[6]
I've read that you used to play saxophone in a band called The Ventilators?
Any recordings?
[7]
You're a music lover. Who are some of your favorites?
[8]
Your readings are legendary. Books on tape are the next best thing.
What have you recorded?
[9]
"Water Music" is my favorite book. How long did it take you to research
it?
[10]
In "Charlie Ossining Goes Downtown", about the making of the film version
of "The Road to Wellville", you say one of the reasons you liked
Alan Parker is because he directed three of your favorite films.
What are they?
[11]
Have any of your other works been made into films?
[12]
You've mentioned an upcoming television series based on your short stories
is in the works. Tell us more.
[13]
I noticed my hardcover edition is "Tortilla Curtain" is printed on acid
free paper. You don't come across that very often.
[17]
If you come to my local bookstore on your next tour, will you sign my book?
[18]
When you write, do you use a computer or do you do it longhand? Would like
to hear yourcomments about switching from the manual typewriter to the
computer, how (you) think it has affected (your) writing style.
[19]
What's this "Absolut Boyle" I've heard about?
[22]What
would you say to young writers starting out?
[23]
Comedy figures largely in all your fiction. Why is that? What do you think
makes a writer "funny?"
[24]
"Greasy Lake"--is it a real place and when does the story take place?
Did you base it on the Bruce Springsteen song? At the end of the
story, what makes the narrator say he wants to cry?
We had to read
your book "East is East", and now we have several questions we would like
you to answer. Here we go...
1. What was your
inspiration to the story? 2. Do you identify with any of the characters?
3. Why did you pick a Japanese alien, and not an Indonesian? 4. What
is the "Yokohama Kick"? 5. What is your intention with the book (Ruth
--> fame) 6. Why can't a Japanese woman (our teacher's friend) understand
some of Hiro's words, like "oyako-shinju"? 7. Have you ever had sex
with a Japanese?
Posted by grade
13 of the German International School Jakarta on January 31, 2000 at 20:17:58
[26]
As for those clothes: Do you ever see yourself changing your look? losing
the goatee? I guess I want to know because as a young guy I was drawn to
read you because you looked cool. As an aging Deadhead (is 32 aging?) I
wonder if I'll see you later in life and say: "wow, I remember when he
used to have planets on his shirt!"
1. How
do you pronounce Coraghessan and what is its origin?
Can you give me a simple phonetic way to pronounce "Coraghessan?" I heard
someone say, "core uh GUESS ann" the other day, but that seems too ugly-sounding
to be the true Irish pronunciation.
It's Cor-AG-hessan, accent on second
syllable. As you may know, this is an old Gaelic term meaning "Take two
and call me in the morning."
My mother's maiden name is Post,
but her mother was a McDonald. Somewhere on the Irish side of her family
originates the name Coraghessan, which may be bastardized (as indeed I
myself am). My father, incidentally, was a Boyle, but his father, Dublin
born, may have changed his name to Boyle from God only knows what.
I suppose I'll eventually dispense
with it and just be "T.C."[as he is in the English editions of his books].
In England my publisher thought "Coraghessan" was so aggressively Irish
that their constituency would be put off. My friends call me
"Tom". (4/20/88)
2.
What is your idea of fame?
My idea of fame is to get the books
out to the public so they read them. I want to be read; even if I
didn't make any money from the books, I would want to be read. If
I had a choice of having a million people read my books or making a million
dollars, I would take the first without qualification. It took me
years to write these books. They're my life blood and soul.
3. Where
did you receive your education?
I ended up being a history and English
major (SUNY Potsdam). When I wandered into a creative writing class
as a junior, I realized that writing was what I could do.
[After graduation] the next four
years [were spent as] a teacher at [my] alma mater, Lakeland High School
in Shrub Oak, N.Y. "Much has been made of this period of his life in previous
interviews - 'The bad kid who turned his life around, that theme,' he says,
dismissing it as irrelevant. Still, the cynical look at American culture
that his work frequently provides draws heavily on his formerly alienated
perspective. It is hard not to find his offhand recollections chilling
and remarkable. As a teacher, he says, some of his students were tough
kids, semiliterate, violent. 'I was 21, and most of them had repeated years,
so they were maybe 19. It was hard. But it was either that or get drafted.'
