Brian Pera Interviews Dodie Bellamy

Brian Pera: Pink Steam collects writing from the last ten years or so. It’s a partial survey of the things you’ve been doing since you first started publishing, which means that other things were left out. What went into the selection process for you? Why some things, and not others?

Dodie Bellamy: I pretty much included any stories that weren’t part of longer projects—including going back and reworking a couple of pieces from the early 80s, in the style they were originally written in. When I decided to make the collection cross-genre, I didn’t want it to include every scrap I’d written, like book reviews, etc. Any essays included had to be closer to memoir, to the fiction. It had to make sense with the rest of the material. As I organized it, different themes appeared that I focused on. I wanted the book to be a fragmented autobiography, I wanted it to be about the ridiculousness of the categories of truth versus fiction. More and more it came to be about family (this was a surprise)—and the idea of ravenously watching, of taking the world in through my eyes. I have some uncollected poetry lying around, but I didn’t put in any poetry. I wanted Pink Steam to be a prose collection, and I wanted it to be accessible. Some people who I’d like to be reading my writing are afraid of it. I’m hoping that Pink Steam will convince them that it’s not hard, it’s not painful, that there’s lots of pleasure in it.

BP: Just out of curiosity, who are these people? I’m not asking for names—I don’t think you mean it that way—but it seems to me that we all write for some vague someone else, hoping they get it in a way that feels like contact. When you say this, I picture some amorphous, Bellmer-like figure made up of various components.

DB: It’s just that I’ve been tarred with the “experimental” brush and many people are afraid of experimental writing, like they think it will bore them to death, and I sympathize with that. I’ve been taking meditation classes and I’ve had to come face to face with my own fear of boredom. But as far as writing goes, for many people, “conventional narrative = fun, cathartic, human, etc. Experimental writing = boring and pretentious.” Fun is important to me too, as is social significance and honesty, all that good stuff.

BP: It seems to me that people often judge the merits or pleasures of a book by how closely they correspond to the pleasures of others, so that books start to feel like strange sort of remakes. If you liked Beaches, you’ll love The First Wives Club, and Bette Midler will always be Bette Midler. By blurring the sense of your character and merging all these elements together you encourage a different sort of engagement, more like an auteur thing, and waiting for your next piece of work is like wondering what Hitchcock will do next. There are signatures, and recurring themes, but the biggest draw, for me, is your intellect. Do books give you as much pleasure as movies seem to?

DB: Novels that have made me want to bolt for my computer include Eileen Myles’ Cool for You and anything by Kathy Acker. Virginia Woolf never ceases to make me want to capture the entire world in words. Looking at art, however, helps me reframe the world. And in a lot of contemporary art I see concerns I address in my writing mirrored back at me. I see art and think, I’m not a weirdo pervert, I’m not alone. “Hallucinations,” one of the key pieces in Pink Steam, was inspired by the photographs of Diane Arbus. The most recent body of work to inspire me was the Montien Boonma retrospective I saw in May at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum. Boonma was a Thai artist who put a Buddhist spin on postmodernism. He died in the late 90s. The show’s catalogue essay led me to read texts by Joseph Beuys and Levi-Strauss, and all of this, as well as the uncut Godzilla and Kurosawa’s film Dreams, emerged, all mixed up, in a catalogue piece I wrote on a painting by LA artist Matt Greene.

BP: How would you describe your work? Is it memoir? Fiction? The two seem at odds with each other, and so many of the things you do break down the conventions of both. Some of the pieces in Pink Steam, like “Barbie’s Dream House,” were originally published in magazines, yet they read like fiction in a way. They’re as much philosophical inquiry as investigative journalism, approaching subjects like Barbie as fictional constructs which have taken on a reality of their own. Fiction and nonfiction are very separate projects for most writers, and they approach them quite differently. You approach the two in a very flat way that ultimately feels much more dynamic, suggesting an endless, incestuous interplay. When you speak about something that happened—a marriage, say, or a friendship—then slip into fantasy and invention, where does that leave you? What’s up with that?

