“Chris Higgs is getting a doctorate, he is an experimental writer, he has a life, a wife, a future in academia. I’m taking drugs and trying to act in a movie.”

Lebron James.

My life has been good lately.

Lebron James left Cleveland to go to Miami. Lebron James choked when he played for the Cavs. But Lebron James was able to blame it on the Cavs because he was carrying the team. Now Lebron James plays on the Heat with Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh, he has no excuse now. But now it is 1 hour before game six, the ratio is 3 wins for the Mavs and 2 wins for the Heat. And the devastating fact is that Lebron James has not scored almost any points in the fourth quarter in the whole series. Lebron James is choking. What does it mean to choke? It means that when a person who should win, who should succeed, throws it away because they are afraid of success and they are choked by fear and anxiety.

I met Chris Higgs at a party in LA several weeks ago. I went to Ken Baumann’s book party for Chris Higgs. I shook Chris Higgs’ hand, he was wearing a suit. He looked like a really nice guy. We talked and made jokes. He told me a lot of English professors are Marxists. We had a good laugh, I couldn’t get enough of that. I thought he was implying that he was status quo, like I am. It seemed like we were getting along, so we decided to do a double interview, we read each other’s books, and then interview each other.

I read Chris Higgs’ book, The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney, and enjoyed it. It was experimental. It had a lot of different parts that had no relation except for a single character named Marvin K. Mooney. The parts were funny and entertaining. I read most of it sitting outside tanning my psoriasis.

When we started this interview I was in Kent, Ohio at my girlfriend’s apartment and having to get up and act in the Shoplifting from American Apparel movie. I was taking Adderall everyday to act, I can’t act without Adderall, I knew if I didn’t take Adderall I would never have the energy to have conversations and be normal. I can’t have conversations with people I don’t really know without a stimulant to help me. It just occurred to me that when I met Chris Higgs in LA I was on Adderall. I am so fucked, I shouldn’t be mentioning this. I’m going to need to start applying to jobs in Santa Fe soon and possible employers are going to look at this article and think I’m fucked. Why am I doing this? I was also taking Xanax to sleep at night. And randomly taking bong hits. Then trying to type out questions and answers. Chris Higgs is getting a doctorate, he is an experimental writer, he has a life, a wife, a future in academia. I’m taking drugs and trying to act in a movie. I’m a normal writer, a follower of Aristotle, I might even want to make it on a big press. But I kind of want to make it on a big press because I don’t want to work 40 hours a week, because I have problems with thinking about things and fucking things up. Today at Red Lobster I walked over to the ice bin and instead of dumping ice in the bin I dumped a bucket of lemons. Like four people standing around me said, “What the fuck happened Noah?” I replied, “I was thinking about something.” Several times while trying to act in the movie, it was my turn to act and instead of responding with my line, I was thinking about something and nothing happened, Pirooz Kalayeh the director was like, “What the fuck is going on?” I replied, “I was thinking about something.” I’m having a hard time. Last night in bed my girlfriend said, “But you have grown strong, you are nicer and kinder than your parents, doesn’t that matter?” I replied, “Only if there is a God.”

This was my first question:

Noah Cicero: Are you mad at Aristotle for writing the Poetics? Do you think since the Founding Fathers threw away Aristotle’s Politics for Locke’s Second Treatise that American writers should do the same with Aristotle’s Poetics?

I think about literature in terms of traditions, the unified plot is European in origin. Begins with Homer and Sophocles. The experimental plot derives its origin from middle-eastern religious literature, the Torah, New Testament, Koran, Saint Augustine’s Confessions. Religious literature doesn’t seem to be concerned with facts or anything linear. It is all about emotion, feeling, all the time.

But at the same time I don’t think America really derives itself from such tradition. I agree with Rorty in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity about if a person consumes many different kinds of language and ideas, then their mind can ‘do more’ or in my words, ‘gets weirder.’ And someone like Burroughs starts writing oddly, off the main path, because his mind is so full of different types of languages and traditions that when he finally decides to write like he wants, it comes out oddly.

Like to me experimental literature is hermeneutics overload. Reading K. Mooney, through reviews, his own writing, his friends writing about him, one gets a group interpretation of one man. Which I felt was cool, it reminded me of Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, how we have so many different roles and personalities. I mean when I think about how my co-workers would describe me, my girlfriend, my friends, etc., it goes on forever.

Chris Higgs: I’m not mad at Aristotle for writing his Poetics. I’m mad that more people are unfamiliar with it, unfamiliar with the absolutely dominate ideology Poetics has managed to engender. I’m mad that some writers and readers have come to naturalize his teachings in such a way as to believe they constitute “the correct way,” and therefore those readers and writers resist questioning or challenging his authority. That’s what I’m interested in: not throwing out the Poetics, but looking it in the face. Acknowledging its power. Then kissing it on the forehead, tucking it into bed, and blaring Norwegian black metal into its ears until the drums burst.

