Sunday
Aug162009
Interview: Ander Monson
Sunday, August 16, 2009 at 10:20AM
Ander Monson's essay "Assembloir: That Which is True of Others Is True of Me" appears in the first issue of The Collagist, published August 15, 2009. He is the author of a host of paraphernalia including a decoder wheel, several chapbooks and limited edition letterpress collaborations, a website, and three books: Neck Deep and Other Predicaments, Other Electricities, and Vacationland. In 2010 Sarabande Books will publish The Available World, a poetry collection, and Graywolf Books will publish a nonfiction project, Vanishing Point. The assembloir in this issue is from the accompanying website for that book. He edits the magazine DIAGRAM and the New Michigan Press.
Here, he speaks to The Collagist's Lauren Walbridge about the assembly of this piece, as well as his forthcoming books, The Available World and Vanishing Point.
1. Can you talk about the inspiration for "Assembloir: That Which Is True of Others Is True of Me"? What was on your mind while you were writing this essay?
This assembloir is one of several that I wrote—or perhaps assembled, though I’m not always sure there’s a difference between the two—for the forthcoming book Vanishing Point (April 2010). I ended up cutting a couple from the book-artifact, but they’ll be included with the web extension of the book. The book has a bunch of terms that bear a small glyph. When you see one of the terms, you can go on the website and type in the term, and it’ll bring up a bunch of bonus content. I think of it as a way to keep essaying and thinking about these ideas past the limitations of the book as physical object.
2. How did you go about choosing the memoirs, and their quotes?
With the help of Dolly Laninga, a writer I contracted to help out with this project, I read (or she and I read, or in some cases she read) something like 300 memoirs. Mainly we just looked for anything interesting that we could find. Really any memoir would do. We’d go through and copy down interesting quotes, or quotes that fit in one of a bunch of categories: “That’s when I learned” quotes, disclaimers about the nature of nonfiction, ending scenes, quotes that talked about significance, and so on. Then I picked through and chose quotes for hilarity, wackness, continuity, or whatever. Those represented in this assembloir are things that are true of me, that tell my story. Really our stories are all not so different, though the particular events of our lives are.
3. Why the decision to repeat certain lines? Did they come up in multiple memoirs, or did they start to take on a significance of their own?
They act as refrains, and give a little bit of structure to the mess. They came up a few times in the same memoir, or in multiples, and I thought that must mean something.
4. You have two books forthcoming: The Available World, a poetry collection from Sarabande Books, and Vanishing Point, a nonfiction project from Graywolf Press. What can we expect from these books?
Vanishing Point is a long meander/meditation on a bunch of subjects all related to the I and consciousness: memoir and jury duty, Dungeons & Dragons, the band New Order, the funeral of president Gerald Ford, varieties of Doritos, forgetfulness, solipsism, a particularly lovely youtube clip, and so on. As I mentioned above, the physical book’s only one part of what I consider the book project, which also includes the website. The Available World’s poems are elegies and tragedies, sermons for the age of information and chemical components in our shampoo, and, above all, absolute availability. This book has a web component also.
5. What other writing projects are you currently working on?
Mostly I’m working on the web halves of these books. There’s a lot of original material on there, written specifically for the site. The downside of writing a bunch of web material is that you end up working on the book much longer than the usual gestation period of the book: normally you’d write the book, give it to the editor, and move on to the next project. In this case I just keep working and worrying on it until it comes out, and then even after. So it slows the other projects down. Next up, though, is fiction, which I’ll be concentrating on after Christmas (a couple bits of which are leaking out from various places in the next six months) and before the book tour for the new ones.
6. What great books have you read recently? Also, are there any upcoming releases you're excited about?
I just happened on Kathleen Peirce’s poetry collection Ardor, which is absolutely stellar. I rarely have the experience of having a book rewire my brain, but that one absolutely did. I also just finished Lem’s Solaris, which was also its own brand of mindfuck, and Sherry Turkle’s Simulation and its Discontents, which, while related in a way, was only okay, which isn’t really within the purview of the question, but then I’ve never been good at that.
Here, he speaks to The Collagist's Lauren Walbridge about the assembly of this piece, as well as his forthcoming books, The Available World and Vanishing Point.
1. Can you talk about the inspiration for "Assembloir: That Which Is True of Others Is True of Me"? What was on your mind while you were writing this essay?
This assembloir is one of several that I wrote—or perhaps assembled, though I’m not always sure there’s a difference between the two—for the forthcoming book Vanishing Point (April 2010). I ended up cutting a couple from the book-artifact, but they’ll be included with the web extension of the book. The book has a bunch of terms that bear a small glyph. When you see one of the terms, you can go on the website and type in the term, and it’ll bring up a bunch of bonus content. I think of it as a way to keep essaying and thinking about these ideas past the limitations of the book as physical object.
2. How did you go about choosing the memoirs, and their quotes?
With the help of Dolly Laninga, a writer I contracted to help out with this project, I read (or she and I read, or in some cases she read) something like 300 memoirs. Mainly we just looked for anything interesting that we could find. Really any memoir would do. We’d go through and copy down interesting quotes, or quotes that fit in one of a bunch of categories: “That’s when I learned” quotes, disclaimers about the nature of nonfiction, ending scenes, quotes that talked about significance, and so on. Then I picked through and chose quotes for hilarity, wackness, continuity, or whatever. Those represented in this assembloir are things that are true of me, that tell my story. Really our stories are all not so different, though the particular events of our lives are.
3. Why the decision to repeat certain lines? Did they come up in multiple memoirs, or did they start to take on a significance of their own?
They act as refrains, and give a little bit of structure to the mess. They came up a few times in the same memoir, or in multiples, and I thought that must mean something.
4. You have two books forthcoming: The Available World, a poetry collection from Sarabande Books, and Vanishing Point, a nonfiction project from Graywolf Press. What can we expect from these books?
Vanishing Point is a long meander/meditation on a bunch of subjects all related to the I and consciousness: memoir and jury duty, Dungeons & Dragons, the band New Order, the funeral of president Gerald Ford, varieties of Doritos, forgetfulness, solipsism, a particularly lovely youtube clip, and so on. As I mentioned above, the physical book’s only one part of what I consider the book project, which also includes the website. The Available World’s poems are elegies and tragedies, sermons for the age of information and chemical components in our shampoo, and, above all, absolute availability. This book has a web component also.
5. What other writing projects are you currently working on?
Mostly I’m working on the web halves of these books. There’s a lot of original material on there, written specifically for the site. The downside of writing a bunch of web material is that you end up working on the book much longer than the usual gestation period of the book: normally you’d write the book, give it to the editor, and move on to the next project. In this case I just keep working and worrying on it until it comes out, and then even after. So it slows the other projects down. Next up, though, is fiction, which I’ll be concentrating on after Christmas (a couple bits of which are leaking out from various places in the next six months) and before the book tour for the new ones.
6. What great books have you read recently? Also, are there any upcoming releases you're excited about?
I just happened on Kathleen Peirce’s poetry collection Ardor, which is absolutely stellar. I rarely have the experience of having a book rewire my brain, but that one absolutely did. I also just finished Lem’s Solaris, which was also its own brand of mindfuck, and Sherry Turkle’s Simulation and its Discontents, which, while related in a way, was only okay, which isn’t really within the purview of the question, but then I’ve never been good at that.
Reader Comments (3)
I would also add that one of the most interesting books I stumbled on this last year is /The Testament of Daedalus/ by British artist Michael Ayrton. It's a pretty spectacular novella, and is a good starting point into the way in which the Icarus/Daedalus/Theseus mythology takes over the center of Ayrton's collected work.
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