both the narrative and diagnostic parts.
The impetus for Peckinpah came from two sources: my hatred of rural Midwestern America and the values, ideologies, socius, etc. that define it, and my longstanding interest in violence and the media, particularly cinema. Films like Straw Dogs, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and The Wild Bunch are cinematic masterpieces. Truly vanguard in their time. They established a rare and unique aesthetic of violence.
HFR: Did the word (or just the idea) of "ultraviolence" take over your mind while writing Peckinpah? Even the "calmer" stories seem to have a violent edge to them.
DHW: I have been interested in the stylistics, thematics and implications of ultraviolence for a long time. It started when I saw Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange in the 1990s. I was in grad school in Boston. That film really struck a cord with me, and I liked Anthony Burgess’s novel even better. In both texts, the term ultraviolence belongs to the Nadsat language spoken by the protagonist, Alex, and his “droogs,” and most teenagers in the texts’ respective futuristic, urban, morally eroded diegeses. Obviously enough, the term indicates excessive acts of brutality, but not acts that are outside of the realm of possibility. In A Clockwork Orange, ultraviolence means extreme violence that could actually be accomplished in the real world. It’s not cartoon violence. However, today we tend to loosely associate the term with cartoon violence (e.g. Wile E. Coyote vs. the Road Runner, The Toxic Avenger, Akira, Kill Bill, etc.)
The bloodshed in Peckinpah’s ultraviolent films is extreme but not cartoon. Still, Peckinpah is often referred to as the father of contemporary cinematic ultraviolence. I think that’s accurate. Retrospectively his films don’t seem that severe or over-the-top. In their historical context, though, they really wigged people out.
The ultraviolence in my book is mostly overblown and unreal—it couldn’t happen outside of a comic book or a demonic episode of Tom & Jerry. In this respect it’s rather un-Peckinpahesque. There are some instances, however, in which the violence I depict, while intense and acute, could take place. So I mixed up the two. I wanted to represent and examine both sides of ultraviolence.
HFR: Tell us a little bit about Technologized Desire: Selfhood & the Body in Postcapitalist Science Fiction, your latest non-fiction book.
DHW: I’m very proud of this book. It was much harder to write than fiction—criticism and theory always is. Technologized Desire is based upon my Ph.D. dissertation, which I completed in 2005. I started writing it in 2003, and since I got my Ph.D., I’ve been refining and revising it. So it was more or less a five-year writing project, not to mention the years of research in science fiction studies I performed in graduate school beforehand. Pain the ass. But that’s as it should be.
My thesis in the book—and this is a severely abridged thesis—is that we are on the cusp of a new “postcapitalist” era characterized by a terminal schizophrenizing of subjectivity by selfhood and vice versa. This process is primarily invoked and facilitated by the increasing science fictionalization of reality, i.e., what used to be purely science fictional (e.g. cyberspace) is now an actual, tangible phenomenon (e.g. the Internet). I unpack this thesis using novels and films, among them Vanilla Sky, Wiliam S. Burroughs’ The Soft Machine, Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness, Max Barry’s Jennifer Government, and the Wachowski’s The Matrix (1999) and its sequels. I advance and problematize my discussion of these texts using lots of postmodern theory, such as Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, Scott Bukatman’s Terminal Identity, Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, a bunch of stuff by Frankfurt school partisans, and so on.
The book just came out officially in June. I’m curious and anxious about its critical reception. I’m so close to this one, I have difficulty looking at it objectively and assessing its overall scholarly mettle. I think it’s ok. But there is a lot more I wanted to do with it, namely in terms of readings of gender and race.
HFR: Going back to your collection Pseudo-City, what was the inspiration for “The Other Pedestrian”(one of my favorites)?
DHW: Damn, I don’t remember. All of the stories were composed with the same “pseudo” diegetic space in mind, i.e., they’re all set in the same irreal city and function according to the same irreal logic. “The Other Pedestrian” is one of my favorites in Pseudo City, too, from what I can remember—I haven’t read it in awhile. There was a guy pretending to be a chicken in it, right?
HFR: Can you explain how you came up with Pseudofolliculitis City, the place where Pseudo-City’s stories take place.
DHW: I address this to some degree in the introductory story. The whole thing stems from my problems with shaving. I have this thing called pseudofolliculitis barbae, which I describe in the first paragraph of the book as follows:
“Also referred to as ‘razor bumps,’ PB is a skin condition occurring in African-American and Irish men, and other people who grow curly, pubiclike hair on their faces. The condition is a consequence of extremely curved hair follicles growing backwards into the skin, producing inflammations, discolorations, and pusy formations. If PB is not properly negotiated, keloidal scarring can result. Keloidal scars are hard, unpleasant-looking bumps on the neck and beard region.”
In the book, PB basically operates as a metaphor for affliction. In general, though, I just thought it would be funny to base an entire book on out-of-control hair follicles. I’m juvenile, I guess.
HFR: As editor-in-chief of the acclaimed website The Dream People. What advice can you give writers seeking to find their work within its pages?
