Review of ZANESVILLE
and an Interview with the author Kris Saknussemm
ZANESVILLE
by Kris Saknussemm
A Villard Trade Paperback Original
ISBN 0-8129-7416-6 $23.95 US
As yet unreleased in Australia
BUY
from Amazon.com
http://www.saknussemm.com
In
January I met with ZANESVILLE author Kris Saknussemm
outside Readings Bookstore on Lygon Street in Carlton, Melbourne,
Australia. I have been a heavy user of the Internet for about
11 years now and I have met hundreds of people online. Kris is
the first person I actually had the courage to meet in person.
I still felt dodgy, hanging around outside the bookstore waiting
for him. I had no idea at all what he looked like. Despite the
press clippings I had collected, a photograph of the author remained
elusive. I mused to myself that perhaps Kris was Clearfather himself,
a master reality hacker who creates his own past and controls
his own future.
Zanesville
sure hacked my mind, its thoughtware continued to alter
my perception for many days after putting the book down. I felt
I knew him and what to expect but I had no idea who he was. Other
guys who looked like writers were hanging around outside the bookshop
as well; I just could not bring myself to approach and ask –
hey man, are you Kris? Too dodgy for my liking. Thankfully I was
not waiting long when a guy who I had never seen before but looked
very familiar walks on up and says – are you Brentley?
– o good, lets go eat. A few weeks earlier I received
an email from him saying that he thought Retort Magazine was cool
and would I like to have a look at his new book ZANESVILLE.
Of course I would, that crazy duck on the website freaked me out.
Besides, who can resist the catch line from an advertisement I
had seen – Better to lose an election than an erection!
After many lengthy email discussions we agreed it would be cool
to meet next time he was in town, and after embarking on his hyperactive
neuron altering text I was looking very forward to the opportunity.
Zanesville
is something entirely new, a new art form, a digital petrii dish,
an uncontained biomystic disaster that is still somehow contained,
somehow…
It is a world that is familiar but totally alien with a startling
array of new consumer products to dazzle and astound (try a tinned
tiny hammerhead shark won’t you). Zanesville literally begins
with a tornado, a potent symbol of the vortex of our protagonist’s
history. The introduction reads like an extended lead-in to a
sci-fi film, the massive scale of a Lucas blockbuster crossed
with the claustrophic foreboding and weirdness of Bowie’s
Labyrinth. Instantly I was drawn into the story as I downloaded
Clearfather’s history file into my head (or the story was
drawn into me, who can tell?).
This is like bluetooth text transmission, wireless, no big spikes
through the back of your skull like in the matrix. And this old
historic world Saknussemm paints, that hints of the absinthe soaked
debaucheries of Baudelaire and dreadful biblical forebodings,
already reeks of the techno-paranoia that is to follow. This is
a world of the putrid stenches that linger beneath the sanitised
vinyl seats of a busy commuter train. Strange albino children
obscured in sedative fogs. Butch pixies. Cracked lips oozing collagen.
Adventures in the Patrick Swayze Center for Serious Depression.
Overnight stays in the Will Smith Hotel. Flesh and machine unified,
bodily secretions and digitised DNA sequences. This is not a map-on-the-first-page
fantasy novel, these biomechanoids that hang around in derelict
factory precincts aren’t carrying your light sabre, they
want to wear your face. It reminds you that plastic is made out
of oil and oil is made out of dead animals and rotten trees. It’s
a anarchistic spiritual journey this text, a satirical metamorphosis
of our dystopic 20th century fondness for infomercials and the
latest gadget into a twisted nightmarish future of drug dependency,
addiction to superficial surgery and bioengineering, a broken
urban landscape littered with the remnants of an exhausted consumerist
ideology, a slapped stick insect leaking its green guts onto grandma’s
favourite lace tablecloth, or a smashed flatscreen monitor oozing
liquid crystals onto an autopsy table.
This
book is the Hegelian dialectic manifested, it contains a threat
and this threat contains its own solution, it is Sleeping Beauty’s
fruit and the Prince’s kiss all rolled into one easy to
swallow pill. Kris Saknussemm is like a magician directing a film
inside of your head. They say a picture paints a thousand words
– I’d sure like to see a thousand words from Zanesville
made into a picture. That would be some freaky picture indeed.