"While he was teaching, he was also
writing, and a story published in The North American Review ("The OD and
Hepatitis Railroad or Bust") won him acceptance at the University of Iowa
Writer's Workshop in 1972. With that impetus, he says, whatever middle-class
values had been instilled in him at home asserted their control. Diligent,
stubborn and hugely ambitious, Boyle earned his Ph.D. [from the University
of Iowa] in 1977. His dissertation, a collection of short stories, became
his first book, ''Descent of Man,'' which was published in 1979."
--excerpted from "Novel Appeal"
by Bruce Weber, Men's Fashions of the Times Magazine, The New York Times,
March 19, 1989.
4. Could
you talk about your origins as a writer?
I recommend you read my essay, This
Monkey, My Back, published in the book, The Eleventh Draft, ed. Frank
Conroy, NY, Harper Collins, 1999.
5. Who
are your favorite authors?
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Flannery O'Connor,
Waugh, Coover, Cheever, Carver, Martin Amis, Kingsley Amis, Lorrie Moore,
Doctorow, Pynchon, Denis Johnson, Borges, Ionesco, Ishiguro, DeLillo, Gilchrist,
Richard Ford, Julio Cortazar and Mary Robison.
6. I've
read that you used to play saxophone in a band called The Ventilators?
Any recordings?
Can't help responding. Don't know what
Ventilators you've come across, but my Ventilators never recorded.
You can hear a rather crude rehearsal tape of me singing I
Put a Spell on You if you go to my website's Multimedia page however.
7. You're
a music lover. Who are some of your favorites?
I always listen to music while working,
and that working music is either classical or jazz. When I'm not working
I listen to rock and roll, which has been the most informative music of
my life. Classical: my heroes are Puccini, J.S. Bach, Borodin, Wagner,
Shostakovich, Copland, et al. (there are so many). I'm not a great lover
of symphonic music--I prefer chamber music, moody cello concerti, etc.
As for jazz, it's primarily Coltrane, the first great artist I was able
to recognize as consciousness began to arise in my feeble brain. As for
rock: I love current bands, as well as the Blues and rock of the sixties,
seventies, eighties, nineties and oughts. Many are referenced in my various
stories and novels [Lou Reed, Springsteen, Robert Johnson., etc].
8. Your
readings are legendary. Books on tape are the next best thing.
What have you recorded?
I take a lot of pride in my readings...I
want to give [the audience] a really good show...You cast a spell over
them. It's a tremendous power.
I've recorded only a few of the
books--the only tape I'm really satisfied with is "If the River Was Whiskey,"
which represents the stories as written, every word of them (we eliminated
some of the stories in order to fit the two-tape format). You can hear
me read Modern Love from
that out-of-print set by going to my website. With the novels, I
was presented with a script to read, and of necessity the script eliminated
much of the beauty of the language. Also did a much-abridged version of
Tortilla. All the nineties books are available unabridged from Books
on Tape and Recorded Books,
and some are well-done, some aren't.
It's difficult to describe to the
non-novelist just how thrilling it is to see or hear your work interpreted
by someone else...And there have been many, many live performances of my
stories and audiotapes [by others], too, and each gives me--the disaffected,
misanthropic non-player--a rush of pure joy and connection: somebody else
is singing my song. I'm happy.
9. "Water
Music" is my favorite book. How long did it take you to research
it?
I made extensive use of Mungo's book,
"Travels in West Africa." It generally takes me three to six months
to do research for a novel. The writing itself of WM took three years.
10. In
"Charlie Ossining Goes Downtown", about the making of the film version
of "The Road to Wellville", you say one of the
reasons you liked Alan Parker is because he directed three of your favorite
films. What are they?
Angel Heart, The Commitments, and Midnight
Express.
11. Have
any of your other works been made into films?
There have been two short films of
my stories--Greg
Beeman's "The Big Garage" [winner of the Focus Award in a nationwide
student film contest sponsored by Nissan] ; and Damian Harris's short (30
minute) film of "Greasy Lake" [which] played at the AFI Festival in L.A.
and starred James Spader and Eric Stoltz--and both dug into those stories
and revealed something new about them.
"Water Music" has been under continual
option since its publication. I hope too to see it filmed. Problem is,
it's going to cost a lot of money.
