For All You Palahniuk Fans--
Here are some interviews with writers featured in the Chuck Palahniuk anthology Sacred and Immoral: On the Writings of Chuck Palahniuk talking all things Chuck (http://www.c-s-p.org/Flyers/Sacred-and-Immoral--On-the-Writings-of-Chuck-Palahniuk1-4438-0328-6.htm):
INTERVIEW WITH MONICA DRAKE
1. Tell us a bit about yourself as a Palahniuk literary scholar. What's the title of your essay in the collection? Have you written other essays on Palahniuk? What made you take the angle you wrote on for Sacred and Immoral?
Chuck Palahniuk and I met years ago when we both signed up for Tom Spanbauer's private writing workshops. I've written the introduction to the collection, and my piece details aspects of what it means to be a writer in workshop with Chuck over the years. We met every week in 1991, and we still meet in 2009. As a writer, there's nothing better than a tight-knit, challenging, energized writers' workshop.
2. Why do you think Palahniuk has earned such a strong cult following? What do you think is Palahniuk's best book? Why?
Chuck set out to write the kind of books he wanted to read. He's smart and full of ideas and likes an edgy joke. He challenged the publishing industry by turning out a kind of work like nobody else was writing, and once he got a book out there, those who were starving for what he delivers flocked to his stories.
I've always been a fan of Fight Club and Invisible Monsters. Those may or may not be his best, but they warm my heart. I was taken with them so entirely when they came out, when Chuck was building his reputation.
3. What are you working on next as a writer?
I'm the author of one novel, Clown Girl, and am working on my second. I have a story coming out in the Sun magazine in the near future.
4. Who/what are other writers/books you recommend? How do you see those authors or books in terms of being complementary to Palahniuk?
Mark Richard, particularly "The Ice at the Bottom of the World." We all fell in love with this collection when Tom Spanbauer introduced us to it. It's a collection that really emphasizes language, "burnt tongue," what words can do on a page.
Another book to read and reread is The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I was amazed to learn that Chuck Palahniuk has long passages of it memorized. Then again, maybe it shouldn't have surprised me; he has that kind of mind.
INTERVIEW WITH JEFF SARTAIN
1. Tell us a bit about yourself as a Palahniuk literary scholar.
What's the title of your essay in the collection? Have you written
other essays on Palahniuk? What made you take the angle you wrote on
for Sacred and Immoral?
I started studying Chuck's work in 1998 when I heard that David
Fincher's new film, Fight Club, was based on a novel. I tracked down a
copy of the book (not easy to find in 1998) and wrote an undergrad
paper on Fight Club. I continued studying Chuck's stuff throughout
grad school, and after attending the 2nd Chuck Palahniuk conference in
2003, I decided that there were enough academics out there that
studied Palahniuk to warrant an anthology. Looking at the existing
scholarship, it seemed natural to focus on his work after Fight Club,
so that scholarship would begin to catch up to Chuck's prolific output
of extremely popular work.
For Sacred and Immoral, I co-wrote an essay called "Invisible Carrots
and Fainting Fans: Queer Humor and Abject Horror in 'Guts'" with a
colleague, Courtney Wennerstrom, who's also here at Indiana
University. We were blown away that a simple reading of a story could
cause so many people to pass out and vomit, and decided to gain a
greater understanding of exactly what was going on at these readings.
In the essay, we work through the tricky issues about social silences,
masculinity/femininity, and sexuality that the story portrays. We were
fortunate enough to be here at Indiana University, where the Kinsey
Institute for Sex, Gender, and Reproduction is housed. Their archives
were invaluable for unearthing the social, legal, and medical language
that surrounds the kinds of injuries the protagonists in "Guts"
suffer, and how Chuck's description of these injuries triggers
physiological responses in his audience.
I have quite a bit of other work on Chuck Palahniuk in print. My
earliest published work on Chuck are several interviews for Micro-film
Magazine (http://www.micro-film-magazine.com/), which highlight his
contributions and support of Dennis Widmyer's indie film work. I've
also interviewed Chuck for the speculative fiction website, Strange
Horizons (available at http://www.strangehorizons.com/2006/20061016/palahniuk-int-a.shtml).
That interview has been extremely popular, having been translated into
Italian on the web, and picked up in print in Playboy Russia (Dec.
'08) and Playboy Ukraine (Jan. '09) early this year. I also
contributed two items to the special issue of the academic journal
Stirrings Still (available at http://www.stirrings-still.org/ss22.pdf)
that was dedicated to Chuck's work; an essay about the influence of
paradoxical thinking and contemporary physics in Chuck's work, as well
as an early version of the bibliography that now appears in Sacred and
Immoral, vastly updated and expanded.
2. Why do you think Palahniuk has earned such a strong cult following?
What do you think is Palahniuk's best book? Why?
I think Chuck tells stories about the ever-more alienated nature of
American culture, how isolated and unfulfilled people feel in the era
of meaningless 24/7 news coverage and glossy marketing. Stories like
Chuck's show how people connect in the most unlikely of circumstances,
and that it's the connection between people that makes life worth
living. It's a message that used to be ingrained in the very fabric of
society, but has fallen away as our culture urges every man to become
an island, every consumer watching home theater alone in the dark in
his McMansion. I think of Chuck's stories as a type of "re-education"
in the importance of social living; each book a perfect little
demonstration of Chuck's universal "people need people" theme.
Personally, my favorite book of Chuck's is Choke, as I think it
represents the apex of his early writings. His most recent, though,
Pygmy, is really great and I think is Chuck's most
technically-accomplished piece of writing yet. In Pygmy, he really
shows his mastery of language, casting the book with a unique voice
and tone, with every word and phrase hearkening to double or triple
meanings. Amazing stuff, and so appropriate that he should dedicate
Pygmy to Amy Hempel, since it's his most crafted book at the level of
the individual words.
