Christopher Higgs - Would you orchestrate everything down to the color of the dishtowels, teacups, and magnets?

Christopher Higgs, The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney (Sator Press, 2010)

"Exegesis as genesis. Metapostheartenism. No—this novel is stunning, a sublime attack on cultural and critical institutions, a lyrical song of self, a brutally candid confession and admission of not-knowing; it's an emotional trip that is unparalleled in my mind. I could not be more excited for you to read this book in paper or digital form, and listen to the incredible and multi-sensual audiobook." - Ken Baumann

Page 243:

"Do you read upside down on the couch with your feet in the air and chocolate milk there by your side? Can you say the Czech alphabet backwards while juggling eggs over a thirty story balcony? Have you ever hotwired a car in downtown Berlin with a safety pin, a screwdriver, and a metal emory board, with the heat encroaching? Are you the sort of person who folds while holding a royal flush just to give the other person a win? Would you ever purposefully misappropriate syntax? Would you orchestrate everything down to the color of the dishtowels, teacups, and magnets? Have you ever not paid your taxes? Do you ever obsess over numbers? Ever set your alarm clock to an even number? What kind of deodorant do you wear? Is it masculine? Can you name a city in France you haven’t been? Are there places in the north of Spain that you have never seen? Have you ever planted a tree? Have you ever forgotten a friend’s birthday? Ever been caught in a lie and forgot what version of the truth you previously spilled? Have you ever raced across the countryside on a horse in complete rhythm? Ever challenged an anteater to a duel? Ever made your loved one go running? Ever parked on the wrong side of the road? When was the last time you bought a lottery ticket? Watched television? Bought clothes from a thrift store, a shopping mall, or on eBay? Would you even recognize the secret password when it mattered most? Would you leave town? Would you try to dig a tunnel to Japan?"


"Marvin K. Mooney left strict instructions detailing his desired method of organization for what he frequently referred to as his “Complete Works.” (Humility was never one of Mooney’s strong points.) He presumed the popularity of his work would surely grow exponentially following his death.’
Authorship is the heart of Christopher Higgs’ debut novel The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney. In its 352 pages, Higgs and Mooney are a tandem of writers working in collaboration to disappear, to relinquish all responsibility to the word, to the title, to the notion of authorship as a whole.
Sator Press, literary newborn from writer / editor / actor Ken Baumann began its walking legs with this first title – but before that there was a simple splash page and a posting on the esteemed htmlgiant simply asking – ‘what is this?’ Months later Marvin K. Mooney began appearing in blog post commentary, enticing writers, readers, and the like to ‘join him’, that they ‘were needed’. The links of these posts led to a Marvin K. Mooney Society webpage (themarvinkmooneysociety.com), which housed very little information but several videos of static laden scenic views or unintelligible groups in seeming prayer or chant. This dialogue opened even further when on the final days before the book’s release many top lit blogs like htmlgiant or bigother were engaged in conversations about the aim or validity of these Marvin K. Mooney publicity stunts. And then, on a day like any other day, the Sator Press website went live and announced The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney by Christopher Higgs – the first official mention of his authorship and the release of the title in paperback, audiobook, and ebook formats. All of this, and the book was not even at our doorsteps, was not yet opened to page one, where the destruction of authorship begins in earnest.
‘This is nothing like my real life. I did not base this story on myself or anyone I know. I used something children call imagination. Past the age of eleven, most people don’t have one, so I understand if you’re one of them. But unlike you, I still use mine. Instead of recapping tidbits of my boring real life, like most fuckwads who call themselves writers, I sit and imagine stuff and that’s where the “story” comes from. There is never any truth in anything I type. My name is not Marvin K. Mooney. In real life, my wife is nothing like the man’s wife in this story. My wife and I never visit the cave anymore. To be honest, I haven’t seen my wife in months. Goodbye cavelight.’
The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney masquerades as exactly what its title describes, a collected framework to reference a single author: Marvin K. Mooney. Composed of notes from Mooney, blurbs and mentions about him from other writers, last pages and guesswork on his disappearance as well as philosophical statements, cut and past lit theory and recovered or re-published stories from Mooney’s supposed literary career, The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney is a book to wade through. By page ten my cuffs were wet, and by the mid-point, my belt was missing underneath a sea of textual scatter.