Not a peep on Peter Cattaneo's progress
on the film version of "Budding Prospects," but he has bought out the option
and I have hopes of seeing a very funny and telling film from him--if not
in 2000, then next year.
Also, in addition to recent films
sales for "The Tortilla Curtain" and "Riven Rock," an option has been taken
on the story that appeared recently in Esquire ("Peep Hall") for development
as a feature (details on all three to come). (11/1/00)
I'm very happy. Of course,
talk to me after the first butchering of my work up there for all to see.
12. You've
mentioned an upcoming television series based on your short stories is
in the works. Tell us more.
Fox has bought my TV show for next
fall. This will be a one-hour weekly series consisting of films of
my stories (two per episode). I will host the show. At this
stage, the writer and director are putting together the pilot episode;
if it's successful, the show will fly. I hope not to become too involved
because my role in life is to write fiction, but I am consulting with everyone
involved, and having a good time pairing the stories for each episode--and
it will be a real treat to film my little commentary each week. We
will have four permanent cast members who will appear in different guises
in each show, as well as cameos by well-known actors, who will likely star
in a given episode and then disappear (get crushed by a raging elephant?
Murdered by survivalists? Put through the meat-grinder of sex?)
We shall see. (9/12/99)
The Fox TV series proceeds apace,
with submission of the script and hope for a nod to move forward with the
pilot, to film in March, if all goes well. The pilot consists of
two stories, "Carnal Knowledge" and "On For the Long Haul." Brillstein-Grey
(now Basic Entertainment) is putting this together, and, as I have said
elsewhere here, I am to host the show, as well as co-produce. (1/13/00)
Bad news: Fox has chosen not to
go forward with my TV anthology series, opting instead for a horror anthology.
That's show biz for you. My show may go elsewhere or become a mid-season
replacement, but it will definitely not be on the air for this fall.
It may be for the best (I am, after all, a literary being and have refused
all Hollywood offers to participate over the years), but I was hoping to
produce an unusual and scintillating show based on the short stories.
(3/5/00)
13. I
noticed my hardcover edition is "Tortilla Curtain" is printed on acid free
paper. You don't come across that very often.
Viking very cool about acid-free paper.
We want our books to last.
14. Does
"Riven Rock" still exist?
If you search the Internet for articles
and reviews about Riven Rock in the period of 1/98-4/98, you will perhaps
come across many articles about me and the book. There was a huge piece
in Chicago's alternative paper, I recall, that gave quite a bit of history.
Anyway, in answer to your question:
Riven Rock is still there, but the two main houses are gone. In 1948, in
order to pay inheritence taxes, Katherine had to sell the estate, which
is now a small enclave of semi-fancy houses behind Riven Rock's stone walls
and gates. The stone garage still stands, as does the theater house, where
I gave the initial reading from the book to kick off my national tour in
Feb. of 1998. The original riven rock is no longer there (the oak died),
but, amazingly, there is another one outside the gates on Riven Rock Road,
split by a fat eucalyptus tree. Innumerable journalists have posed me there.
What fun!
15. When
will your next novel be published and what is it called?
"A Friend of the Earth" was completed
at the end of May, and my longtime publisher, Viking Penguin, will publish
the book in August of next year, a year with a lot of zeroes in it.
A Friend of the Earth is a very grim comedy dealing with the environmental
movement in the 80's and 90's, and ecotage in particular. It is set
in the year 2025, in Santa Ynez, California, on the estate of a faded rock
star who has his own private menagerie of the creatures no one else would
want--warthogs, hyenas, Patagonian foxes and the like. The hero is
Tyrone Tierwater, former radical environmentalist, who, at the very young
age of seventy-five, manages the menagerie. And the rest of the earth's
creatures? Largely extinct. On the book tour for this one,
I plan to pass out boxes of Kleenex before we get into the Q&A.
But wait: though the world has turned to shit (global warming, etc.), we
have a happy ending. Sort of. (8/4/99)
I've been away for the past week
or so, checking out some of the locations in my just-completed novel, "A
Friend of the Earth." Some of the action takes place in and around
the Siskiyou National Forest in Southern Oregon, and, though I've been
there before (many years ago), I just wanted to take a look. As a
result, I've made some minor changes for accuracy and invented a town that
doesn't exist. (The beauty of writing fiction instead of faction.)
