G. S. Carnivals
09-30-2009, 05:07 AM
TLO Member Interview: Joel
Conducted by Phillip Stecco
Joel Lane is a novelist, short fiction writer, and poet. He lives in Birmingham, England.
1) How did you first encounter the work of Thomas Ligotti?
In early 1980s small press magazines: I read ‘Drink to Me Only with Labyrinthine Eyes’ in Nyctalops, then ‘Les Fleurs’ and ‘The Consolations of Horror’ in Dark Horizons. It was clear that Ligotti was a writer with issues, as well as back issues. He knew the genre, and he had a bitter emotional agenda of his own.
2) What are some of your favorite works by Mr. Ligotti?
‘Teatro Grottesco’ is a particular favourite, because it links visionary imagination to a very real and painful theme. The same is true of ‘The Bungalow House’ and ‘The Clown Puppet’. That particular batch of Ligotti stories from the mid-nineties really impressed me.
Before that, I liked some of the bleak, unsettling early stories like ‘Dr Locrian’s Asylum’ and ‘The Greater Festival of Masks’. For a while I felt Ligotti was getting too abstract and philosophical: the stories felt too much like essays. But in recent years I think he’s found his voice again. The Quine Organisation stories and some of the other stories in Teatro Grottesco are really powerful uses of weird fiction to explore the pathologies of the modern world.
I appreciate Ligotti as a social commentator who deals with corruption, injustice and deceit; and as a psychological writer who deals with madness, illness and despair. At his best, Ligotti is a true humanist.
3) What other writers do you enjoy reading?
Within supernatural horror, which I read obsessively, my favourites include Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Machen, Walter de la Mare, John Metcalfe, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, Fritz Leiber, Harlan Ellison, Robert Aickman, Ramsey Campbell, M. John Harrison, Lisa Tuttle, Nicholas Royle and Conrad Williams.
In other fields, I appreciate the noir fiction of Cornell Woolrich, Dashiell Hammett and David Goodis; the poetry of Robert Browning, Rainer Maria Rilke, T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Edwin Morgan, Allen Ginsberg, Thom Gunn, Tony Harrison, Ian McMillan and Carol Ann Duffy; the existentialist novels of Jean Genet and Albert Camus; and the non-fiction writings of Michel Foucault and Theodor Adorno.
4) Is your own writing regimen lazy or disciplined?
Both and neither. It’s obsessional and inuitive, so I can be very driven, but I have no business plan. I work hard at writing and rarely have trouble getting started. I do rely on ‘inspiration’ rather than conscious planning, but fortunately my unconscious rarely goes on strike.
5) Has success nudged you in directions you'd rather avoid?
I know not this ‘success’ of which thou speakest, Willis.
Gaining a bit of recognition within the weird fiction small press provides a temptation to include yourself in a particular ‘school’ or clique, and that needs to be resisted. I read widely in the genre and don’t write with any specific peer group in mind – but reviewers often assume I belong to a particular ‘tendency’ and react accordingly. For example, a review of The Lost District claimed that it was a formless modernist work with no connection to the weird fiction tradition; while another reviewer claimed The Witnesses Are Gone to be a safe, traditional exercise in familiar pulp horror. Both reviews were negative, but I console myself by thinking that they can’t both be accurate. That kind of narrow product branding needs to be resisted, I think, unless you genuinely want to go there.
6) Do you have any favorite singers or musicians?
Where do I start? Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen (especially his acoustic albums), Joy Division, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Cure, Richard Thompson, Nick Drake, Sandy Denny, early Fairport Convention, Show of Hands, June Tabor, John Coltrane, Nico, Sonny Boy Williamson (the second), Nine Below Zero (post-reunion), REM (mid-period), Scott Walker, Nick Cave, Tindersticks…
7) Do you have any favorite artists in the visual media?
Van Gogh and early Picasso – also the weird illustrations of Virgil Finlay and Harry Clarke.
8) What are some of your favorite movies?
Running On Empty, Round Midnight, Kanal, The Tenant, Carnival of Souls, The Innocents, The Devil’s Backbone, Kes, The Crying Game, The Night of the Hunter.
9) Do you watch television?
Not often – maybe Newsnight and the odd film or music programme. I used to like Buffy and Angel, but somehow TV has lost its appeal for me.
10) What foods do you enjoy eating?
Pasta sauces, casseroles, curries, fish and seafood, cheese, mushrooms, yoghurt, muesli, tangerines, blueberries; whisky, vodka, coffee, chilled water.
11) Do you have any odd hobbies or collecting fetishes?
