Spotlight On…

This is my last Spotlight On… interview. I’m happy it’s with Ben Loory. Ben and I met, briefly, in San Francisco a few weeks back. I liked hearing him read. His stories were tender, moving fairy tales. I like tender, moving, and fairy tales. One of my favorite fairy tales is Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince.” Ben’s stories also affect me at deep levels. I like Ben Loory’s writing. I like Ben Loory.

Enough about I, read this great interview with Ben and check out his fantastic links. Thanks, Ben. Only next time, Ben, the cupcakes? For real, okay?

Writing-wise, where are you now? Where are you going?

At the moment, I’m entering the copy-editing process with my book Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day, which will be out July 26, 2011 (or so the Penguins tell me). I’m also in the middle of a new book about a town which is composed of a bunch of first-person stories (some of which have popped up here and there — in decomP, Quick Fiction, Smokelong Quarterly, soon Keyhole). I’m also writing a screenplay and working on any number of other projects — a memoir, a novel-shaped circus-type-thing, a collection of longer stories, an autobiography in the form of a menu (just occurred to me), a second collection of Nighttime-type stories. I don’t know; I just wake up every day and sit down and see what happens. I don’t like to think of myself as going anywhere; I kinda like being here.

What informs your creative process? How do you keep inspired?

For me, inspiration is internal conflict, and I never have any shortage of that. The danger I face is going too far and flying off into the luminiferous aether. Gotta make sure to hold on and remain aware of the world. Touch things, eat food, look at frogs, etc. And when I do go emotionally dead sometimes, I just lie in bed and read until I bore back to life.

Aside from writing, what hats do you wear? Is it hard to juggle everything?

At the moment, I don’t have any hats; I’m like the opposite of Bartholomew Cubbins. That is to say, all my hats involve writing, so I don’t have to do much juggling. That’s not going to last long, though, unless I sell this screenplay. So let’s all cross our fingers on that. My editor won’t let me re-title my book Harry Potter and the Mysterious Kraken.

In light of your recent story, “The TV”, published in The New Yorker, have your thoughts changed any regarding print versus online publication? What is the future of print publication?

My guess is that pretty soon — like in about fifteen seconds — the whole e-reader thing will be perfected: it’ll look and feel exactly like a book; you’ll be able to turn the pages and write notes in it and everything. The only difference will be it’ll be any book you want; like a pop-up-book of all possible books… And then, pretty soon after they perfect that, they’ll find a way to just beam the shit directly into your brain, so you don’t have move your eyeballs or think about it or anything. And then everyone will finally have read all of William Vollman, and we can go back to peacefully hacking each other to death over who’s got the best-colored daffodil or whatever.

So, to answer your question: I don’t know. I try not to think about business. As for the future, I have enough trouble with the present. I just like writing stories.

Tell us something that most people don’t know about you?

I miss my parrot. She died four years ago. Her name was Isabella. She was an African Grey. She used to make the sound of the phone ringing. And then the sound of the answering machine picking up. And then outgoing message (in my voice). And then the long BEEP. And then an impression of an incoming message, which was always differently-voiced and indistinct. And then, at the end, there’d be one last beep. And then she’d drink a little water.

If you didn’t write, what would your life look like?

I’d be swimming in the Mediterranean, and there’d be a boat nearby with a guy in it playing the tuba. And Scarlett Johansson would be there, and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and some other intelligent people.

Or, I would be a musician. Hopefully, Matt Pike. Writing is great, but there’s nothing like playing music. Nothing in the world.

Or, on the third hand, I would be dead. I try to keep that hand behind my back.

Please tell us your favorite, and why:

a. Musical

That’s a hard one; I’m a big fan of musicals — black and white, Busby Berkeley, Ruby Keeler, the old stuff. But Berkeley musicals always suck except for the sequences he choreographed, so none of them are worth watching in full. I have a DVD that’s just the Berkeley musical numbers, with the offending “dramatic” portions stripped away. That’s probably the best DVD of all time. Well… one of them, anyway.

Here, watch this, and see for yourself:

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg…

As for actual individual musicals, I guess I’d have to go with Bandwagon. There’s this amazing scene where Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse fall in love in a carriage while going through Central Park. They stop the carriage and get out and dance and then get back in and drive on, completely happy. It’s all done without dialogue and is just heartbreakingly beautiful. It’s exactly what a musical should be.

b. Fable/Fairy Tale

“The kites and swans of elden times had the privilege of song. But when they heard the neigh of the horse, they became enchanted by the sound. And so they tried to emulate it, and in doing so, forgot how to sing. The desire for imaginary benefits can lose you very real things.”

