THE FIVE PERCENT PARADOX

Interview conducted on January 1^st and 2^nd, 2010

David Klein: When we spoke a few weeks ago, you said you were outraged by the treatment of writers by editors and publishers, both in the ephemeral media and the book trade. How different is that now than it was, say, ten years ago?

Gary Indiana: To put it in the clearest way possible, I’ll start by citing Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s seminal essay on the consciousness industry from 1964, in which he states—I can’t quote exactly—that the consciousness industry only needs 5% of originality to control the human mind. That’s to say, to sustain its control of consciousness via cultural media, by mass consumption of cultural products that are only fractionally different than what’s already been produced. In 1964, that was an hypothesis, supported by developing tendencies. In 2010 it’s a full-blown reality.

The implemental effects of this reality don’t only compromise writers: filmmakers, artists, every kind of cultural worker in the global capitalist system is compelled to internalize templates imposed by the apparatus of production and distribution. The bureaucracies that operate the consciousness industry now only allow 5% of originality into its menu items, so to speak, and what that means is, if you want access to mainstream markets, the bureaucracies tell you what to write, how to write it, and what ideas are acceptable and which ideas aren’t allowed.

Everyone knows I’m an anarchist, and that’s not an acceptable thing. But, since I can also bring better than 5% to the table, I’m among the peculiar elite the culture system highly values for exploitation. It’s much easier to extract that 5% from someone who can produce 20 or 30 percent than squeeze it from people whose maximal capacity is four percent. This has nothing to do with metaphor, but with quantifiable productive potential.

Obviously the case is somewhat different from one discipline to another. But even with painting, and other visual products displayed in galleries and museums, almost all of the power over production has passed out of the hands of the actual progenitor of the object, the image, whatever, into those of a curatorial politburo.

Traditionally—we can use the concept of tradition here--filmmakers have been most overtly at the mercy of producer-impressarios and distributors, and that goes back to the earliest days of industrialized cinema, except in idiosyncratic circumstances, when the filmmaker also owned his own studio, as Griffith or DeMille briefly did (a much later example is Jean-Pierre Melville, on the production side only), and arranged distribution himself, since significant amounts of money have always been required for mainstream film production. It was understood from earliest times that film was a collaborative medium, with a large bottom line to answer for.

Today, an individual producing cultural artifacts that require absolutely zero investment to make, aside from the cost of a notebook and a pencil, or a computer, or canvas, paint, and brushes, is required to allow collaborators into the creative process itself. I don’t mean fabricators or assistants or that kind of thing, which many artists need, for works that require somewhat greater investment than a painting. I mean collaborators at the conceptual level, who haven’t any creative or artisinal capacity at all, who simply wield power over distribution through markets.

DK: What about independent film?

GI: On a slightly smaller scale of investment, the Hollywood paradigm has almost entirely permeated so-called independent film. There are occasional flukes. You could generously say more than occasionally. But even that has to be qualified. Unless you plan to show your film exclusively on You Tube, there are bureaucracies you have to deal with, who’ll muck around with it, assign themselves certain rights, require various credits that translate into cultural capital, convertible into financial capital.

To go back to the 5% idea, Hollywood, which is much more clever, owing to long experience, than any independent filmmaker—I don’t mean that as a compliment to Hollywood at all--has reconstituted all the standard formulae, tricking them out in a coercively seductive way, with scripts that are intricately plotted—though you could easily graft them out from beginning to end on the basis of the first five or ten shots; plot is the sleaziest form of ingenuity, the best films don’t have any essential plots and neither do the best novels (plots are not stories, merely graph markers)--and even emit permissible dissonant messages, while recuperating the boilerplate of the happy family, or, rather, the troubled but sacrosanct nuclear family, mommy daddy baby, or babies, whatever, the imaginary imperative for couples to reproduce their neuroticism in progeny, or adopt children and install their pathologies into other people’s little bundles of joy, whatever; and the happy end, or the plangent promise of a happy end in the future that says, “Well, even though everything is totally fucked right now, tomorrow the sky will be blue, for sure.”