(8/22/99)
Proofs are finished on the new novel,
"A Friend of the Earth," and we are looking forward to bound galleys sometime
this spring. No pub date yet, but it will be an early fall book from
Viking Penguin. Outside magazine will run an excerpt from [it] sometime
[this] year. (1/13/00)
"A Friend of the Earth," the new
novel scheduled for September first in the U.S., is now being translated
by Robert Pépin, and should appear in France next year. (2/6/00)
16. What
are you working on now?
I am now working on the stories to
complete the next collection, which will include many of the thirteen new
stories I held back from "T.C. Boyle Stories," plus the even newer ones
I've just completed and those numinous ones yet to be. The collection
will be called "After the Plague," and Viking Penguin will very likely
bring it out in August of 2001. The title story of the new collection
will appear in Playboy later this year, as will another new piece, "The
Black-and-White Sisters." The former piece has a lot of fun with
apocalyptic notions (it takes place during and after a mysterious illness
wipes out 99.9% of us; the latter is a very twisted love story about two
sisters, one of whom wears black exclusively, and the other of whom wears
white. They live in a black-and-white environment as well).
Other stories from the collection, which some of you will know, are the
ones that have appeared in The New Yorker recently--"Achates McNeil"; "She
Wasn't Soft"; "Killing Babies"; "The Underground Gardens"; and possibly
a revised version of "Mexico," which appeared in different form in T.C.
Boyle Stories. (8/4/99)
I continue to work on new short
stories at present, fleshing out the collection that will be titled "After
the Plague." I hope to wrap that up and deliver it sometime this
winter, for publication in the fall of 2001. (10/9/99)
I leave tomorrow night for Paris,
to do press interviews in support of Grasset's publication of "25 Histoires
D'Amour." This is a collection unique to France, in that it incorporates
many of the stories from the "Love" section of T.C. Boyle Stories, as well
as new pieces from the collection, "After the Plague," that will not appear
in the U.S. till fall of next year. For example, the opening stories--"Termination
Dust" and "She Wasn't Soft," have appeared here only in magazines.
Grasset will bring out the succeeding two volumes--"Histoires de Mort"
and "Histoires Bizarres," over the course of the next four years.
(2/6/00)
When the next collection ("After
the Plague") comes out next year, I'll be sure to indicate where the stories
originally appeared, because such info. is interesting to know. (4/5/00)
17. If
you come to my local bookstore on your next tour, will you sign my book?
I'd like to hear what others think
about signed editions. I guess you do get a piece of the author, as with
the religious relics of old, but from me you're likely to get just a bit
of sloughed-off skin and a pathetic scrawl.
I'm not a collector myself, but
I'm sure you've seen the collectors lining up at my appearances with big
shopping bags full of books. I don't mind. Some authors refuse to sign
any books because they don't think they should add to the value of a given
book, which could ultimately be traded like stamps or baseball cards. But
I don't want to be a policeman. If you come to see me, I'll sign your book,
no questions asked, and I'll stand there for two hours if necessary (and
sometimes it is necessary), until everyone has been accommodated.
(I'll sign all commercial editions, but decline only to sign advance readers'
copies because those are given away free and then become objects of greed
for certain sellers and collectors.)
I do have some signed first editions
myself, usually from friends. The late and great Ray Carver signed "Cathedral"
for me in the most personal and truly touching way. That book, which is
sheer greatness to begin with, means even more to me in that signed edition.
Yes, that was Ray, right there, and I vividly remember the circumstances
under which he signed my copy. There's a real charge in that.
So ultimately the experience of
the signing--the recollection of the moment, of the reading that preceded
it, of the era in one's own life during which the reading/signing took
place-- make it a very satisfactory thing all the way around. And plus,
you do have a flake of the writer too, this physical sputtering weak little
line
of a signature limping across the page.
18. When
you write, do you use a computer or do you do it longhand? Would like to
hear your comments about switching from the manual typewriter to the computer,
how (you) think it has affected (your) writing style.
Time moves on. I graduated from the
earlier technique (last story so composed was "After the Plague"). All
stories since, and "A Friend of the Earth," composed directly on computer.
I don't really see much difference in this way of working, except, of course,
that one can edit more quickly and put out the final product more expeditiously.
