Soft Skull News

I just found these two interviews with Lydia Millet today, on Jessica Lee Jernigan's blog, one from 2001 about My Happy Life re-posted yesterday, the other The Nuclear Sublime posted today.

They're both quite short and both are every bit the sublime punch in the face that I find Lydia's mode of expression to be.

From one interview:

I think the Apocalypse is happening all around us. We go on eating desserts and watching TV. I know I do. I wish we were more capable of sustained passion and sustained resistance. We should be screaming and what we do is gossip.

From the other:

None of us have visions of reality that are valid or invalid; we just have visions. How well we do in the world depends partly on how well our vision matches the prevailing cultural vision. In her case there’s really no match, and as a result she doesn’t fare too well in the world by conventional standards. But her vision is so strong that it sustains her through terrible adversity. And that’s what I cherish about her, and why I never considered stripping her of her delusions. Where would we be without our delusions? I’d fight anyone who tried to take mine away from me.

This reminded me of one of the loveliest things I find about my job as publisher—reading author interviews after the book is published. You think you know the book after you've edited it, and hung out with the author, and pitched it and pimped it, and talked it up...and then you read these interviews and it is like you completely rediscover the book.

So here are a few more semi-random interviews with Soft Skull authors...

Jennifer Knox, author of A Gringo Like Me, interviewed by Kevin Sampsell for Powells.com's great new blog.

KS: Billy Corgan and Jewel have done it. Which other pop stars should try their hand at publishing a poetry book?

Knox: First I'd like to say that I'm a huge fan of Michael Madsen's book, especially the poem about him masturbating to the girls changing in the windows of the dorms at Northwestern. That's what I call letting it all hang out. If Dean Martin was still alive, I'd love to read a book of his pantoums — but just pantoums. Ol' Dirty Bastard should have written a book of poems. I guess I can only think of dead people — and Michael Madsen.

Camille Dodero interviewing Lisa Crystal Carver about Drugs are Nice.

http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/other_stories/multipage/documents/05106422.asp

"I had to get drunk every day to write the Boyd chapters," Carver admits, sunlight from the coffee shop’s front window casting yellow onto her tall visage. "It was the only way that I could write this hideous stuff. My daughter was in preschool from nine [am] to noon, so I would be drunk writing. My husband would pick her up from school, then I would sober up."

Above all, Carver’s biggest difficulty in making the private public has been honestly discussing her situation with Rice. "You know I have an open marriage," she says, lowering her voice to a whisper in the coffee shop, even though she’s telling someone with a recorder. "So I still have the whole process of falling in love and seducing and all that. And now it’s strange because [potential love interests] read bad things that happened with Boyd and that’s, like, creepy. You don’t like to think about someone you feel new with trapped in that yucky situation. That almost makes someone seem dirty, a lot more than being a former prostitute, or having fake shit onstage."

And, just to show that Soft Skull's male authors have things to say as well...A Mark Ames interview on Alternet about Going Postal.

Why do you think we have all of these "wage slave" and "temp slave" T-shirts and e-jokes around? Americans like to turn everything painfully true into a little quip, as if by quippifying the painful truth, as if by becoming self-aware of one's shameful and intolerable existence, one partially nullifies one's pain. This is what you'd call "slave humor." Slaves did the same thing, turning their pain into quips. And remember, there were almost no slave rebellions at all in America, less than a dozen.

As for the slave tendency in humanity, I think it's a lot stronger in America than in most other countries in part because no other country on earth has so successfully crushed every internal rebellion. Slaves in the Caribbean for example rebelled a lot more because their oppressors weren't as good at oppressing as Americans were. America has put down every rebellion, brutally, from the Whiskey Rebellion to the Confederate Rebellion to the proletarian rebellions, Black Panthers, white militias... you name it. This creates a powerful slave mentality, a sense that it's pointless to rebel.

And this in turn creates pointless rebellions like modern workplace and school rebellions, just like our early slave rebellions were carried out in totally pointless, seemingly random ways. Or it creates a mass of quipping slave-comedians, like we have today.