Film in Europe, South America, Africa, and parts of Asia is considerably more disruptive of these homiletic formulas; those regions don’t share the American puritan mentality, they’ve seen a lot more direct carnage and trauma, genocides, forced migrations, wars and so forth, experienced substantially more history. Here, the burden of making a film into something slightly better than technologically brutalizing or infantilizing kitsch is often carried entirely by actors and technicians, not by directors or script writers. Actors can introduce things into movies that undermine the recuperative messages embedded in the scripts. It’s still widely imagined that actors are cattle. Hitchcock fortified this delusion by using them as cattle. Most good actors are much smarter than most other people, because their growth as artists depends on honing their powers of observation and mimicry. Something similar applies to film technicians. Directors and screenwriters, in contrast, project their solipsistic ego images into story lines and the image frame. That has nothing to do with the observation of reality—which is why it’s referred to as “the director’s ‘vision,’ or the writer’s ‘vision.’ It’s projected from inside outward rather than extrapolated from actual life. In any case the 5% concept applies to almost anything that gets made.

DK: If we could stay with cinema for a minute, what would you characterize as recuperative, in the films that you’ve seen in the past year or so?

GI: I can think of many obvious examples—although, for most consumers of images, they’re not obvious, and probably the fact that they’re not obvious to many people reflects how sophisticated the doctrinal system they reinforce really has become. I’ve seen, god, at least 20 films recently in which the FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Homeland Security are depicted as heavily staffed by charismatic figures (movie stars) who are superintelligent. There is invariably a lot of smooth interagency interface and cooperation, amazingly glitch-proof technological systems—importantly, all surveillance or weapons technology—deployed to catch the bad guys, kill the bad guys, remotely control pawn figures who emerge as protagonists of the underlying melodrama, whatever.

Only last week, a guy--whose own wealthy, and hence credible, father urgently contacted at least one of these superintelligent agencies to identify his son as a security threat--sailed right through the security at Schiphol in Amsterdam; he didn’t even have a passport on him—just a visa. He was shabbily dressed and incoherent. He was on a watch list. He boarded a flight to Detroit without any problem and activated a Semtex-based bomb as the plane descended for landing, though it failed to detonate. So these myths of superintelligent spy networks, hypervigilant screening of people boarding aircraft, and so forth, obviously have no relation to reality.

Also, this ‘Department of Homeland Security’ bureaucracy, which is basically an American version of the STASI—even that word, ‘Homeland,’ has a bluntly fascist connotation—designed to surveil the general population, rather than to contain any exiguous ‘terrorist threat’—well, in film after film, the establishment of this gigantic, albeit incompetent, totalitarian agency as a permanent feature of the American government is normalized. In another year or so, people will believe that it’s been around since the Constitution was drawn up, rather than devised a few years ago, when the Constitution was being shredded into confetti with the passage of the Patriot Act.

The CIA and the FBI are heroicized as absolutely benign organizations that only portend bad things for bad people—the bad people, too, are portrayed as superintelligent, highly organized, often controlled by diabolic ethnic stereotypes; these scenarios are a form of brainwashing, pure and simple.

The CIA is a paramilitary force accountable to nobody and the FBI is there, like Homeland Security, to violate the ordinary citizen’s civil rights. Let’s not leave out the actual military. The brainless worship of militarism is absolutely standard in contemporary Hollywood film production.

Yes, you get some dissonance. But it’s not the generative dissonance that would stir up the population to revolt against this heavy tendency towards total control of consciousness, behavior, the imposition of a kind of conformity and obedience that Goebbels and Hitler could only dream about.

DK: Assuming all that, how far do you think ‘the control of consciousness’ can be taken?

