As part of Citizen of the Month’s Great Interview Experiment I got the privilege of interviewing the Unreliable Narrator. Knowing she was good with words (you’ll soon discover why) as well as a very intelligent person (her site also has an official theme song) I pondered my questions very carefully and then sent them off. Today I received my answers and I’m thrilled with the results (and hopefully you all are too). So without further ado….
1. How did you get the moniker Unreliable Narrator?
I gave it to myself, in an undoubtedly bootless effort to forestall ex-friends and ex-lovers and ex-employers staggering onto my blog and emailing me angrily about how wrong, Wrong, WRONG I got everything—reminding us all, “Hey, this is just one crazy chick’s temporary take on what happened.” It’s my optimistic prophylactic against self-bludgeoning as well.
2. You mentioned you were in school? What’s your major?
“In school”–that sounds so fun! I’m a graduate student and teaching associate at a ginormous ugly football university in Arizona, seeking my terminal degree–an MFA in creative writing (poetry).
3. What is your all time favorite word? why?
Thinking about this idly for the last couple of weeks has yielded only the realization that I like adverbs way, way too much–especially poly-jointed Latinate ones with lots of prefixes. Cf. “an undoubtedly bootless,” above.
4. If you could take only 4 items to a remote place for a month, what would they be and where would you go?
Dude can I just say first? that sounds SO FUCKING GOOD.
I probably wouldn’t want to go to Mexico or Italy, usual fantasy destinations—I’m feeling right now like someplace simple and scorpion-free. The Professoressa has a summer place on an island in Wisconsin—in my dream world, there. Deeply rural Western Massachusetts, maybe. Somewhere grassy and numb and totally silent.
Assuming the Brujo is not an item and therefore can’t come, I would take….a very long DSL cable! KIDDING.
a) relatively unscathed purple-batik journal, which I started last year before being devoured by State School
b) new blue fountain pen (needs to be aggressively procured from Santa Fe pen shop who repeatedly fail to deliver it)
c) Featherweight sewing machine with stack of fat quarters tucked in the case (breaking rules of 4 items) and
d) a picture of Pyewacket to remind me of HOW NICE IT IS NOT TO BE AROUND HER WHEN SHE’S MIAOWING.
5. What did you most aspire to when you were 10 years old?
Publicly, within my family, I said I wanted to be an entomologist. I was fascinated by insects and had a murderously thorough butterfly collection (which now horrifies me to remember). I hadn’t yet become obsessed with musical theater, the ballet, the opera, Shakespeare, concert piano—all those yearnings which would torment me through adolescence.
I specifically remember visiting, for some reason, the agriculture/science building of the junior college I would later attend at 17, and seeing the fetal pig embryos in jars and what have you. And imagining that someday I would be a PROFESSOR OF SCIENCE, sweeping through the doors to teach my class, wearing (for no reason I can explain) a gray Harris tweed skirt and pantyhose and silver strappy high heels. Hey, I was ten. Though I don’t think my fashion sensibilities have much improved.
When the Brujo was about five and was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, he replied serenely, “A Chinaman.” And I similarly (but less openly) *really* wanted to be? An Indian. A princess. A time-traveller.
And a starship captain’s girlfriend, so I could hang around in sleazy outfits and eat blue snack food.
6. Would you have considered your present self someone to look up to when you were 10?
Bwahahahaha! Well, maybe.
7. I notice you listen to Ani Difranco. Do you remember how you discovered her music?
Weirdly enough I just told this story to the Brujo. I had acquired, somehow, a paper catalog to a music store called Ladyslipper Records. This was in, like, 1989, loooong before teh Interwebs. It had this hippie-looking purple watercolor painting on the front and was filled with “women’s music”—the real deal, like Cris Williamson and Holly Near and Ferron and artists to whom mostly no one listens anymore, mostly because they were mostly terrible. I could never afford to order anything, though; those were the Lost Years and I made $5 an hour at the bookstore. Actually maybe that’s where I got the catalog—the guys in the record half of the store were always giving me freebies and posters and stuff.
Anyway I would pore over the fairly elaborate descriptions of the recordings for HOURS. And they had I think two tapes by this shaven-headed big-eyed girl—Ani really was a girl then, maybe 16 or 17 herself. But what really drew me to them wasn’t her pictures but the reviews of the music as being completely ferocious and unprecedented. I was really into the Indigo Girls at that time *shudder* and was teaching myself to play every single Suzanne Vega song on guitar, but I also loved Sinead O’Connor and was CRAZY about Melissa Etheridge. I basically could only fingerpick but I was frustrated with how sweet and tiny that sounded, and I desperately wanted to know how to make a big loud sound, but without strumming.
So when I was at the Women’s College in 1993 and Ani finally played Amherst, my girlfriend kimba and I went immediately to hear her—I seem to remember paying with a roll of laundry quarters, which of course you couldn’t do now. And I remember that she opened with “Fourth of July,” I was standing about ten feet away, we were *surrounded* with entranced guitar guys, and I was like, “Uh-huh. Yes please. That.”
So in a period of a few years I went to a dozen of her shows, talked to her at summer folk festival camps, learned scores of songs, etc. In the late nineties I quit going to live shows because I couldn’t handle her audiences any more—either their size or their attitudes—around the same time that Ani herself started writing songs about her frustration with audience, oddly. Conversely, I have never heard Tori Amos live, ever, though I dream about meeting with her and talking to her and playing for her all the time—almost on a weekly basis; her persona has long been an inner mentor to me, completely unknown to her.