I would disagree with your formulation of traditions on the basic premise that you are using the word “plot” for both traditions. If there are only two literary traditions, which I would ultimately argue is not the case, then for me they would be divided by their obedience to the Poetics and their disobedience to it. That is to say: in western literature there are those works that tend toward the rigid codification of plot, character, and setting, toward the structure of a beginning, middle, and end, toward a unified and coherent narrative, toward a mimetic imitation of real life. And then there are those works that resist coherent depictions of plot, character, and setting, that explore malleable structures other than the beginning/middle/end, that seek dispersion and proliferation rather than unity, and foreground creations of the imagination rather than reproductions of reality. To enhance this counter formulation, I would resort to various Deleuzian distinctions between the molar and the molecular, the sedentary and the nomadic, which each serve to point toward a division of texts between those with affinities toward stasis and those with affinities toward dynamism.

In fact the more I think about it, the more I would disagree with your assertion that religious texts are “experimental” – especially those in the Judeo-Christian tradition. They most certainly have a beginning, middle, and end. They present the unity of time and space, as well as the unity of character. They are rigid, molar, and sedentary. Thus in many ways they abide by the commandments of Aristotle’s Poetics. I would also note that I am suspicious of the relevancy of acknowledging the predominance of pathos (emotion) in those works, and flatly disagree with any connection between pathos and experimental work. For me, understanding experimental literature means understanding Kant’s third critique: aesthetic judgment arises from the free play of the imagination, not from understanding nor from emotional investment.

Noah’s feelings after reading this: I thought about Kant. A weird German man. The Categorical Imperative, thought about Simone De Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity, that I liked De Beauvoir’s ethics more.

Then I thought if I agreed. No, I didn’t agree with the sentence, “It is all hermeneutics.” I read Marvin K. Mooney and interpreted it as a novel about a man that chose to have fun writing strange pieces of fiction because reality was too much for him to bear. Then when reality was really too much, he escaped and disappeared. But was I wrong?

It started to dawn on me there was a huge discrepancy in our worldviews.

There is always a question of what I believe is true, everything my father believed was for sure not true, but still he had a job and a garden?

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NC: Here is a question for your teacher self: how to resolve this conflict, I call it the Proust/Joyce, Heidegger/Wittgenstein conflict.

Now these men are statistically considered genius, influential, remarkable, must reads.

Proust and Wittgenstein are both men with what I would call Unique Perspectives: they had Jewish/gentile identity problems, wealth but without ambition to use it to gain power, and they were homosexual. And they were super well-read. They were pretty well-read but what made their works great was the fact they were such outsiders to mainstream life by fate.

Joyce and Heidegger on the other hand were gentiles, straight, and beyond well-read. You get the feeling from them that they just fucking knew everything. The thing that made them great to me is their obsession, that they became like monks to their disciplines. And they refused to take the easy way, everything had to be hard. Heidegger instead of nice little articles, “I’m going to ponder on the word ‘is’ for a decade.”

I think the difference is this:

Proust/Wittgenstein: unique perspective

Joyce/Heidegger: Extreme religious obsession

Do you think this model is accurate?

Could you improve on it?

Where do you think you fit into the model?

Would you tell your creative writing student, “If you want to create literature, you have to be condemned by your society to a unique perspective or have extreme religious-like obsession to your craft, or just leave the room.”

Noah’s feelings after re-reading this question while not on drugs: This question is really fucked. I wouldn’t have written this question if I wasn’t on drugs. God what is wrong with me?

CH: Well, firstly I should say that I rarely teach creative writing courses anymore. These days, I primarily teach literature courses. That said, I do not believe it is imperative that a writer be either obsessed or condemned by society. So, I guess what I would tell a student is, “If you want to create literature, then create literature.”

As for me, I don’t really fit into either of those categories. I mean, I suppose I should fall into the second of those categories, given that I’m straight and white and well-read. But I don’t really fit because I don’t think of myself as obsessed in the way that you are presenting the idea. Now come to think of it, I’d argue with your characterization of Joyce as the obsessive rather than Proust. Whereas Joyce wrote various books and explored various forms, Proust dedicated his life work to one ongoing story in the same form. That sounds like obsession to me. In this way, I think that it might be a better pairing to put Proust with Heidegger, as they both labored over the same bloody thing for the majority of their life. Wittgenstein changed his mind halfway through his career and disavowed his early work, but the central thesis of his Ph. Investigations (i.e. the majority of problems are simply a matter of faulty language) seems as revolutionary as Heidegger’s attempt at the destruction of philosophy, and most certainly not less obsessive.

As to the second category: do I have a unique perspective? Yes, of course, but not because of uncontrollable circumstances, rather because I took it upon myself to create a unique perspective: for as long as I can remember I have been driven by an insatiable curiosity, a drive to seek out strangeness and newness. Could I, then, perhaps add a pairing to your model? How about:

Stein/Goldman: willfully creative

Gertrude Stein and Emma Goldman both willfully created space for themselves in a society otherwise inhospitable to women — not just “outsiders to mainstream life” as you’ve characterize Proust and Wittgenstein, but truly silenced minorities. Furthermore, Stein (especially in Tender Buttons and Stanzas in Meditation) created work sui generis. And Goldman’s role in the development of anarchist philosophy made direct engagement with the real world regardless of the fact that women weren’t even considered citizens at the time. Both of them seem to have been driven by an insatiable curiosity for strangeness and newness, driven by an impulse of intellectual nonconformity similar to my own. So, in spite of the fact that I’m a man and therefore endowed with the privileges afforded to men, I feel an affinity with them, I see myself in them much more than I see myself in either of the other categories you’ve presented.