‘ “Hey, what’s that you’re reading?”
You could answer a number of things, one of them being: “It is a new work of creative nonfiction by Marvin K. Mooney.”
In follow-up, you may be asked:
“What’s it about?”
To which you can safely reply: “It is a text about itself. It is a pretentious, egomaniacal, megalomaniacal, and hardly worth my time; but for some reason I continue to read it – perhaps I am being forced to at gunpoint, perhaps I am slightly enjoying it” ’
And this is what is most fascinating about the book: how it manages to discuss, to live within, and to subvert the notion of meta-fiction, all at once. There are shouted moments to the reader, enticements and goads to us, followed by three-part fictional narratives and prefaced by philosophical interjections and the planting of literary theory seeds. And Higgs, playing at Mooney (and sometimes at himself) does a tremendous job finding the exact moments of lull, of hush, where the text threatens to overwhelm itself and collapse, and uses those exact moments to change the pacing of the text, to break into a new dialogue, or to switch to another mode.
There are places where the wading through of The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney is deep or rough or super complex, where it takes something other than a simple read to find Higgs’ meaning and willingly subvert the text alongside Mooney, but in the end, the mud-stuck footsteps through the lake of this book are worth it, every page, to come out with Mooney or Higgs, or without them perhaps, on the other side of literature." - J. A. Tyler

"I have just finished what someone named Christopher “The Zoologist” Higgs is calling your complete works. He is either stupid or misinformed (and likely both) as the book makes reference to pieces that are not included, and can’t even decide who it’s written by. What kind of title is The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney for a book that’s primarily interested in making a diaristic sort of product that refuses to draw a line between product and process, author and character? It offers two title pages (inverting title and author info) in the format of title pages, though one could imagine that Higgs wants us to view every page, if not every sentence, as a kind of title page, reintroducing us to the book over and over again. It brings up questions of unity early, after all. Higgs may want us to believe that the only suggestion of unity here is the fact that all of it is bound together—or binary-coded together in the case of the digital edition.
Higgs also claims you have disappeared, then speaks as if he were you to confuse the nature of this disappearance. It’s fairly simple, really. You vanished as soon as he saw you, like a star in the corner of his eye that he’s now trying to look at directly. He’s got his rods and cones all mixed up. [You can't invent a fiction unless it disappears.]
Here’s my utilitarian feedback on the digital form. Sator is a new press, and digital readers are a new tool for information delivery. You might expect some hiccups. I read the digital version on a Sony eReader pocket edition. The default text size was small—too small. So I hit that button with the magnifying glass and the plus sign on it. This demolishes the format. Words break in the middle, page numbers get squished into positions where they don’t belong, and, worst of all, white space (I’m a poet, so you can imagine my horror at this) is abolished. This is likely more a fault of the good folks at Sony than the good folks at Sator, but I think it’s worth mentioning. I don’t know enough about the technology to suggest a fix. As someone interested in how technology affects our reception of information, and literature in particular, I was deeply troubled by this. I found myself shrinking and magnifying the text constantly to notice any discrepancies, especially since there were places where form and space seemed significant. However, I don’t think that Monsieur Higgs and his history (or yours?) of the circus particularly suffer from this discrepancy in format. In fact, there are places where the shifting form due to magnification may be enhancing his point. I suspect he may even do this on purpose in the future.
It’s a brilliant piece of work, Mr. Mooney, whatever it is. Belles-lettres? Does that still mean something? According to Wikipedia it does, but I’ve been taught to distrust all my sources no matter how agreeable they seem. Even this book tells me to stop reading. Does Higgs really want me to stop reading? Does he enjoy making me feel rebellious and James Dean-y as I defy the book? [If ever there was a rebel without a cause, it is anyone who reads this book after it tells them to stop.] Is this some small tribute to Choose Your Own Adventure novels, highlighting that every book is choose your own adventure—keep going or end it now? Or does he simply want me to ask all these questions? Knowing Higgs a bit, my best guess is that he wants us to ask the questions, regardless of the answers. I also think he’d be pleased that we keep reading, not only because it pleases most writers to be read, but because he’d prefer a reader who challenges the text. He tells us that plot, character, setting and theme are the enemies. And aren’t they the enemies because they force us to obey, to reach the same conclusions as the writer? If we labeled them tyrants, would we be wrong? This book can’t even cohere enough to force me to read one page after another. I could skip around and open it anywhere and be on the “right page.” I’d miss everything and I’d miss nothing. It’s not a paradox; it’s a deliberate construction of consistently enjoyable work. You don’t have to read it all to feel its finished. And you can read the whole thing before you feel it’s actually begun. That’s kind of the point.