– Aesop

I sorta cobbled that “translation” together out of a bunch of other versions I found, so it’s possible it bears little relation to the original. But, whatever, in any case, I love it. I like to say it in my head while I make toast.

c. Movie

Groundhog Day. Is what I say today. Tomorrow, I’ll say Lost Highway. And the day after that, I’ll say His Girl Friday. Or Goodfellas. And then we’ll rotate back.

ALTHOUGH… Last year I went to see a tenth anniversary screening of The Blair Witch Project at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. It was a cast and crew Q&A thing, everyone was there except Eduardo Sanchez (one of the two writer/directors) and the guy who played Mikey (the sound guy), whose wife had had a baby the night before. I should say that I’ve always loved The Blair Witch Project; it’s horror that never looks away. I heard Daniel Myrick (the other writer/director) on NPR one time, on a show all about famous hoaxes. Some guy called in and said that he’d always been a big hiker, but ever since he saw BWP he’d been too scared to go back in the woods, and how did Daniel Myrick feel about that? And Daniel Myrick said he felt great about it. That that was exactly what he wanted. That when he made a horror movie, he wanted to scare people — he wanted to scare the shit out of them, he didn’t want to kind of scare them a little, he wanted to fucking terrify them. And I loved that; I love horror movies and always have, but it always disappoints me when they end up patting you on the head and telling you everything’s okay, that the world’s understandable and virtue is rewarded and all that kind of crap. They pull back the curtain on the Lovecraftian emptiness and then hand you a teddy bear and a lollipop and tell you it was all a joke. But The Blair Witch Project never does that. It’s just a well you fall into and keep falling into forever until the movie ends and you’re in reality and maybe still falling and what are you going to do about that, huh?

And on top of that, the dialog is amazing.

Oh, which brings me to the point.

Right, so. At that screening, they talked about the way they made the movie. Myrick and Sanchez came up with the idea: team of three documentary filmmakers go into the woods to make a movie about a witch and end up disappearing and this is their film, which was supposedly later discovered under a rock or something. Did they write a script? No. Dialogue? No. They had a basic idea of how the story went. They went and hired three actors, based on their intelligence, senses of humor, verbal and improvisational abilities and chemistry. Then they taught those three actors how to be documentary filmmakers. They taught the guy “playing” the camera guy How To Be a Cinematographer; “the sound guy” how to do sound, the director how to direct (and work a video camera). Then they took them out into the woods and pointed them in a direction and told them to go make a documentary about the Blair Witch. And the “actors” went off and not only improvised EVERY SCENE, but directed, shot, and ran the sound, ON EVERY SCENE, completely alone, no other crew. The directors were never on the set, no one was. At the end of each night of shooting (it was, I think, a two-week shoot), the actors would pitch their tent and eat their food they brought (there were no trailers or bathrooms or “set times” or anything), and they’d stick the film and video they shot in a basket and leave it outside the tent, and a PA would sneak in and grab it from the basket in the night and take it to the directors, and the directors would go and watch it during the night, and make notes about things they thought should be added, or shot again, or stuff like that, and those notes would be ferried back and left in the basket, and the “actors” would read them in the morning before that day’s shoot.

I could go on about this forever; it’s just fascinating to me. But I don’t have a point, other than that it’s fascinating, and you can just go read about it somewhere else. But let’s just say that’s my favorite movie to think about.

Meanwhile, here’s His Girl Friday:

d. Painting

I’m a big fan of Yves Tanguy. I love those weird shapes in the Twilight Zone-y landscapes. They seem to express something important to me about the strange and miraculous nature of life. A “what the fuck is this place, anyway?” kind of thing, similar to how I feel when I see footage of paramecium bobbing around and touching each other with their cilia. Paramecia? Ciliae? Whatever.

(Emotionally convincing incomprehensibilities are the truest representations of reality. Is I guess what I’m saying.)

On the other hand, there’s Van Gogh’s Mulberry Tree.

Though really, that’s the same hand. Only the hand just burst into flame and is suddenly speaking seven thousand languages.

e. Place

“Bed is my friend.”

– Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

Please do a five minute free-write with the word “cupcakes” and share.

I made you these cupcakes. I hope you like them. They’re invisible and don’t exist.

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Ben Loory lives in Los Angeles, in a house on top of a hill. He was born in Dover, New Jersey and is a graduate of Harvard College. In November 2008, his story “Photographs” was a finalist in the Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers Contest. Since then his fables and tales have appeared online and in print in journals and magazines of all shapes and sizes, ranging from literary to fantasy, humor to horror, young adult to SF to sports-related and more.