5/4/07. Booksmith, 1644 Haight St. (863-8688); Page Street Public Library. Chuck Palahniuk, bestselling author of books including The Fight Club, Survivor, Invisible, Monsters, Choke, Haunted, Stranger than Fiction, appeared at the Page Street Public Library to SRO fanatics.
Place this bet in your time capsule. Chuck Palahniuk's novels will be required reading in American literature classes 100 years from now.
He kicked off his tour of latest book, Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey. (Doubleday, 2007). The epigram reads: Do you ever wish you'd never been born? Here's the opening line to Rant:
Like most people, I didn't meet Rant Casey until after he was dead, that's how is works for most celebrities. After they croak, their circle of friends just explodes.
Here's the closing line: The rest of you gaddamn losers. Enjoy your death.
The book is written in style of a oral history -- multiple sources are questioned about a shared experience. (See Capote by George Plimpton).
Chuck's fiction is a little bit different: characters who pretend to choke on food while dining at upscale restaurants, plane crashes, fight clubs, haunted houses, Judas cows -- what will he think of next? How about murder, bee swarms, government enforced segregation, car-crashing teenagers, and time travel all mixed together and bathed in biblical overtones and let's not forget rape!
Did the fire marshal knew how many people were in this room? Chuck was in the backroom pumping up gigantic moose heads, arranging the phony bouquets of flowers, signing books he would be giving away to people who "asked" questions, and trivia based on his bestselling books and movies. I was the lucky one who sat front and center and asked the first question (and received the bouquet and 2 signed copies of his favorite books, the dark and funny Clown Girl (Monica Drake), and the funniest, dirtiest, smartest book seen in years, Obscene Interiors.
Question (Me, Anna Rowe):
Vladimir Nabokov said we don't read so much as REREAD books. What is the last book you've reread?
A: I just reread a memoir about a woman named Lucy Greely called Autobiography of a Face. Lucy has lost most her face to cancer as a small child. Entire jaw was gone. I didn't know that when I was writing Invisible Monsters, and I ended up meeting her in New York with Amy Hempel. That was shortly before she committed suicide and rereading that book with its upbeat ending and knowing that she would kill herself within a couple of years just gave that book an enormous meaning that it didn't have the first go-through. (He gave me the bouquet and the two books). Beautiful!
Q: In the novel The Fight Club, what disease do people suffer from if they attend support group called "above and beyond"?
A: Brain Parasites.
He then read a story called Cold Calling, passed out a passel of joke cigarettes, answered a question about the Judas Cow (yes, they calm the other cows down before they're lead to slaughter).
Q: Why was Rant done in oral history form?
A: 1. I find the form incredibly readable. It's like eating potato chips. You get the meat of each moment - it keeps you reading compulsively.
2. If you use a non-fiction form, you can tell a really incredible story. This form will invest that story with a credibility and a gravity it would not have whether it's Orson Welles doing War of the Worlds, Martians invading the world. But if you do it on a broadcast in non-fiction form...it's believable. Fargo...Bullshit. Convincing bullshit. In this form, you can tell a completely over-the-top story.
3. Form allows you to cut narrative like you would cut film, and you don't have to have constant transitions. You can cut from what needs to happen to what needs to happen...allows you to write in effective way, like a movie!
Q: (me, again): Chuck, you dedicated the book to your father. Is he still alive? You know, the story about keeping your head down and not looking up from the sidewalk?
A: That's a question that shouldn't have been asked. I dedicated book to my Dad, who was from the Idaho Panhandle and he was really self-conscious about being a hillbilly, that he had raised a whole passel of hillbillies. And, once my Mother was going to Spokane to have all of her teeth taken out, because it had been after she'd given birth to the last of us, and her teeth were really lousy from calcium loss, and she was going to have dentures at the ripe old age of 32. And while she was getting her teeth pulled, my father took us for a walk in downtown Spokane, a big city. My siblings were like these dirty Waltons. Beverly Hillbillies. Golly, Dad! It's the first time I'd been in an elevator, and I was maybe 8 or 9 years old. And my father got really angry, and he said: Goddamn it! Don't you kids look up anywhere from the sidewalk. I don't want these people to know we're a bunch of redneck filthy hillbillies. If you want them to think you're a hillbilly, just keep looking up at those tall buildings. So we spent the whole day walking around Spokane... I just wish my father had gotten past that self-imposed hillbilly identity. (How poignant, I thought).
It was cold, windy when I inched my way back alone (my friend, the photographer, Les had left early) to the MUNI and carried thoughts, my bouquet, books in my large "French" bag...What a memorable night! Chuck had been in good form and was up to his old tricks, and grateful he had graciouisly signed my copy of HAUNTED: "HAPPY NIGHTMARES!"
Funny, always on the edge of reality and bloodied by the profound horror of narcissim. (Playboy).
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