See what he has done? He has caused me to draw conclusions and respond. I’m not merely satisfied with reading it and having coursed it through my brain. It’s caused me to begin writing something of my own. This is good work.
The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney is probably worth reading more than once, though it’s possible this will never be done. It’s intellectual without being snooty, funny without being insulting, and paradoxical without being cryptic. [Though some of the more experimental passages may come across as cryptic, the reader will benefit from reading them the way a musician might read finger exercises. Don't expect a melody to emerge. Find some level of discipline or pleasure that gets you through it. The passage may simply be asking you to calculate your own attention span; it may be trying to distract you from everything but its own rhythm by not allowing you to engage; it may be laughing at my suggestion that it be "doing" anything.]
Here are some of the questions, Mr. Mooney, that Higgs makes me ask myself:
What is the difference between lying and making art?
Where is the line between author and character? And is a made thing ever natural? (The Garden of Eden was a made thing, wasn’t it?)
Does literature about literature become part of the work?
One reviewer has written (before reading the book, oddly enough), “I’d like to take a class on this book.” Already, it has entered the mind that for our experience of the work to be complete, we must have more input from additional sources. The author’s own input is not enough. The Complete Works addresses this question by opening the novel with essays and reviews about your works, Mr. Mooney—both positive and negative, both thoughtful and inflammatory.
Not too long ago, our access to information was more limited. But I hardly need to point out that now if we want to know what ten “Top Critics” and 10,000 other people thought of Shutter Island, we can go to one website and introduce ourselves to additional views on the topic. It’s more difficult to find a copy of The Waste Land without footnotes than a copy that includes them. Classic works of literature are released almost invariably with essay introductions that explain and/or explore the historical context and value of the work you’re about to read, as well as its themes and plots. Higgs knows that art exists for its reaction. It likes to be looked at/taken in. It wants those people out there in the dark to engage. That’s why it makes us make it. And The Complete Works seems to suggest that the author alone makes nothing, makes only a search for some sort of identity, a new someone to engage with. So The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney could not be complete without responses to that work.
Until now, I always thought of the blurb as a marketing tool. It is, of course, but I recognize that it’s effective because it is evidence of engagement, which is the enlargement of the work. It’s already bigger than the author, the book, and the me that’s picking it up. There’s an other who picked it up, too. This is more attractive intellectually than physically, as it’s now making me consider the collection of skin oils and bacteria on the books I pick up. Of course it disgusts you, Mooney. If you had ever thought that your writing would lead to so much illness and overpriced antibiotics [and the resultant resistant strains of bacteria and more illness] you would never have begun. You would have been happy to grind glass or race Formula 1 cars against Danica Patrick.
Possible blurb: This is a book so good that it can’t simply end. It requires an encore. [This will make no sense as a blurb. You have to read the book, nearly to the end, before you understand this. Blurbs need to help us sell books. This will only confuse people. Confused people don't buy books. They're too confused. They go home and watch dinner and eat TV. See how this could be a problem for us?]
