Ariana Reines Interview

The Cow, by Arian Reines has been a revelation. To refer to The Cow as poetry seems rather reductive - it feels more like a living creature. Using the cold, clinical language of the abatoir, mixed with a fragmented cut-up of various characters - Reines has sculpted a multi-faceted yet cohesive voice that forces the read into avenues of sex, scat and violence. Words don't do this thing justice. Read it for yourself. I wanted to know more.

OK so I guess I just want to start by finding out what you've been up to most recently. I know you did a reading in New York a few nights ago – could you tell me a little more about it? How did it go? What did you read? I've only ever been to a few readings. How do you go about choosing what to read? Is it like acting? Do you have to assume a character for your performance?

so this soft targets gig was this past wednesday. soft targets is a great literary/arts magazine. one of their editors contacted me with a solicitation shortly after the cow was published. because for the past year or so i have lived in a hole and have had a bizarre reluctance to assimilate too much new art for fear it would make me forget my life, which is not to say myself, but seriously, in order to write the cow i had to refuse or renounce relenquishing an acute & exhausting despair so that i could ramp it up high enough for the whole thing to work. i'll explain more later, but yeah, soft targets literally fell into my lap and i was amazed, and it was cool that they invited me for this. gary lutz is a writer of uncompromising fiction that quickens the beating of my heart when i read it; he's also known to be a retiring fellow, so it was an honor to meet him. here i go, i want to tell you all about kalup linzy's gorgeous performance and the fucking brain-rinsing music of mick barr, but you've asked me about me.

so the morning of the soft targets thing i wrote a story instead of packing up my shit to move out of where i was living. while i was writing the story something jizzed or ectoplasmed on me and i don't know who or what. i mentioned this on the dc blog. and i posted a picture of the event on my blog (www.ariana-reines.blogspot.com) i wrote the story partly cos i was in despair about sectioning off and packing up my personal effects (i have no talent for this kind of organization) and also i was in despair about my mom; where would she go; what would she do. as you might know, she was in jail in february/march, and had been living at my house ever since; it was the third time she'd had no place else to go but my place; i'd been suffering a lot over it.... etc etc. so i wrote this story about fucking, computer programmers, a narrator who has a sister who lives in cleveland, people who like to fuck a certain race of person. i needed something that would have the jarring tenderness i prize in all writing but also something that would be cooler and seem glib without actually being glib in order to reach the new york people. the cow's a book that's designed to feel like an emergency, to exceed itself, to embarass, harass, and refuse to be itself. that can only really work in private; when i read from it the work becomes persona, and that isn't the point.

so yeah, doing a reading's like acting, for me. the one i did 2 weeks ago at the bowery poetry club, (you can hear some of it if you go to http://writing.upenn.edu/ pennsound/x/Segue-BPC.html and scroll down) i wore butoh whiteface for. i don't do a ton of readings, mostly cos i've been too preoccupied with my family to book them. i used to organize readings for an art gallery in new york and a small literary magazine in paris; generally, readings suck.

one thing that might be interesting is that the first money i ever got for writing as $75 for winning a women's poetry slam when i was sixteen. the poem i performed, slam-style, was about getting fucked over and abused by a psychotic butch girl i was in love with at the time. after winning the money i became disgusted with poetry slams as an institution; felt they were impure; that it was all about my youth and cuteness and not about "poetry." i don't have such an ungenerous attitude about that now, but that's how i used to feel about performance & writing, that they were seperate universes that shouldn't corrupt each other, which is a bizarre and backward way to feel, but which is probably somewhere underneath the "acting" approach in any case.

Can I get a little of your history? How long have you been writing?

I was born in Salem, Massachusetts.

Both of my mother's parents, Polish, survived the Holocaust.

I am interested in how suffering's housed and passed down through crotches.

Anyway, I've written all my life, and in school it was easy to get recognition for it, as i could handle writing in different ways; was a voluble, extroverted personality. Then a lot of bad stuff happened and I changed, became kind of slanted, miserable, and private. Writing didn't become a vocation until, broke and jettisoning things I loved, it became the cheapest art to do, the one that required the least in terms of material organization. Or seemed to require the least at first.

