February 28, 2003
Today is the day to listen to sleep in your clohes.
Hey? Did you know that this week marked the one-year anniversary of Zulkey.com? Nobody told me! Don't worry, though, there will be some sort of attempt at a celebration in the weeks to come.
Today's interviewee, the proprietor of Eyeshot, is many things to many people. He is a cool East-Coaster with pretty eyes. The first time he was preggers, he was living in Alaska. He's a tall fuzzy-sweatered Oberlin intellectual. He was impregnated the second time, in the steaming mud bath, by someone, a Swede we now suspect, who had apparently ejaculated in the mud shortly before he bathed (in the buff). He's a writer and editor. He later gave birth to a most "special" child: an upside-down semi-colon, who he never got around to naming. He's a sweetie. His fourth child came when an upside-down exclamation point had asserted itself in his knickers! He's a meanie. He's also very, very imaginative and sometimes silly. This introduction makes no sense, does it? Just read the damn interview.
The Lee Klein Interview
Where did the name "Eyeshot" come from?
In a recently televised interview, when Michael Jackson was asked about the
inspiration for "Billie Jean," he pointed skyward and respectfully
whispered "Above." My inspiration was no less divine: driving home
from work, midsummer1999, the name appeared all of a sudden, sprayed Jackson
Pollack-like across my windshield in revelatory bird
splatter: Eyeshot. The name made sense at the time: everything online is within
the sight of everyone with access to a computer; plus it has that semi-disturbing
"shot in the eye" connotation; plus, it was shortish, once considered
a plus for website names...Two years ago, a friend who was very drunk (and
tended to talk a lot of trash when sober) told me that the sound you make
when you say "eyeshot" means "what you want to do with your
life" in Indonesian.
What are your general qualifications for accepting pieces for Eyeshot?
What are some of the favorite pieces you've published?
Not sure whether the word "qualifications" in the question refers
to me or the pieces...I have no more qualifications than anyone else: Webdelsol
has not yet awarded me an official web-editor certification plaque. But I
think I sort of know what sucks gargantuan pellets of literary goat poop
and what’s worth the minimal trouble of formatting and posting, and by
extension, reading by Eyeshot’s meager visitorhood. That last line nicely
transitions to a few words about the qualifications of the pieces I accept:
I actually just tried writing a list of things I’d suppose I’m looking
for, but for each example, I realized I’m also looking for its opposite.
Like if I say I wanna see convoluted or impossible or satirically absurd plots
written in rich, creamy language spiked with generous chunks of humor, I’d
also like to see simple, sober, earnest stories about someone’s mother
sewing together the paws of her child’s stuffed animal or whatever. So
it seems like the general qualifications depend on the specific merits of
the submitted piece...I guess it’s all about what gives me pleasure as
a first reader. If a piece is explicitly "a humor thing," and I
laugh once or twice, I tend to post it. If I don’t laugh, and it’s
supposed to be funny, I reject it. If something is more serious and I like
it on a sentence-to-sentence and overall thematic level, I post it. If not,
I don’t. If something is incomprehensible and I still can read it all
the way through in one sitting without yawning or gagging or redirecting my
eyes to anything else in the room, I post it. It’s a semi-simple, semi-intuitive,
semi-scientific formula, as you can see...What are some of my favorites? Other
than this you mean? I think I’ll
skip the second part of the question to avoid dropping names.
The art you feature on Eyeshot runs the gamut from beautiful to confusing
to disturbing. How do you choose what goes up? Is it your artwork?
Wow, Claire! Thanks for calling those photographs "art"! I took
about 99% of them. I carry a digital camera and go on huge walks through NYC,
taking shots of whatever: close-ups of torn posters covered in graffiti and
scum, reflections in shop windows wherein I appear sort of like the dippy
fella in those Where’s
Waldo books, and (whenever possible) terrorist
attacks and the resultant vigils and outpouring of related
agrammatical merchandise I suppose I stick to surfaces because I’m
sort of too cautiously considerate (respectful and shy) to interrupt and ask
people (particularly much older, odder-looking folks) if I could photograph
their faces for my pissant website. I wind up deleting most of the pics I
take, then I crop and distort the dozen or so I can work with. I just barely
try to match a piece’s content with the pics, but never in a literal
way: if the story’s about a fish, I won’t accompany it with a picture
of carp for sale in Chinatown. Eels,
maybe. But not carp.
You're not only an editor; you're a writer. Are there any brass rings,
publications-wise, that you're hoping to see your name in?
