The prize for this and other questions/contests of the night is a signed book, Knockemstiff, by Donald Ray Pollock.
After the blow-up contest, Chuck begins his reading of his short story, "Loser". Since he explicitly states that this story is a benefit for people who come to his tour, I won't go detail by detail, but basically it is an absurdist story about a college kid who appears on the Price is Right while doing some Hello Kitty blotter acid. The contestant questions the merits of being tested on such trivial things as the price of bread or potatoes for the ultimate reward of winning a boat-load of fluff that is supposed to somehow justify the banalities of his life. The contestant ends up bidding a billion trillion gazillion dollars and 99 cents on the showcase showdown and receives a text, "asshole". The text is from his mom. He sums it up by saying, "Nothing in the world is worth all that you think it is."
The story, while not mindblowing, illustrates several points later for him during the interview segment of the show.
From my notes on the show, I don't have much on the questions that were asked of him, but I do have some interesting points Chuck made in response, unfortanetly in no particular order. (side note: the questions asked seemed to put Chuck off as way too academic)
While discussing his writing style, he refers to a Tom Spanbauer workshop, in which he was taught that the best way to write a story is to write something humorous and something heartbreaking, and the closer you can juxtapose the two, the better off you are. He quotes his own "asshole" text as an example. Here the contestant is struggling with the fundamental question of his own identity and the true worth of this commercial fluff being pandered to him and his mother texts him with this text which basically calls him a fool for not competing to win. Of course, when Chuck makes the point it is much more eloquent.
At another point in the interview, the interviewer begins to ask why he treats his women characters in such a disturbing manner. Chuck cuts him off and says I eviscerate my men and leave their guts on the floor. They are treated in a much worse manner. Score one for Chuck.
Along the same lines, the interviewer asks him if by turning his characters into self functioning machines and ignoring the author (referring to Chuck's minimalist style), doesn't he, Chuck, create unsympathetic characters. To which, Chuck gives an interesting reply. He doesn't believe in sympathetic characters. He believes in a conflicted attraction to his characters because they are more dynamic. He explains: if by doing something perverse, or abject, in the pursuit of something noble, doesn't that make for a more interesting character.
He goes on to talk about Diderot (I hope I'm getting this right), who said that humans prefer to create either/or situations, and therefore have a hard time dealing with an unresolved duality. His example was that zombies are both alive and dead. So, typically, the aim of the zombie story is to solve this "problem", to make the zombie dead. But the dualities are what make characters interesting; he mused, take Prince, for instance. His point was that readers don't have to be sympathetic to the characters as long as their is an engaging conflict encapsulated within the character's motives.
Another question of the interviewer was to ask whether when Chuck writes is his goal to be shocking? He says that he doesn't try to shock, so much as engage the reader.
The interviewer deigns to ask another question, which I guess has been asked time and time again, and that is whether Chuck is a nihilist. I haven't heard his responses before, but this time he responds that in America, anyone who doesn't believe in the same set of drama as the populous is called a nihilist, much like in Europe they are quick to call people fascist. He preferred to label himself a romantic, but I couldn't tell if he was being sarcastic or not...suprisingly, I think not.
The interviewer asked another question about how Chuck felt about his Fight Club movie being assimilated into the common day culture. His example was about the Daily show and how Jon Stewart remarked, "the first rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club." Chuck's response was that he found it interesting that things which a culture can't readily assimilate due to grief or shock or whatever, they break down by making lesser but more numerous copies of those things. He joked that the Titanic was so shocking that it brought about numerous news stories, then movies, then theater, until finally, he had found during his research on pornography that it had been the premise of seven different porno films. Truly, a dramatic example of his idea.
When the interviewer asked him if there was room for true love in his stories, Chuck replied, to me, that's the same as putting more cat food in the bag.
One more question I remember the interviewer asking was how he felt about different artists making adaptations of his works, i.e. the Fight club movie, Choke movie, etc. He responded that he was done with those works and knew how he would tell the story, but was intrigued by how others would tell the story. He has no interest in screenwriting because he is more comfortable with the medium of the novel. What he likes about the novel is that the audience for books generally has a higher level of education than other mediums because, he says, a book implies ongoing consent from the reader. It's a commitment that they are going to get emotionally involved at a higher level of thinking. As a writer, this is a qualification with which he is the most comfortable.
On to the audience questions...
One audience member asked whether other philosophers, besides Diderot whom he referenced earlier, had any influence on his works. He responded that he liked Kierkegaard's idea of the leap of faith. Chuck said that basically our teen years into our twenties is a time of trying on different personalities/ideologies with a simple leap of faith to find out whether they fit. For instance, many people wake up one day and say I'm Buddhist, but don't really know what it means to be buddhist. Considering the popularity of books like Hesse's Siddhartha, I believe this is true. We are constantly grabbing at different -isms to see if we belong.
