Black Wave

"I’m going to spoil it for you now. I’m sorry about that. It exists in two halves. In the first half, ‘Michelle’ is clearly closely related to Michelle Tea. The second half leaps forward in time and takes all of that textural detail that’s been built up about 1990s queer San Francisco society and throws it into a post-apocalyptic future, that’s quite possibly one we’re heading towards ourselves. “Autofiction doesn’t need to be at all about one’s own life and times” It’s got sci-fi elements, and it just feels like this is how exciting a work of autofiction can be. It doesn’t need to be at all about one’s own life and times. It can use that dense bedding of someone’s own personal reality to tell quite a different story from what has actually happened to them, or what they’ve actually experienced. It’s very Ackerish. Michelle Tea needed to have this character, so she stole all kinds of trappings from her own existence and then took it somewhere really unexpected. I’m trying to think, but I can’t think of anyone else who’s doing quite that with auto-fiction. It felt to me like another one of the multiple radical possibilities, rather than just the Knausgaard, ‘I’m going to tell you everything that actually did happen to me.’ It’s self-absorption, not necessarily in a negative way, but being completely absorbed in the true story of the self. All of them are really, aren’t they? They’re all connected. These are all people who know each other in various ways—perhaps not Isherwood because he’s a different generation—but otherwise it’s all people who are interconnected socially, but also by virtue of the kind of experiments they’re carrying out with writing. They’re all rooted in modernism, too, I think that’s the other thing. This list is really about the modernist novel versus the realist novel in various different ways. These don’t feel like post-modern experiments, so much as modernist experiments. Which is to say, they’re about consciousness. They’re about what it means to experience the world. It really feels that they’re trying to find a way to make language chart human consciousness and the experience of existing in a particular moment in time. As opposed to mimetic realism that’s trying to tell a story about a person, or a family, or a culture, and to recreate the streets and sheets and clothes and attitudes in a painstaking, accretive way. You feel like these books are trying to capture what it feels like to experience it from the inside. Yeah, absolutely. Certainly, Acker is somebody who lived an extremely raw, sort of self-decidedly raw existence. Also people who are forming community in different ways, trying to establish relationships in different ways. These are all writers, including Isherwood this time, who are setting themselves against a particular kind of society and a particular kind of culture and inventing alternatives. I mean, we could’ve talked about Virginia Woolf in this conversation. Orlando fits here, with its weird, fabular appropriation of Vita Sackville-West’s life. Is it bio-fiction, maybe? And Burroughs too. In a way, it’s a shame that we didn’t because I feel like he’s a missing link in the timeline we’ve drawn. Because he was Acker’s mentor and because he was also playing this same sort of game. He was using elements from his own life in books that were simultaneously fantastical, that were pastiched from many different sources. He used the cut-up technique in order to create a different kind of realism, which was much more… I keep talking about psychic realism, by which I mean what it feels like to inhabit the interior of a culture, rather than the exterior of it. The dreamlife of a culture, its unconscious, rather than the physical streets and shops and houses, which is where the realist novel does its work. Yeah. That has an erotic quality about it that’s very much the erotic of Myles’ work too. This sort of glorious overabundance that exists outside the capitalist exchange. I think that’s such a fantastic quote. I think it’s absolutely perfect for the kind of writing we’re talking about. Sexy waste, erotic excess, and also at the same time economical. Like I say in Crudo , this is art that helps itself to the grab-bag of the actual."