Brass rings? I don’t submit too often to brass rings. I’d be happy
to have anything appear wherever, whenever. But responses are more like brass
knuckles; they tend to say "not here, not never." Thusly, I’ve
posted stuff on Eyeshot under about
40 pseudonyms. I’m pretty tight with the editor.
You have an interesting practice of publishing the rejection letters you
write to contributors. Has this made you unpopular or do people deal with
it?
It’s true: I sometimes take the time to write elaborate, occasionally
evil, always over-the-top
rejection letters. This is a reaction to submitting elsewhere and waiting
between three months and a lifetime to receive a freaking form rejection slip.
As an editor I try to provide the kind of service I’d like to receive
as an oft-rejected writer: I send as immediate a response as I can (usually
an hour to no more than three days after I receive a submission), letting
the submitter know more or less exactly why the piece was rejected, all of
it presented in such a way that at least one person (i.e., the rejection letter
writer) giggles to himself at least once. When I post the rejections on the
site, I try to withhold all reference to a particular writer or story...Does
this make me unpopular? Only one or two people ever complained, and when they
did, a minute later I deleted the offending excerpt, while thinking s/he who
complained is sort of humorless and lame and deserves much worse. People actually
e-mail positive comments about the rejections: they’re one of the things
on the site that seem to bring the sadistic side of Eyeshot’s visitorship
the most pleasure. But if the rejections have made me unpopular with the thin-skinned
teary twits
of America’s hinterland, that’s fine: if someone’s offended
by what I do, I’d prefer they submit somewhere nicer like Pindeldyboz.
It’s all free, after all. It’s all volunteer work. I follow whims,
and if someone’s ego gets trampled by a silly impulse, I take a second
to apologize, then forget about them forever
after.
Round two: Some people claim you're a name dropper. Is this true, or are
they just hating the player?
Rushdie would never say I’m a name dropper. DeLillo’ll vouch for
me...Actually, we both know you’re referring to a particular person’s
allegations. The story, from my perspective, and with all respect to the particular
person, goes like this: one evening, at a bar, this particular person was
out of his/her mind on Kokie’s finest confections. And s/he asked me
what I’d been doing that day. Rather excitedly (and soberly) I told this
particular person that -- by way of a potentially playah-hateable chain of
events -- I’d been simply standing on the sidewalk with these two guys
who reminded me of Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Tweedledee, in particular, I’d
admired for many years; Tweedledum wrote some controversial Oprah book that
came out just before 9-11. (Both Mr.
Dee and Mr. Dum had copies of their books torn
to shreds by Mr. Pollack at a recent event you attended.) So if this particular
person had asked what I did the night before, however, I would have responded,
"Um, watched Zoolander?" Instead, she asked what I’d done that
particular day. And I responded with totally uncool/earnest excitement (sin,
sin, sin). What’s funny is that, after I finished answering the question
about what I’d been doing that day, the particular person went on for
like fifteen minutes, gushing about Jake Gyllenhaal. As Goethe once said:
"It’s fine to talk about movie stars you’ve never met, but
once you say something like, ‘Yeah, I was kicking it after the New Yorker
thing with freaking Nikolai Gogol and Bruno Schulz,’ you’re immediately
guilty of name-dropping." As Plato once said: "That’s total
bullshit, yo!" And when it comes to other allegations potentially implied
by your question, I don’t think it’s wrong to talk about a good
friend when someone (who I know like 300 times less than the owner of the
dropped name) points out the friend’s appearance in a magazine then asks,
"What s/he’s up to?" I tend to hold dearly to the same belief
Teddy Roosevelt clasped firmly to his heart: namely, that all those guilty
of such name-dropper baiting should be splayed and flayed across hot racks
solely reserved to sear the hypocritical... If you really want to hear name-dropping,
contact The Other Lee
Klein. He’s the world’s foremost intoner of proper nouns. Otherwise,
I would like to send much love out to the particular person alluded to above.
Back to coddling. You're a good-looking editor and it's reported to have
been affirmed online. Honestly, on a scale of 1-10, 1 being not and 10 being
hot, how hot or not are you?
Someone once submitted this
photo of me (from 1998) to amihotornot.com.
