“It’s spelled Motherfuckers.”—An Interview with Rachel Kushner

(Gabriele Basilico, Contact, 1984)

I was surprised when my friend Rachel Kushner told me that, having just finished her final edit for her first novel, Telex for Cuba, she was excited to start work on a second novel which would be set in the New York art world of the early 1970’s. I remember being shocked that she had already figured it all out and knew where she was going next… usually, when I finish a lot of work, I just want to stay in bed and sleep for a year. And so when I heard from her sometime later that she would be travelling to Italy to do research for the novel, I just assumed she had changed her mind and decided instead to write about Italian revolutionaries.

When I started reading The Flamethowers I was humbled and embarrassed to realize that I had underestimated her commitments. Set in both New York and Italy, parts of the book reminded me of social experiences in the art world so acutely I cringed with painful recognition as I read.

Ten years after Rachel interviewed me for the then very new Believer, I had the pleasure of driving with her across town to Santa Monica City College where we wandered the campus looking for KCRW. Far from my Eagle Rock studio where the first conversation took place with a cassette recorder, pen and paper, we found ourselves lost looking for the underground recording studios. We asked several students where it might be, and eventually, in a black room with headsets on, we had a conversation about The Flamethrowers

—Laura Owens

I. A LACK OF AGENCY

THE BELIEVER: What I thought was interesting about the book is the lack of agency all these women have in trying to negotiate their world, and like the fact that this woman––who is this incredible motorcycle racer––goes to a dinner party and barely says a word the entire night––you hear her thoughts, but you don’t hear her voice.

RACHEL KUSHNER: Sure—maybe it’ll be the case that some people will be disappointed by her so-called lack of agency, and my rebuttal would be that maybe their those peoples’ expectations have to do with literary conventions of heroism more than with real life situations that young women face. Or that they expect of my narrator a strength they think they possess, but the thing is, she doesn’t have it. She has her own strength, which isn’t about being the loudest at the dinner table. I was trying to render something that felt real to me for a very young person in New York City, meeting artists for the first time. The tone of the scene, also, is meant to fit the 1970’s, and I think my impression of that time––despite there having been all these amazing women artists, like Yvonne Rainer, Martha Rosler, Lynda Benglis, Mary Heilmann—is that the Minimalists were still totally ascendant. It was a very male world. And not just male, but macho, in a sort of clichéd way. Even in the 1990s when I was young and living in New York, I felt like I didn’t really have a right to speak until I had some purchase on the discourse and could sound smart.

BLVR: Right.

RK: And if I didn’t know a reference that somebody brought up––to interrupt their story, to ask them to explain the reference, was a way to let them know that they shouldn’t pursue anything with you beyond acquaintanceship. So maybe I was channeling a little bit of that. I hate to say it, but some men do talk a lot. I have been to art world dinner parties where there are a few people who are self-authorized storytellers, and they hold court, and they assume what they are talking about is interesting to everyone else, and there is a kind of tacit social pact that it is interesting, and that they will be allowed to speak until they’re finished. The late, great Walter Hopps was kind of like that, but he had the most terrific stories. And everyone would just listen. His protégé Anne Doran wrote to me and said she felt like Walter would have loved my book, which was, like, the best compliment. Maybe the portrayal of this quiet young woman and a bunch of silverbacks holding court would have seemed realistic to Walter.

But there were some other formal reasons why I had this scene that you’re talking about––the dinner party––narrated in the first person by a young woman, but also crowded out by other voices. Bolaño does this thing in The Savage Detectives where the narration is all being told by one person but it skitters among different voices of people who are telling stories in the book, just in dialogue, and I was inspired by that. I wasn’t consciously emulating him, but I think I was given a green light by that novel. So I let the male artists at the dinner table just go on and on, and I thought, wouldn’t it be funny if one of them holds court not by talking but by forcing everybody else to listen to a reel-to-reel tape recording of his voice?

BLVR: That was one of my favorite moments in the book. It took this idea of the monologue to another level that became incredibly comical and tragic and pathetic at the same time.

RK: Oh thanks. That was the idea, I guess. But I relate to him in a way, too. Once you start, I mean attempting to actually say something, where do you stop?

BLVR: I’m remembering seeing you read at the Hammer, and you read an essay based on a motorcycle race that I believe you partook in?

RK: That’s right––you came to that reading? It was like twelve years ago.