Noah’s feelings on reading this answer: He told me my question was fucked up. Had to Google Emma Goldman. Emma Goldman is an anarchist. I read anarchism. I’m not an anarchist. I’ve never had anything to do with anarchism my whole life. I have a political science degree. I’m certified. The political philosophers my political thoughts grow out of are Hobbes, Locke, Hans Morgenthau and Jared Daimond. Anther huge, huge discrepancy in our worldviews.

He seems to be really into creativity. I thought the word, “Creativity.” And then “Imagination.” I realized I never think those words. I never think about myself being a creative person. I’ve written a lot of shit, and never once thought, “I am being creative.” What do I think? “Emotion.” No, I don’t think that, I think, “Freedom.” I write for freedom. Freedom from a world that shits on me and hates me and has never treated me good, that humiliates me. That makes me feel constrained and afraid and alone, and scared. To escape what makes me feel constrained, afraid, alone and scared I write about exactly those same emotions. I am a debased man. A Christian, a European gentile. I have learned this by reading Jews, God and History and A History of the Arab Peoples. My God was a suffering man, a man that washed feet, John 13:1-20. Jesus washes the feet of his disciples, debased, no job is below my suffering European God. Jesus gets crucified and taunted by the Roman soldiers. He is humiliated, suffers and dies what seems to be a pointless death. I write from this pain, this pain my European God tells me to enjoy. What a strange God? The God of the Jews, the ancient gods, Zeus and Aphrodite, the Hindu gods and especially Buddha. Which made me think of Brad Warner, who is in the movie, a Zen Master, Buddha says one can escape their suffering. But the Christian God, Jesus, says that one should enjoy their suffering, that one should rejoice in debasement. Chris Higgs doesn’t seem to believe in the European God. Maybe he is totally post-modern? For some reason I think the Muumuu House clique are Christians. Tao Lin, Sam Pink, Jordan Castro, Megan Boyle, Scott McClanahan, my girlfriend Brittany Wallace, they seem to believe that suffering is beautiful.

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CH: Best Behavior opens with an “Introduction” that appears to be non-fiction, about you going to a Waffle House every night for a week with a stack of books in order to do “important research” toward writing a book yourself that might “define a generation.” Certainly a provocative and ambitious feat, despite being downplayed as merely the outcome of boredom.

Looking over that list of books you took to the Waffle House: Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Burroughs, Mailer, Yates, Plath, Kesey, Thompson, Brautigan, Capote, Ellis, McInerney, I’m struck by the homogeneity. With the exception of Sylvia Plath, it’s a list of middle to upper class white men. And with the exception of Burroughs and Brautigan, it’s a list of conventional realism.

How do you reconcile a desire to define a generation with the fact that a generation is made up of diverse groups of people contending with various levels of privilege and oppression? Maybe this is a question about the impossibility of summarizing America, about the way in which America inherently resists a totalizing narrative. Makes me think about the conversation Benny has with Tom White in Chapter 10: how America is a place without a binding source of meaning. In other words, is the very idea of “defining a generation” even possible for an American writer?

Noah’s feelings after reading this: Do I hate women?

NC: Concerning white males, white males are the only ones who have the egos big enough to announce to the world, “I’m going to write a book that defines a generation.” It really starts with Michelangelo, Michelangelo was always like, “Go big or go home!” Michelangelo really shows how the European man went from a debased lover of Jesus to, “I want to dominate, everything I do will be epic and reveal to the world my personal power.”

There is no such thing as a book that describes a generation. It is just something we do for fun. It is really fun to talk about the best movie or best song or books that define a generation. The Sun Also Rises doesn’t define a generation, at that time in American history barely anyone left America to live in Europe, and barely anyone was white collar. Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road was probably more real to the American people at time. The reason The Sun Also Rises is read more now as opposed to Tobacco Road is because since the 1920s the U.S. has become service-based, only 1% of the U.S. economy is agriculture. A large portion of the economy now is white collar. We as a people living in 2011 America relate more to The Sun Also Rises than Tobacco Road, which leads us to assuming The Sun Also Rises defined that generation, but really it didn’t.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas defines the hippie segment of society, but in reality very few people were actually hippies. My parents are baby boomers and just worked at jobs, I think they smoked some weed and had unmarried sex, but overall they were normal and boring.

The reason I picked On the Road, The Naked and the Dead, Naked Lunch, Revolutionary Road and The Bell Jar was because I was hoping people would notice all those books all define the same generation. And notice that the other books were basically added in because I’ve heard people say that about those books, each book has something to say about an aspect of that generation: On the Road defines the drifters and people who did drugs, The Naked and the Dead those who went to war. Revolutionary Road those who came back from the war to live in the suburbs, The Bell Jar that if you were a woman of intelligence and feeling, life really sucked for you. Naked Lunch defines the new philosophy that consumerism and addiction will lead to happiness.

