Apocalypse Redux: The World of Justin Taylor

    
(The Apocalypse Reader cover and Justin Taylor in his "bomb shelter".)

Last week I blogged about Wastelands, an anthology of contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction. This time, because Monday is all about post-weekend devastation, we here at Omnivoracious bring you some historical, and sometimes hysterical, perspective to the subject via the multi-talented Justin Taylor. His The Apocalypse Reader, published last year by Thunder's Mouth Press and featured on National Public Radio, is the perfect companion volume to Wastelands. It contains a rich mix of stories from a wide variety of time periods, from Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne to Kelly Link, Michael Moorcock, Tao Lin, Steve Aylett, and Ursula K. Le Guin. The range of tone is quite remarkable. Taylor, who recently edited a second anthology (Come Back, Donald Barthelme, published as part of McSweeney's 24) has done a great job of including everything from black humor to extremely serious and unsettling views of the way the world ends. I recently interviewed Taylor via email, to find out just how serious he is about this whole apocalypse thing...

Amazon.com: For the edification of our readers, can you describe where you are right now, while you're answering these questions? Are you in a bunker or other shelter, for example?
Justin Taylor: I'm writing to you from my special bunker, which is craftily disguised as a bedroom with good natural light on the 3rd floor of a small apartment building with bad pipes. It's all really high-tech next-gen kind of stuff. In the event of Apocalypse, my bedroom will float here in space while the rest of the building and/or world crumbles around it. Oh and the pipes stay connected too, so I'll be floating in space but still able to use the bathroom and shower and stuff, though nobody really knows if I'll be able to get hot water or for how long, though that won't be much of a change from how the water situation is now. Of course the exact location is confidential, but I can tell you it's in Brooklyn.

Amazon.com: Does an apocalypse, by your definition, have to be society-wide or can it be singular and personal?
Justin Taylor: It can definitely be either, or both at once. Not to get philosophical on you, but reality is only ever experienced by individuals, so in that sense all Apocalypse is personal. If God returns to earth later this afternoon and Judgment Day begins, that will be something that happens to every person who ever lived, including me, you, Christopher Hitchens, Oprah, Stalin, and every member of the Ming Dynasty. But my experience of Judgment will be my own; it's not something I can share with Oprah.

Amazon.com: Is an apocalypse synonymous, in a sense, with an epiphany, even if in a dark sense of the term?
Justin Taylor: In my introduction to the book I point out that the word "apocalypse" comes from the Greek, and literally means "a revelation" or "an unveiling," but the main idea, I think, is of irrevocable change over which one has no control. "Epiphany" suggests (to me, anyway) interiority and self-initiation, and these notions are sort of in contradiction with another important aspect of Apocalypse, which is Witness. Both "revelation" and "unveiling" imply a subject to whom the thing is revealed, to say nothing of the secondary implication that someone/something is doing the revealing. These are important aspects of Apocalyptic thought, in some cases as important as the revealed event itself.

Amazon.com: Have we always thought we were on the verge of some apocalypse or other?
Justin Taylor: Absolutely. Every single generation in recorded history has wondered if—or even hoped that—theirs would be the last, and I think it's safe to say that the concept goes back even further. We have dreamed of the end since the very beginning. It may even be that the fantasy of Apocalypse precedes the fantasy of creation.

Amazon.com: How do you modulate tone in an anthology like this one? I love depressing stories, but I'm assuming you had to take real care with story order and whatnot.
Justin Taylor: A lot of work went into ordering the stories. I put Lovecraft's "Nyarlathotep" first, because it's a spitfire opener and I thought it worked as an overture to the whole rest of the book. And Lynne Tillman's "Save Me from the Pious and the Vengeful" is at the very end because it's such a powerful affirmation: tenderness without illusion, sentiment without schmaltz. Lynne's piece is a counterpoint to Lovecraft's purple histrionics and really a perfect coda to the book. Dennis Cooper's "The Ash Gray Proclamation" is at the very center, because it's a monumental piece of writing by one of our greatest living writers. So that's the "superstructure." The rest of the stories were organized around those, by a combination of sheer intuition and my own highly refined senses of their themes and relationships to each other, which is the kind of thing that develops after you've read a manuscript probably a hundred times. In my introduction I call it "the logic of the mix-tape or the Grateful Dead bootleg."

Amazon.com: How do you view genre versus non-genre? This anthology is refreshing in the way it puts "literary mainstream" and "SF/fantasy" writers side-by-side.
Justin Taylor: Well, I think that the value of labels is limited, though obviously they serve an important function as loose indicators of styles or trends. But to put it in terms of some of my authors: take someone like Steve Aylett. Is his work sci-fi? Is it fantasy? Satire? Or is it—God help us—"experimental"? A novel like his book Lint is all of those things and then some—there's no name for what Steve does. Or Lovecraft! Here's a guy who could barely get published in his lifetime. He had to fight to break in to magazines like Weird Tales. Seventy something years later, his work is considered literature. He has a Library of America edition. Is Brian Evenson a genre writer? Seems to me that a lot of his stuff meets the criteria for horror and/or fantasy writing, but when he gets pigeonholed as a genre writer, it's usually as "experimental" before it's anything else. But call him whatever you like; I'll go to the mat with anyone who says his work is less (or even other) than "literature." What it comes to is this: if Diane Williams and Rick Moody and Ursula K. Le Guin and Lucy Corin and Nathaniel Hawthorne could all sit on my bookshelf, there was no reason they couldn't all be in my book.