3. What are you working on next as a writer?
I'm finishing my dissertation at Indiana University this month and
will accept my Ph.D. in December. Taking that project from its form as
a dissertation and turning it into an academic book is my next major
task. During that time, though, I've got a few shorter essays
(including one about Palahniuk's Pygmy) that will find their way into
print eventually.
4. Who do you think would enjoy Sacred and Immoral? Why do you think
it's a significant collection of writing? Do you have any commentary
on the book's price? Any apologetics to those who are anti-academics?
Sacred and Immoral is intended for folks who like to think deeply
about literature, and the ways that fiction interacts with social,
cultural, and philosophical issues at stake in the real world. As a
piece of scholarship, Sacred and Immoral is the first concentrated
effort in scholarship to get beyond Fight Club. It's been thirteen
years since the book was published, and a decade since the film came
out, but the overwhelming majority of Palahniuk criticism,
scholarship, and teaching is still focused on his first novel and
film. Sacred and Immoral is an effort to expand the academic
conversation about Chuck's work -- he didn't stop producing good
writing after Fight Club, so to do our duties as literary scholars, we
shouldn't be so myopically focused on that first novel.
As far as the price of the anthology goes, its pretty standard for a
hardcover volume of scholarship. The publication of this volume as a
scholarly work, though, was vitally important and necessitated going
with an academic publisher and having a comparably smaller print run
and higher prices. This choice was so important, though, because to
influence the way that Palahniuk is researched, taught, and discussed
in colleges and universites, the volume had to be published in a forum
and style that academics recognize and value. This means that the
hardcover will be more expensive than the average fan probably wants
to pay, but if people ask their libraries to order the volume, they
can read it and then pass it on to other interested parties through
the wonderousness that is the library system. Eventually, if sales are
good enough, this volume may see a reprint as a much more affordable
paperback, too.
5. Who/what are other writers/books you recommend? How do you see
those authors or books in terms of being complementary to Palahniuk?
The last really great book I read was "The Brief Wonderous Life of
Oscar Wao," by Junot Diaz. The book and the characters are completely
engrossing, telling a multi-generational story of fear, flight, and
alienation during the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic. I'm
going to be teaching this book in my literature classes at the first
opportunity, and I'm recommending it everywhere I go for its amazing
voice, its clear sense of place and time, and its beautiful,
heartbreaking characters. Junot Diaz's prose is rolling and lively,
and even the frequent snippets of dialogue in Spanish don't slow the
book down for an English speaker.
INTERVIEW WITH RON RIEKKI
1. Tell us a bit about yourself as a Palahniuk literary scholar. What's the title of your essay in the collection? Have you written other essays on Palahniuk? What made you take the angle you wrote on for Sacred and Immoral?
I forgot my title. It's long. I think it's "Brandy and Tender and the Middle Finger: Foucaultian Carceral Mechanisms and Althusserian Ideological State Apparatuses in Palahniuk's Early Novels." Something like that. I was getting my Ph.D. at the time, so my colon was full of colons and my head was full of academic double-speak. I like the article though. Post-Marxist analysis of his early writings. I actually think it's the best way to look at Palahniuk and the article explains why. It's my only Palahniuk essay, but it became part of my Ph.D. dissertation.
2. Why do you think Palahniuk has earned such a strong cult following? What do you think is Palahniuk's best book? Why?
'Cause he's awesome. I saw him read in Oak Park, Illinois, and it sealed it. Great reading. Best book is Fight Club by far, but I've only read, what?, five of his books? Fight Club is Palahniuk's "Who Made Who." What I mean by that is AC/DC has a riff, a sound, where you know it's them (but can get repetitive). But even though the songs sound the same, some stand out. I always dug "Who Made Who." Great song. Palahniuk's like that. He gets stuck in the same riffs (for good or for bad), but it helps give him his own voice. For Fight Club, all the riffs were there, perfect construction. Love each line. Even if I see 'em again in other novels. I think with Palahniuk your favorite book depends on the order you read 'em. I read Fight Club first. Before the film came out.
3. What are you working on next as a writer?
This is my web site, so poke around and you'll see. Big thing though is check out my novel U.P. (http://www.amazon.com/u-p-R-Riekki/dp/0979625564). If you're a Palahniuk fan, you'll probably dig it a lot--see how he influences my writing.
4. Who/what are other writers/books you recommend? How do you see those authors or books in terms of being complementary to Palahniuk?
Some names that come to mind immediately are Knut Hamsun, Kathy Acker, Sarah Kane, Charles Bukowski, and William Shakespeare. I think, with the exception of Shakespeare, they're all cult type writers in the outsider form that fits well with Palahniuk. Transgressive. As far as writers I know that I recommend--John Casey, John Bullock, Rafael Alvarez, Melinda Moustakis, and Mary Summers come to mind. Also Tara Yellen, Sydney Blair, Patrick Borden, Christopher Tilghman, and Ann Beattie, of course.
5. What is your response to the films Fight Club, Choke, Postcards from the Future, and/or those that are in development?
Postcards from the Future rules. If you haven't seen that documentary, definitely watch it. I have to admit, I've watched the commentary with Chuck Palahniuk to Fight Club more times than I've watched the actual film. He's great in a non-fiction setting. Although it's hit or miss in parts, I recommend his Stranger than Fiction: True Stories. And youtube him. Palahniuk's great in interviews. I think that's why he's at superstar status--great books and a great interview.