(5/12/00)
I've worked all these years on a(n
Olivetti) portable typewriter my mother gave me when I went away to college
at the age of 17. I still compose on the typewriter, but my two teenage
sons, 12 and 16, have recently integrated me into doing a final draft on
the word processor. I enter my typewritten draft into the word processor,
which then allows me easily to expand things, and change things a little
bit here and there. (Interview in The Writer, October 1999)
As for your question about switching
to the computer: duck to water. I've always composed on a keyboard, and,
being a fanatic for perfection, I love working on the computer. "A Friend
of the Earth" is my first novel composed on this medium, and I don't foresee
going back to a typewriter. (8/22/99)
One of you has asked about "Absolut
Boyle," which I have yet to see, but apparently has begun appearing in
magazines. I have a written a little story for the venerable vodka
company (sake is my drink, as you will see in "A Friend of the Earth,"
though I have been known to quaff vodka occasionally, as well as tequila,
the very fine John Powers Irish whiskey, and all sorts of other things).
[The ad] ran everywhere all the
time. But I never saw it. Don't bother much with ads--I think my brain
(what's left of it) has trained my eyes to ignore them. But deep down in
the postings, there's a mention of it--so somebody saw it when it first
came out. I do believe that it's still running. (2/1/00)
[ABSOLUT BOYLE is an ad in the ABSOLUT
LITERARY SERIES. The text by T.C. Boyle tells the tale of a man who ventures
out of a cabin for a walk in the woods, only to become caught in a snowstorm;
he has thoughts of a certain death, while trudging through knee-deep snowdrifts.
He has a rejuvenant encounter with a familiar bottle of Absolut Vodka.
The tale is printed in two columns over a faint vision of the author in
the snow; pine boughs border the page. A small, black, letter-high figure
of an Absolut bottle ends the story; no other Absolut image was found.
(Absolut Boyle, 10/11/99 Newsweek, p. 54)]
20. Why
do you write about food so often?
I've tried to figure it out.
My mother didn't feed me, so what can I say? That's why I'm 30 pounds
underweight.
No, I think I have a guilt of being
a fat cat in America while half the world is starving to death and the
waste we have is very depressing and shocking to me and I feel guilty.
Even though I always clean my plate.
I've never met a food I don't like
and have eaten about everything. Refused the horse and whalemeat in Japan
on general principles. Dumbest thing I ever ate (not the creature: me;
that is, I was stupid for having eaten it) was a raw snail scraped off
the rocks in Mexico. Sick for life, oh my brother. (Not really.) As for
zebra mussels--at least they purify the water. Lake Michigan in downtown
Chicago is positively pellucid.
21. When
do you write?
Seven days a week, I get up in the
morning, do my work, and when I look up it's 1 or 2 in the afternoon.
Then I have a sandwich and go out and get some physical exercise.
22. What
would you say to young writers starting out?
The advice, which I've given out half
a million times, is this: read. Find a writer who knocks you out and read
and obsessively re-read his/her work. Writing is the expression of an assimilation
of words, phrases, ideas, textures, structures. Read and absorb. And then
see what comes out of the old fingertips. Read constantly. And read
what's happening right now. A lot of young writers have tremendous
talent, and they could probably tell you every night the lineup of the
TV shows, the new CDs coming out. But they don't know much about
current writers. They know plenty about what came before, because
they're studying that in class. I think they come to this art of
writing with a kind of naivete. But writing is a synthesis--something
you do over a period of time, a period of history. So you have to
read, and read voluminously.
23. Comedy
figures largely in all your fiction. Why is that? What do you think makes
a writer "funny?"
Comedy is my mode of dealing with tragedy
and despair. What do we call it -- gallows humor? Black humor? Sardonic,
bleak, stripped-to-the-bone humor? I do feel that the tragic and poignant
can be made even more powerful, more affecting, if the writer takes the
reader by surprise, that is, puts him or her into a comic universe and
then introduces the grimmest sort of reality. Flannery O'Connor taught
me this, in stories like "Good Country People" and "A Good Man is Hard
to Find," and especially in a novel like Wise Blood.
What makes a writer funny is hard
to define in the abstract -- we know it when we see it, and roar, shake
and slobber in response. And we know when an unfunny writer -- an unfunny
person -- attempts to be funny and falls flat. I don't know. I guess comedy
is inbred, part of a writer's gifts, an individual way of seeing the world
and revealing it in such a way that others see it too. But listen to me.