BLVR: Yeah. And it was really interesting that this character, who goes unnamed throughout the book––the main character––has this history with racing. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

RK: I had written an essay about an illegal road race on Highway 1 in Mexico, where you span the entire peninsula of Baja in one day. You have to average over 100 miles per hour to do that. And I was doing pretty well in that race, but I crashed halfway down when somebody pulled onto the road right in front of me, and there was a truck coming from the other direction, so I had no choice but to ride off into the soft sand on the side of the highway, which was incredibly lucky, because it was either cliffs or rocks on either side, all the way down, except in this one place. I was going 140 mph. There were people on the side of the road who had broken down, which was why this person had pulled back on the highway. So there’s proof, witnesses to the speed I was going … I was very lucky. I was basically fine.

BLVR: The character in the book also crashes––racing her boyfriend’s family’s fancy motorbike.

RK: She’s riding an Italian motorcycle––it’s a fictional make called Moto Valera. She’s on the Bonneville Salt Flats, where they do land speed trials. I’ve never done that. But when I was a kid I used to drive through the area, and I was always fascinated by it. We would sometimes stop there––my dad is interested in motorcycles and cars––and then I took a trip there by myself when I was writing the book, to watch the land speed trials and take in the environment of that scene. I was interested in having a character who was doing a land art project, like artists were doing in the early 70’s. Except for Nancy Holt and a couple of others, it was mostly men who were doing these projects. I had seen a photograph of huge arcing motorcycle tracks Michael Heizer had made at El Mirage Dry Lake in California. I thought, what if it’s my character who made these? Laura’s phone is buzzing. [laughs]. Who’s calling you?

BLVR: The Democrats. The Democrats literally call me four times a day.

RK: I forgot all about the Democrats.

BLVR: They still need money.

RK: At least it wasn’t the Republicans.

II. POCKET CUNTS

BLVR: I’m going to read one of my favorite little passages in the book that I thought was such a beautiful image that sort of illustrates this problematic thing that happens with women in the art world. It’s this character Lonzi who’s––can you describe Lonzi?

RK: Yeah, he’s a fictionalized futurist of sorts. He’s a little bit Marinetti, but he’s not Marinetti. He’s the leader of this avant-garde little gang in Rome around 1910, and they ride motorcycles and romanticize machinery, speed, war, violence, the future. But I just want to say one thing that doesn’t pertain to who he is in the novel: I named him after the radical and great Italian feminist Carla Lonzi, who wrote We Spit on Hegel. He has contempt for women but he invokes a really cool one every time someone says his name.

BLVR: Awesome. Okay, here’s the quote, “Women will be pocket cunts,” Lonzi said. “Ideal for battle, for a light infantryman. Transportable. Backpackable. And silent. You take a break from machine gunning, slip them over your member, love them totally, and they don’t say a word.”

RK: I wrote that?

BLVR: It’s amazing. I don’t know why the image of pocket cunt––just the sound of the words together, I think is totally amazing. Then there’s another moment where you talk about this man who actually has a hole in his pocket that he’s fingering, and he can’t find change to buy his girlfriend a hamburger in Mexico, and it’s sort of this illustration of how she thinks he’s so pathetic that he can’t even buy her a hamburger. I thought that was really interesting.

RK: Wow, yeah, I’m trying to link them through the value of the pocket. The second character you bring up is in the 1960’s––Burdmoore Model, who is a member of this anarchist street gang. There’s a warrant out for his arrest, so he flees to Mexico with his girlfriend, Nadine. They live in great deprivation—everybody gets rashes and fevers and bitten by fire ants. Then they make it to the border and are going to a McDonald’s and she’s like, ready for a hot meal. His wallet has wiggled through a hole in his pocket. He’s unable to buy her a hamburger. From her perspective, it is a massive and profound failing on the part of a man. If they’re going to play gender roles, then she needs to be provided for. But he couldn’t even provide her this most fundamental thing, a McDonald’s hamburger. I guess I was thinking of the misogyny in the anarchist gang in the novel: the women make fliers, mop the floor, or strip down. The men load weapons and talk up a big game.

BLVR: There’s a lot of twinning or doubling going on between the two stories: the Italian narrative and the New York narrative. There’s an insurgency happening in New York with the anarchist street gang, the Motherfuckers… How is it spelled, because it’s not––

RK: It’s spelled Motherfuckers.