The thing is: I’ve always had an obsession with generation-defining literature, and I had this weird experience where I was in buttfuck Ohio dealing with the sadness of Midwest life, then went on a greyhound dealing with the misery of the super poor and fucked, then went to New York City and dealt with nicely educated people who are actually pretty fucked up themselves. And the story is about a guy who gets his picture taken. I mean the plot of Best Behavior is this: A guy goes to NYC to get his picture taken by a magazine. Which is absurd but makes sense in our culture, because we are obsessed with fame. The character wants fame, his piece, the glory of American fame.

But what it means to be a soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan, or to be a young stock broker or a black person who grew up in the projects or a Mexican that jumped a fence to get here and is fated to work at Taco Bell his or her whole life because they don’t know how to read English well. Well, I don’t know what the experience is of those people. I invite them to write their story. I invite everyone to write a book that defines a generation.

CH: I’m curious about the balancing act between philosophical digression and human interaction. On the one hand, Best Behavior seems highly concerned with telling a story: showing people living lives, doing things, having problems, negotiating relationships, etc. On the other hand, it seems equally concerned with cultural commentary: from the inclusion of gas prices to the observations about Youngstown and NYC, from the exposition about politics and religion to the conversations about sex and boredom. Do you envision yourself as a writer of cultural commentary as well as a storyteller? Do you consider it journalistic? Perhaps this is also a question about the difference between fiction (storytelling) and nonfiction (fact telling). Much of the book seems more journalistic than novelistic, in the sense of Kerouac and/or Thompson. Would you agree or disagree, and then how would you characterize the distinction or lack of distinction between fiction and nonfiction in Best Behavior?

NC: I like the idea of creating a snapshot of emotion. History will archive the photos of this time, the movies, the laws, the court cases, tax records, what we drove, what we ate, how many students were in college, how many were homeless, all kinds of records will be printed out and stored. To me that is where the writer comes in, the function of the writer. (Take note this is all in my head and things I tell myself, none is either true or not true. Only thoughts in my head.) To me the writer records the feelings, the emotions of the people, how man interacts with the reality presented to him. What that interaction means, what feelings it causes. There needs to be a record of feeling. It is like when you are reading a middle-ages history and the author spends a chapter on Chaucer and Piers Plowman. Or when you read a history of Greece and the author talks about Sophocles. To me novels like Harry Potter and Tom Clancy aren’t actual novels, they are paradigm control. They reinforce the paradigm of whatever is present and stagnant, they mean nothing. They are infrastructure, just like roads, bridges, and schools. They are there to keep the people in line and society functioning.

I’m not concerned with keeping society functioning or not functioning, only that it needs to be recorded.

I mean, everyone talks about gas prices, everyone mentions these common political developments. They don’t understand them because researching politics bores most people. But they talk about them, it causes them to feel things. It is strange to think, but probably barely any novels put out this year have characters mentioning gas prices. Without a doubt in the next 40 years oil will disappear from the American landscape, historians will look at our novels several hundred years from now looking for the reason why Americans consumed all the oil and went to war for it and spent trillions on protecting their oil interests. The historians will look in the novels and find nothing, they won’t find people mentioning debt, I think it will look odd to them.

I don’t like strictly political writing though. But if everyone is talking about something, to me, it should be mentioned. To me we live in the shadow of the Leviathan, the Octopus and the Churches and their religions. These are three huge forces, much bigger than any one person. And we are in a constant state, every moment of our lives trying to adapt and live within these great forces. And we hope everyday that these Forces keep deciding not to kill us, fire us or take away our homes, and stick us in prisons. We hope that these Forces don’t fuck up. We want these Forces to behave, to be proper, to do the right thing. It greatly saddened us in 2008 when the Forces fucked up. The Forces showed their incompetence, the Forces destroyed and made life worse.

To me, man lives in a triangle, the government, the economy and religion/philosophy and man travels his life in this triangle, he can take the easy way and just submit or he can cause himself anxiety, fight or create as you say, but he still must live within it.

I think I just try to show that, that we are people living little tiny bullshit lives, but at the same time we are part of a great wave of history.

I don’t think it is journalism, it is more like sociology without statistics. It isn’t even political, because a political direction is never definitively chosen. Actually Michael Seidlinger who co-runs CCM who published Best Behavior has a BA in sociology and is getting his masters in sociology, I think that implies in a way that my books appeal to students of sociology. Of course I would have to create a survey, collect data, then put it into SPSS and run ANOVA, Chi square and multiple regression analysis to see what comes out.

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NC: Learning question, just teach me: As far as I can tell there is no such thing as “good writing.” Or what it means to be a “good writer.” But there is “good content.” Is Hemingway a “good writer” or was he just good at finding “good content.” His content was bullfights, wars, women, romance, boxers, and hunting. All very exciting things. Then there is Joyce, his content had a lot of sex. Burroughs had drugs. Kathy Acker had lots of sexual description.