GI: Hopefully not as far as people who want to engineer consciousness down to the last synapse imagine. America, which has dominated the consciousness industry since 1945 through quota demands for its cultural products and subsequent developments like GATT and so on, is finished as a world power, it’s in decline. It’s thrown out the Magna Carta and destroyed its credibility as a model for development. All it has is this internationally deployed military power to enforce its imperial ambition. Its two financial enforcers, the World Bank and the IMF, have become unwelcome in most of the world, because they service the corporate oligarchies of whatever countries they lend to, they demand a draconian role in the political infrastructures of borrowing nations, and, in any case, they’re essentially bankrupt. So you have the little Obama getting laughed out of Peking and looked at as a weird joke in Copenhagen. Only in the American press do you find him taken seriously. You can’t run an empire that doesn’t collapse pronto by bouncing checks all over the planet and giving your creditors IOU’s and bombing civilians in countries that didn’t like you in the first place with drone aircraft. So, okay, the country is washed up, still I don’t think anyone can say how much of a travesty of basic human rights we have to arrive at before people just take matters into their own hands.

Americans privilege emotionalism over cogitation, it’s a deeply, intractably anti-intellectual country—we don’t have any widely respected artist intellectuals on the level of Alexander Kluge or Hans Magnus Enzensberger; just so you don’t think I’m romanticizing Europe, they’re a bit coterie in their own country, but at least they’re recognized as important cultural influences, they have access to media, they’re paid attention to by people in power, in fact both of the people I mentioned have at various times managed to own a piece of the media, Kluge still owns a television channel and Enzensberger had a publishing house for quite a while. Don’t kid yourself, things like McSweeney’s and n+1 are just little mafias jockeying for turf, full of replacement envy of the really big showboats in the culture, and their best and brightest would be laughed out of town in any European capital, and most anywhere else except the United States. I don’t mean those mafias are unintelligent; they’ve been trained at the best schools, they know how to do an impressive little tit-tup on their teeny public stage. Unfortunately, our best schools generally produce a lot of arrogant little thugs with no authentic experience of living in any world that doesn’t support their narcissism; they live in an abstraction. In the rare instances where they venture out of the abstraction, they revert to the same emotionalism and sentimentality that you see in the culture at large.

DK: Most of what you’ve said since I turned the tape recorder on has been abstract, or general—

GI: You should have asked something specific.

DK: Will you talk about your experience with Basic Books, the Warhol debacle as you referred to it the other day?

GI: We don’t even have to go there. My personal experience with them only reflects the symptoms of something systemically shutting down. The first book they brought out, ‘Utopia’s Debris’—they asked for a book of 400 pages. That’s what I gave them, collected essays. They then decided, without consultation, that it would be a book of 300 pages, and tossed out 100 pages of essays willy-nilly. Moreover, they simply assumed that the essays that remained had all been published previously and vetted by other people’s legal departments and all that stuff, and in fact, at least seven of them had never appeared anywhere before. I rather counted on their incompetence and laziness to sail those through. Not that there’s anything libelous or factually skewed or whatever in the ones that hadn’t appeared elsewhere, and most of the essays that survived the purge of 100 pages were ones I definitely wanted in the book. But my essay on Highsmith was left out, some jerk lopped off the second part of the essay on Mary Woronov, and I’d interspersed, through the various sections, tribute pieces to writers and other people who’d died, like Mario Savio and Paul Thek; the only ones they kept were the ones on Gavin Lambert--which, like most of them, was more about his work than his biography--and Susan Sontag.

DK: I’d like you to go back to what you said earlier about the 5% of originality, if you could cite some concrete examples of it in operation.

GI: Who can say if it’s 5% or 6% or 7%, but it isn’t much. That movie Invictus. The 5% is Matt Damon’s performance. Ten minutes into the thing you realize, if you’re analytically minded, that the whole movie is going to be a thinly veiled apologia for Obama’s endless compromises with the right wing and nothing about Mandela and the ANC and the historical forces leading up to Mandela’s release and subsequent election as the President of South Africa. And Morgan Freeman is really ghastly in it, trying to “act.” He’s such an old ham, you could stick a bunch of pineapple rings on him with toothpicks and serve him for Christmas dinner. But he’s exactly the right actor for that movie’s actual agenda. He's not African, and he's played imaginary American presidents, so you get right away that you're watching Freeman as Obama impersonating Mandela. I like Clint Eastwood’s movies, generally, but I walked out of Invictus after an hour or so and I almost never walk out of a movie. Too uplifting and contrived from the get-go.