BLVR: One of the main leaders, his name is Fah-Q?

RK: Yeah. His full name is Fah-Q Motherfucker.

BLVR: Fah-Q––that’s beautiful. So there’s an insurgency happening both with the Motherfuckers in New York and this group in Rome which is based on the student movements. Were you conscious of this doubling?

RK: I guess I was. It would be naïve to say I wasn’t. But the Motherfuckers were earlier—the late-1960s, and when I immersed myself in each world to write about it, I was only thinking about that discrete group, time, context, and not about manipulating any elements in order to produce parallels or emphasize differences. There were other doublings that I was aware of more pointedly. The blackout in New York in 1977, which was considered the “bad” blackout because people looted their own neighborhood shops and so forth, as compared with the “good” blackout of 1965 when everybody behaved and was genteel and they left businesses intact. The blackout of ’77 coincides in time with political actions in Italy that almost tore the country apart, and I thought of them as something like fraternal twins, although it wasn’t at all clear to me what they shared.

I was thinking about this march in Rome on a real day around which I constructed a chapter––March 12, 1977––an apotheosis of an era when people in Rome were taking it upon themselves to determine what they were going to pay for rent, electricity, public transportation, movies. I was thinking about that, and about the blackout, and I didn’t want to over-connect the two phenomena, but I felt that if I wrote about both maybe some secret coherence would reveal itself to me––or that it wouldn’t, but simply by putting them in one novel I would suggest to the reader that there was some kind of resonance between them.

III. BOXES WITHIN BOXES

BLVR: You’ve written about art for a really long time, and been a part of the contemporary art world through knowing artists, and writing in Artforum, and writing in catalogue essays, and various––

RK: Yeah, I guess that’s true.

BLVR: Do you feel like it gave you some permission to write about this scene because you have first hand experience?

RK: Probably yes? A lot of my friends—as you know, being one of them—are artists. I feel like I know it as a social world and a discourse, so yes, I probably self-permitted. I felt like I should do it, in fact, which is a bit egotistical. But so often when novelists try to do a scene that deals with the art world, if they get the smallest thing wrong, the whole thing––the whole ship sinks. You have to know the codes. But also I think people outside it have these misconceptions about the art world, and even a kind of hostility, so they try to do a sendup or a takedown and that’s even worse. To do that, you better know the milieu inside and out.

I’m familiar enough that it’s unlikely I’m going to screw up basic details. And my experience with artists probably inspired a lot of the dialogue in my book, if not directly, in a synthesized way. Which is how I like to write, not with specific real life people in mind, but drawing from out of the unconscious these characters who are made from some deep metabolic understanding of certain kinds of personalities. Everything in the novel has to manifest organically as I write it.

But I walled off a lot of art history and art theory and didn’t use any of that really at all. I felt my characters, some of them, knew it, and that was probably necessary that they know it, but I was certain that describing art and ideas about it would injure or even kill my novel. I kept all that off-screen. The reader knows they are artists but I wasn’t going to give long descriptions of what they make or what they think about what they make. I just think that doesn’t work in novels. It comes off as precious; everybody knows the fictional works are fake, and being “made” by the author. I have almost no descriptions of artworks. I tried to keep the actual presence of art in the background.

BLVR: I’m a painter, and sometimes I think about paintings within paintings, and something I really noticed in this book was how many stories within the novel there are. There’s this amazing story of a meteorite crashing into a woman’s home, and probably several others that I’m not remembering right now. You seamlessly weave together these beautiful little stories.

RK: Oh thanks. Well, I love it when you have done that, put paintings inside paintings. I mean, even as a child if there was a children’s book with paintings on the wall inside the image––like in Goodnight Moon—I always felt entranced, like I was seeing something more, a surplus of viewing that was not being controlled for presentation: as if the pictures inside the picture were “real” views, less authorized, because incidental. I guess that’s part of the playfulness when you, Laura, paint paintings inside of paintings—it suggests access to a more insightful view if you can see inside the picture something that wasn’t drawn by the hand of the picture maker. Of course it was drawn by the artist, but there’s the implication that it wasn’t. That the artist is revealing this other thing she did not draw.

BLVR: Yeah.