I personally at times feel like a slave to “content.” But the thing I find in the experimental literature that is currently being written compared to what was written in the 60s and 70s is a departure from topical content. James Chapman, Michael Seidlinger, and Ofelia Hunt, and you with Marvin K. Mooney seem to be against “good content.”

And almost like the narrator is very disembodied, like there is no concern to place the narrator within a sociological context, I think even Acker stuck her characters in a sociological context.

What do you think caused this change?

Why do you think humans living now would enjoy writing in such a fashion?

CH: For me, content is truly minor if not wholly irrelevant. As a reader, I have no interest in the content of a book. Likewise as a writer I give content very little thought. What matters to me is form. Not *what* a book is saying, but *how* a book is saying it. As Gertrude Stein demonstrates in her 1926 essay Composition as Explanation, content will always remain the same; what changes from generation to generation is form. This is why we hear that old saw about there being “nothing new under the sun.” In terms of content, this is true. There are no new stories to tell: love, hate, conflict, adventure, etc. It is the same for us as it was for Homer. What can be new is the way one of those tired stories is composed and presented, which is what interests me. Perhaps this is why you sense that I am against “good content.”

Let me frame it another way. In 1925, José Ortega y Gasset published an essay called The Dehumanization of Art, in which he attempted to describe what he perceived to be the closely connected tendencies of avant-garde art. He identified seven, namely: the tendency

To dehumanize art

To avoid living forms

To see to it that the work of art is nothing but a work of art

To consider art as play and nothing else

To be essentially ironical

To beware of sham and hence to aspire to scrupulous realization

To regard art as a thing of no transcending consequence

For me, the first four and the last one are the most salient and the most apropos answer to your question. That is to say, experimental art purposefully distances itself from the human aspects of life, privileges form over content, is about adding to the world rather than representing or documenting the world, seeks to be an end unto itself rather than a means to some other end, and does not pretend to escape immanence.

Another reason you may sense my distaste for content is that I do not see the role of the artist to be that of documentarian. I see the role of the artist to be that of creator. Since all content has already been created, the only way for an artist to bring something new into the world is through form, composition. I see it as the ultimate middle finger to Plato: I can create the forms behind the shadow! I am not a slave to simulacra!

I think writers might enjoy writing in this fashion for the same reason readers might enjoy reading this sort of work: to experience something that does not already exist, to look not at a mirror, but at a new thing.

Noah’s feelings on reading this in a Starbucks drinking a dirty iced chai:

Read these lines and felt:

To dehumanize art

Is that possible? I feel the human behind every piece of art. I detect their social class and era, in every line.

To avoid living forms

That sounds cool.

To see to it that the work of art is nothing but a work of art

There is no such thing as pure art. You are a representation of your race, social class, gender, and many other things, you aren’t isolated, but an outgrowth.

To consider art as play and nothing else

I wonder if I am playing right now?

To be essentially ironical

Sounds good.

To beware of sham and hence to aspire to scrupulous realization

To regard art as a thing of no transcending consequence

I don’t know what’s going on?

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NC: Political question (I just would like to see this statement clarified): This line you wrote in the interview with Ken Baumann and you wrote something similar to it in Marvin K. Mooney, “Let go of the rope! You’re tired of going to the grocery store and finding fruits and vegetables from overseas, which have been treated with cancer-causing chemicals? Don’t bother fussing with the management or writing a letter to your congressman… let go of the rope and go build an organic community garden. Action. Creation. Do not be duped into thinking that you can win a battle against the powers that be – they are the powers that be because they took action, because they created something.”

To break this down in terms of political philosophy this implies a Saint Augustine’s City of God interpretation of the world. That a person can live in their own little world working at a community garden and through this behavior it will weaken the State or that the State will leave them alone. And I hear this philosophy from people in the arts community, a philosophy that states, “lets just live in our City of Art or Literature and be in our own world.”

The problem is that the State is very important whether you want it to be or not. The State and its large-scale infrastructure provides for roads, electricity, water and our safety. The State provides the safety for me to sit right now and type an interview instead of being worried about attacking tribes and starvation from lack of resources.

It must be noted that when Europe really followed the City of God interpretation of politics between 500 to 1000 years ago there was endless marauding bands that attacked and pillaged the people of Europe, there weren’t even really wars, because there was nothing resembling a state, and because they could not have peace, they could not have time for art which led to a Dark Ages. Another example would be the Buddhists in Tibet, the Buddhists didn’t think it was important to think about politics and the Chinese were able to take them over.

But at the same time you are giving the State too much credence in that statement, a modern government is like 98% decisions regarding questions like: “How much salt should we buy for this winter?” “What company should we use to redo this strip of highway?” “Should we build a new bridge and make the old one into a bike path?” “How many needles does the CDC need this year?”

