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When V. Vale decided to chronicle the emerging punk scene in a magazine called Search and Destroy, his first two backers were Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg. After a two-year run, he turned his attentions in 1980 to publishing books under the RE/search imprint. Going with the old axiom that freedom of the press was a function of who owned one, he became a proficient typesetter and would maintain a hands-on relationship with the technology of printing for 30 years. His books have chronicled subcultures (modern primitives, industrial culture, the world of zines, oddball music and strange films), as well as featuring underappreciated authors (J.G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, Octave Mirbeau, Charles Willeford). He has been a literary fixture in San Francisco since he quit the band Blue Cheer to pursue a career in letters. Here now in an e-mail exchange we see what is capturing his attention as we start the second decade of the 21st century.
Artillery: What phenomenon currently most captures your imagination?
V. VALE: For decades the work of Fernando Pessoa had remained in my library untouched like a stillborn infant. Yesterday, by a chance encounter, I became awakened to Pessoa and his concept of heteronyms. How had I missed this fantastic inspirational idea? It's really quite simple: You create complete identities for different writing genres such as fantasy, science fiction, nonfiction, futuristic fiction, gothic fiction, mystery fiction, poetry, criticism, essays, etc. What this means is, under your secret pen name, you are free to write **with no inhibitions whatsoever** because no one will know that "you" wrote it (unless you tell someone, of course). You can do this for drawing, art, film, music — any genre expressing creativity. It seemed like a massive territory of creative "freedom" was opened up, because "inhibition" is probably the chief enemy of a writer. Everybody (maybe) wants to tell the truth when they write, just because it's easier — the trouble is, there are so many types of "truth" within just a single person. And everybody changes day by day, if not hour by hour or minute by minute or second by second ... kind of. So, today's "truth" may contradict yesterday's, etc.
There's no excuse for NOT writing cutting-edge material now! (Unless, of course, you're TRYING TOO HARD to write "edgy"/"gross-out"/"over-the-top" content.) But, under your own "heteronym," you can now be free from pretentiousness and inhibited, self-censored, pedantic, sophistry-soaked, platitudinous penmanship. (Well, at least, that's the hope.)
It seems like it would be great fun to try to write like ____ (Oscar Wilde, John Waters, put in any name here of somebody you admire).
And you can even "channel" dead people, like Edgar Allan Poe or Baudelaire (Twenty Prose Poems comes immediately to mind) or Lautreamont — that might be harder or more convoluted.
I've always liked the idea of experimenting with "mediumship," because some people historically even adopt totally distinct personas and voices as they become "mediums" channeling other identities. Early in my life I was fascinated as I watched African-American women become "possessed" and start yelling out "Jesus!" and then speaking in tongues and sometimes rolling around almost in trance-state "fits" on the floor. When the "possession" ended, they would revive, exhausted, and act subdued and quiet, as though they had returned from a long and arduous journey. This was when I was about age 5 or 6 and living with an African-American family as a temporary foster child in Whittier, California. The family would drive to Long Beach to attend the services of a very charismatic black preacher named Pastor Robertson.
At this same time I heard old, heavy 78 rpm blues records on a wind-up Victrola and was fascinated by the "mutation" of the American English language — blues music is kind of "revolutionary" to someone who had just been exposed to "regular" symphonic or popular music that is characterized by unvarying rhythms and perfect pitch and harmony — no bent notes, no dissonance, no noise, no hoarse voicings, no erotic moans, no Howlin' Wolf-style coyote calls, Ray Charles falsettos, etc.
So, you can invent heteronyms that cross gender, race, persona, personality, nationality, era, decade ... the list goes on and on. A much bigger creative universe is now possible, just by a simple "new" idea: HETERONYMS. Or is it "HETERONOMY"? That's the IDEA of today, for me, at least. Tomorrow might be different.
Is there still anything "underground" in the "wired" and "connected" world?
The Internet is as huge and vast and complex as the world's sewer system — trillions of words and images and videos and music recordings (and commercials and spam, of course, being 97 percent of the content) to troll through. There's plenty that's "underground" — but WHO CAN FIND IT? And, just because something/someone is "underground" — are they PROPHETIC? TIME is the ONLY STANDARD to judge by. Will an artist's or movement's or author's work be influential/relevant/inspiring a hundred years from now? Fifty years from now? Just thirty years from now?
RE/Search #6/7: Industrial Culture Handbook (1983) contained one of the first usages of the term "INFORMATION OVERLOAD" and that condition, INFORMATION OVERLOAD, has long since become the status quo of the post-Internet world. There are right now hundreds of tiny niche "movements" (every "band" contains its own "movement" or may be part of a larger movement like, for example, "punk squatters"). The rise of the kitchen/living room/backyard "concert" (no permits needed) has given thousands of traveling musicians an audience, just as the Macintosh "Garage Band" software has given millions of musicians a free or inexpensive recording studio. And the Internet has given everybody a huge global audience — at least potentially. Granted, most people are "giving" their art away, but ... look at it as thousands of "undergrounds" existing and proliferating contiguously, constantly morphing and renewing, synergistically (at best) multiplying virally — like that image in a Sherwin-Williams advertisement of paint covering the earth. We're drowning in free music, imagery, words and video — more than anyone could experience in a thousand lifetimes. The real question again is, WHAT IS PROPHETIC? ■
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