If you decide to read the book, as you must, be prepared for the shifting forms. One minute it’s an essay, the next it’s a story, and then it’s a drawing of France or California (who really knows the difference?). It’s sure-footed, then dissociative and self-conscious. It will remind you of Seuss, then Stein, then Derrida, then Pynchon. It calls itself both a novel and nonfiction (it also calls itself American even though it devotes several pages to “defining” Paris and seems particularly knowledgeable of French cinema, while it makes no mention of Chuck Norris, chicken fried steak, or the bolo tie). As I said before, I’m not sure if this Higgs is misinformed or stupid, but he’s made something that is label-defiant, like that peanut-butter/jelly in one jar gook, or comfortable lingerie. (If you put a label in it, it’s no longer comfortable.) He’s at least pretending to be legitimately confused about whether he’s him or whether he’s you, so he’s not sure it’s all fiction. It is, which is just short of saying it’s BS, and I know Higgs won’t mind me saying so. It’s supposed to be BS. If it were anything more than that, according to his own book, it’d be the artistic equivalent of a crapper. The world needs more crappers, as evidenced from the apparently constant lines that ladies deal with in their lavatories, but I don’t think Higgs’ goal with this work is to supply them. If so, he’s failed miserably.
Mr. Mooney, I recommend this book. I also recommend that you sue Christopher “Master Plan” Higgs for fraud and libel.
Sincerely,
Tyler Moore"


“If everyone were not so indolent they would realise that beauty is beauty even when it is irritating and stimulating not only when it is accepted as classic.” – Gertrude Stein, Composition as Explanation

It’s difficult to know how to start a review of The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney by Christopher Higgs because (disregarding that ironic ‘complete’) the novel itself feels like a succession of starting points, a corridor of departures and disappearances. A novel where it doesn’t feel strange to read the sentence, 50 pages in, “This is the first sentence in this novel.” A novel that ‘ends,’ then has an ‘encore’- for which the reader is instructed to clap - and then a preface. But to start with the beginning of the book in fact takes you further back, outside the book, before the book. Not only because Higgs and his publisher Ken Baumann engaged in an extensive pre-publication publicity campaign in which a mysterious character calling himself ‘Marvin K. Mooney’ started commenting on lit-blogs, but because the title character (author?) of Christopher Higgs’ boldly experimental debut novel takes his name from the children’s book Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now! by Dr. Seuss, first published in 1972.
Seuss’ book is basically a silly rhyme in which a fictional character called Marvin K. Mooney is asked to leave in many different ways and by any means possible. So it, too, is a series of proposed departures.
Just go.
Go.
Go!
I don’t care how.
You can go by foot.
You can go by cow.
Marvin K. Mooney will you please go now!
You can go on skates.
You can go on skis.
You can go in a hat.
But
Please go.
Please!”
Seuss tells us almost nothing about Mooney’s personality, except perhaps that he stubbornly hangs around where he’s not wanted, but the poem turns up the interesting theme of identity. Seuss’ is an evasive and enigmatic text because it sets up at least one other character (the speaking one who is asking Mooney to leave), about whom we know nothing. And while the poem continually points toward Mooney’s absence by asking him to “please go now,” it simultaneously and repeatedly confirms his relentless presence. The character of Mooney hovers between presence and absence throughout the poem, a vibrating, swaying neither/nor that is mimicked in Seuss’ sometimes perfect, sometimes awkward rhymes. Certainly, Mooney ends up having a much greater presence in the poem than the other speaker. The poem’s engagement with ‘identity’ is further enriched because Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now! is aimed at very early-level readers, readers not yet capable of reading The Cat in the Hat. It’s a text, therefore, for readers starting out, for readers getting to grips with language, when the conventions of narrative form are something new and unfamiliar. Given the youthfulness of its target-readership, it’s also a text that overtly confronts the identity-shaping properties of language. ‘Marvin K. Mooney’ is less an ‘everyman’ and more a ‘hollow man,’ an empty vessel without any of the personality traits to make him a realistic figure. This person without a personality becomes interchangeable, most famously, in 1974 when Dr. Seuss sent a copy of the book to his friend the political columnist Art Buchwald in which the name ‘Marvin K Mooney’ was crossed out and replaced by ‘Richard M. Nixon.’ Buchwald reprinted the altered rhyme in his July 30th Washington Post column, just nine days before Nixon resigned. Above all, Seuss’ Mooney is an unabashedly fictional character. But how much more fictional, for that matter, is Mooney than Dr. Seuss himself, the penname of Theodore Seuss Geisel, who also wrote under the names Theo LeSieg and Rosetta Stone?