I had a gorgeous childhood until I was about seven. After that time everything got disgusting.

I want to say something about bad writing. I'm proud of my bad writing. Everyone is so intelligent lately, and stylish. Fucking great. I am proud of Philip Guston's bad painting, I am proud of Baudelaire's mamma's boy goo goo misery. Sometimes the lurid or shitty means having a heart, which's something you have to try to have. Excellence nowadays is too general and available to be worth prizing: I am interested in people who have to find strange and horrible ways to just get from point a to point b.

What other writers have influenced your work, or inspired you to write?

I think everything I've ever read, including stuff I haven't loved, is influential to an almost terrifying degree. But to keep things down to the essentials, at least what I can discern today: Michel de Montaigne, Chris Kraus, Avital Ronell, Charlotte & Emily Bronte, Charles Baudelaire, Francois Villon.

I wouldn't let myself read Dennis Cooper's novels til I finished THE COW because I knew the influence would be incredibly strong and even debilitating. All this other stuff had already been in there for a while before I started writing the book in about 2003.

So let's talk about The Cow. Where did the whole concept come from? How long did it take you to write? How do you feel about the finished results? Are you happy with The Cow? Did it turn out how you hoped?

My intention for THE COW was to make an organ. Not an item, or edifice. Every book is a mesh, a language mesh, to use Paul Celan's phrase, through which you pass as you read it. But Mallarme was wrong about the point of everything being to end up in a book. Nothing "ends" or "ends up" in a book; a book's the opposite of final, if it's ever open. A closed book's another story. Language is a mode of transport because sentences and lines are not heiroglyphs, they have direction. I wanted to work with this, so the poetics of THE COW includes a lot of sentences and is pretty oldfashioned in that respect. I don't have anything to prove about the solidity of the word, the immensity of the void upon which it founders, etc. Metaphor means to carry across and language is inherently metaphorical, right. Well, CATTLE CAR is the vehicle that transports meaning through THE COW. I wanted to impose BACKWARDS on language's, or English's, innate urge forward into the future, to shove the brains into the guts, To shove the material fact of bodies into the nothingness they often seem to be disgorging.

Which means to shove the present into the past.

I have always been interested in the figure of the SEIVE and of the BLOTTER as ways to understand literature. SEIVE: I pass myself through the mesh of words; BLOTTER; I sop up the excesses I can't stand to just leave alone by reading.

The concept for THE COW came from my mom's obsession with Creuzfeldt-Jakob. Her madness is really singular and I have only been able to trace out a tiny corner of what it means or is. Not to mention everything I have in common with her. The book's for her and of her. A person reading it could find: a preoccupation with digestion (have you read Proust's correspondence with his mom?), the question of metaphor (well actually the question doesn't exist anymore, cos metaphor doesn't exist anymore), cattle cars, the lie of comforting Holocaust literature, schizophrenia, sexual mania, what constitutes a witness, the fundamental horror and disgustingness of birth, mothers, the ruined condition of thought or rumination, the destruction of all interiors, terror, the unspoken but overt links between excressence, the "unnatural", writing, and evil, French modernism, the nastiness of surviving, the violence of all transportation, how love makes people disgusting, nausea, revulsion, not dying of a long affliction.

And I was interested in the cow as both a witness or figure of oblivion in lots of classics: Joyce, Nietzsche.

Basically, in order to expose how meaning's both excessive and nonexistent I had to work with a cliche, to open it. Something so visible it's invisible, so ingrained in the culture it's an impossibly huge aporia.

It was important to me to not write in a single form. Overt formality creates a patina or lacquer; I wanted to consistently break or break up the surface of the text, to make absolutely sure it keeps on haranguing itself.