Every state deals with the same 98%, in China, France and America, there is somebody right now discussing how to get money to purchase desks for a school and concrete for a road. It is only like 2% that concerns actual ideology. And the most ideology can do with politics is concerning certain moral value questions, like abortion, drug use, freedom of speech, basic rights, which would be 1%, the other 1% would be how politicians are chosen, if they are voted for, by blood, or by committee. And how the politicians debate the questions of state, through committee or through voting. But what is strange is that the public is deeply concerned with only that 2%, the artists talk about that 2%, the teabaggers talk about that 2%, and the political science majors talk about the other 98%, which are things like the tax code, about the CDC and Pell grants being cut, if there is an X amount of jobs for future college grads, or should should we start directing young people to vocational schools because that is what society demands, was Justice Kennedy right in the Citizens United Case and if he was right, what does that mean for our constitution, and little things like, should our town have more bike paths?

But I think this is a question of fun. Sartre, Deleuze, Ayn Rand, and Glen Beck are fun. They are fun people with lots of ideas about everything. Do you think that people are more attracted to the fun of political philosophy which leads them away from the serious political questions like, “What kind of tax should we implement to decrease driving in the United States?” Sartre would be like, “raise the tax,” to decrease driving. Rand and Beck would be like, “Let the market take care of it.” But what would you say as a person that believes in creativity?

Do you think it would be wrong for a person to email their senator or representative about passing a budget plan that gives more money to the CDC than to the military?

Do you think that this idea of creativity could create a sustainable government that could protect itself from foreign invasions, protect its interests in other countries, maintain at worse an 8% unemployment rate and produce a surplus of food?

Do you think the revolutions and protests in the Middle East are reactionary or action?

One more idea that must be dealt with, I have heard this idea from people, “you will change the world by what you buy.” This I agree and disagree with at the same time. Now take the Sustainability movement, it resembles the Abolitionist movement, the abolitionists started fighting in the 1700s and it took 100 years to end it. But by persisting and having stamina they finally prevailed. But in our land it ended with a war that killed 600,000 people. So I agree that if you don’t buy certain things or notify other people of the value of shopping at certain places, it will slowly consume the population. The problem is that, the idea of the corporations being destroyed merely by liberals purchasing certain goods over other ones seems implausible. The only way the corporations could be destroyed is through real violence, battles, armed and well-trained soldiers, expert generals, having well-educated people to do logistics, etc.

I think this idea of you can buy certain things and change the world stems from an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. That no one has any real power anymore so they tell themselves something that equates power, but actually means nothing. It means nothing to email a congressman, it means nothing to shop at Whole Foods. The corporations own the government, they have usurped the power, not even individuals, but corporations. Which implies that democracy is gone. We knew democracy was gone when none of the bankers got arrested after the 2008 clusterfuck from hell, it proves that there is no Rule of Law in America, there is Rule of Law for normal people and Divine Law for the wealthy. The only possible solution to this problem is to revolt and destroy the corporate state. The problem is, everyone loves Pepsi, Nike, Starbucks, and cell phones. We have actually sacrificed our democracy because corporations make our lives really comfortable, the Last Man reigns!

Noah’s feelings while re-reading this question not on drugs: I am attempting a new idea, a metaphysics of fun. The idea is that all philosophical ideas that catch on have an element of fun in them, and hopefully have a little use. That Nazism was fun for the poor Germans and campaigning for Obama was fun for young people in 2008. Truth is irrelevant, truth doesn’t matter to anyone. No one has any interest in truth, except when it comes to engineering, because people don’t like when bridges collapse and kill grandma, but when it comes to ideas, they want the ones that preserve their own state or change their state (Strauss). (A semi-Straussian and a Deleuzian, no wonder this is going so badly.) And they will take the ideas that seem the most fun to them that can do that. This is a new idea, probably needs a paper, or a book. Will write the book one day.

The last part reflected my idea of a powerless emotion, but I wrote it badly and it came off like I was agreeing with Deleuze. But then I realized experimental literature is a sign politically that democracy has failed in America, that people are disconnected from politics, from Social Duty as ancient Cicero called it. America with its surplus of food and 60 years of world domination, and peace on the landscape, has allowed for people the Pursuit of Happiness, which is a rough translation of Aristotle’s version of the perfect government which creates peace for people to follow their version of Natural Sweetness. Aristotle returns.

People have had it so good in America that they had no reason to change things, only to preserve. They are safe, so safe they don’t even notice the amount of violence that is required to keep them safe. Maybe I’m a pragmatist, a Rorty relativistic pragmatist.

CH: Allow me to contradict myself in a few, hopefully fruitful ways. Allow me to stumble around a few ideas regarding the distinction between macro- and micro-politics. And allow me to reveal my privilege as a straight white male from a solid middle class family in Wyoming, who moved away from that family at the age of nineteen with only a couple hundred dollars and began living independently without outside support ever since, who currently lives a relatively comfortable life in the lower middle class afforded by academia.