Amazon.com: How much research did you do in tracking down some of these stories? For example, you've included Stacey Levine, who isn't widely known even though she should be, in my opinion.
Justin Taylor:  I did a ton of research. I had a two-page list of stories before I started soliciting writers. I spent a whole summer reading Apocalypse stories. I found the Poe story that way. It's a totally oddball story, and I found it on like page eight hundred and something of his complete works, but I thought people would prefer to read something weird and rare and unexpected over, say, "Masque of the Red Death," which would have been a perfectly reasonable choice for an Apocalypse anthology but we've all seen it a thousand times. I was not shy about asking people for recommendations and leads. This is how I got to Stacey Levine, I think via Shelley Jackson, who definitely turned me onto Lucy Corin.

I [also] kept myself on constant alert. I was working on an MFA at New School while I was editing this book, and the stories by Jeff Goldberg and Jared Hohl were both stories I read first as workshop submissions in a class that David Gates taught. Neither of these guys is a "name" writer, but I thought their stories were great, and I knew they would hold their own if I published them alongside heavies like Moorcock and Gaiman—and they did. Jeff's story, "These Zombies are not a Metaphor" was recently broadcast on NPR, and Jared Hohl's "Fraise, Menthe, et Poivre 1978" has gotten singled out for special praise by more reviewers and bloggers than any other story in the collection.

Finally, I encouraged writers to go against expectation. When I solicited Joyce Carol Oates I had a particular story of hers in mind, but I invited her to send whatever she wanted. The story she sent, "Apoca ca lyp se: A Dip tych" is about nine times removed from anything you'd ever expect to see from Joyce Carol Oates. She even sent a little note saying that if I thought it was too weird we could pick something else, but I loved it.

Amazon.com: Some of these stories really just smash right through certain taboos. Was there anything you hesitated to include, or anything you didn't include that you would've if it hadn't been so disturbing?
Justin Taylor: No. Art should challenge and in some cases discomfit you. It should even offend you, if you're the kind of person who likes to be offended by ideas. I hope people won't read that as a sort of blanket statement of support for "provocative" or so-called "transgressive" because I don't mean that. A lot of that work is incredibly vapid, banal, or in its own way socially conservative. People have told me they found Stacey Levine's story to be the most disturbing in the book, because it's really gory, gruesome, and yet incredibly intimate: the effect is unnerving. I could see Brian Evenson's and Steve Aylett's both drawing heat, Brian for heresy and Steve for political reasons.

Dennis Cooper's story probably has the most "taboos" per capita, but I didn't hesitate for a moment about publishing the story. Quite the contrary—I solicited it specifically from Dennis and it was the first confirmed entry in the book. It had been published once before in the liner notes to a CD, but I published it in a book for a first time, and it was such a high honor for me to be able to do that. Dennis' work is brilliant, but for a total newcomer to his work it can maybe be a lot to take on at once and if you get overwhelmed by the content then some of the nuance and intelligence and humor is lost on you. Some people did react poorly to this story. So with anyone who felt like they didn't get it—what the story was saying or why I included it—I was more than happy to talk about the choices I made, and the extremely high value I place on Dennis's writing, and whatever else they wanted to know that I could tell them. But people claiming to be outraged or offended have already made up they're minds, probably before they opened the book. Those people are axe-grinders, they're pamphleteers. The Helen Lovejoys and Bill O'Reillys of the world give no courtesy or respect, and therefore they deserve none of either. 

Amazon.com: Do you feel we're currently approaching an apocalypse of sorts?
Justin Taylor: I absolutely do, in a few senses. First and foremost I believe that globally we are approaching—or have already passed—some sort of brink with regard to global climate change. We are Wile E. Coyote run off the cliff's edge, floating only because we haven't looked down yet. On the domestic front, the Apocalypse of the Bush administration is one we can actually look forward to with unqualified joy, because it will mark the end of a very nearly successful attempt to overthrow the American system of government, but will the next person attempt to undo the damage or will they finish the job? The next administration—Democratic or Republican—should approach the situation as a sort of post-Apocalyptic rebuilding. They should start by appointing a Truth And Reconciliation commission, the way African countries do after civil wars and genocides, so that there will be a real and undeniable record of what was done to us and done by us.

Amazon.com: What are you currently working on?
Justin Taylor: I've been hard at work on my own writing. I recently finished a short story collection and am trying to work on a novel, but I also teach and write some criticism—book reviews and such. And poetry. A chapbook of my poems is coming out later this spring from a new small press here in Brooklyn. Parts of The Apocalypse Reader have been translated into Dutch by an awesome journal called Deus Ex Machina. You can check that out online here.