Higgs’ novel is soaked and dripping with questions like these, of the nature of authorship, fiction and identity. The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney is arranged as just that, the collected writings (Mooney never completed a novel, we’re told) of a disappeared writer, a figure like Weldon Kees or Bas Jan Ader. Higgs and Mooney are interchangeable and interdependent, concealing themselves one behind the other, whilst simultaneously stepping in front to take centre stage. In a conventional sense, it’s difficult to clearly define Higgs as the author of this novel. Mooney (because of his history) is not Higgs’ creation. The book is filled with quotations recycled from other writers, artists, philosophers and critics. Some portions of the book that are presented as part of Mooney’s complete works have previously been published by Higgs under his own name, with no mention of Mooney. Meanwhile, the book has two title pages, calling itself ‘The Complete Works Of Marvin K. Mooney: A Novel written by Christopher Higgs’ on one and ‘The Complete Works of Christopher Higgs: A Novel written by Marvin K. Mooney’ on the other. On top of all of that that there are fake commentaries from fake scholars about Mooney’s work that hilariously and expertly pastiche literary criticism, criticism that might just as well be written about Higgs’ book, like this one from ‘Dr Phyllis Salzburg, Narratologist’:
“How can this even be considered a novel? That’s the question I struggled to answer after the editor of a small literary magazine sent me the manuscript to review for an upcoming issue.”
Meanwhile there are repeated objections from Higgs that he is not Mooney. Or are they objections from Mooney that he is not Mooney?
“This is nothing like my real life. I did not base this story on myself or anyone I know. I used something children call imagination. Past the age of eleven, most people don’t have one, so I understand if you’re one of them. But unlike you, I still use mine. Instead of recapping tidbits of my boring real life, like most fuckwads who call themselves writers, I sit and imagine stuff and that’s where the ’story’ comes from. There is never any truth in anything I type. My name is not Marvin K. Mooney.”
And elsewhere: “I am not who I was just a moment ago.”
Higgs provides no neat resolution to these and many other questions and paradoxes. The book is anything but neat. It’s a hodge-podge, an amalgam, a collage. It’s a collection of pieces of writing that feel as though they’re left deliberately incomplete. It’s an elaborate fiction that doesn’t bother to maintain its conceit. It’s a novel with no plot to hold its tummy in. On the second page of the novel, Mooney’s oeuvre is described as a ‘Rhizomatic Assemblage.’ It’s a tempting seed to plant, one that is immediately buried in the soil of a humorous refusal to elaborate and present a ‘univocal argument’ or a ’specific hypothesis pertaining to its relevance vis-à-vis the work of Marvin K. Mooney.’ That is to say, the strand of thought is momentarily severed. And yet, reading the novel, the writings of Deleuze and Guattari on the ‘rhizome’ were the theoretical lollypops I felt most like sucking. With it’s radically collaged structure, its refusal of closure, its embrace of paradox and its series of fruitful points of departure that are simultaneous points of disappearance, Higgs’ novel, more than any other I’ve read recently, seems to inhabit a tubing, branching, underground network of rhizomes, which are characterized by their all-over fertility, i.e. any part can be broken off and start as a new starting point. All of which takes me rather irritatingly neatly and circularly back (forgive me, Mooney) to where I started this review, worrying about starting points and how to set off. If I had to write a one-word review of The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney, I’d unhesitatingly choose ‘frustrating’; deliciously, excruciatingly frustrating. I loved it." - Colin Herd





Christopher Higgs, Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously (Publishing Genius Press, 2009)

Read it at: http://www.baltimoreisreads.com/higgsgenius.pdf

"BUTLER: One of the most immediately exciting things about this text I think is the way it plays with and mishmashes syntax both syllabically and structurally. There is a certain tone about the ongoings that you manage to establish in the very first sentence: a way of speaking that sounds wholly new. Can you talk some (a) about the state in which you approached this, or (b) how you began to write it, and/or (c) what outside influences or impulses led you into the mode, if any?
HIGGS: I approached the construction of Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously in two ways:
1. By remixing previously written texts
2. By process of what André Breton called “automatic writing”
In the case of #1, (“Lonely…”; “Escape…”; “Of Her…”) I wrote these texts in a straightforward manner while in graduate school at U Nebraska (2004-2006) as pieces of conventional realism with beginnings, middles, and ends. I liked them okay, but they had no real oomph. Like most works of conventional realism, they were boring, so I kept them stashed away figuring maybe someday I’d do something to make them interesting.
