Something Said

Who among us hasn't been interviewed, done interviews, or greedily read what others have said? Inquisitive conversations with people we might marry, work with, admire, or dismiss constitute much of what we say, even if what we say is said as automatically as the phrases of a foreign language textbook, where seemingly benign inquiries after a person's well-being can also be heard as personal intrusions. "Hello, how are you?" You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say may be held against you.

In his collection of real, embellished, and blatantly fictional interviews, and of eavesdropping and essays, Made-up Interviews with Imaginary Artists, Alex Stein considers the interview as a literary form. Although the title seems to weigh in on the fictional potential of the question and answer model, most of the book consists of interviews with real people. Of course, after reading of the author's misadventures with recording equipment, and of the interpretive liberties he sometimes has been forced to take to compensate for mechanical lapses, we might wonder whether the real interviews are made-up as well. And when, on the first page, poet and visual artist Cecilia Vicuña tells him her secret for understanding the poet Lima ("I understand him perfectly. Completely. But this is because I do not read him with my knotted mind, I read him with my unbound life"), the knotted life of my unbound mind understood perfectly that the book might well be a hoax. Completely.

But no: as part of the Ugly Duckling Presses Dossier series, this book is an inventive mix of approaches to the interview, a taken-for-granted convention that is as underappreciated as it is ubiquitous, and a lively addition to cross-genre writing. I share my first impression of the book not to knock Vicuña so much as to reveal my own biases. Mostly, though, my impression is based on what I read when I read this remark taken out of context. As Stein makes clear, "This is a book about listening," these interviews are not the product of writings or email exchanges, but of transcriptions Stein made of conversations he taped, of exchanges he listened to, in person and then afterwards. He takes everything out of one context, of speech, and put into another, of a revision of a transcription. Furthermore, Stein says that any changes he has made to what was said are made in order to register "the spirit of the occasion, without corrupting beyond recognition its material surface." He compares the interview to a translation, where the goal is not to reproduce the original language literally and word for word, but to express what the subject has to say. Before publication, he says he shares what he writes of the interview with the subject, and if the subject objects, he destroys all record of the interview.

Without the real interviews with Vicuña (who, in the context of her section, expresses herself quite well), poet Lorna Dee Cervantes, mountaineer Pat Ament, translator Peter Grandbois, and writer Joanne Greenberg, the absurd dialogues that make up the final quarter of the book would have been slight, even snide, rather than playfully insightful. Stein's choice of these subjects seems more driven by geographical necessity rather by some mad scheme. He came into contact with them around Boulder, where he went to the University of Colorado. Even if the subjects are each, in his or her way, involved with making art from language, this collection is rather like the answer to one of those classic interview gambits: If you were to choose five people to have dinner with, who would they be? I confess, I would have answered, "None of the above," having no prior interest in the works of the writers or the exploits of the climber, but these are fascinating, revealing, and often compelling disclosures. What's more, Stein can elicit the most effusive outbursts with minimal effort. He says the word, "Story," and Ament unloads one death-defying feat after...