C.B. Murphy  .:. Writer

I^*: What’s the most interesting thing about your writing that you can think of?

C.B.: I’d have to say voice, or perspective, though voice is the more popular word. There is a lot of talk about voice in the writing community. I’ve heard it said that “voice�? is the reason literature will survive.

I: So tell me about your voice and how it’s different.

C.B.: I like to think of my voice as a curious voice, motivated by an interest in people, culture, history and philosophy, not necessarily in that order. Also, it’s a voice of someone who didn’t study writing in college and had lots of different jobs. (Laughs)

I: Hmm, sounds kind of highbrow.

C.B.: (Laughs). Not at all. If anything, it’s like those 19th century guys who tried to study everything and ended up with exotic cabinets of curiosities. I still believe one has to write for oneself oneself primarily. That means my writing has to be motivated by questions I want to explore in a personal way. Some famous writer said this (and I’m sorry I don’t know who it is, as it’s stock in many writing programs): “Find the doors (portals) in your life that you wished you had gone through or that you’re still curious about. Unfinished business and unresolved relationships. Now, send your character through those doors.�?

I: Why not just write a memoir?

C.B.: Like A Million Little Pieces? (Laughs) Obviously, there are lots of problems with memoirs. First, we don’t really want ourselves to look too bad, hence the glorification of victimization. Look what someone did it to me. The Child Called It. Secondly, we usually have to exaggerate how bad our story is, as if real life needs punch to make a good story. I feel sorry for James Frey. I mean, he played the game the way he was coached to play it but when he got caught, instead of exposing the “lie of the memoir industry,�? they chopped him up and fed him to the sharks. But of course, he’s made a lot of money. Which helps.

I: What do you mean “lie of memoir�??

C.B.: I just don’t think people are that trustworthy when they tell their own stories. They’re playing into this common belief today (which I think is a natural reaction of inundation by �?stories�? in the news) that there is something inherently more valuable in a true story or �?based on a true story.�? I also get caught up in it all the time. “It really happened!�? I’ll say. I think it’s because we want data from the real world that supports our proposition that life is pretty strange. Of course, we value truth over lies, but the problem is that truth as presented as a story is already a form of fiction. There’s no getting around that.

I: Tell me more about those doors you send your characters through. How is that different from what everyone’s doing?

C.B.: Well, I don’t know what motivates people to write fiction other than we all have a story to tell. Unfortunately, many think it’s an easy route to glamour and wealth. I look at it this way: I’m going to be spending one heck of a lot of time with this story and these people, so I want what they’re doing or experiencing to enlighten me in some way, especially about the choices I’ve made in my own life.

I: You mean like “how am I doing?�??

C.B.: Not so much how am I doing, but what other kind of life could I have lived given the “material�? I’ve been given. I like the idea that you’re really only given so many people, stories, and questions to ponder in your short life. You might as well work the material you’ve got. I also find many writers just making up characters they think would be interesting. So you get upper middle class college kids writing about people in trailer parks. They’ve never been in a trailer park, they just think a trailer park person (or these “trash people�? as Ali G would say) is more interesting, I suppose, because they might be more prone to do something interesting, like maybe kill someone, a real action, not just drink a latte and kvetch.

I: So, you don’t do that? Do you have �?real issues�? in your books?

C.B.: It’s unfashionable to say you’re exploring anything other than characters and stories in fiction. False purism, I’d say. I wish people would take on more issues, even though you have the downside of that, too.

I: What’s the downside of writers taking on issues?

C.B.: It can reveal the writer as either poorly educated or, more likely, unaware that they’re proselytizing their beliefs when they think they’re merely working the issues. Helping us get more enthusiastic about recycling or the elimination of hunting, as subtexts in a novel.

I: Who does this? Any names?

C.B.: People do it unconsciously but just to pick an example (and she’s well enough established not to care what I say) I’d put Barbara Kingsolver in this category. She probably doesn’t think she’s “flogging her set ideas�? (as opposed to exploring them) in her novels. Louise Erdrich reads like this too, often. They would say they are primarily storytellers, but many writers today think the writer’s job is to subtly put forth their “solutions to the world’s problems.�? Just look at their villains. Complex villains will tell you who is really seeking and who is flogging. Sometimes even T.C. Boyle does this, though not always. He did it in Friend of the Earth but not in Drop City.