DB: As I suggested above, breaking down that barriers between autobiography, fiction, and essay has been a goal of mine since the beginning—and the selections in Pink Steam emphasize that blurring. For instance, I made the names consistent, so the same characters keep popping up in different pieces, in pieces that feel more like memoir and in pieces that feel more like fiction. In Pink Steam, my story “The Mayonnaise Jar” is a blend of several different elements, including the raw material of my first marriage, my grade school report cards, and objects we had hanging on the walls of the apartment we shared the day I threatened him with the mayonnaise jar. The supporting cast flickers in and out—sometimes like friends I’m gossiping about, and at other times figments of my colorful imagination. The obvious question this is all leading to is what’s the difference between the subject of gossip and a figment of the imagination? My answer would be: little if any. This blurring was a vision I inherited from the 80s San Francisco queer writing community, but mostly from Bruce Boone. He would talk to me quite eloquently and at length about his dreams of a writing that merges these genres. In a way, I’m still trying to enact Bruce’s dreams, which were totally liberating to me.

BP: I’ve heard a lot about Bruce Boone, usually in this way, referring to him as some sort of catalyst. Theoretically, your work seems really freed up. What else, to your mind, has liberated it?

DB: I came to the San Francisco queer writing scene after a long engagement with feminism. Soon after I got my undergrad degree in comparative literature in 1973 I looked back on my classes and realized that in those four years I’d read the writing of only four women—Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse as part of an independent study on stream of consciousness fiction, Gertrude Stein’s portrait of Picasso, one paragraph of Madame de Stahl, and some concrete poems by Mary Ellen Solt. I made it my project to read nothing but books by women and to read every book on feminism and literature I could get my hands on. I did that for years, and when I came to San Francisco, I took a course at SF State with Kathleen Fraser called “Feminist Poetics,” and she introduced me to French feminism and this vast array of women writing experimental poetry. Kathleen was always telling us to not be ashamed to write out of female experience and to invent forms that would best represent that experience. I was also involved in the Feminist Writers’ Guild in the late 70s, which also was important in encouraging me to write from a female perspective, to try to figure out what writing from a female perspective would mean for me. My trouble with early feminism was its tendency to be prim. I needed the gay guys to show me how to write about sex, to validate that this was an important, serious subject matter.

BP: What about biography in general? I’ve read a lot of it in the past year (Robert Mapplethorpe, Diane Arbus, Fairfield Porter, Robert Fraser, Andrew Loog Oldham) and the thing I’ve noticed about bios is that they’re often so airtight. They’re theoretical propositions really but they typically present the individual in a way that corroborates whatever information they’ve come up with or wish to include. They’re always at least somehow about their author, and disguise themselves as assertions. I think about my day, all the little sinkholes no one would ever know about because no one is around to observe them or because there’s no paper trail for these moments. What would get edited out of my story and how would the seams be sewed tight? Yet we really believe, I think, in biography as a definitive practice, which is to say I guess that we really believe that people are knowable. Kevin Killian, your husband, co-wrote a book about the poet Jack Spicer and continues his commitment to making the record on Spicer’s life less hazy, so much so that you’ve called yourself a Spicer widow in the past. Recently, he discovered a poem in Spicer’s papers that no one had never seen before, right? I love how he called it, in quotes, a “new” poem, a sort of knowing nod to what I’m talking about. That must have been an incredible moment, having a new world of insight open up like a portal into another dimension. Kevin’s fiction mixes memoir and invention, too, in fantastic ways. Do the two of you discuss any of this? Has his being so involved in Spicer’s and his own biography played into your practice as well? What kind of environment does that create? It seems like the merging of biography and fiction is built into your living situation.

DB: Both of us move in and out of one another’s work constantly, as characters, and in more subtle ways. Kevin’s interests will find themselves spilling into my work, and vice versa. Kevin’s play The Vegetable Kingdom, for instance, was poking fun at my vegetarianism. When he wrote an essay for the catalogue to the SF State Poetry Center’s video collection, he had me sit down with him and describe what each poet was wearing. Kevin loves to write about fashion, but he doesn’t know the terminology. My work has many a pop reference that I’d be ignorant of were it not for Kevin. And we actually did write one piece together in Pink Steam—it’s called “Reptilicus,” which was a long ponderous poem I wrote in the early 80s about female identity in crisis. Ten years later, Kevin hacked into it and added some distance and humor. And the piece works much better with his interventions. Do we discuss writing, biography, meaning? Of course we do, but in bits and fragments, mixed up with more daily matters like the cat peed on the bathroom floor again and we’re going to have to buy some more paper towels. We just celebrated our 18th wedding anniversary—that’s a lot of time for talking.