In the case of #2, (all the other pieces) these texts were written more recently (in the past year or two) and came from sessions in which I sat down and allowed the voices in my head to speak through my fingers without censorship. These voices tend to speak in rhythmic/sonic ways rather than narrative ways.
In terms of outside influences, there are gobs (Gertrude Stein, Gary Lutz, e.e. cummings, Jean-Luc Godard, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, etc.); but one I would like to mention specifically is a short piece by Darby Larson called “Journal Entry: 2-13-03” [http://ir.interserver.net/stories/story83.html] which appeared in the online journal Insolent Rudder. I remember reading that while I was in my first year of graduate school at the University of Nebraska and going: oh hell yes—this is a style I must try to expand upon!
BUTLER: Would you say that any one sentence in this text could signify the whole, i.e. could “Complain nor explain a single lie and that is true.” in any way speak for the whole here? Can a text be reduced?
HIGGS: That question makes me think about Alice Fulton’s concept of fractal poetry. She borrows Mandlebrot’s model of “a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole” to describe a poem in which each sentence acts like a representative of the whole (you can find out more about this in Fulton’s brilliant collection of essays titled Feeling as a Foreign Language).
Even though I think her ideas are fascinating, especially when she suggests we should “look to chaos and complexity theory as touchstones for contemporary aesthetics,” I don’t purposefully construct fractal poems—i.e. I’m not an adherent to her methodology—and Colorless was not constructed in this manner.
I do, however, wonder about how each sentence fits into the community of sentences that encompasses the text. If you think about a text as a community of sentences, then you can think about each sentence as a citizen in that community. One citizen can’t express the totality of a shared community, but nevertheless, one citizen does reflect similar (inherited and simulated) cultural values, behaviors, beliefs, dreams, and characteristics. For example, I can’t possibly encompass the entire concept of America. I can’t even encompass my local community here in Clintonville, Ohio, even though I share the experience of living in these communities, am part of these communities, and help to construct these communities. Individually, I believe each sentence in Colorless contributes to both the heterogeneity and homogeneity of the text, same as how each citizen contributes in a community. I also believe each sentence both represents aspects of the text and differentiates itself from the text, same as how citizens both reify and reject aspects of their community.
BUTLER: In some way, some of the tone is a mishmash of what seems like an instruction manual, and a series of observational reports, some of which, in another way, seems like a great long apology for the present and the future at once. A philosophical spit up of “what the fuck have we done?” Do you consider this a political document? A personal document? Is this a document?
HIGGS: I am resolutely apolitical: I don’t believe in politics and I abhor the use of politics or the application of political theory in literature. Art is art because it is useless. As soon as art becomes useful it becomes decoration or propaganda or something else other than art. A good analogy would be sex. As soon as sex becomes useful it becomes procreation. To say that a piece of writing should have a purpose or should be about something or should convey something or should do something is akin to saying sex should have a purpose, that sex should produce a baby. (Here we can see the connection between conventional realism and crazy fundamentalist Christians, not to mention product-obsessed capitalists.) I humbly disagree. For me, sex is valuable in-and-of-itself. Art, too, is valuable in-and-of-itself.
I really like your idea of Colorless as a philosophical spit up.
In terms of it being personal, I would say it is personal by virtue of being written by me. However, the content—which is always secondary to me—is completely fabricated. I revel in falsification. This whole notion of “honesty” or “truth” or whatever it is conventional realists find so appealing about “writing what you know” or “keeping it real” makes me gag. To me, the attempt to replicate reality in literature is as much of a complete waste of time as the last season of Battlestar Galactica. Mimesis is no more relevant today than bloodletting: you could do it, but why?
BUTLER: I found it interesting that you labeled and set off sections within the text. Did this occur as a series of creations that were then strung together? Or was it written as one long piece?