When I was a boy, my parents would have their friends over for dinner. Those friends had kids about my age, so the kids accompanied the parents. After dinner, we kids would go downstairs to my playroom and the parents would stay upstairs and do whatever it is they did when the kids were away. Obviously my parents owned the house and by extension the playroom. My parents also made the rules about what was acceptable and unacceptable in terms of behavior in the playroom. As well, notwithstanding my own contributions via my meager allowance, my parents paid for the materials in the playroom. And always, they decided what toys were permissible and what toys were impermissible. This analogy perfectly exemplifies my view of the relationship between citizens and their government.

Simply put, the government is the parent and we are the children. We are free to whine and throw a fit and stomp around about the rules our parents make for us, but ultimately it does not matter whatsoever to them. They govern and we do not. Perhaps they take our concerns into consideration, perhaps they do not. Ultimately, we are in the subordinate position. We are, in the realm of macro-politics, devoid of power. To think otherwise seems to me delusional.

I recognize what I am saying could be construed as cynical. But how else are we to reconcile Marcuse’s demonstration of the one dimensional man’s total administration? Or Foucault’s demonstration of the totality inherent in the discourse of power? Or Baudrillard’s demonstration of our our ineluctable imprisonment in simulation and simulacra?

We are daily reminded of our powerlessness, of the ultimate futility derived from direct engagement in politics. Just as the goings on upstairs had nothing to do with us children, because the decisions of the parents were final despite our protestations, the decisions of the government are also final. (The children did not want to go to war in Iraq, but this did not stop the parents. The children did not want a prolonged war in Vietnam, but this did not stop the parents. The children did not want to see the dissolution of collective bargaining in Wisconsin, but this did not stop the parents. Et cetera.)

*Caveat: There are of course ways of exerting power over parents, but this would require (i) the annihilation of the parent; but not just one’s own parent, in this age of global transnational parenting, one would have to destroy all parents. Think: Russian Revolution but bigger—of course, the examples I gave before (Marcuse, Foucault, Baudrillard) would argue that destroying the parents does nothing because the system remains in their absence thus we would be bound to repeat ourselves and replace the dead parents with new parents—children, of course, are merely parents in the making , or (ii) a series of micro interventions, which is to say non-direct affirmative creation. Here I return to my “Let go of the rope!” analogy to which you have referred.

The time of productive direct engagement at a macro-political level has passed—if ever it existed. Often I am reminded of this when I am watching basketball on television. The referee will call a foul and the player will attempt to refute the call. I always wonder: why are you protesting? It will not change the outcome. Never in my entire life have I seen an example of a referee changing their mind based on a player’s plea. Could you even imagine it? Whistle blows. Foul on #24. Player says, “Hey, I didn’t foul him!” Referee goes, “Oh, you didn’t? Okay. My bad. Forget it, play on.” How ludicrous!

So the question is: why do it? Why protest a call? I think the answer is that this behavior is the same behavior of the naïve citizen who assumes or believes that they will be heard, that their voice counts, that what they say and think can change things, that direct engagement will create change. In both cases, as history has shown, this faith falls on deaf ears. Change comes from power, and children without maniacal bloodlusts or innovative micro-political ideas are powerless against their parents.

Artists are children in the playroom. Sometimes, there are those children who get it in their head that they will go upstairs and demand a second dessert or demand a new toy. While those children are off protesting, we others are enjoying our game. Those agitator children are the ones who miss out on creation by engaging in reactive behavior. Those of us who recognize the futility of direct engagement with parents or referees or government do not waste time in that direction, do not give our time and energy to that losing battle. Instead, we take action and create in our playrooms.

Noah’s feelings on reading this in Starbucks: Chris Higgs hates me. Chris Higgs thinks I’m an asshole for concerning myself with politics. Am an I asshole? I talked to Jordan Castro about what this said, Jordan said he is an anarchist, Emma Goldman got brought up again. Occurred to me that The Human War is about a man who had no power to stop the war. I did not want to argue with Chris Higgs, but keep examining the emotion of powerlessness. Rape is bad because it causes another person to be powerless. Are we being raped by the government? But according to Hobbes and Aristotle we have a good government. The United States Federal Government that holds the document of the U.S. Constitution protects us from harm and allows for us to follow our Natural Sweetness. By defnition it is a good government. But democracy might be dead. We might be slaves to corporations. Is our government just another corporation amongst other corporations? This is the question, there is something wrong with the logic. Do I bitch about the government just because I am an American and Americans love to bitch about the government? They are fullfiling the laws for good government set down by Aristotle and Hobbes, our constitution is based off of Locke. The thing is, before, the corporations owned everything, people voted to maintain slavery, voted for Jim Crow, voted to create codes for not allowing in Italians, voted for horrible things. Maybe we have democracy, this is what America wants, they want comfort, they want Pepsi, Nike, cable television, distraction and stupidity? I have a horrible view of humanity, Chris Higgs has a much different version of humanity, his humanity is creative and makes things. My humanity watches television and slowly withers away into the threads of a recliner.

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NC: In an email you said our books are “radically dissimilar.” But I don’t think they are, they almost have the same plot. They are both about white male writers who are disgusted with traditional writing and believe by writing differently they will actually achieve some level of fame. The difference is that Benny Baradat gets some fame by getting into a magazine, but only after years of paying his dues through getting books published by small presses and getting press through the underground literary avenues, and Marvin K. Mooney gets some by disappearing.

