LP: In your latest novel, 300,000,000, we might at first take investigator E.N. Flood as a foothold in approaching serial killer Gretch Gravey, whose journals Flood is trying to make sense of. But certain developments may lead us to question the reliability of Flood's perspective, not knowing whether our understanding is being strengthened or blurred or both. For a reader, this can be disorienting. What's the experience like on the other side, as a writer? Especially in terms of working with a 'character' who may not be drawn so much as undrawn?


BB: I'm glad the tension between those voices stands out, and results in a state of further pathos, rather than definitive clarity. I think my goal in the beginning was to make the book as difficult for as many readers as possible out of the gate, to dive headfirst into the emotional hell I felt at the time that I first started typing at it, during one of the worst phases in my life. So the first draft of the book was written entirely in Gravey's intentionally disruptive, shape-shifting voice, from out of a state in which I was essentially trying to burn myself out, eat through my own process so that I would never have to write again, which eventually ended up leaving so many questions in the original document that I wondered how many readers would bother, something I had decided I didn't care about at all; but then, in explaining the often very abstract concepts in Gravey's narrative to myself, I realized that so much of what I felt about the story wasn't fully on the page yet; that what I was feeling wasn't simply hell in full, but an experience that was simultaneously being guided by the part of me that wanted better, wanted to commit to something deeper in the guise of chaos. Figuring out the vehicle of allowing Flood to notate his experience of reading through Gravey's voice then allowed me to not only clarify some of the more oblique information for other readers than myself, but also to complicate the experience by holding it up to a mirror of sorts, demanding that the face behind the mask come out, and eventually at the same time dragging the reader into a deeper pathos than the killer's voice alone could supply, by pointing out the arcane aspects I saw at work and peeling back their layers, revealing all sorts of interconnected passages beneath the surface that served not to explain away the would-be sacred shriek of the originally channeled text, but to turn the heat up on it.

A shorter, more practical answer might be: I love revision more than writing. I love hunting for errors and making them into real terrain, and wiring together subconscious or fleeting aspects of a frequently state-of-consciousness-composed text over and over until it takes on a life of its own.



2.

LP: If you could collaborate on any creative project with any artist, who would you choose and what would you make?


BB: A great question, and one that probably changes in answer every few months or years for me, but right now I'd say Stan Brakhage. His films are each like encyclopedic novels to me, that mutate and revise themselves continuously, even in the midst of viewing. Beyond immense. Of course, pretending my adding anything to what he did is a joke; instead, I can collaborate by trying to approach language with a similar intent of design.



2½.    

LP: Does the Great American Novel...?


BB: ...stand a chance to ever learn to change its own diaper? What an unfair question. It's such a big fat baby still, and who could be charged to wipe up that much dump material on their own? When it is still so afraid of its own excrement? With so many cameras down its throat?


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Read Blake's fiction.

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