HIGGS: I sort of answered this in question #1, but what I left out was the fact that the final published version is significantly different than the original version I constructed and submitted to PGP. When I sent Colorless to Adam Robinson [Publishing Genius’s publisher] it was twice as long. Once he sent the proofs, or whatever they’re called, we looked at it and we both agreed it was too long. I chopped the hell out of it and rearranged the hell out of it. Some days I think I made the right choices, the right cuts, the right configurations; and some days I think I should have done it differently.
BUTLER: Please tell me about your creative process, how you approach the desk, how you sit at the desk, how long, what interrupts you, what you let in, what you do not let out while you are writing.
HIGGS: I write on my laptop, most of the time while listening to music. I only allow myself to be interrupted by my two true loves: Caitlin and Beatrice.
BUTLER: You are very concerned with music, can you tell me about the influence(s) of any music(s) on you during this period, or on the text directly?
HIGGS: Because the text was written in two different time periods, over the course of three years, I couldn’t possibly remember what I was listening to when. But I do know that the Wu-Tang Clan’s double disc album Forever has always been a source of inspiration. During the sessions of automatic writing that I mentioned earlier, I would listen to that album and attempt to ride the beats with my fingertips. Sometimes I need hip hop beats to fuel the words, sometimes I need abstract sounds like Meredith Monk or Sigur Rós, sometimes I need the calm of Erik Satie or Glenn Gould.
BUTLER: Please tell me about the title, a Noam Chomsky quote, and how it spoke to you as the leader for the text, how you came across it?
HIGGS: The Deleuzian in me loathes Chomsky’s grammatical hierarchies. But he is certainly one of those thinkers I see as a productive adversary. If you watch or read the Chomsky/Foucault debate you can see what I mean.
Straight away, I should admit that my main areas of research are experimental literature and critical theory. I am not a linguist nor have I received formal training in the field of linguistics. What knowledge I have acquired on the subject comes from independent inquiry, which is my way of saying that I approach this subject as an armchair enthusiast. To shed some light on my position vis-à-vis generative grammar (i.e. Chomsky) I’ll briefly point out two (of the many) issues I find particularly problematic. First, generative grammar is predicated on the binary assumption of Either/Or: a sentence is either correct or incorrect. To this I would counter with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a rhizomatic grammar predicated on multiplicities engendered by the binary Both/And. I should think this distinction would be particularly appealing to anyone in the creative arts. Either/Or is limiting and creates negation. Both/And is open and
creates affirmation.
Second, the “generative” aspect of generative grammar refers only to the surface structure of a given system, based on the assumed existence of an inalterable deep structure. In essence, what Chomsky’s generative grammar proposes is a finite system of possibilities (again, a limiting approach), which is to say that difference, according to Chomsky, is a superficial attribute. AsDeleuze would argue, difference is not merely cosmetic; difference is the constitutive element of individualized assemblages.
Aside from those two issues, the title just felt right from the beginning because the project for me was about form, about grammar, about syntax, about exploring the interstitial landscape between sense and nonsense. I wanted to see how far I could push a sentence before it broke, before it lost all semantic value—which is something I’m not sure is possible.
BUTLER: Please tell me about one (if any) of the things you have hidden in any one sentence here. A joke you might not have meant to be seen. Please let me see it?
HIGGS: After I read this question, I went back and reread the text to see if such a secret existed. I’m afraid I came up relatively empty. I think this is because I don’t write from myself or from my life, in other words I don’t code reality into my work. I begin with words as things, removed from personal connections of signifier/signified and proceed from there. But now that I’ve written that, I think maybe personal elements seep in: there is a repetition of smoking or attempting to quit smoking, which rings confessional. There is also an overwhelming sadness and loneliness in the text, which I suppose could describe my years in Nebraska (save the companionship of my super cool brother, Matthew). But particular word-level or sentence-level secrets were not encoded purposefully.
BUTLER: How did you get involved with Publishing Genius, and how did it come about that you put Colorless out with them?
HIGGS: I actually learned about Publishing Genius when you published Pretend with them. I remember reading your chapbook and thinking how cool it was—I don’t think I’d read an e-chapbook before then. I went and read all of the other chapbooks Adam had published and loved the hell out of them.
Colorless was/is a section of a novel I have just completed, The Collected Works of Marvin K. Mooney. I knew I wanted to try and get more parts of the novel published before I went looking for a publisher, so I began to toy with the idea of pulling out sections and submitting them as chapbooks.