I’ve read most of the biographies and memoirs about Sylvia Plath, which are glaring examples of the kind of slanted biography you’re talking about—especially Janet Malcolm’s hatchet job—but that doesn’t mean I won’t gobble up the next one. Kevin’s work on the Spicer biography has, on a gut level, demonstrated for me how history is a fiction. Human memory is so bizarre and unreliable. I watch Kevin trying to decide what’s a “fact” in Spicer’s life. One person remembers Spicer liked peanut butter. Is that a fact? Hardly. Kevin has to go out and try to find other people who remember Spicer liking peanut butter and hopefully find something from the period written down to corroborate it. I remember a group of us sitting around a couple of years after Sam D’Allesandro died, trying to remember the timeline of our involvement with Sam, when he’d entered our scene, what events he’d been at, in what order. We only knew Sam for a few years, and we didn’t know him well. There wasn’t a whole hell of a lot to remember, but it was hopeless. Nobody could agree on anything. I can’t imagine an outsider stepping in and trying to sort through such a tangle. And that’s when the events were still fresh in our minds. Imagine talking to somebody 20 or 30 years later.

BP: It just occurred to me that gossip is storytelling. I never thought of it that way. It’s a form of biography. I think that’s why I love oral histories so much. They’re nothing but gossip, with little or no pretense of objectivity. The great thing about the Capote book, for instance, was how much bias existed in everyone who was interviewed. Everyone had a score to settle, and the anecdotes were often very vicious, but their details kept changing from person to person. Same with the Edie Sedgwick biography—all that enmity toward Warhol, everyone finally getting his or her say.

DB: I loved both of those books, there was so much energy in the telling, and the bias was so glaringly obvious it was delightful, and all the clashing opinions. It’s totally significant that Capote called In Cold Blood a nonfiction novel. In the Capote and the Sedgwick books the reader isn’t being duped into any sort of official version of a life. In oral histories, such as the Sedgewick book, we take in “facts” in little bits mixed in with all this static, and the facts are always questionable—the whole process of reading is much closer to the way we take in our lives. I love that there’s so much “information” on the internet and so much of it is totally unreliable. In my acknowledgements for Pink Steam I spelled Brion Gysin as “Bryon” Gysin, and it seemed that no matter how Greg and I spelled Brion Gysin we’d come up with a website that spelled his name that way. Greg had to find a photo of the cover of one of Gysin’s books before we could put that puppy to bed. In my “fiction” it’s not important to me what’s factual or not—as long as it excites me, I can stick it in my work, regardless. And usually I pervert it to such an extent that factuality is beside the point.

BP: Pink Steam reads like a book watching a science fiction movie. One side of the screen starts merging with the other like James Woods sticking his hand through the static in Videodrome, creating weird, trippy mutations in the text. The Letters of Mina Harker, your first novel, is like that too. Part possession, part evisceration, the narrative gets taken over by various horror and sci-fi signatures. What attracts you so much to these movies? Why sci-fi, and not, say, thrillers—or costume dramas?

DB: I love Videodrome, and I think there’s some reference to it in Mina. I thought after Mina I’d done horror, and I’d give it up, but that hasn’t happened. I’m still attracted to it. When I open myself to a horror movie (moving beyond “I’m too sophisticated for this, I can safely laugh at this”) and really let it wash over me, I feel like I’m connecting to very deep, primal levels of consciousness. I’m fascinated by the whole issue of inside versus outside, how the person is constantly invaded in horror, how the integrity of the separate self is called into question. When I read Buddhist texts, I’m amazed how this breakdown of inside and outside is dealt with as a positive, but in Western culture, all we have is horror.