She was sure it’d get a 9. She told me she understood the site’s
tastes. But, alas, she was wrong: it received a 9.9. The corresponding female
9.9’s were all nearly
naked strippers, by the way, straddling poles strippers tend to straddle
when they strip. Around that time the 9.9 photo went up, we also submitted
a more recent shot. It turned out that between 1998 and late 2000, I’d
plummeted 1.1 points...These days, following a similar annual arc of descent,
I’d say I’m in the low 7’s, although pride restrains me from
attempting to determine my current attractivity.
Alternately, are you deck or
fin?
Speaking as a resident of the Polish neighborhood right next to NYC’s
Hipster Ground Zero, I realize that using these words ("deck" and
"fin") immediately marks one as a wannabe hipster, and since I neither
am a hipster nor do I aspire to hipsterdom -- and yet I read and discussed
the whole Hipster Handbook thing at a hipster bar when it was on freewilliamsburg
back in 2000 as opposed to an article on NYT.com last month, etc -- I guess
all I can honestly say in response to your seemingly rather simple question
as to my deck-ness or fin-ness is this: "I’m opposed to the question
on the following grounds: I’m not gonna play into some punk’s gambit
to capitalize on the codification of an identity based on a superficial composite
of something that’s really sort of a cultural phenomenon." That’s
totally not a hipster comment, right? But then "I am not a hipster"
is the number one tenet of hipsterdom, especially if you drive a 1991 Volvo
and listen to Prince as much as anything from Constellation
or Drag City Records. But, Claire, as far
as I know, the only made-up words I use are "agreeance"
and "mulesinme," which means "I think there are mules in me,"
which means "I am not feeling very fertile."
You're an only child. Are there any ways in which you're a typical only
child? Who do you think only children get along best with? Other only children?
Youngest children? Oldest children?
Only children get along best with pretend friends.
What's the first album you ever bought, and what's the last album you've
bought?
The first album I bought was Pink Floyd’s "The Wall" when it
came out. I’d get in trouble for singing "We don’t need no
education" etc in first grade. But maybe my first purchase was actually
the soundtrack to the movie "Grease."
Or Queen’s "Jazz," the one with the poster of the naked
bicycle race. The last album I bought was Bonnie Prince Billy’s "Master
and Everyone."
You recently returned to New York City after a stint in Iowa City. Will
you miss anything about the Midwest?
I’ll miss having nothing to do in Iowa City...On the G train through
Brooklyn yesterday, I saw three 10-year-old Latino kids yell out "Hitler!"
to a Hasidic Jew getting off the train. A second later, a middle-aged white
guy stood in front of them and asked "Which one of you is man enough
to tell me who just yelled Hitler?" The kids didn’t say anything,
then one of them took the blame. The guy grabbed the kid by the throat, knocked
his head against the subway’s window, and said: "You don’t
yell freaking Hitler to a Jew!" Then he sat back down, continued reading
the New York Times. He wore glasses and high-tops. A woman in her mid-twenties
stood up and yelled: "You don’t touch another person like that!"
The guy responded: "You probably said it first." The woman responded:
"You just don’t touch someone like that." The guy responded:
"Words ain’t gonna teach those freaking kids anything". . .
Things can be pretty overtly interesting when you’re doing nothing at
all. In the Midwest, everything’s much more subtle: "What’s
that smell? Manure? The Quaker Oats plant blowing down from Cedar Rapids?
Maybe another crystal meth lab exploded?"
You're currently working on a novel. What's it about? How are you finding
the novel-writing process? Do you have a particular process?
There’s no real sense saying what the book’s about. Right now, it’s
about one thing. Let’s say, in honor of the upcoming baseball season,
it’s about a homosexual
home-plate umpire in love with a pretty Dominican catcher. By the time
I’m done with it, I’m sure it’ll be all about what goes through
the mind of a blind aerial skier as she glides toward the ramp in the hope
of winning a seeing-eye miniature horse...It’s
really my third attempt at writing a novel. The first is here.
The second I abandoned after 200 pages, then whittled to this
and that. Process-wise,
I prefer writing by hand. It’s as mobile a system as a laptop, somewhat
cheaper, and it keeps you from editing and editing and editing as you try
to write the story. Once something’s scrawled out, I type everything
up. Then rewrite it. Then print it. Then scratch 30% of it. Then delete everything
else. Then insert a picture of an ostrich.
Then trace it with words. Then rewrite the traced ostrich in such a way that
people move around and speak in such a way that doesn’t sound all that
stupid.
So tell us what it's like to be from New Jersey.