RK: Of course with your paintings, each one of those paintings is rendered in a slightly different style, and they have different frames, right? So each one of them is this little view into another landscape or space, and it’s sort of a joke. It’s very playful. Perhaps in a similar way, but inside the script of language, the constant talking of human beings, these smaller vignettes began to take form as I wrote. Eventually I realized that they pertained in some way to the structure, that they were like “holes” or “views” from inside the narration, which is first-person, and that the vignettes could incorporate all kinds of life that the narrator herself is not part of, has no access to. Part of my own education as a young person in the art world was listening to people be the raconteur. I wanted the reader to share the narrator’s experience of being the listener. Formally it was a nice challenge to me to see how much I could get away with before the reader goes––wait a minute, who is the narrator of this novel again? In one instance, late in the book, there are I think thirty pages basically that are all dialogue––one character is talking. And as you pointed out, there’s the photograph from Time magazine of the woman hit by the meteorite, and the narrator has a long rumination about her.

BLVR: The housewife.

RK: Yeah, and it’s funny because there really was a woman––sometime in the early-1950’s––who was hit by a meteorite, and I’ve seen a picture of it, but it wasn’t at all like I described it. I thought I’d seen a photograph of this woman when I was a child, and I assumed it must have taken place in the 70’s. I remembered it being the cover of a magazine, and the woman was sitting at her kitchen table, pulling down her stretch pants to show the bruise on her hip. As I wrote, I tried to recreate what it looked like in my mind, the look on her face, and then I got to this idea that it could make a person incredibly proud to have been hit by a meteorite. I mean, what are the chances? For me, an image—it doesn’t have to be a visual image, sometimes it’s a phrase, or an idea––that’s a way to start something. The image is surfacing for some reason. I’d been thinking about that photo since I was a child. Now you can find out everything because of the Google, and after I wrote the scene I looked it up––

BLVR: The Google?

RK: Yeah, and so the photograph in actual fact was black-and-white, not color, despite my having remembered it in color. And I had pictured the woman being kind of plump and comely, with a headscarf, sitting at a western-style kitchen table. I mean, maybe I was confusing it with the cover art of a Wanda Jackson record or something … because I was waaay off, which is fine. The photo was actually very grainy, and it was of a person looking half-alive and totally traumatized, lying in a hospital bed. So it really had nothing to do with my own riff about it. Except for the bruise. I had the bruise right.

BLVR: My brain’s going off on this sort of universal scene of domestic violence––it’s like she’s in her home, and she’s hit…

RK: Hmm, yes, I see what you mean. Being hit—perhaps one is ‘chosen’ for that, in a similarly complicated way. I didn’t think about the meteorite in terms of domestic violence, but rather, in terms of those two words: It’s domestic, and it’s violent. The impersonal violence of nature isn’t something we’ve really accepted.

Laura Owens is an artist who lives in Los Angeles and recently completed “12 paintings” at 356 south mission road.

THE AGE OF CELEBRITY SEX TAPES AND EXECUTION TAPES: AN INTERVIEW

In If You Won’t Read, Then Why Should I Write? (Penny-Ante Editions) Jarrett Kobek uses transcriptions of celebrity sex tapes to trace a narrative through decadent, post-internet celebrity in America. Beginning with Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s 1998 honeymoon tape, fragments of amusingly vapid dialogue are juxtaposed with the celebrity’s criminal history (on inlaid black strips of paper) to sketch an era in which entertainment overrides justice, and a life without consequence is the norm for a privileged few. Kobek is the author of two previous books. We spoke over Skype. – Matthew O’Shannessy

THE BELIEVER: To start off with, why did you get interested in celebrity sex tapes?

JARETT KOBEK: There’s probably a twofold answer to that. The first is that I think in the last ten years, everyone has unfortunately had to develop an interest. It may not be as profound as my own, but everyone is at least aware of these things. The genesis of this project was whenever the first Paris Hilton sex tape came out, which was almost ten years ago at this point. And you know, the sex on these things is always really bland because probably the most uninteresting thing in the world is watching narcissists fuck each other. But what was really interesting even then, was the dialogue that was occurring during the sex or between the sex, or just watching Paris Hilton and her big dumb boyfriend try to talk to each other like human beings and their complete failure to do that.

I think in that tape there’s this really amazing moment where at some point she’s having sex and actually her cell phone goes off, so she just gets on her cell phone. So then you have three layers of dialogue going on. In the background they’ve left the television on because if you’re Paris Hilton you’re going to leave the television on while you have sex, and there’s the dialogue between her and the guy that she’s having sex with, and then she’s on the phone. It’s just an amazing biopsy of a certain kind of profoundly consumer American life. You know, taken to its furthest extreme.