BP: Dozens of horror movies keep running through my head now and I totally see what you mean. Rosemary’s Baby is a pretty obvious example. I read the book and saw the movie and one of the things I always thought about both was how steeped in conspiracy-thinking they are, which is about that other level, just behind the scrim. I’d overlooked the flip side of that, which is much more personal. The personal is just as unstable in that story. The same goes for the Stepford Wives, but what a letdown the remake was. So much has happened since the original, not just politically but socially. Did you see either version? What did you think of them? I was a little defiant watching each. I kept screening alternate scenarios in my head, taking things in the direction I thought they should go.

DB: The original Stepford Wives is one of my favorite movies. I wasn’t tempted to see the remake. The original Stepford Wives took itself seriously and was addressing pressing social issues. Feminism was still skirmishing on the battlefield. Given the way male/female relationships have changed since then, and even the way women are portrayed in the mass media—like we have female action figures now—I couldn’t imagine the movie working—but, more importantly, I couldn’t imagine the movie taking itself seriously. The previews seemed lifeless.

BP: Can you name four or five horror movies which embody what you’re talking about, and some of the scenes or details from them that stick out most for you?

DB: In The Fly, the human is infected with the animal. Same with The Wolf Man. In Carrie—how would we split that one? Thinking versus action? Immaterial/material? Thoughts, which are immaterial, leave the body and bludgeon people, lock doors, set things on fire. Thoughts are sort of like ghosts in Carrie. Zombies, like ghosts, blur the line between life and death, but with an added layer of contagion. The single mind becomes part of the group mind. One’s integrity as an individual dissolves. The inside/outside confusion is demonstrated most vividly in Cronenberg’s They Came From Within. I love movies where people’s guts burst out of their bodies. I can’t analyze why, it’s like being a kid and seeing a pile of mud, you just have to stick your hands in it. Everywhere in horror we find metaphors for disease, violation from within. Like vampirism. Those two little bite marks on your neck are just the beginning of your troubles. Slasher movies to me seem to be as much about penetration as death, don’t you think? As for memorable details, the pink steam rising from the laboratory of mad scientist Vincent Price, in the 3-D House of Wax, was so striking to me that, of course, I named a whole book after it.

BP: Sci Fi is an interesting jump from horror, because it often deals with that split sense of self too, and if there’s anything worse than a devil taking over your mind, it’s got to be a computer. At least with the devil we have years and years of biography to go on, and can understand ourselves through our understanding of someone else’s understanding. One of the great things about sci fi narrative is this break in logic. Once the computer or the machine develops a will of its own, there’s really no window into that mind—which links and scrolls and scans into infinity and communicates, underneath a veneer of user-friendly accessibility, in a highly specific series of codes—so that interpretation becomes even more treacherous. It also seems like possession in sci fi is often even scarier than in horror because in sci fi—say, in a movie like Alien—the monster is totally foreign and doesn’t just want to work in concert with the body but to use it as one in a series of stepping stones. Possession in Sci fi makes the body completely disposable in a way possession in horror tends not to. Rosemary is integral to the plot in a way, though they’ll get rid of her if she tries to thwart it. The machine in The Entity is perfectly willing to dispose of Julie Christie the second she gives birth, and being surrounded by androids is a lot scarier than having demon worshipping neighbors, who still have a heart, somewhere in there.

DB: Machine horror, as you describe it, sounds much more Kafkaesque. It’s about our fear of modernity, of The State. But are you sure about the name of the Julie Christie movie? The Entity is the movie where Barbara Hershey gets fucked by a demon. I just described the Christie movie to Kevin. “Demon Seed,” he said, instantly. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it, but I remember it having a profound impact on me.

BP: I saw Moulin Rouge for the first time while reading Pink Steam. Like that movie, you beg, borrow, and steal from other sources and influences in a way that’s intellectual and inventive and entertaining. You throw it all together. You’re one of the only writers I can think of who advances literature to the level of a deluxe DVD edition, where extras and interviews and deleted scenes and director commentary are all a part of the mix. You seem to get it, that a reader can process all these levels at once, that in fact this sort of writing is probably closer by now to realism than the traditional idea of classic narrative is. I don’t see a lot of precedent for your work—not in literature. I picture you in a laboratory mixing different things in steaming beakers, ducking in case things explode, and I wonder: given there’s no formula for what you do, what on earth made you believe you might be onto something? What’s given you the confidence to cut your own path this way?