With Brothers, the 5% is that it almost doesn’t have a happy ending. And the acting, more or less all of it, and quite a lot of the script. But it’s still essentially about this sacred nuclear family configuration, the sanctity of monogamous sexual relations within marriage, the fact that Jake Gyllenhall’s character doesn’t fuck his brother’s widow, as they both think at the time she is. It’s almost an anti-war movie, you could call that the 5%. If the Jake Gyllenhall character had fucked her, it would have been an anti-war movie.

DK: Does the 5% idea rule apply to American literature as well as American films?

GI: I don’t read American literature, so-called, unless it’s written by a personal friend, or maybe Gore Vidal or someone of that fast-expiring breed. And he can be quite tiresome too. I only like the essays where he doesn’t yammer on about what an exalted patrician family he comes from and how his blind grandfather invented Oklahoma and how he knew Amelia Erhardt and blah blah blah. The novels like Duluth and Kalki, the ones Calvino called ‘hypernovels.’ Not the historical ones, except Julian. He’s a really disgusting person, I’ve heard. I’m glad I never met him. If Renata Adler published something, I’d read it. I don’t know if I’d drop everything and rush out to get it, when you reach a certain age that kind of enthusiasm seems kind of stupid.

I know there are a lot of good American writers, who certainly get away with more than 5%--Denis Johnson, I do read him, and I’ll mention him only because he’s not a personal friend. If you start mentioning friends, some friend you forget to mention is going to be pissed off.

I just generally prefer reading people like Jean Echenoz or Fernando Vallejo, they’re way beyond 5%. Actually, let’s drop the 5% business now. I’m not especially fluent in speaking French or Spanish, I speak Cuban Spanish and they drop a lot of words and talk really fast, but I can read those languages without much difficulty. Italian. I’m trying to learn German, finally, after decades of putting it off. Anyway, I prefer reading non-Americans, someone like Ryu Murakami or Coetzee or even Margaret Atwood, who’s North American but not US American, because they’re not closely concerned with the US’s problems. I like to see this country, when I have to, through the eyes of somebody who doesn’t live here and isn’t from here. The good writers here all know what’s wrong with the US and they don’t know any more about it than I do, and I don’t want to be influenced by their little methods or what have you.

DK: Literature isn’t only about social problems, or politics. A writer’s work is a world of its own, isn’t it?

GI: I’m almost 60 years old. There are books I don’t have time in my life to read. I’m not in the literary world here, I don’t need to read books by people who are. I don’t have time. I don’t care for the people in the literary world here. I’ve seen them in action now and then, networking, and I can’t separate the spectacle of that from what they write. Maybe they’re wonderful writers. I just don’t fucking care.

DK: But you live here yourself.

GI: I read a great deal of American non-fiction. The nice thing about non-fiction is that if it’s any good, it’s not “American,” even if it’s written by an American. I haven’t got any nationalistic feelings or any patriotism or any mental or emotional attachment to this country per se, it’s a physical attachment because at the present time, and hopefully not straight through till I finish up, I’m stuck in it. I don’t mean I hate the country or the people in it, I hate the government and the way the society is organized and the way the culture industry operates here.

DK: Where would you prefer to live?