I: Name some good writers who explore ideas well.

C.B.: I think of this type of writer as part scientist. They don’t know at the outset that they’ll be able to draw concrete conclusions from their “science.�? Currently, I’ve been reading a lot of Iris Murdoch. She seems to be somewhat controversial today, as if her “philosophical�? ramblings harm her fiction. I feel differently. When I encounter her writing, I am sitting up straight and interested; I sense this writer is really trying to understand human nature from an anthropological and historical perspective, impossible as that is. She writes from a place of not knowing which is opposite to her reputation as a know-it-all. Of course, sometimes she seems to be writing comedies of manners, but in The Sea, The Sea she’s really trying to discover something about life and I think she succeeds.
I do find that many British writers (Anita Brookner and A.S. Byatt come to mind) seem more comfortable with this “thinking�? approach to writing than Americans. I’d put J.M. Coetzee in this category, too. His book, Disgrace has this urgency that fiction can reveal truth, even if, in the end, it would be hard to summarize what that truth is. J.G. Ballard is philosophical, too, but in a slightly more unorthodox way.

I: So, I want to ask that question. Who are some of your favorite authors and influences? Is a favorite author different from an influence?

C.B.: My favorite author is usually the one I’m reading. But I’d like to say there are a number of writers that are not so popular today that I find amazing. James Purdy, Robert Stone and Walker Percy are a few that come to mind. Currently I’m reading Independence Day by Richard Ford. I also like Thom Jones and George Saunders, though I wish they’d write more novels and less short stories.

I: Hmm, aren’t these all males, and more or less from the same generation? How are they different from one another?

C.B.: They’re quite different. I’ll address the gender question in a moment. James Purdy is partly identified as a gay author now, so he has a following there. Robert Stone seems to have been somewhat discredited because he was trying so hard to be a popular novelist, the same put-down John Irving is always struggling with. And Walker Percy? Apparently people used to read him in college, but his existential Catholicism is rather strange, though granted he sort of spun out near the end. Every once in a while someone says The Moviegoer was a great book, and I think it’s representative of some of his best writing.

I: Do you ever read women authors?

C: Thanks for the unbiased question, but yes. I have my
“Canadian women�? batch I like, including Carol Shields (The Republic of Love), Margaret Atwood (Wilderness Tips), and of course Alice Munro (Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage). And I’ve already mentioned some of the Brit women I like: Iris Murdoch, A.S. Byatt and Anita Brookner. For Americans I like Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Conner and E. Annie Proulx.

I: Aren’t we a bit weak on the American women? Two of them are dead.

C: (Laughs) Um, Melissa Bank—I studied with her in Southampton, she’s very good. Funny.

I: So, you never studied English or writing in college?

C.B.: I did have an excellent freshman English class at the University of Michigan before the revolution stalled the campus for a better part of a year. I still remember reading Huysmans and Petronius. But no, at the time was influenced by some poets and artists on campus who were very into the Black Mountain artists: Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Stan Brakhage (film) and John Cage (music).

I: Wouldn’t that have been a reason to study English?

C.B.: I suppose, though I don’t even think you could study writing at that time. But these guys, my grad student mentors who I shall not name here, thought English departments were corrupt, and that one should study real subjects like anthropology and geography.

I: Corrupt—how? And why those subjects?

C.B.: The Black Mountain guys, I think Olson led the charge, said there were two kinds of poets, the “academics�? which meant bad and the “projective verse�? people who listened to breath and really believed that their poetry (and I include fiction in this) could uncover truths. Ezra Pound was cool with them, as they sort of forgave him for his fascist psycho period.

I: Are we talking Beats here? Kerouac and Ginsberg?

C.B.: I think Allen Ginsberg was a sort of honorary member of the club, but the story I got was that this group frowned on the overt hippie thing—taking drugs and beating up cops as we took classes on at U of M.