DB: I love your deluxe DVD metaphor. Bringing all these pieces in from the media is a way of questioning the division between myself and culture. I don’t believe there is a self separate from the culture I’m immersed in. Since I was a young poet I was trying to approach topics from various angles. I remember a serial poem I wrote in my mid-twenties called “Split,” where each poem in the series approached the concept of “split” from various angles and meanings of the word. I also wrote a 30-page poem about different experiences with religion I’d had. I always thought for fiction, I’d have to do this linear thing, that I didn’t mind reading, but writing it felt like a straitjacket to me. When I was in Bob Gluck’s writing workshop in the early 80s, I was exposed to prose models where one could approach things from many different angles, and I was encouraged to do so. “The Debbies I Have Known,” now reprinted in Pink Steam, is the first story I ever wrote. It’s me sticking my toe in the water, learning my craft. There’s not a lot of interiority in that piece because I didn’t know yet how to work it in. As I wrote Mina I learned how to weave in the interiority, which was what I was most interested in.

BP: One of the ways you complicate that interiority is with these strange interjections, where the text breaks through itself, sort of like Mercedes McCambridge’s sudden outbursts from poor little Regan’s mouth. They also remind me of that moment in Lord of the Rings where Bilbo Baggins is overtaken by his lust for the ring and for a nanosecond his greed and inner frenzy have a face put on them. Had you seen this technique somewhere? I’ve never seen anyone do that the way you do. How else did you figure out to make things more interior? It’s such a strange form of interiority, too. Something weird and unsettling happens to writing which is confessional in nature while at the same time playing up the artifice of narrative. When the sense of self a writer creates is stable—or, lets say, reliable—the confessions become juxtapositions of one face with another. One is true; the others are masks. When all the faces figure equally, its more difficult to establish a barometer. Which is Mercedes McCambridge and which is Linda Blair? Somehow, that questions stumps an audience, yet the question of how much of Regan is Linda Blair is somehow a no-brainer.

DB: Very funny, Brian. But I don’t remember where I got the idea for “interjections where the text breaks through itself.” In Mina I’m dealing with two characters inhabiting the same body—Mina and Dodie, so I think the interjections arose from that. I was inspired by Kathy Acker and the experimental poetry being written around me, where voice and person were slipping all over the place. Nonlinearity in writing didn’t come easy to me, so I think this method of having a more linear voice that got broken up was a way to have my cake and eat it too? Mina functioned as a sort of id character, and it’s always pleasurable when that id voice breaks through. You see this sort of thing happening a lot in comedy voiceovers.

BP: In The Letters of Mina Harker, an adulterous couple discusses their relationship at a crowded party as “two virtual strangers,” making a conscious, ironic effort to pretend not to be so familiar, yet people in your work, even intimately acquainted characters, always seem more than a little estranged from each other. “Between us, a shrinking of time and an expansion of space,” as “Kong” puts it. People come to the table with such different takes on a shared reality that they seem to be starring in two completely different films. Trying to get a grip on one’s own script, let alone the other person’s, is a treacherous, slippery proposition. In literature, at least, the female heroines who are the most keenly aware of all these dichotomies are often portrayed as hysterical. You have a pretty amazing grasp on the subtle, contradictory levels of intercommunication and identity yourself, and you express that perspective in an assertive, disjunctive style. You say, in “You Edju,” that people were separated into ideological either/ors where you grew up—that you often fell on the wrong side of all those slashes. Does any of this have anything to do with your interest in the female monstrous? How would you characterize the female monstrous?

DB: Of course it does. That women are often associated with the monstrous is not an idea that I invented. There’s lots of books written on it. One of my favorites is The Monstrous Feminine by Barbara Creed. In my childhood I was ostracized, intensely ostracized, and identifying with the monstrous is something I do all too easily. It’s a place I feel comfortable in. There’s a romantic side to the monster, all that aloneness brings tragedy and lots of time to think. The monster—such as Carrie—often has more depth than the cheerleaders who are abusing her. There’s a fine line between monster and saint. I love the flaws in people, those little chinks of vulnerability that one can see into. I also love Freud’s hysterics, that direct link between psyche and body. Hysteria is interesting in a similar way that porn is interesting—when writing causes arousal, the links between mind/emotion/body are so blatant.