I went searching for potential places and when I read the Publishing Genius submission guidelines where Adam writes: “What is coherent? Why do we think we understand something while we think something else is nonsense?” I knew it would be the perfect place for Colorless. So I sent it to him and he dug it. We clicked right away. It was a great experience working with Adam. He’s smart, sincere, understanding, and truly invested in promoting innovative literature. BUTLER: Why are chapbooks important? What is it about chapbooks that influenced your perspective of chapbooks or books as an enterprise separate from any other form of printing?
HIGGS: I think chapbooks in general are important because of the function they serve: bringing work to life that doesn’t necessarily fit in the profit-oriented framework of the publishing industrial complex. I like the ethos of chapbooks. They feel anarchic to me.
I think the specific chapbooks that made me go “whoa! chapbooks are awesome!” are the ones that Octopus put out a few years ago to commemorate their eighth issue. The designs were amazing, the artifact itself felt good to hold, and the diversity of poetry was killer.
BUTLER: How do you see the future of electronic texts and the work of ebooks/echapbooks in relation to traditional print distribution?
HIGGS: This is tricky for me because I am in academia. For academics, the internet is considered (at best) a second-class citizen. Internet publications don’t matter, don’t count, and are not considered prestigious by any measure. Academia seems only to care about centers of established credentials, which, at this point in history are predominately in the print medium. As a member of academia I am forced to play by their rules, to publish work in “respectable” journals, if I wish to advance my career.
That said, as a writer I am all about electronic publications. The number of people who read work online far outnumber those who subscribe to literary journals. (This is one big disconnect between academia and “real life”) Also, I believe the prestige aspect will come for electronic publications when the generation of people who grew up on the internet rise to power. As it stands, the establishment is skeptical of the internet like how any old person is skeptical of any newfangled thing.
BUTLER: You also curate an e-museum-esque blog that documents some of the web’s most interesting art/media/texts/oddities/etc. What made you begin this blog, and how do you come across the items you feature, as in: what draws you to the pieces or kinds of pieces that you include on Bright Stupid Confetti? How does BSC influence your writing?
HIGGS: Wow, this question could be its own interview! I’ve been doing BSC for maybe four years now? It is something I look forward to every day, but I’m not sure it influences my writing any more or less than any other aspect of my life.
BUTLER: The response so far to Colorless has been interesting, in that certain people have made a point to express befuddlement with it, in the face of so much other potential texts, and yet many others also have expressed a wonder in that befuddlement. Would you talk about, perhaps, the experience of writing such a challenging text as this one and the way your level of expectation of its reception has met with the actual reception, and perhaps even talk some about the community of writers/readers that seems to have burgeoned among certain strands of the internet?
HIGGS: This is a big and troubling question. Obviously, I wish more people would dig what I’m doing, but I feel like people who respond negatively or who respond with befuddlement do so because of their conditioning. I don’t blame readers as much as I blame Aristotle. He is my chief enemy because he is responsible for establishing the conditions from which contemporary readers approach literature, whether they know it or not. When a reader fails to engage a text, any text, one of the primary reasons is because they have determined the text to be lacking in some aspect of what they believe a text “ought to be.” So at a very basic level, it has to do with assumptions.
Just look at the concepts people use to discuss literature, especially what is called fiction: the necessity of a protagonist/antagonist, the necessity of conflict, the necessity of a beginning, middle, and end, the necessity of unity of time, place and character, the necessity of moderation of excess and deficit, etc. These all come from Aristotle (see: Poetics, Rhetoric, and Nicomachean Ethics). Readers assume a text should contain these elements for no other reason than because Aristotle told them they should (or more likely because a teacher indoctrinated them with these values). My claim is that although these beliefs have become doxa, they are not evidence of truisms nor are they proof of necessary conditions for literature. They are simply outmoded beliefs that need to be reevaluated.
Colorless is an attempt to take up this challenge.
BUTLER: Here’s a funny/unfunny one: why do you write?
HIGGS: I write because I had an amazing high school teacher named Diane Panozzo who encouraged me." - Interview with Blake Butler