The biomystical character Clearfather, ex porn star turned cyberwarrior
against the omnipresent technofeudal overlord the Vitessa Corporation
is enigmatic, loveable, charismatic and prone to playing with
language in a high brow intellectual way but can suddenly slide
into slovenly rhymes such as “Old Mrs. Rushcutter had
a rough-cut punt. Not a punt-cut rough, but a rough-cut punt.”
In other words, totally loveable! The narration from the story’s
author and the protagonists own observations become very blurred,
almost like it is Clearfather telling the story himself in this
clever almost idiot-savant kind of obsessive way. Books like this
help you to remember that in the beginning there was The Word,
and that the word reigns supreme. Characters like Clearfather
will live on in the cybernetic dream.
Saknussemm
has shoved his way into the broken line of my favourite authors,
he writes with the mastery of the greats, Baudelaire, Lautremont,
Philip K Dick, William Burroughs, JG Ballard, Umberto Eco to name
but a few. He creates a new version of the old familiar world,
a new fractal of the possible direction we could all slide if
this dimension continues as it is. Do yourself a favour and read
Zanesville, read it three times. It is being described as brilliant,
funny, impressively deliberate and as one of the most original
books to appear in a long time; and I agree with the reviews.
It is not every day you get the ear of a burgeoning great author
and I definitely wanted to ask him some questions, this was going
to be interesting indeed. We spent four hours on the pavement
in the sun drinking beer. I managed to ask him the following questions
before coherence left me for the evening.
First
up Kris, after I read your book I could not help but think of
many of my favourite authors, (see above). Do you view such comparisons
as debilitating to an author’s career, or do you find such
comparisons encouraging?
We’ve
all heard the saying, “You can choose your friends, but
not your family.” Well, the thing that writers do above
all is to choose their family. They externalise their imaginations
and emotional being, and they knowingly or not reach out to their
antecedents and inspirers. I think the only time comparisons are
debilitating is when an author feels they’re outright invalid
or superficially applied. In this case, you’ve put me in
great company, and I’d love to think my work was worthy
of them.
In
several reviews I read of Zanesville previous to my having read
the book it was painted as being a satire, comic, a parody. Personally,
while indeed in part it was obviously a satire, you intentionally
draw our attention to this in the beginning with the giant electronic
billboards streaming AL-WAQI’A STILL A THREAT, I found it
contained a warning about humanity’s current obsession with
things like genetic engineering and physical enhancement via plastic
surgery and implants, the dangers of physiologically addictive
entertainments and artificial stimulants. But it was also funny,
and entertaining. So my question is, was it your intention to
educate and entertain, or just freak people out in general?
This
may say something disturbing about my psyche, but it would have
been a far freakier work if I’d really let my creatures
loose. I felt I was being very disciplined and restrained. I hesitate
to claim any educational benefit. Authors who consciously try
to educate their audience have usually underestimated their audience.
I’m very happy if the book is entertaining. Entertaining
the people I’m trying to reach is a high calling. As to
the predictive, warning aspect of the story, there are undeniably
things in our society which are scary and which really scare me.
I find the best way to deal with them is through farce. Other
people’s paranoia can be so amusing—it’s only
our own that grates and jars. ZANESVILLE was a way for me to distance
myself from certain fears about our culture and regain my sense
of humor and hopefulness.
There
is an ever-present supernatural theme throughout the book, to
your character’s, godheads and ritual prayers are commonplace.
I read in your biography that while working with the guerrilla
theatre group you founded (False Frontier Society) you had a near
fatal fall from scaffolding. Did this experience lead you into
themes of mortality, transcendence and personal longevity that
you explore in Zanesville, or were these things of interest to
you previously?
These
themes have always been of interest to me, and indeed the accident
you mention, although unhinging, was only one in a long series
of “ritual enactments.” I’ve always believed
in a secret, invisible world of presences and influences behind
or adjacent to this reality. When I was growing up, my father
was a minister and my mother was a drama teacher and theatre director,
so there was from the beginning an underlying element of ritual
magic and “spirit talking” in the family, although
neither of my parents would have acknowledged it as such. My principal
life experience and the inciting incident for this on-going fascination
actually occurred when I was 9. I was attacked by a sexual predator
along a railroad bridge that lay on the way home from school.