BP: Ginger Snaps got at those issues of the monstrous and ostracism so well, I thought. The werewolf movie has always been a male province, exploring the onslaught of adolescence from a guy’s point of view. But it takes over women too, it’s that weird shift of self we’ve been talking about, that sort of invasion. Am I this? Yesterday I was more that? How much of me is me and how much someone else—and who is this someone else I’m feeling like? I loved how Ginger Snaps rethought all those things from a woman’s point of view, because of course it’s much more complicated for a high school girl to become a werewolf. She goes, instantly, from virgin to whore in people’s minds, and the predatory thing, from a woman’s point of view, made much more sense. I mean, I’d want to get back at all those guys too. Becoming a werewolf was liberating for her but also a major dead end. You never get that from guy werewolves. It’s just sheer craziness, where they become what they already were, only more emphatically. Ginger Snaps also threw a sister in, creating a really symbiotic relationship between these two teenage girl outsiders. As the older sister became a werewolf, “inside” and “outside” kept shifting, and one sister was on one side, then the other, the perspectives kept changing in a way you never see in werewolf movies.

DB: I haven’t seen Ginger Snaps for a couple of years, so I’m hopeless at commenting on it. I’m really bad at remembering plots. My mind doesn’t work that way. It’s more like disembodied images stick with me. I could recite the plot of Carrie, but that’s because I’ve seen it like 50 times. But, I disagree with you a bit about the male werewolves. They often seem tormented by their condition—like the horribly suffering Lon Chaney Jr. in the 1940s Universal Wolf Man series—or Willow’s boyfriend on Buffy—I can’t remember his name. Oh, it’s “Oz,” of course, a very telling name.

BP: “Hallucinations” describes Yoko Ono as a “post-verbal Cassandra, shrieking our impending fragmentation.” I thought of you and your work when I read that. I was also reminded of you by a recent interview with Oliver Assayas, the director of Demonlover, a movie I really loved. “For a lot of people, cinema, and specifically independent cinema, is a world where they are protected from the complexity of today’s society.” That made me think of books. Even when they set up a series of challenges and are at their most ostensibly experimental, the experiment is typically constructed as a puzzle, coded somehow with a conceptual solution, which sort of tempers the complexity by reducing back toward simplification. Winks and nods and that sort of thing seem to prevail in a lot of experimental fiction. Like, Hey, just kidding, folks. A lot of what passes for experimentation now seems laughably innocuous to me. Do you relate to any of it? Why do you think people are so hostile to radical experimentation in literature, when they can accept all sorts of unreality and contradiction in their everyday experience?

DB: Brian, I don’t care for irony in fiction, and so much popular alternative writing is loaded with irony. It’s all about safety and taking the position of being superior to your subject matter. Lots of experimental writing is linked to intellectualism, which can be very alienating, very anti-body and anti-emotion. It seems to me this is the defining difference between straight experimental fiction and queer experimental fiction. The queers who do weird stuff with words very much engage the body and emotion, and they like to push their material into places that don’t feel safe. For my writing to work, I need to go into areas where I don’t feel safe. I always start with what I want to say and then try to figure out a form that can get at it, rather than begin with form.

As far as people in general’s fear of experimental writing, beyond an obvious concern that it’s going to be boring, I think it’s a fear of chaos. We use words to organize the world, and the world is a very scary place. I think people are afraid that if they enter into a space where words don’t behave themselves, that they’ll be plunged into chaos. And in a sense, they’re right. I’m all for mucking up cultural categories and pulling the ground out from under the reader.

 

Brian Pera is the author of Troublemaker (St. Martin's Press) and the editor of LowBlueFlame.com. He lives in Memphis, TN.

More information regarding Dodie Bellamy, Pink Steam, and Suspect Thoughts Press is available at www.suspectthoughtspress.com.

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