Hanging out the laundry yesterday I was thinking about why Ani and why Tori. I used to be fond of mangling Eliot’s bromide about Shakespeare and Dante, and saying that Tori and Ani divide the world between them—there is no third. (I didn’t discover Joni Mitchell until very late, for some reason.) They cover different territory within me and within many listeners—just think of their nicknames: The Little Folksinger and the Queen of the Fairies. Tori spaces herself all over that numinous inner landscape which is at times nonsensical and at other times insane; her lyrics aren’t representational, and very literal hearers find them bewildering. It probably sounds moronic, but listening to Tori taught me how to read Dickinson. She is often a language poet, if you’ll let me get away with that, while Ani is very much a formalist. Ani favors those 3- and 4-line stanzas, very square song structures, repetition with significant variations, and has that trademark politicized realism, with a kind of fearless, bawdy Chaucerian humor.
But I think the real reason why their music has spoken to me so richly and accompanied me through so much is for the very simple fact that they’re both a few years older than I am. And through the reality of how long it takes to write songs, record them, distribute them….I wind up hearing lyrics and music that directly address what I’m going through, in a sometimes uncanny way. So they had abortions/miscarriages/girlfriends/bad breakups/divorces/parental separations/reevaluations of work/artistic crises etc. in roughly the same timeframes as I did.
Having, basically, immensely talented big sisters has been invaluable in the sense of predecessors, or permission-givers. (”I can SAY that?! I can MAKE that kind of move?!”) And obviously sometimes it’s depressing/paralyzing, too, the way it can be when you have really cool older siblings—when you’re saddled with any anxiety of influence.
8. Is the change in voice from 1st person to 3rd person and vice versa something intentional or a personality quirk?
By “personality quirk” we hope you’re not thinking that we actually walk around all the time addressing others and ourselves like this? Because that would be SERIOUSLY ANNOYING. Technically, though, that’s the change from singular to plural so she thinks you do mean the change to third person. And she’s not quite sure, honestly, why or how she stumbled on it—probably via poetry—but she did notice pretty quickly that it enabled her to write about all kinds of things she couldn’t have touched with a bargepole in the first person. Yet another unreliable subterfuge tactic.
9. Favorite album of all time.
That would have to be Joni Mitchell’s Blue, which I think contains Whitmanian multitudes. I spent one unemployed summer learning every single song on both guitar and piano, though now sadly I can’t play any of them.
10. What one thing do you regret most?
Only one?!?
Honestly, tonight…and many times since then: I regret not waiting until I got to the top of Atalaya to swallow more pills with more brandy, because then I wouldn’t have been able to get back down again no matter how fucked up and turned around I wound up getting.
I know, that’s horrible. I would never have met the Brujo, never have started corresponding with oleoptene, and there’d be three fewer years of verbiage hurled at the aether. And, you know. I’m supposed to teach in four hours and tonight it’s true. I was curled up under my desk earlier; I have my period; I haven’t even started grading papers; it’s a bad night.
11. What do you wish you had invented?
The bicycle-light generator! Actually I *did* invent it, my first year at Cambridge, and I described it excitedly to all my new British friends who listened politely and then told me it had been invented sometime before the first world war.
12. What is your favorite sound.
“How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.”
13. Coffee or tea?
Tea, always—until the State School slammed into me sometime around last December. Then, at the advanced age of 38, I was like, “What is this marvelous drug which turns me, on three hours sleep, into a PAPER-GRADING MACHINE?!?” And I’m such a cheap date—all I need is half-a-teaspoon of the Brujo’s thick indigo brew, with about a gallon of milk, and I’m wired all day.
Lately I’m addicted to this horrible coffee that comes from a machine in my office building on campus—for 75¢, it dispenses what it calls an “International Coffee” which is mostly corn syrup solids. Maybe February was so hard this year because that machine broke down, and of course Walt Whitman and I are the only people who ever use it, so they didn’t fix it for weeks and weeks. I just wish I could put my mug under the spigot but it insists on dropping down a wasteful little paper cup every time.
14. Describe using just 6 words your favorite food.
Maguro, tekka maki, sake, toro, ebi.
15.Do you have any irrational fears (zombies, werewolves, pirahanas in the toilet, etc).
Ghosts—is that irrational? I don’t know. I saw one when I was about three or four years old—I was up past my bedtime reading in bed and I was completely terrified (although it seemed harmless, mainly curious, just an amorphous glowing purple blob with eyes, but it moved *fast* and I knew it was not at all something I was supposed to be seeing). Ever since then I have, perhaps deliberately, NOT seen ghosts—but any film about that stuff scares the beejeebus out of me: The Sixth Sense, for example, or in fact A Christmas Carol, when I was about 8 or 9 years old. For MONTHS after I see one of those movies I’m all jittery and haunted and refuse to look in mirrors when I’m alone in the loo at night. And then there was the weird certainty I had one summer at Chez Zen that a dead priest was trailing me all over campus, which was unnerving, to say the least.
16. Earliest memory?
I remember being in my crib one evening or morning—Texas, rainy, gray, dim outside, an overhead bulb—and watching my mom put the diaper cream down on my changing table. It was a white tube with dark blue square letters outlined in red, and I realized that the letters on the tube meant the name of it—DESITIN. That the word was the name of the thing.
Well that wraps up the interview, thanks to the Unreliable Narrator herself, and Mirrorpond IPA for helping discovered the questions I needed to ask.
Ok that was fairly fun. I had a great time doing this and almost want to interview lots of people now to get a birds eye look into their heads.
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