I escaped but all my school books had to be abandoned. I went
into traumatic shock, living with my grandmother for six weeks
afterward. When I eventually returned to school, I found that
my classmates, who had found my school books torn up along the
tracks, assumed I’d been killed. For the rest of that year
I had an eerie celebrity of having come back from the dead. That
sense of movement between the worlds has never left me.
I
believe that there is an important relationship between the scanning/surveillance
technology in Zanesville and the diagnostic quality of the text
as a whole. I get the impression you are a heavy technology buff.
Are you personally interested in the evolution of technology and
the future implications of such things as nanobots, or are you
like a method actor who gets seriously interested in his subject
only while writing about it and then you become an authority on
the subject?
As
with people like J.G. Ballard, I am extremely curious about the
interplay between technological development, culture and the individual
psyche. Back in the middle of the 19th Century Thoreau said “Man
has become the tool of his tools.” Ever since I read that
I’ve been interested in trying to understand the dynamics
of this observation, and I’ve been very influenced by people
like the anthropologist Edward T. Hall and his theory of how our
technological “extensions” have redefined and vastly
accelerated human evolution. The whole question is, I think, the
major cultural issue of our time. But I’m not a technophile
and certainly not a techno-fetishist. If anything, I believe we
overvalue, animate and even deify technology, while forgetting
or ignoring some of the really complex and intricate social mechanisms
which define human culture and make technological advancement
possible.
May
I pry into your technique? If I may, how reliant are you on technology?
Are you one of those writers who uses the latest voice-to-text
technology or do you sit down in the garden under a shady tree
with a notebook and a cigarette? Do you work with the smell of
high-density plastics or old typewriter ribbons?
I’ve
had a bag of mini-cassette tapes and a handheld recorder for years.
Never been able to use them. I have to have the keyboard action,
to have those reflex arcs lit up. I use a laptop now, which does
offer some appreciated mobility, and I carry notebooks and pens
around—but just for notes. For me, working effectively outside
my office would be like a sculptor who welds trying to do stuff
on the run. You can harvest things, reflect on what you’re
doing and get inspiration—but then you have to get back
to the shed. Using a computer just makes sense. Mine’s a
cool silver one with a lovely sensual touch. Her name is Barbara.
You
are from the United States originally and have been living in
Australia for the past 20 years. Although your book uses American
English I find it very, if you’ll forgive my terminology,
European in its philosophical thematics, it’s post-existential
anti-authoritarianism, like the writings of Guy Debord in Society
of The Spectacle. Also I cannot help but think of Nietzsche while
reading Zanesville, his Ubermensch seems manifestly Clearfatherish,
as does his Zarathustra. Do you have an affinity toward any particular
national identity or do you consider yourself a citizen of the
world?
Often
when people hear me speak they can’t quite pick out what
kind of accent I have or where I’m from. I guess that’s
how I think of myself. Very American in one sense, and not all
in others. I definitely have been heavily influenced by European
writers and thinkers like DeBord and René Girard, the author
of books like Violence and the Sacred. There is a profound insularity
(if not ignorance) in American culture, which is only understandable
because Americans feel they are the centre of the world at this
point in history. That view concerns me greatly so I can’t
imagine ever feeling truly “at home” there, although
I confess I also miss it. I think I’ve come around to being
grateful for my distance from American culture, even though that
hasn’t helped my writing career—but I’m always
curious about what sort of outrageousness they’re going
to get up to next. The US is arguably the best funded social experiment
on the planet, and I don’t want to miss anything.
It
is obvious from reading your work and speaking with you that you
are wide awake to the political situation on planet earth at present.
What is your take on the current government attitude of implying
that ‘the arts’ are dangerous to the statuts quo and
the implementation of draconian sedition laws. Do you consider
this to be an ominous sign of a further erosion of civil liberties?