I: You took classes on beating up cops?

C.B.: Well, not at the official college but SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) was allowed to use our classrooms and they put on the seminars. The Black Mountain people saw themselves as revolutionaries, but not street fightin’ men and women.

I: More along the lines of Foucault? Revolutions in thought?

C.B.: Yes, the French idea that studying something in another way, say like deconstructionism as a form of (rather safe) radicalism was appealing, though they weren’t in agreement with him. They were text-readers and text-interpreters, but almost neo-occult in their attempts to re-legitimize magical practices such as the Doctrine of Signatures.

I: Magic? Whoa, I’m lost.

C.B.: Merely in the sense that the real truth is hidden and has to be discovered and that poetry (and all the arts) was the way to do this. They were also opposed to overt “magic�? in the Carlos Castenada sense, drug-taking and appropriating native culture. Though as I said, they were anthropologists, just not into drugs, per se.

I: So this mysterious “they�? influenced you to study geography?

C.B.: Yes, at the time geography was considered the hot field for infiltration. You know, break down the ideas of space and time, now that’s radical. I never quite understood how it was all supposed to work, but I did enjoy studying the radical offshoots of classical geography, such as perceptual geography (the geography you carry in you head) with Yi Fu Tuan and historical geography (geography as envisioned in ancient texts and maps) with Fred Lukermann.
But I fell out with the Black Mountaineers right about then, so I never got access to the whole plan.

I: How did you fall out?

C.B.: Well, I got into films, underground or experimental film we used to call it, the kinds of things Stan Brakhage (the guru) was putting out. There were oddball but acceptable offshoots of what he was doing, and Kenneth Anger (the Aleister Crowley disciple) was one, like the token “bad boy�?. I thought I could sort of hitch my wagon to the “Anger-thing�? and that way avoid what they were all doing which was studying real hard in graduate school and starting to teach in universities. I wasn’t all that excited about being an academic in the library, especially when the hippie revolution was (apparently) exploding all around me.

I: So you were a filmmaker, cut off from the Black Mountain people, what next?

C.B.: Well, I made a lot of feverish little 8mm and super8mm and some 16mm films, but I balked at the point of distribution. The independent movement a la Sundance was starting up at this time, too, only they were “narrative�? filmmakers as we used to say disparagingly. Well, they won, we lost.

I: We lost? Who is we?

C.B.: I think the idea, mostly Brakhage’s, was that there would be a ‘revolution of the eye’ because film was getting cheap enough to become a real art medium. I think they thought that there would be a movement of �?art films�? that were non-narrative, sort of like moving paintings, and that would interest people more than “just more stories.�? That idea went pretty much nowhere.

I: So they died out like the Neanderthals?

C.B.: No, they are actually getting a tad more respect now. But what I’ve heard is that all the MTV and commercial directors studied, and appropriated, all their techniques: fast cuts, disjointed imagery, absurdity, old fashioned film looks, scratches on film, etc. but used them to sell something, either cars, Ipods or bands.

I: Sounds like sour grapes.

C.B.: Well, two interesting items before we leave film. One is that the “museum film�? has been revitalized by Matthew Barney (The Cremaster Cycle) and it’s interesting that he ended up with Bjork. These two things are connected. Another interesting fact: Brakhage’s most influential students now make cartoons: the South Park guys were his students. So, he’s influenced culture, but probably not in the way he expected.

I: But on your resume (looks down at paper) there’s a huge gap between your filmmaking and your novel writing. What’s with that?

C.B.: Now that is an excellent question. I don’t think I have a very good grasp at all about what people think, nor does anyone else. Especially pollsters. A lot of my conclusions are based on anecdotal encounters—what else have we really got? I have learned to value rather than disparage the fact that I have not had the benefit of studying English or literature or creative writing in college, so things can still be fresh to me that everyone else has “read in college.�? (Laughs) In this sense I am an outsider and damn proud of it.

I: Aha! So you admit it, you’re undereducated!