I'll try again: comedy is organic to the work, just as the characters,
plot, and metaphors are -- you can't force it or it falls flat. Yes?
24. "Greasy
Lake"--Did you base it on the Bruce Springsteen song? Is it a real place
and when does the story take place? At the end of the
story, what makes the narrator say he wants to cry?
The story itself was inspired by Bruce
Springsteen's song ''Spirit in the Night'' and employs an epigraph from
that song ("It was about a mile down on the dark side of Route 88"), but
it is not about its characters. As anyone who has read the story
will know, the characters and situations are wholly invented. I see ''Greasy
Lake'' as a kind of riff on the song, a free take on its glorious spirit.
I tried to keep the "punks" universal,
rather than pin them down to a timeframe. Actually, the story was written
in 1981, during the punk era, and the styles, of course, were simply recycled
(with the addition of straightpins, etc.) from an earlier period. The beauty
of "Greasy Lake" is that we have all been there, no matter the era, and
you can take the "greasy" reference for what you will.
It seems to me that the narrator
wants to cry because something has been revealed to him about the nature
of life, its dark accidents and the limitations of hip. There is always
a badder character than you. And what are you searching for anyway? Death?
Yes, but for an accident of fate, he could have been the guy bobbing in
the lake.
I don't think it's the author's
place to offer interpretations of his own stories, so I hope that others
posting messages here can help you.
(Sandye'e note: Get your other
"Greasy Lake" questions answered here.)
25. Hi
TeaSea,
We had to read
your book "East is East", and now we have several questions we would like
you to answer. Here we go...
1. What was your
inspiration to the story? 2. Do you identify with any of the characters?
3. Why did you pick a Japanese alien, and not an Indonesian? 4. What
is the "Yokohama Kick"? 5. What is your intention with the book (Ruth
--> fame) 6. Why can't a Japanese woman (our teacher's friend) understand
some of Hiro's words, like "oyako-shinju"? 7. Have you ever had sex
with a Japanese?
Posted by grade
13 of the German International School Jakarta on January 31, 2000 at 20:17:58
Dear German-school Jakartans: Great
questions. But I'm pressed for time and have to be short, okay? 1) A news
story had an Asian (unidentified country) jumping ship in the south of
the U.S. I made him a Japanese, because the culture fascinates me. 2) I
identify with Hiro. He is me, I is he. 3) See answer the first. 4)Invented.
5) Yes, Ruth's ambition in the book is a meditation not only on fame but
on professional jealousies and hates, like those mentioned ...in the literary
disputes messages. 6) Don't know. As far as I know, all terms are authentic.
My Japanese publisher did not correct me, so I assume they're right. 7)
Well, I wasn't really asking. Plus,it was very dark, goats were bleating
and the sky felt like a crown of thorns. TCB.
26. As
for those clothes: Do you ever see yourself changing your look? losing
the goatee? I guess I want to know because as a young guy I was drawn to
read you because you looked cool. As an aging Deadhead (is 32 aging?) I
wonder if I'll see you later in life and say: "Wow, I remember when he
used to have planets on his shirt!"
Thanks for the
compliment on the clothes. As far as changing the look is concerned, let
me quote Woody Allen: "Change equals death." As far as dress is concerned,
I enjoy being flamboyant. Why not? Why does everybody who does
literature have to have a pipe and a tweed jacket? I really loved
that early and very short-lived hippie period, the psychedelic era of clothing.
You know, the eyeballs on the jackets, collar points out to here.
I just really dug that. It didn't last too long, and then, like everybody
else, I was into torn-up denims and work shirts. But I guess, in
my latest incarnation, I've dragged a little of that with me.
Enough that
the rays of the sun and the tug of gravity and the little clocks in our
cells should grind us down, but shave the goatee? Never. Actually, I did
shave it once, just to see what was under there--to my horror, I discovered
that I had no mouth, no chin, no skin even. Whew. Won't catch me doing
that again.
27.
Where may I write to you?
The best place to write to me is the
Message Board, of course. I may also be reached by writing care of
the English Department, THH430, University of Southern California, University
Park, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0354.
Page originally designed and compiled for www.tcboyle.com.