Henry
Miller once said, “We don’t need more freedoms, we
need bigger ideas.” To me, there’s no question that
there is a concerted program in place in America which is designed
to undermine specific freedoms that I feel are very important,
and it’s spreading fast to places like Australia. But sometimes
the civil libertarians worry me as much as the religious fundamentalists
and the political hardliners. Fanaticism and ideology are the
real enemies—and the nullification of common sense that
comes from inter-tribal conflict. In the American state of Florida,
a currently enshrined civil liberty is the right of average citizens
to carry a concealed firearm. I don’t know if I feel good
about that. Or consider the issue of abortion. If you’re
a leftist minded person, to have any reservations at all about
the abortion rights issue’s monolithic importance on the
social agenda is sacrilege. Forget healthcare, education, the
environment or the question of public versus private responsibility—are
you Pro-Choice, yes or no? No one could be more vehemently opposed
to the growing strength of the Christian Right than I am, but
I find it ludicrous and pathetic when singing Christmas carols
is outlawed in public schools and the only song that passes muster
is “Frosty the Snowman.” This is one of the things
that ZANESVILLE is about—the paralysis of reason and goodwill—the
inability to be discerning for fear of discrimination.
I
think there are indeed vicious assholes out there trying to control
us, but I’m actually far less worried about their frontal
assaults on personal liberties, than I am by the collateral and
peripheral damage of orthodoxy, political correctness and the
downside of things like computer technology, which offers so many
welcome benefits while having harrowing implications for the right
to privacy.
As
to any “attack” on the Arts, whether overt or insidious,
I think it’s a blessing. We have far too many culturally
approved artists supported by grants, comfortable with low-responsibility
teaching positions (that are really effectively grants) or earning
significant sums for churning out insipid middle of the road drek.
I don’t think artists as individuals have any responsibility
to be political, moral or socially instructive in the least. They
do need to have ability, vision and courage. I think threats of
“sedition” are the best thing that could happen. The
sad truth is the Arts today are about dangerous as whist and lawn
bowls.
Considering
the previous question and the climate we are operating in here,
and if it’s not asking you to jump into the fire, what is
your political persuasion? Are you left of the fence, right of
the fence, or have you built an easy chair on the fence?
In
American terms I am staunchly left. I believe the current administration
is not only stupid but malignant. The nation’s foreign policy
is a disaster of phallic militarism and commercial greed. The
let market forces rule/retreat behind the walls of wealth mentality
has, along with endemic racism, meant that the public delivery
of healthcare and education is virtually obsolete. Things ain’t
good on any level and those in power are intent on doing still
more and possibly irreparable damage. Of course they are merely
public stooges for less directly accountable corporate criminals
and witch hunt-hungry special interest groups who are crazed with
a religious sense of mission that is every bit as terrifying as
the most rabid Muslim fundamentalist.
Living
in Australia, my views soften considerably and I think the situation
is genuinely very, very different. I strongly oppose many of the
Federal Government’s policies but I think Labour is a shambles
of ineptitude and petty squabbling. The Union movement seems deeply
corrupt, and no party is effectively supporting small business,
which is responsible for 75% of employment in the country. The
privatisation mania will no doubt have the same negative effect
as in the States, and yet I see that there has long been a complacency
within the Australian populace, a dependence on a bureaucratic
socialist model of government, which in my view still needs to
be prodded awake. As to Australia’s support of American
foreign policy, what real choice is there? Either party would
do the same. In for a dime, in for a dollar. Or rather—in
for a penny, in for a pound of flesh—and a cubic tonne or
two of greenhouse emissions.
You
said in a letter to me that it took you many years to get this
book into print, and I applaud Villard (an imprint of Random House)
for doing so. With this in mind and considering the fact that
Retort is a writers magazine, I have to ask you a writer type
question. Do you have any advice for all the writers out there
who are walking the same path littered with rejection slips and
faith stealing economic ghosts? Maybe a little advice about keeping
the faith, which often seems to be the hardest part…
One
of the principal characters in ZANESVILLE says at one point, “I
have time for science, religion and magic.” I think all
three are required to survive as a writer. You mentioned faith,
so let’s take religion first. It’s essential to have
faith not just in yourself but in a higher power or more precisely,
a higher purpose. For some people, this will be a traditional
divinity. For others it will be like the Third Mind that William
Burroughs and Brion Gysin wrote of. For still others, it will
be a sense of participating and sharing in a larger cultural project—telling
a portion of the Giant Story, contributing to the Big Debate.