C.B.: I would be the first to admit that, though I think of it like I think of many things: that the “na´ve�? approach is underrated. People want to be sophisticated, “experts,�? which I think they mostly do out of panic that someone will put them on the spot and ask them what they really think about something. So little is fresh today. I think it would be easy to blame “the omnipresent media�? for that, but I think it’s mostly human nature. Thinking is a task that requires calories of energy and to many people it’s not in the “fun�? category. We flatter ourselves that all this information floating around makes any of us smarter.

I: That sounds a bit snobby. I thought you didn’t like snobs.

C.B.: (Laughs.) Well, again I’ll take refuge in “outsider status.�? When I was in high school there was a guy no one reads anymore named Eric Hoffer. He proudly described himself as a longshoreman/philosopher and mainly survives today in “Great Quotations�? sites. But he sort of inspired me that you can look at something and study it as an “amateur�? and come to some very valid and different conclusions than experts. In other words, I value common sense highly, and that makes me somewhat of an oddball. Hoffer wouldn’t make it at all today. Except if there was a philosopher’s version of American Idol. Hmm, not a bad idea. “So You Think You Know Something?�? Never mind, bad idea.

I: Speaking of oddballs, I saw some of your paintings. Are you afraid if readers saw them they’d think you were insane?

C.B.: (laughs) Maybe. Writers and readers are often very poorly educated, visually. It depends on several things, to answer your question. One, does the person know anything about art at all? Two, if they do, how much? Three, how much do they know about music?

I: I don’t follow. Music?

C.B.: Well, what the art world and the music world (and I guess every world now) have in common is that they are divided into genres. I paint in a certain genre that many people don’t even know exists if they don’t know much about art. They might look at my paintings and say, “Whoa, painting your nightmares?�? I bring up music because if you play something like punk rock (or post Neo-Punk or something) people don’t generally think it’s “less valuable than�? classical or folk rock or whatever. In music, they’re more likely to just get it that there are different worlds, not necessary in a hierarchy. In the world of fiction, there is so much snobbery. “Literary�? writers (most writing conferences and camps as far as I can see) look down on the genres (thrillers, romance, science fiction, etc). But the genres sell better, they have that going for them.

I: So what genre are you writing in?

C.B.: (laughs) Got me. I admit to some people I call it “literary�? though I don’t like that term. I like ‘character-driven’ or ‘mainstream’, vague as they are. Literary implies you’re aiming for the smallest, smartest, least book-buying slice of the market. Not particularly smart, but very gratifying if you make it there, I suppose. I read an interview with John Updike recently where he said literary fiction is going the way of poetry: soon its only readers will be the same group that writes it—a small, select, overeducated (if you will) audience.

I: So why don’t you write a genre? Or something like “The Da Vinci Code�??

C.B.: (laughs). I wish. I was disappointed with “The Da Vinci Code,�? since you brought it up. The characters were very stock. I don’t understand why writers do that. Is that the kind of character they really want to read about? Apparently, but I find that hard to believe.

I: I understand you had a “problem�? with the Da Vinci Code. What was that?

C.B.: (laughs). Well, I was doing this series of weird paintings (by the way, my painting genre is called Lowbrow or Pop Surrealism or Neo-folk – I’ll let you know when they settle on a term)… and my images were all about the Templars, and the Holy Grail and all that. A friend, also a painter, came over and said, “Oh, that’s just like the Da Vinci Code.�? “The what?�? I asked. You see, I can be sort of �?out of it�? in some ways, mostly on purpose. In anthropology there is some term for it, something like simultaneous development, like two cultures figuring out how to make pottery without interacting. I think this happens in Hollywood, too, but I don’t think the void is so pure there. Anyway, my involvement with the Templars predated any knowledge of “The DaVinci Code�?. It came partly from a lifelong interest in occult iconography. I just happened to pick up on it about the same time Dan Brown was writing his book. Apparently.

I: But weren’t you writing the “End of Men�? at that time and wasn’t that all about Templars?

C.B.: Well, yes, I had originally planned to have my character in “End of Men�? obsessed by the Templars but in a really different way than The Da Vinci Code approach. I was really trying to do John Fowles “The Magus�? meets Matthew Barney.