Why do you think we chose such characters?

And what do you think are the philosophic differences between the characters? And how do these characters symbolize the lives of people living in our society?

CH: I’ll start with the last part of your question: “And how do these characters symbolize the lives of people living in our society?”

For my part, again, I do not wish to symbolize anything, especially the lives of people living in our society. To be completely frank, when it comes to my writing I have little interest in the lives of people living in society. My goal is to create something that is other than real, that is something in and of itself, not a representation of something else.

As to my thoughts regarding the radical dissimilarity between our books – I find your analysis of their similarities interesting but unconvincing on the grounds that (i) it supposes a similarity of plot, when in fact I don’t believe my book has a plot, and (ii) it privileges the role of the characters. For me, the character of Mooney is incidental. It is not a book “about” him so much as a book “about” his work. In fact, I only came to the character toward the end of writing the book, when I felt I needed a tent pole for the tent – a formal choice if ever there was one. Also, whereas my Mooney character is never well-drawn or unified, your Benny character is extremely well drawn and unified: your book clearly presents a believable character engaged in plausible situations that could occur in the real world. Not to mention the fact that your book tells a story. My book does neither of those things. In terms of “plot” your book moves through cause and effect, mine moves, at best, through convulsion. Whereas your book is structured in the traditional scene followed by scene fashion, mine is devoid of scenes in the traditional sense. Whereas your book seems concerned with narrative clarity, my book is concerned with narrative complexity, opacity, and difficulty. Unlike you, I am interested in purposefully confusing the reader. I am interested in producing a work that resists understanding and emotional connection. I do not wish to have a reader “relate” to what I write. For me, “relating” is the kiss of death.

Let me return to the example of the Ortega y Gasset essay. In it, he uses an example of someone looking at a garden through a window. It is possible, he explains, to peer through the glass and see the garden – this is the mode of conventional realism; but it is also possible to readjust our eyes so as to look at the pane of glass instead, at which point the garden itself becomes out of focus, blurry – this is the mode of experimental literature. Obviously I am interested in the latter, whereas you seem to be interested in the former. That is to say, instead of presenting the world as it already exists, I would rather force the reader to shift their perspective in such a way as to make the world seem dramatically askew. Put another way, Best Behavior feels very true to life, even if it is a fictionalization of life. The scene where Benny is on the bus and shares an intimate sexual moment with a woman who has just been released from prison resonates in the way a story told to me by a friend at a bar might resonate. This mode of realism differs greatly from my hodgepodge cacophony of word salad.

Noah’s feelings while reading this on Adderall at the movie set: Why am I alive? I like how he writes so orderly. My writing is chaos. I am chaos. I am choking this interview like Lebron James is choking the NBA championship.

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CH: I am curious to hear about your relationship to, or your consideration of, an audience.

Do you see yourself writing for your friends or for a general readership? Do you think about the audience while you’re writing? How much do you allow anticipated criticism to dictate your choices? Given the fact that many of the characters seem to be real people with the names changed, which reminded me of the way Kerouac wrote about his life by changing the names of the participants in such a way as to make it pretty obvious, do you worry about hurting people’s feelings or causing problems amongst your contemporaries?

You’ve mentioned that you view literature in terms of traditions. I would be interested to hear your take on where Best Behavior fits in this schematic. With whom do you envision this novel being in conversation? With what tradition do you see it aligning, and why? Was this a conscious move on your part? In other words, aside from sitting down with the intention of defining a generation, did you also sit down with the intention of writing a book in a particular tradition? Going back to Kerouac again, this might also imbricate a writing style or process – I’m thinking of Kerouac’s practice of “automatic writing” and must admit I wondered if you had used this technique in writing Best Behavior.

NC: Having a complete inability to answer these questions, I will write this: I’m choking like Lebron James, I can’t answer these questions. I hurt a woman. Yes, I hurt someone. Did I do it on purpose? Did I want to hurt someone? If I could I would wash her feet to get her forgiveness. The whole world is watching Lebron James choke. Millions of people right now as I write this, are watching Lebron James choke. He is not Michael. I read the word “Kerouac” and think, “I am not Kerouac.” “I am choking.” “I want to be Noah Cicero.” Goddamn it, how do I become Noah Cicero? This is the greatest war of my life, to become Noah Cicero. Am I infantile? I cannot make something that is concretely me. Am I decadent, and just recycle? This fear keeps me up at night. I’m working on a book now, I want it to be me, Noah Cicero. Can I even be Noah Cicero unless I sell an X amount of copies and get to do talks at universities? I know I have a wonderful girlfriend and people who love me, but I still want more, like a good American. I grew up in a shitty town in Ohio, with a butcher for a father and a tow motor driver for a mother, to get this far should be amazing. There has been a lot of painful days and emotions have overwhelmed me. Overwhelmed. I’m done now, I’m going to watch the second half of the NBA championship and see if Lebron James chokes.