BLVR: Obviously these tapes are much longer, and you’ve picked out certain elements and then arranged them, put them with the criminal records. In a way it’s more than a transcription. You’re going for a certain effect.

JK: If you put Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian on a camera for five hours, you would be amazed how little usable material there really is! So there’s some editing, but it’s not huge. And I really didn’t want to transcribe people moaning or whatever it would be. The sex part is by far the least interesting. The criminal records — I think I was transcribing one of Vince Neil’s sex tapes from Mötley Crüe and I realised that he had actually killed a guy. Then I remembered that the actress Rebecca Gayheart also had a sex tape and she had also killed someone, and I started to think about how we had gotten to this point as a society where there’s an actual distribution mechanism. There’s an actual product in which we watch felons fuck. 

And I thought, that’s really interesting, that’s a way to elevate it beyond just being this sort of gag book where it’s like, Oh yeah let’s laugh at Vince Neil, or Let’s laugh at Tommy Lee. When you start to realise that – maybe not the majority, but a significant minority of the people in this material actually have criminal histories, they have committed really crazy or serious crimes, and that none of them did time¾ that’s the key. You start thinking about the way that fame in particular, but also money, perverts criminal justice.

If I had run over a nine-year-old kid, I probably would have gone to jail, but Rebecca Gayheart didn’t. I think she got 1200 hours of community service. So inserting the criminal records became a way to put some gravity into the work.

BLVR: The sex tapes are part of an era – the last decade or so – where it’s not about suppressing the tape anymore, it’s about turning it into a marketing tool. It’s a way to kick-start your career. What interests you about this era?

JK: That’s a good question. There’s a narrative in the book, I don’t know how evident it is to anyone else, where you can see the point where the tapes begin. At first, it really is just people’s home videos. Then in the middle of the book it shifts into people doing these videos with the intention of turning it into a marketing tool. Then by the time you get to the end of the book, it’s become an actual genre. I don’t know if I have that much to say about it other than it happened, that it’s a definite narrative progression.

That last decade was such a deeply fucked-up time that it just seems endlessly rich in terms of material to mine, in a way that I’m not sure the 1990s necessarily were rich. I mean, everyone in the 90s thought they were rich, but then if you look at them in comparison to the 2000s, the 2000s have a lot more of real consequence going on. At least from the American perspective, it’s a much richer time in terms of society just going really haywire and getting truly bizarre and truly baroque.

For me, I was a teenager for more or less the whole 90s, and I hated it, I really hated that decade. I hated the 2000s, too, but I hated them in a much different way. Where I felt like the 90s never made any sense to me, the 2000s made sense to me in this aspect where everything was just breaking in America. The 90s in my memory were just so incredibly superficial. Not that the 2000s didn’t have superficiality, but there’s something much darker about popular entertainment when Amy Fisher actually shoots someone through the head and now you can watch her have sex for money, on tape. I mean, that’s really deeply disturbing!

I don’t have any hard conclusions to draw about it, because it’s not completely clear to me what’s going on. Usually when I do these things, I do them to try and figure out how I feel about them, and I usually have a much better sense by the time the project is done. This one, I don’t. It’s still really murky to me. It’s like, maybe that stuff is beyond critique. Maybe the critique can only be indirect ¾ because how do you critique Amy Fisher’s artist statement? It’s just so bizarre.

BLVR: In your other books, there’s an interest in the overlap between fact and fiction. But what you’re talking about here with the tapes is that they’re contrived or they’re a marketing tool.

JK: Yeah. I really feel like having read as much Philip K. Dick as I could in the 90s was like some bizarre training ground for the eventuality of the 2000s, in terms of this sense he had that everything eventually was going to become entertainment and everything eventually was going to be about how you can make money by transforming everything into entertainment. He strikes me as profoundly ahead of his time.

BLVR: So you’re interested in the sort of entertainment complex that produces these things?

JK: Yeah. It might’ve been about 10 years ago at this point — but there was a moment when the Russian Mir space station was crashing into the earth, and Taco Bell actually put a giant target out in the ocean. The idea was, if the satellite hit the target, then everyone in America would get a free taco for a year or something like that. That was the moment when I started to realise that Philip K. Dick may have been much more prophetic than I had given him credit for. Reality TV, these sex tapes, strike me as very Dickian. They strike me as science fiction — in the most mundane as possible way: there’s not a lot of science but there’s certainly a lot of weird fiction in there.