I: More please.

C.B.: “The End of Men�? was originally about a bunch of friends making films about the Templars on a Mediterranean island. It was always more about their filmmaking and love affairs and intrigues than the Templars. I just thought they could use an avant garde “take�? on the Templars as a sort of film template so they could force each other to do things on camera, sort of cinema verite-like.

I: Quick description of Matthew Barney. He’s fairly obscure.

C.B.: Not really, not if you’re into art. I suppose you could be into film, the Sundance kind, and not know who Barney is, but he’s been featured all over the place: the Guggenheim and even here in ‘lil ‘ol Minneapolis, there were posters about Cremaster on Hennepin Avenue. You know, the Walker’s here. More New Yorky than New York at times, people scowling, dressed in black.

I: Let me explain, just for the record: Matthew Barney makes personal “art�? films with large budgets and high production values. They are quirky and dreamlike, with content bordering on the hyperpersonal. How’s that?

C.B.: Thanks. By hyperpersonal I assume you mean, like, um, the cremaster muscle–the muscle that raises and lowers the testicles? Yes, very personal material. Barney has a lot going for him. An ex-model, he’s a good-looking guy and manages to be nude or partially nude in most of his films at one point or another. That helps. Plus the cameos by the famous: Norman Mailer and Bo Derek. Cameos impress people. Don’t get me wrong, I like Barney. God knows we need someone to sidestep the Sundance nazis, but my interest in Barney as a writer was with people “like�? Barney… artists, filmmakers and how they interact with each other and love/hate each other.

I: You know so much about people like this? How?

C.B.: Well, I was in Southampton at the Writers Conference in 2005 and took a class with a rather famous novelist. She told me point blank that “she knew artists and they didn’t talk like the people in my book.�?

I: Why are you telling me this? This isn’t therapy.

C.B.: (laughs). No, I know. You’re free. But here I was, OLDER than her, she knew NOTHING about me and she assumed (I assume) that I was this quirky dude from the hinterlands who fantasized about what New York artists might talk like and, duh, got it all wrong.

I: How is that not true? You are a quirky old coot from the hinterlands.

C.B.: (laughs). Well, for one, I made what they used to call “experimental�? films or “underground�? films back in the 1970’s. I know quite a bit about them, and even met some of the more famous filmmakers of the era. For many years (including today) most of my friends have been artists or ex-artists (as the markets destroyed their careers). They are, or were, dancers, “performance artists�? (remember those?), poets, painters, crafts people, musicians, etc. Granted, I don’t currently live in New York…

I: Why are you getting so bent out of shape here?

C.B.: Sorry. It’s just assumptions people make. Isn’t that what snobbery is all about? Weren’t we talking about snobbery? I feel close to the creative process in visual art as well as writing and I found it offensive that someone assumed I was out of touch with it merely because I lived in Minnesota, was an old white guy: what does he know?

I: Jeez, lighten up, man.

C.B.: Ok. Ok. Breathe with me. (laughs)

I: Ok, funny. Since you brought up diversity…

C.B.: Oh, please, not diversity, anything but diversity…

I: Hmm, anything?

——

I: What do you write about? Tell me about your novels.

C.B.: I have two novels that are completed and not yet published. A segment was

I: Who do you write for?

I: Why aren’t you famous already?

I: Why should I spend time on this site or reading this interview?

I: Are you worried that too many people are writing and less and less people are reading?

I: Do you think videogames will replace reading?

I: How does your painting affect your writing and vice versa?

I: What do you think would help the world read more and why would that be a good thing?

I: What’s harming fiction most now?

I: What do you think of Minnesota writers (especially Garrison Keillor)?

I: Do you have any friends that are writers? Or maybe I should ask do you have any friends at all, seriously?

I: Which do you like better: “Poets and Writers�? magazine or “Publisher’s Weekly�??

I: What do you think of the cartoons in Publisher’s Weekly?

I: What’s the future or publishing? Reading fiction? And why? (please keep it brief)

^* “Interviewer�? self