GI: In utopia, like everybody else. Since that’s not an option—oh, I can say this differently. I have a very close friend who lives here in New York. She’s French, she’s lived here for 30 years, and she likes living here because she doesn’t catch everything that people around her are saying. She’s very intelligent and talented and full of life, it’s quite deliberate on her part that she hasn’t perfected her English. She’s able to filter out a lot of the bombardment of twaddle that anyone living in New York is subjected to. The sheer inanity of this place is overwhelming to someone who understands all of it, who registers everything of a verbal or written nature. When I’m in France, I understand what people at a dinner party are talking about, I can converse, but I don’t even register what someone on a cell phone in the street is blabbering about. I don’t focus on it, so it slides right off me. It’s even more the case in Germany or Poland or Morocco or wherever. I loved the months I spent in India because the way they speak English is almost incomprehensible unless you listen closely, and much of the time you don’t have to. Same thing with Japan or South Asia, it’s total gibberish to me. So, you know, you can make up your own version of what people might be saying. I think the majority of people everywhere talk a lot of banalities most of the time and if you don’t understand them, you can imagine that they’re much more mindful and decent and kind or whatever than they actually are. Or you can just goof on them in your head. Make up a whole fantastic life story for them. It’s possible to use your imagination to make your own reality. You don’t have to analyse everything, you don’t feel you have to figure out what other people’s pathologies are, if what comes out of their mouths is only semi-intelligible to you or, better still, completely lingua incognita. Sometimes you can even forget what your own pathology is.

DK: In other words, you feel oppressed by your own awareness.

GI: Not exactly. If I feel oppressed, it’s because the conditions of life here oblige me to deal with technology, with the warping effect that capitalism and technology have on people’s behaviors and personalities, which is more extreme, as far as I can tell, here than in other places that have as much technology but not the same kind of rapacious, unbridled capitalism welded to it. Because of certain particular circumstances I have to contend with, I think it’s too late for me to live in Cuba, though I think of all the places I’ve lived, I felt happiest there. And during the years I spent primarily in Cuba, I wasn’t living in a luxury hotel or hobnobbing with a bunch of cultural bureaucrats, I lived in an apartment with a well-educated, sweet family who were just getting by, and despite all the scarcities and difficulties, they knew how to be happy just living each day as it came and making the most of what little they had. This was in Havana, the capital, and there weren’t any billboards and there wasn’t this electronic assault of cretinizing advertising and celebrity worship and disgusting greed. I’ve been everywhere on that island and when you go out to Pinar del Rio at one end or Santiago at the other the complete absence of everything that’s horrible here is even more gorgeous. You don’t have to be afraid of people, you don’t have to worry about getting mugged or fag-baited or shot by some lunatic with a handgun or stared at like you’re from another planet. People just accept you the way you are and they’re incredibly open-hearted and kind.

Of course I understand that it’s a dictatorship, and that vast numbers of people there believe they’d be happier if they could live, if not here, then in some other country; but it’s not an insane dictatorship like North Korea, it couldn’t be more different; people love to dance and play music and fuck and talk and share things, and go about their lives with an attitude of mutual respect and affection, despite the micromanagement of goods distribution and what have you, and when you look at the United States, and the kind of insanity it thrives on, you can’t help thinking that Cubans have a better life. Not materially better, spiritually better. In spite of everything they have a real society, a real social contract, a real sense that other people exist and that everyone has an equal right to live. Yes, I could leave when I wanted to and most Cubans I knew couldn’t, but the fact is that when I’d spend six months on the island, I didn’t want to come back here. I hated the whole idea of coming back here. A lot of transvestites and gay guys I knew down there thought if they got to Miami, they’d automatically have a big house and a Lexus and tons of money—from where, they had no concept at all—and hang out with Madonna in South Beach.