BLVR: There’s a lot of negative writing about this sort of stuff – “being famous for being famous,” all that. Are you critical of people who don’t earn their fame, or are you just observing?

JK: I feel like there are much better things to worry about. It doesn’t really matter why people end up famous. In an ideal world, everyone would win fame and glory for actual achievements, but I don’t think that’s the world we live in, and I don’t think that’s ever been the world we’ve lived in.

At the same time, it is dispiriting when you find out how much money Kim Kardashian has made in the last three months. When you live in a society where the people from Jersey Shore are making millions and millions of dollars for apparently nothing, it does become incredibly dispiriting.

I think there’s something useful in looking at these people and seeing the extent to which luck and base motivations can get you to the same place that you’ve been raised your whole life to believe that if you just work hard enough, America will reward you. Most of the time it won’t. Often it seems like success comes not so much from their hard work as from profound psychopathic tendencies.  

BLVR: We haven’t talked about the sections with Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein. Why did you put them in?

JK: Well, Saddam has been like a lodestone over my literary career. My short story about him was the first thing that I ever had professionally published. I’d seen Saddam’s execution tape, and I don’t know how it happened, but he’s a genocidal dictator who used chemical weapons against his own people, and yet somehow in the tape he ends up coming out looking like the best person in the room. You know, he’s funny in it, and he’s calm in a way that no one else is.

I was thinking about these tapes and how it was interesting that the mechanism for the delivery of Saddam and Gaddafi being executed was pretty much the same mechanism of delivery for these sex tapes. They were all shot on really shitty equipment. I think Saddam’s was shot on somebody’s cell phone—probably Gaddafi’s was too—and then distributed on the internet.

It’s really interesting that it’s the same medium, and that it sort of works in the same way, in that the object of fascination in the tape is based primarily on these people being flashing images that have come before you. What’s an interesting contrast is that these are people who actually do end up suffering some kind of punishment. Whether or not it’s a just punishment, it’s punishment for actions they’ve done in their society, that then come to a definite termination point. I mean, I’m not trying to liken Saddam and Gaddafi to Paris Hilton in that obviously these guys were genuinely horrible individuals responsible for some really atrocious things, but it sort of seems like it’s a related if dissimilar genre.

The precursor to those execution tapes, much like the precursor to the sex tapes was Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson’s, is the execution of Ceaușescu in 1989. So there’s a real parallel. I thought, How much celebrity can you have without consequence? and, Okay here’s consequence: here’s celebrity, here’s consequence.

BLVR: People have talked about literature being, in a sense, behind other art forms – not having caught up to things like contemporary art or music. Would you agree with that?

JK: Completely. It’s weird that literature is always going to be bound to a human need for stories that have a beginning, middle, and an end. My big inspiration over the last ten years is the Scottish comic book writer Grant Morrison. He’s really really fascinating because he’s been writing these really shitty superhero comics, which are the best things ever because he’s figured out that, okay, you have to have story beats here, here, and here, but you can use the moments between these beats to talk about whatever it is you want to talk about. It’s crazy when one of the major works of experimental fiction for the last six years has been a guy writing Batman, but it’s a really astonishing work.

BLVR: Your book is more like an artist’s book, in the sense that the design and physical aspect of it is so carefully crafted.

JK: Yeah. My interests and sensibilities may be better aligned with the people in the art world than the people in the literary world, and thus far my literary career seems to have had a pretty huge intersection with the art world. The literary world is — I mean, there’s a lot of criticisms you can hurl at the art world, but all of them can be hurled at the literary world in a much more severe degree. It’s kind of dismal. My one success was with Semiotext(e), who I don’t know if anyone in the world would look at them as entrenched within the literary establishment. I think there’s a certain flexibility in the art world that isn’t in the literary world right now.

I know the intention with Penny-Ante was to have the book be more like a limited edition or an artist’s book than, okay, we’re going to publish this thing that will infinitely be in print. It’s more like, We’ll do 1000 of these books or we’ll do 300 of them, and that’ll be the end of it.

Matthew O’Shannessy is a writer and member of the art collective Tape Projects. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.