I suppose due to the nature of the text, everyone you talk to is going to have a different opinion, perhaps. After the first time I read it, I started thinking about Georges Bataille and his idea of Acéphale – the idea of removing the head, or at least the notion of getting the rid of the distinction between the brain and the body. I guess when I read The Cow I got the idea that you were trying to show that the brain was as much a part of the body as anything else, no more and no less important that any other organ. Could you discuss this? Was this part of your thinking? Has Bataille been any kind of influence?

The Acephale has been very important to me, yes. Thanks for your insightful question. In fact, I was desperate for the book's cover image to be one I had found on one of PETA's many anti-meat websites-- a decapitated cow upended in a garbage can, with the ruddy arm of a male worker pushing a mop in the background. I've attached the image to this email. Aside from this urgency about reading what happens when the innards of a body are literally splattered with its shit, when the body of the animal has no integrity or person/animalhood, but is rather a unit of production, a mobile site out of which various resources are amped up, extracted.

This of course refers us back to the bodies of death camp victims, which were called "pieces" or "schmattes", "rags", in the camps, and which were put to various practical uses-- hair shorn and woven into rugs, dental gold melted down and rendered into jewels, bone phosphate powder fed to pigs and used as fertilizer.

Despite the fact that our brains are open troughs full of advertising, bullshit, and other garbage, every body's organized to transmit, transmute, bathe in what's a fundamental radiance, life itself. Celan wrote, "The world is gone / I must carry you." When I was writing THE COW I felt the world was gone, and could no longer carry any body. So a body had to carry itself. What would that look like? What would that sound like? Autism? Schizophrenia? Something crying out (and of course when I say "cry out" I am referring to Rilke's First Duino Elegy) inside itself is the opposite of lyric, right, some kind of guttural implosion.

Are there any other writers that have made work focussed around body that you admire?

Well, can I name some people who aren't strictly writers? Marina Abramovic has had an enormous influence on me. Richard Foreman, Diamanda Galas, Gaspar Noe. Alain Resnais.

You've used pieces from Gertrude Stein, William Burroughs, among others, in The Cow. How did you set about doing this? Did you use the cut-up method and act primarily on chance? Or were you very precise in what samples you used?

Desperatly and maniacally precise. I didn't cut up, except that my brains're already cut up, like most people's. Many of the allusions came out easy from memory, others i circled in books and recopied. The Old Testament stuff tends to be the hardest for people to place, incidentally. I guess people don't read that edition of the Bible much, but I adore its heavy beauty. The stuff from the WR2 website is there for its ugliness. On the other hand some of the Merck Veterinary Manual citations are just beautifully written.

Anything, if it is too allover, recedes into the regularity of its own style. There is nothing so riotous or insane that it doesn't become a kind of wash at a certain level of accumulation. Likewise there is nothing so "direct" or "spare" that doesn't recede into the uniformity of its style after a while. You can get pleasure out of something that stays within its own domain, you can call it good. One of The Cow's most pressing concerns was NOT to have a single style, not to settle upon a correct way of speaking itself, to renounce the possibility of its own completeness, to renounce correctness too.

What have you been working on most recently? A new book? Can you also tell me about the film you're working on? Are you writing a screenplay, or actually making the film yourself?

Right now I'm working on a book called THANK YOU that's very easy desperate little poems. I have completed a second, more serviceable draft of an essay/novel whose working title was The Hand of Thomas but that I'm now calling THE NEGATIVE; it's basically about Blanchot, Doubting Thomas, Gnosticism, and what I can only call The Visible.

The film's already shot: it's about the disintegration of my grandmother's body; I was thinking of the Maysles brothers, Rodin, and Velazquez when I filmed her; I waned to get very close to what scared the living shit out of me. Editing the film has been slow, but it's a fascinating process for me, and hard, cos so much of the footage is excruciating. I was compelled to do the film because my grandmother's "testimony" had been unsatisfactorily filmed by Steven Spielberg's SHOAH foundation. The visionary filmmaker Ken Jacobs very generously leant me a wonderful handheld mini dv to shoot with, and his daughter, Nisi Jacobs, was a great friend and encourager to me at the beginning of the project. I hope to have it completed by the fall of 2007.