I think it’s appalling that some gazillionaire artist like Julian Schnabel jets down there for a film festival, hangs around with the privileged cultural elite for a week or a few days or whatever, then makes a movie in Mexico tricked out to look like Havana, about how crushingly oppressed the Cubans are, and how terrible Reynaldo Arenas had it there. Reynaldo Arenas was a third-rate writer who hustled infinitely better writers like Lezamo Lima and Virglio Pinera, physically unattractive men who fell for his good looks, to get ahead in the literary microworld down there…and Arenas, like Schnabel in a way, was a born hustling egomaniac who parleyed his minor talent into a fairly cushy situation right in Havana, but of course he wanted more. So he gets out of there, comes to New York, gets fucked by everything with a cock and gets AIDS--well, that part is horrible, of course, and it’s also true that at the time when he lived in Cuba, homosexuals were extremely mistreated—rather the way they were in America until the Metrosexual was invented. Except here they could make a lot of money in certain professions, and queen it over other gays with less money, as long as they kept the sex thing under the rose…But things weren’t at all the same for gays in Cuba even when Schnabel went down there as a tourist, and they’ve vastly improved since. Except, and this is important, I knew many guys with HIV in Cuba, and because of the shortage of medicines, I had to smuggle anti-retroviral drugs in for them—not because the Cuban government had any objection to that, I never once had my luggage searched or any pharmaceuticals confiscated, I should say rather that I had to smuggle anti-retrovirals out of the United States, via Jamaica or Mexico, and then to Cuba, through a network of people who pooled drugs that people who’d died had left over. If Cuban doctors had had access to those drugs, which cost $1500 a month in this country--a complete obscenity for which you can thank Bristol Myers Squibb and Gilead Sciences, Big Pharma, our whole disgusting medical system--they would’ve been supplying them to Cubans with HIV absolutely without cost.

I got free medical care in Cuba, for minor stuff, but if I’d needed a triple bypass that would’ve been free, too. I did give the doctors what money I could, to buy medicines, but they certainly didn’t ask for it, much less demand it.

Not to belabor an earlier point, but there was every reason for someone like Nestor Almendros to get out of Cuba when he did, and you could make the same argument for Arenas, except that…Arenas could quite easily have wormed his way into the culture elite allowed to go abroad, given his profession. Pinero left there all the time as he pleased, to go to Buenos Aires or wherever. Arenas was halfway home free when he made his heroic escape with the Mariel boatlift. He was impatient, and he was a drama queen, and, if you like, he was an artist, he wanted to roll the dice with his own life without having to inch through the bureaucracy, okay, understood. But I think it’s bizarre for someone like Schnabel to pass his ridiculous judgements on the country years afterwards—has he ever stuck his neck out indicting his own country’s failings? Unlike Cuba, the US doesn’t learn from its mistakes, ever. I don’t mean to say the Arenas film wasn’t a good film; it was. But it was science fiction. Actually, Schnabel seems fixated on making movies about individuals from minority groups he doesn’t belong to. Basquiat, a middle-class black posing as a street kid; Arenas, a gay novelist; and some paralyzed French guy who wrote a book by blinking his eyelids. I gather he plans to film some epic about the Palestinians next. That should be rich. He’ll solve the Palestinian problem. What Elia Suleiman can’t do, he will.

DK: Not your favorite person.

GI: He’s perfectly nice, if you’ve never met a person before. At least he’s not collaborating with some Russian arms dealer, like Damien Hurst and Jeff Koons, to concoct some “award for new artists.” I like some of his paintings, they’re nice decoration for a McMansion in Tampa. Hey, you know the Vatican is reaching out to artists now as a way of deflecting all their pedophile problems, they’re even going to have their own Pavillion in the Venice Bienniale. Maybe Schnabel could be the first Jew to represent the Vatican in Venice.

DK: We’ve strayed way off the original subject of this interview.

GI: I don’t quite remember what that was. I was about to say that Benedict, this Pope Benedict creature, was Franz-Josef Strauss’s closest advisor, before ascending to the Papacy. For the historically challenged, Franz-Josef Strauss was, during his miserable lifetime, affectionately known as The Little Hitler of Bavaria by most sentient Germans.

DK: About publishing, and the culture industry, and your vicissitudes with it. You avoided talking about the Warhol book, in fact.