As you may know, New Jersey is located between two of the country’s largest
cities. And so it’s sort of like being an only child: mom and dad are
NYC and Philly. But only children don’t have official birds, and New
Jersey’s bird is the yellow flicker. Or maybe the gold finch. There’s
a joke about the state bird being the mosquito: it’s about as funny as
the "You from Jersey? What exit?" joke. Beautiful beaches, plenty
of forests, amazing highways: what more could you want from one of the most
densely populated states in the U.S. (the strip between Philadelphia and NYC,
up Route One, diagonally through the middle of the state, is supposedly the
most densely populated extended stretch of land in the world). Just recently,
driving back from Iowa on I-80, I could tell when we were back in NJ -- not
because I smelled the stench of some terrible-smelling smelly thing or because
the car was blown off the road by the flapping of radioactive woolly-mammoth
moths or because I saw a huge roadside sign welcoming us to New Jersey --
but because, simply, there are three lanes instead of two, the lanes are a
little wider, and it’s a law for the lanes to be marked by those little
reflector things -- not just the strip separating two-way traffic, mind you,
but each lane of a three-lane highway. Amazing highways in New Jersey! The
state’s often shat upon for its industrial wastelands, but those areas
have their "unreal city" sort of beauty, and they’re really
only a small percentage of the Garden State’s total acreage. But, Claire,
did you know that New Jersey has a solid literary history, too? That’s
right: Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Phillip Roth,
Edmund Wilson, W.S. Merwin, Stephen Crane, Paul Auster, Mark Leyner, Sam Lipsyte,
Jonathan Ames, Peter Benchley (author
of "Jaws") plus a few hundred more who lived and wrote there for
a while (Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Kenzaburo
Oe, Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Ford, Thorton Wilder, James Merrill), not to
mention it’s the land of Bruce Springsteen, Bon Jovi, Blues Traveler,
Bruce Willis, Whitney Houston, The Feelies, and The Fugees. And Einstein and
Edison and the guy who figured out Fermat’s Theorem and the freak they
based "A Beautiful Mind" on. But your question was about what it’s
like to be from this land, right? My experience was almost exactly like a
cross between "The Sopranos" and "Happiness."
You have a website and spend a pretty good deal of time online, yet you
sort of seem to have a love-hate relationship with e-communication. When do
you think the Internet is useful for disseminating information and communication,
and when do you think it sucks?
At best, it’s like an improvised, interactive novel, wherein characters
emanate from the transmission and trail of their words. At best, people keep
people company, fend off loneliness. At worst, it all reeks of the loneliness
people are fending off. And I think certain people tend to direct too much
of their life into it and become emanations, reduced to words interacting
with other words. I could write more on this, but won’t.
Who was the last author who inspired you, or who you imitated or ripped
off from?
Are you implying I’m a ripper-offer? Huh? Very well then. W.G. Sebald’s
"The Emigrants" is not something one can easily imitate...
You are one of the few lucky ones who have guest-starred
in an Irritable Colon video. Were the directors zealots or were they coddling,
providing a wonderful snack table and a director's chair with your name on
it?
Indeed, I was privileged to a behind-the-scenes glance at the Irritable Colonists’
creative process. I’ve always thought those two guys were Phoenix’s
long overdo (and significantly more masculine) answer to Milwaukee’s
Laverne & Shirley. Now I think they’re well on their way to proclaiming
themselves Iowa City’s Affleck & Damon for the Midwest’s disaffected
laymen. One colonist
even provided pepperoni pizza in exchange for helping him unload a moving
van of his junk. Otherwise, among other things unmentionable, the video of
which you speak shows me breaking an egg into a bowl of potato chips. (Editor's
Note: If you cannot use the above link in Quicktime, try
the Realplayer version.)
What made you decide to begin the Eyeshot
Literary Escort Service? Did it inspire any love matches?
Have you ever read Woody Allen’s story "The Whores of Mensa"?
Well, the Escort Service was sort of inspired by that, but instead of just
talking about "The Wasteland" or whatever, interactions with escorts
would also involve inflatable voyeurs, blood ceremonies, mako sharks, and,
of course, wild humping. As far as love matches, didn’t you use the service
to secure our premiere offering?
Here is a question that you posed to your Escorts, and now I'd like to
hear your response: "Have you ever entertained sexual fantasies about
a literary character? If so, please describe your date."
It’s hard for me to answer this one: I tend to prefer realities with
literary authors to fantasies with mere characters.
How does it feel to be the 45th person interviewed for Zulkey.com?
It’s clear you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel...