An Interview with Ben Rosenbaum

The October newsletter just went out, I won’t bug you with reproducing it, but here is an interview with Ben Rosenbaum that tailed the newsletter out:

-Who -is- Ben Rosenbaum, really?

 

That’s the question, isn’t it?

 

Really, “Ben Rosenbaum” is a useful fiction; both external forces (other people, social systems) and a loose and shifting, but (almost) always dominant coalition of agencies mostly situated inside the electrochemical web of my nervous system, have an interest in stabilizing the identity, and perpetuating the myth of the continuity and agency, of this “Ben Rosenbaum” for a variety of reasons — as a locus of responsibility and retribution and a lever to constrain behaviors (“Ben Rosenbaum” is who we punish if “Ben Rosenbaum” is observed to screw up), as a mechanism of collaboration, and as an optimization strategy for cognitive processing (we invent a story about what “Ben Rosenbaum” decided and why based on “what he’s like”, to avoid having to remember and consider the vast protean mess of signals that really, amplifying and inhibiting each other in complex and unreproduceable ways, produced the behavior); plus, “Ben Rosenbaum” is in some sense a self-perpetuating viral language game with an interest in defending its own existence.

 

Just like anybody.

 

-Why write? Videogames and TV are much more fun, aren’t they?

 

They’re easier fun, but writing is richer fun.

 

Similarly: Why do people buy cameras? Don’t they have enough pictures to look at?

 

-Why genre?

 

Children raised by wolves do not speak. Outisde of strange private twin languages, all human communication takes place inside an already-begun conversation. Every beginning is a response. We don’t talk out of some hidden acultural source of meaning buried inside us. Rather, we caught by something that already exists out in the world and find outselves saying “okay, but —”

 

In fiction, this is called “genre”.

 

In a sense “genre” is always something to push up against the borders of; or, maybe, to have nostalgia for, and burrow back towards the center of.

 

But then, a genre is never one thing with clear borders and a capital, like a country: it’s more like one thread in a mess of zillions of different colored threads we are all tangled up in.

 

However, I think you’re really asking “why spaceships and talking animals?”

 

Answer: Because they’re cool. (Which is another way of saying “I don’t know”).

 

I guess I like strange things, because when I start talking about strange things, I’m less the “Ben Rosenbaum” we talked about above. When I start talking about strange things, I stray from the country of the known. The bureaucrats in my head get confused and can’t find the applicable paragraphs and start stumbling and dropping their rule books, and the freaky wild children come out and start to dance.

 

But of course, any coherent art is really going to be a dance *between* the bureaucrats and the wild children. All bureaucrats and you’d have something awfully safe and boring — “this is delicious, please may I have another serving? Oh, but after you, no, I insist. Thank you so much. Lovely weather we’re having”. All wild children and you’d have something on the order of a private twin language or schizophrenic ecstasy, gibberish to anyone else.

 

So the answer to “why do you play there, where you tend to play, on that particular range, in the wild mess of interpenetrating traditions we call ‘genre’?” is probably: that’s where it’s just strange enough, and just orderly enough, for the agents in my head to all play together.

 

-If you had to do it all over again, what would you do?

 

Pretty much what I did.

 

Started playing rugby earlier, I guess.

 

-What warps your writing the most?

Maybe the way words sound? I often feel seduced by the pull of words into saying something other than what I’d planned.

 

-Do you have a favorite place to write?

 

At the moment, Stacey’s Coffee Parlor (http://www.openmikes.org/listings/stacyscoffeeparlor) — during the day when it’s quiet — on Leesburg Pike in Falls Church. Except they have free wireless access, damn them, so I can’t bring the wireless laptop, because I have no willpower.

 

-What’s the most challenging aspect of writing?

 

Constancy.

 

-What’s the most whacked out thing said in a review of your work?

 

I’m afraid no one has said anything whacked out. I’m tempted to write a review with something whacked out in it just to be able to answer this question better. I hereby call out to all reviewers: please, say something whacked out. I implore you.

 

-Okay, you’re going to get marooned on an island by a bunch of angry editors, what one book do you take and why?

 

Well, I really should take something mammoth that I’ve never managed to read, like Gormenghast or Finnegan’s Wake. But then, what if I don’t like it? Or, say, Swiss Family Robinson? But the joke might get old fast. Probably I would want something really weird with beautiful poetic passages, sex and violence and horror, intrigue, strange fantastical speculation, written in a simple, earthy style, yet with enough strangeness and obscurity to completely bewilder me about what the author could be possibly talking about, or to infuriate me and make me want to argue back; and ideally with a long tradition of interpretations to argue with too; so the best bet is the Bible (or the Mahabharata, if I can get a good translation).

 

Or “Desert Island Survival for Dummies”.

 

-Is there a book or story you wish you could go back in time and kill the author of so you could submit their manuscript as your own?

 

I am envious, but not murderously so.

 

-When I interview you again in 10 years, what will you hope to be talking to us about?

 

How striking it was that peace, good sense, long-term planning, responsible stewardship of the environment, and benign and efficient social pragmatism broke out all over the world, just when it seemed least likely. And then all those books I wrote.

 

-What are your current plans for literary world domination?

 

My plan is that the literary world will be dominated by a wildly heterogenous group of constantly changing authors, irreconciliably different from one another in approach, concerns, and ideology, giving us the broadest possible palette of literary delights, and that filtering systems will emerge in an uncoordinated fashion to let us each, given our own idiosyncratic tastes, tell the good stuff from the bad.

 

This plan is working out pretty well so far. (The whole Internet thing was a particularly clever move on my part).

 

-Last, but not least, if zombies were spreading throughout the land by infectious bite what would be your 5 point response?

1) Load up car with food, family and water. Also gasoline from utility shed. Call family & friends to wish luck, exchange tips.

2) Drive to Patti’s farm in Texas. (Sing a lot in car, and play Count the Zombies).

3) Help build stockade.

4) Monitor http://www.BoingBoing.net  for clever zombie-situation solutions involving hacking toy robot dogs, exposing zombies to unicorn porn, cooking up your own zombie solvent with household bleach, etc. etc.

5) Debate Ted Chiang on David Moles’ blog about philosophical implications of zombies, until the power goes out.

Filed under the topic Journal on October 17th 2005 at 12:12 pm. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.