Absolutely not. Just because they never found the perpetrator doesn’t mean I was involved in any way, shape or form – human or otherwise.
12) What recreational activities do you enjoy?
Political activism, live music, long walks (in ruined urban locations), making awful puns.
13) Life?
The real challenge of life is to remain engaged and responsive, not just withdraw into your own safe world. I used to dream of being a hedgehog in a burrow. I have to make myself engage with the outside world, but I rarely regret it. That’s what life’s really about. If the world is ####, change the cistern.
Sorry. I did warn you about the puns.
14) Death?
Death is the way life needs to end, and therefore in principle is not something to fear. But equally, to entice it or to grab it prematurely seems to me quite wrong. One of my characters manages to step back from suicide by imagining his sister having to go through his address-book and phone all his friends.
If you can face death knowing you have done your best and have nothing to be ashamed of, then it may truly be a release – but if you face it with all kinds of unfinished business chasing you, it will only be an escape. And no, I don’t believe in an afterlife – I can’t imagine anything worse.
15) Work?
I’ve worked in non-fiction publishing and journalism most of my life. It’s good for me to have an external focus – keeps me aware of other people’s needs and experience. And while I have serious issues with corporate culture and the worship of profit, I think work can bring you valuable perspective – in particular by making you aware of the need for workers to organise in defence of their rights. The alienation of people from their labour destroys them as human beings – as the works of Marx and Ligotti well demonstrate.
16) Do you have any interesting work anecdotes to relate?
Nothing suitable for the public domain. See my stories ‘Beyond the River’ and ‘Among the Dead’ for some echoes of my experience in the corporate purgatory.
17) What is your earliest childhood memory?
Walking along a wall outside our flat in Leicester. I was three.
18) What is your fondest childhood memory?
Reading Tove Jannson’s picture book Who Will Comfort Toffle? My first experience of how a story can capture a negative emotion (in that case, loneliness) and then resolve it.
19) Do you have a special plan for this world?
Not personally, no. We need to shake off our little individual schemes and work together towards a shared vision. There isn’t a future otherwise. Trotsky’s ‘transitional method’ isn’t a special plan, but it’s a programme for worldwide revolutionary change that is realistic and genuine and offers a way forward for humanity.
20) What else should we know about you?
I have a third novel coming out soon, called Midnight Blue. It’s about folk music, loss, radical politics, ghosts and madness.
Conducted by Phillip Stecco
Joel Lane is a novelist, short fiction writer, and poet. He lives in Birmingham, England.
1) How did you first encounter the work of Thomas Ligotti?
In early 1980s small press magazines: I read ‘Drink to Me Only with Labyrinthine Eyes’ in Nyctalops, then ‘Les Fleurs’ and ‘The Consolations of Horror’ in Dark Horizons. It was clear that Ligotti was a writer with issues, as well as back issues. He knew the genre, and he had a bitter emotional agenda of his own.
2) What are some of your favorite works by Mr. Ligotti?
‘Teatro Grottesco’ is a particular favourite, because it links visionary imagination to a very real and painful theme. The same is true of ‘The Bungalow House’ and ‘The Clown Puppet’. That particular batch of Ligotti stories from the mid-nineties really impressed me.
Before that, I liked some of the bleak, unsettling early stories like ‘Dr Locrian’s Asylum’ and ‘The Greater Festival of Masks’. For a while I felt Ligotti was getting too abstract and philosophical: the stories felt too much like essays. But in recent years I think he’s found his voice again. The Quine Organisation stories and some of the other stories in Teatro Grottesco are really powerful uses of weird fiction to explore the pathologies of the modern world.
I appreciate Ligotti as a social commentator who deals with corruption, injustice and deceit; and as a psychological writer who deals with madness, illness and despair. At his best, Ligotti is a true humanist.
3) What other writers do you enjoy reading?
Within supernatural horror, which I read obsessively, my favourites include Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Machen, Walter de la Mare, John Metcalfe, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, Fritz Leiber, Harlan Ellison, Robert Aickman, Ramsey Campbell, M. John Harrison, Lisa Tuttle, Nicholas Royle and Conrad Williams.
In other fields, I appreciate the noir fiction of Cornell Woolrich, Dashiell Hammett and David Goodis; the poetry of Robert Browning, Rainer Maria Rilke, T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Edwin Morgan, Allen Ginsberg, Thom Gunn, Tony Harrison, Ian McMillan and Carol Ann Duffy; the existentialist novels of Jean Genet and Albert Camus; and the non-fiction writings of Michel Foucault and Theodor Adorno.
4) Is your own writing regimen lazy or disciplined?