Another person asked what books he read growing up. He said that when he was really young, he read the Bobbsey Twins. He liked how pure the parents were. He could pretend they were his own, instead of having to deal with outbursts like "Fred, did you bring home crabs again!" Apparently referring to his home life. (his real father's name was Fred)
Another audience member asked about how he got the idea to do a story on a cult. He began his response saying that most people learn early on about some emotional "scam" they can enact which will get people to love them. He then tries to figure out how that scam applies to characters that have evolved to what society would deem outrageous levels. For instance, he said that in Survivor he was in some dirty phone booth near a bridge when he saw a sticker that was telling people if they felt like jumping to first call this number. But that sticker was replaced with another sticker, when the original number ran out of funding, that said something like if you are thinking of jumping don't. He then thought about how some person could replace it with his own sticker and number. Which brought about the question, what type of person would do that? What emotional scam would he be running that required such a desperate attempt to attain fulfillment through other peoples problems? If you have read Survivor, you know what Chuck's answer is.
Also during the question/answer session with the audience, he often answered the question directly and then expounded on it further with his own stories or stories told to him by his fans after different shows.
He told one story about a heating pad. I guess he has told numerous times before, because he polled the audience to see how many people had heard it before he decided to tell it.
The story comes from a lady who was in the brownies in second grade, about seven years old, sometime during the sixties. One time while she was sick to her stomach, she stayed home and was laying on a heating pad to soothe her stomach. The heating pad had a vibrating function. While she was resting, the pad shifted to her crotch area and began vibrating. Well, she was amazed at how great it felt. So, at the next brownie meeting, she showed all the other brownies, and they loved it as much as she did. She had never been more popular. She began having the brownies over to her house all the time after school. Well, finally, her mother came home and found all the brownies sharing the heating pad. Her mother kicked all the other girls out and beat her with the cord of the heating pad. She called her a motherf-ing slut. The lady never had another orgasm again. Another example of the tragic nature of the ways we deal with the taboo.
Another story he told, in response to a question about his use of choruses throughout different books, concerned a time he spent at a strip club. An older gentleman dressed in a tropical white suit would roll up dollar bills and piece them together to form a rod of sorts. Then he would get the strippers to go down on all fours in front of him and all the while he would yell with a raspy old man voice, "Arch your back!" And then he would toss a dollar off the end of his rod. Chuck used this as an example because afterwars his friend would call and just say "Arch your back" and then hang up, even into the current day. To him, it was a way to recall an era of his youth through one simple phrase, much as in a story he can use a chorus to tie together all the elements of the story so far and bring it to the readers mind again.
He told another sad story some time during the night, the details of which I didn't get down as well. It concerned another fan who stayed after a show to tell her story. She was a beautiful girl with confidence growing up, but she had some tragic accident that left half her body atrophied. After this, she was consumed by her ugliness. She would date whatever guy would look at her. One of these guys asked her to go to a sex club and have sex in front of a bunch of other men, to which she consented. While performing, all the men crowded around to watch. Afterwards, she said, "I'm glad I left my heels on." But truly, in spite of any loss of dignity she might have felt, she also had her first feeling of attractiveness again. So, she turned to porn, and the porn movies, by different camera angles made her appear beautiful again.
One final disturbing true story he told was about at the end of another show, how some guy starts throwing down polaroids, like some Vegas dealer. When Chuck looks at them, they are either old men, or beautiful young girls lying slumped in what looks like sleep. So, he asks the man, what in the hell am I looking at? To which the man replies, it's my art. I work in a porn shop and we have peep shows there. Occasionally people die; the men from over exertion, and the women from overdosing. Before the police arrive, I use the company camera to get these polaroids.
I don't remember why he told the preceding story, but it just proves the point exemplified by his book Stranger Than Fiction.
Well, if you made it this far, I hope I haven't bored you to death relaying the random items I recall from my notes. I had two intentions with this blog. One, to relay to anyone who has never been to a book reading/signing, the insight you can learn from an author's discussion of his work, and two, to try and remember everything that happened tonight.
My final thoughts, much like Jerry Springer does at the end of his show, is that like Springer, Palahniuk explores the taboo, the perverse, the grotesque underbelly of society, but whereas Springer ends his show with a few lame sentences which he tries to pass off as a moral, Palahniuk makes the moral the foreground of the story, and the absurdities and perversions are only the supporting story. It is this powerful twist Palahniuk uses to show that the inversion of the underbelly really shows us that the heart of man is noble in spite of what his actions might suggest.
Some other stories and authors discussed during his show are:
E.B. White's Dusk in Fierce Pajamas
An obscure book, called Obscene IntentionsMark Rashard
Joy Williams
Ira Levin
He closed the show by passing out stuffed puppies.