DHW: Is it acclaimed? Well, thank you for that. There are two main criteria for publishing fiction in TDP. Work must be short (between 5-1000 words, preferably 5-500 words), and it must be recognizably irreal in some way. We get a lot of good writing that we turn down because it isn’t irreal at all. Minor criteria include writing mechanics, use of language, style of prose, etc.—the usual suspects. For more tips on what we’re looking for, I encourage folks to check out TDP’s submissions guidelines.
HFR: Besides the obvious authors, who (or what) else has inspired your own fiction?
DHW: I’m inspired more by films and television shows than books or stories. I don’t like most of what I read; it doesn’t entertain me. In fact, part of the reason I write what I write is to entertain myself. I get bored too easily, or I can’t get passed slipshod prose. But mostly writing bores me. Authors are too fucking serious. I’m more of an image than a word guy, too, which I hope is evident in my writing: I massively favor description and detail over exposition.
As for specific films and shows, I watch just about everything—mainstream, underground, blockbuster, cult, foreign, old, new, etc. I really like shows on HBO and Showtime. Right now I’m plodding through the third season of Dexter and the first and second seasons of Californication and when I’m finished I’m going to re-watch The Sopranos from the beginning. I like Weeds, Trueblood, Entourage, Big Love, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Brotherhood, too. As for films, I’m a special effects whore and don’t care much about narrative depth or character development. This week I’ll probably go see Transformers 2. I loved the first one. Michael Bay may be shallow but he’s a sharp stylist. But I also like films that employ stylish camerawork, ranging from Touch of Evil to Run Lola Run. And I like silly films (e.g. Airplane!, The Toxic Avenger, The Rocky Horror Picture Show) and weird films, of course (e.g. Eraserhead, Tetsuo, Delicatessen).
The most influential films on my writing are science fiction. Top five: Blade Runner, The Matrix, A Clockwork Orange, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Metropolis.
What I don’t like: contemporary spoof films the likes of White Chicks, Meet the Spartans, Epic Movie, and horseshit like that. Spoof films ain’t what they used to be.
HFR: Can you give us a peek at your writing schedule (if any)?
DHW: I don’t have a set schedule. I write nearly every day, whenever I can, preferably in the morning with coffee, but as a fulltime English professor, father, husband, etc., I have to be flexible. I write in short increments, usually no longer than an hour at a time, sitting at the kitchen counter (where I am now) with my MacBook. Not very romantic, ritualistic or quixotic, I’m afraid.
HFR: What's in the future for D. Harlan Wilson (upcoming releases, speaking events, etc.)
DHW: This year I’ve attended a few conventions, where I usually sit on panels and do book readings and/or signings. I’ll attend a few more cons before 2010. There’s more information at my website. I don’t do many bookstore signings. I used to. But unless your publisher can sport tens of thousands of dollars to run you around the country, it’s not worth it. Most publishers can’t do that, especially in the small press, not to mention the shitty economy.
As for my future projects, I’m always writing stories, reviews, essays, etc. Here’s my book itinerary for the next three years: Codename Prague (Raw Dog Screaming Press 2010), The Kyoto Man (Raw Dog Screaming Press 2011) and They Live: Cultographies (Wallflower Press 2012).
HFR: Blankety Blank: A Memoir of Vulgaria was one unique serial killer tale. Was it difficult (as a writer) to work this into such a bizarre setting?
DHW: Not really. I know I wanted to do a book about a serial killer. At the time, when I was conceiving of Blankety Blank in 2006, I was studying a lot of Ripperology. Not sure why. Jack the Ripper has always fascinated me. Also, I wanted to set a book in a near-future version of the place where I grew up: Grand Rapids, Michigan. I do this often, create settings based on personal experience and then use those settings to explore topics that interest me or that I’m obsessing about—typically the latter. I do the same thing in Peckinpah: it’s set in a version of the shithole town I live in now and the topic I explore is ultraviolence à la Sam Peckinpah. Anyway, when I think about it, the serial killer in Blankety Blank is a minor character. The book’s more about my estranged, patriarchal, middle-aged, blasé protagonist, Rutger Van Trout, and his goofy family. The serial killing that takes place is ultimately incidental. And the serial killer is more of a symbol for the unsettledness Rutger experiences, an unsettledness that he can’t figure out, i.e., he knows he’s mad, sad, conflicted, vacuous, etc., but he doesn’t know why—the origin of his malaise is a mystery. This is a common affliction among males who have mid-life crises. But admittedly I represent Rutger’s ordinary mid-life crisis in an oddball way. In many respects, my serial killer, who isn’t even human, is more normal and ordinary than the people whose neighborhood it terrorizes.
HFR: You're stuck in an elevator between the 354th and 355th floor in an unnamed building somewhere in Pseudofolliculitis City. The top hatch opens and your small space is quickly invaded by nipples of abused pedestrians. What do you do?
DHW: Collect the nipples, set up a kiosk, sell the nipples for $5 apiece.
HFR: How can readers find out more about your work?
DHW: The best place is my website. I’m also alive on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, GoodReads, etc. Thanks Nick!
(NOTE: Due to time and space issues, the HFR's review of D. Harlson Wilson's PECKINPAH: AN ULTRAVIOLENT ROMANCE will appear in the August Review Updates, to be posted 8/1/09.)