Both and neither. It’s obsessional and inuitive, so I can be very driven, but I have no business plan. I work hard at writing and rarely have trouble getting started. I do rely on ‘inspiration’ rather than conscious planning, but fortunately my unconscious rarely goes on strike.
5) Has success nudged you in directions you'd rather avoid?
I know not this ‘success’ of which thou speakest, Willis.
Gaining a bit of recognition within the weird fiction small press provides a temptation to include yourself in a particular ‘school’ or clique, and that needs to be resisted. I read widely in the genre and don’t write with any specific peer group in mind – but reviewers often assume I belong to a particular ‘tendency’ and react accordingly. For example, a review of The Lost District claimed that it was a formless modernist work with no connection to the weird fiction tradition; while another reviewer claimed The Witnesses Are Gone to be a safe, traditional exercise in familiar pulp horror. Both reviews were negative, but I console myself by thinking that they can’t both be accurate. That kind of narrow product branding needs to be resisted, I think, unless you genuinely want to go there.
6) Do you have any favorite singers or musicians?
Where do I start? Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen (especially his acoustic albums), Joy Division, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Cure, Richard Thompson, Nick Drake, Sandy Denny, early Fairport Convention, Show of Hands, June Tabor, John Coltrane, Nico, Sonny Boy Williamson (the second), Nine Below Zero (post-reunion), REM (mid-period), Scott Walker, Nick Cave, Tindersticks…
7) Do you have any favorite artists in the visual media?
Van Gogh and early Picasso – also the weird illustrations of Virgil Finlay and Harry Clarke.
8) What are some of your favorite movies?
Running On Empty, Round Midnight, Kanal, The Tenant, Carnival of Souls, The Innocents, The Devil’s Backbone, Kes, The Crying Game, The Night of the Hunter.
9) Do you watch television?
Not often – maybe Newsnight and the odd film or music programme. I used to like Buffy and Angel, but somehow TV has lost its appeal for me.
10) What foods do you enjoy eating?
Pasta sauces, casseroles, curries, fish and seafood, cheese, mushrooms, yoghurt, muesli, tangerines, blueberries; whisky, vodka, coffee, chilled water.
11) Do you have any odd hobbies or collecting fetishes?
Absolutely not. Just because they never found the perpetrator doesn’t mean I was involved in any way, shape or form – human or otherwise.
12) What recreational activities do you enjoy?
Political activism, live music, long walks (in ruined urban locations), making awful puns.
13) Life?
The real challenge of life is to remain engaged and responsive, not just withdraw into your own safe world. I used to dream of being a hedgehog in a burrow. I have to make myself engage with the outside world, but I rarely regret it. That’s what life’s really about. If the world is ####, change the cistern.
Sorry. I did warn you about the puns.
14) Death?
Death is the way life needs to end, and therefore in principle is not something to fear. But equally, to entice it or to grab it prematurely seems to me quite wrong. One of my characters manages to step back from suicide by imagining his sister having to go through his address-book and phone all his friends.
If you can face death knowing you have done your best and have nothing to be ashamed of, then it may truly be a release – but if you face it with all kinds of unfinished business chasing you, it will only be an escape. And no, I don’t believe in an afterlife – I can’t imagine anything worse.
15) Work?
I’ve worked in non-fiction publishing and journalism most of my life. It’s good for me to have an external focus – keeps me aware of other people’s needs and experience. And while I have serious issues with corporate culture and the worship of profit, I think work can bring you valuable perspective – in particular by making you aware of the need for workers to organise in defence of their rights. The alienation of people from their labour destroys them as human beings – as the works of Marx and Ligotti well demonstrate.
16) Do you have any interesting work anecdotes to relate?
Nothing suitable for the public domain. See my stories ‘Beyond the River’ and ‘Among the Dead’ for some echoes of my experience in the corporate purgatory.
17) What is your earliest childhood memory?
Walking along a wall outside our flat in Leicester. I was three.
18) What is your fondest childhood memory?
Reading Tove Jannson’s picture book Who Will Comfort Toffle? My first experience of how a story can capture a negative emotion (in that case, loneliness) and then resolve it.
19) Do you have a special plan for this world?
Not personally, no. We need to shake off our little individual schemes and work together towards a shared vision. There isn’t a future otherwise. Trotsky’s ‘transitional method’ isn’t a special plan, but it’s a programme for worldwide revolutionary change that is realistic and genuine and offers a way forward for humanity.
20) What else should we know about you?
I have a third novel coming out soon, called Midnight Blue. It’s about folk music, loss, radical politics, ghosts and madness.