However you think of it, you have to feel you are not just alone
typing in a room. You are linked. You bring the whole art form
alive through your efforts. The word has to be made flesh continuously.
As ego-driven as the enterprise can often seem to be, it’s
really about communication, connection and collaboration. Those
who lose themselves will find themselves.
The
science is the systematic discipline of defining your audience
and reaching out to them in deliberate, measurable ways. Don’t
show your work to friends or colleagues you know won’t understand
it (although you may well reconsider them as friends and colleagues).
And don’t submit your work to publications or publishers
that are clearly not going to “get” it. I once submitted
a highly experimental novel to a major New York publisher—and
surprise, surprise, they wrote back! They wrote back and suggested
I seek urgent psychiatric evaluation. We can, if we choose, sabotage
ourselves and waste tremendous amounts of time and energy. Or,
we can be brutally honest and build the strongest and most self-sustaining
networks possible, however small. The acid test is this—which
would you honestly prefer, one reader who really digests your
words, questions your ideas and engages with what you write—or
ten people who know your name? Do you want the big display section
in the chain bookstore—or would you feel more pride in seeing
someone in a wheelchair who is dependent on public transport get
your book out of the library? If you’re truly honest with
yourself about what kind of success you’re seeking, you’re
100% more likely to achieve it.
As
to magic, I mean the ceremonial attempt to reinforce and project
one’s imagination. I set out to write not to seek approval
or gain recognition and/or income—I wanted to make a world
interesting and whole enough for me to live in. Of course contracts,
reviews, awards and recognition become important—but they
are really only means to send one’s imagination rippling
further out into the pond. My work space is filled with icons,
images and quotations that strengthen my inspiration field. I
see the whole act as transposing my Tardis-like environment into
the larger world. Above my desk is this remark from Kafka:
“If
you have the strength to look at things steadily, without, as
it were, blinking your eyes, you can see much; but if you relax
only once and shut your eyes, everything fades immediately into
obscurity.”
I
think above all else, writers need to protect their sense of concentration.
It’s a hard thing, because you may lose a lot. I lost a
marriage. I lost years and thousands of dollars. I now celebrate
those losses and failures. Unless you are a culturally sanitised
spokesperson angling for grants and approval, you will be very
lonely and wonder what the hell. But every so often, if you can
sustain your focus and suspend your own disbelief, the magic circuit
will be completed and for a moment you will be not just telling
a part of the Story but a character in it. Now all you have to
do is to make that moment last.
And
finally, but very importantly, what can we expect next from Clearfather
in The Lodemania Testament, from the brilliant mind of Kris Saknussemm?
Is there any thing you can give away without ruining the surprise?
The
next book, which has the working title of ENIGMATIC PILOT, takes
us back to the beginning of the Lodemania saga—to the birth
of Lloyd Meadhorn Sitturd in the mid 19th Century—his mystical
experience with the tornado and the trials and adventures that
both shape my alternate version of America and his life. His first
life.
Readers
will have to wait a little longer to find out what happens to
Clearfather and for “all to be revealed”.
ZANESVILLE
by Kris Saknussemm
A Villard Trade Paperback Original
ISBN 0-8129-7416-6 $23.95 US
As yet unreleased in Australia
BUY
from Amazon.com
http://www.saknussemm.com
Self
Portrait ©
Kris
Saknussemm
Brentley
Frazer
© Brentley Frazer 2006
Brentley
Frazer Poet, has poems and other writings published internationally
in many of the worlds most reputable journals, magazines and anthologies
including, The
Moosehead Anthology X, Rattapallax
Magazine, Short
Fuse, In
the Criminals Cabinet, The
Age, Exquisite
Corpse, 3AM
Magazine, fusebox,
Big
Bridge,
Jack Magazine, nthPosition,
Identity
Theory, Cordite
Poetry Review, Get
Underground, Tiger
Magazine, Hutt,
Paper
Tiger New World Poetry 1&2, Subversions,
The Stalking
Tongue, Stylus
Poetry Journal. His work as a poet and his work as publisher
and editor of ejournal Retort
Magazine has been recognised by major media, most notably,
Realtime
+ Onscreen (Australia), The
Courier Mail (Australia), The
Guardian (UK) and The
Colombia Journalism Review (NY USA) [FULL
BIOGRAPHY]
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