GI: If I did, it’s because then it becomes only about me. I will tell you that when, after nearly three years of the so-called editor promising edits by a certain date and then flagrantly not coming through with them, concocting every kind of horseshit story—car accident, injury falling from a horse or something, ‘walking pneumonia’ which she flew to Marrakesh in order to recover from, I swear she actually had the effrontery to tell me that as if I were a complete idiot—well, after all that time I went to the best arts lawyer in the city and tried to see if I had a legal case to take my book away from them. I’ll explain: I was paid the advance on signing and then the part of the advance released upon acceptance. But she and her company claimed that the book had not, in fact, been accepted; the turd I had as an agent, looking out for his interests rather than mine, backed this cretin up at every turn, and actually said that they’d paid out the second part of the advance ‘as a favor’ to me—absolutely gaga. For a long time I had the suspicion that he was fucking her, I’d always been told by various people in Los Angeles that he was a serial philanderer, not that I give a shit about who’s fucking anybody, but I’d get an e-mail from her in the middle of the night, then a follow-up e-mail from him dated about two minutes later…but then I realized, whether they were literally in bed together or not, he was anyway the type of person who would sell out any client to maintain his good relations with whatever publishing houses he had any good relations with. They played a lot of mind games on me, and even though I saw very clearly they were doing that, I’d gone into a clinical depression, and couldn’t compartmentalize this shit away. I woke up every day for two and a half years just wanting to kill myself. Planning it, reading up on how to do it without leaving a mess. I was also, physically, extremely ill. Okay, enough about that: what I was told, and this by a great lawyer who very much had my interests at heart, that this now goes on all the time, and there is absolutely nothing the writer can legally do about it. The contract was totally standard, and it was constructed, apparently, by a coven of Jesuits, so that legally, acceptance of a book in the form of paying out the advance due upon acceptance isn’t de facto acceptance of the book. It’s just the beginning of brain rape by some megalomaniacal editor who can actually force you to tear huge chunks out of your book, who rearranges everything you’ve written, like some six year old playing with scissors and crayons, and you do it that editor’s way or they sue you for what they’ve paid out. I had published fourteen or fifteen books by that time, all but a couple of them with major houses, and I had never had anything like this experience in my life. Not with book editors, not with magazine editors, never ever ever. Until this episode, what typically happened was this: you’d get notes from the editor, and it was your call whether to agree with or override his or her suggestions, one by one. I had some trouble at Doubleday with their corporate lawyer but the editorial people were on my side, and I brought my own lawyer in, and the trouble went away. It was an matter of prior restraint, though nobody had to articulate that. It was all very civilized and calm, Doubleday published it exactly as I wrote it.

What I wanted to say about this Warhol business is that it’s completely consistent with the mentality that prevails now throughout publishing—with some wonderful exceptions, there are plenty of superb editors working in mainstream publishing still. The hyenas are crowding them out because that’s what hyenas do. They care about power and they enjoy pushing people around and that’s it and that’s all. Small presses are a mixed bag and they’re working under enormous constraints and much as they’d like to, most aren’t financially well-fixed enough to market a book properly; the best they can do for you is keep it in print for a much longer time that the major ones will. That’s not so new, it’s been true for many years. With major houses, which are all owned by people like Rupert Murdoch, if a book doesn’t “open big,” like a Hollywood movie, it’s remaindered in about four or five months. They don’t want to let go of it in case the writer hits a lucky streak later on, so instead of saying it’s out of print, they tell the bookstores it’s “temporarily out of stock.” Usually, if you can prove that nobody anywhere can order the book except on amazon.com for ten cents from a used book dealer, you can get the revert and force them to give back the rights. I don’t know how that will change with this Google business and Kindle—great name for it, Kindle, reminds you of book burning, don’t it? The Google thing is sheer fucking piracy. And the burden of proof is on the writer, they don’t come and ask your permission, you have to find out if they’re scanning your books. And even if you declare you don’t want your books scanned and made available for free to anybody in the world, the way I read the malarky they do send you, some weasly little e-mail form, you have to let them scan it anyway and they send you a check for about $35 as compensation. The head of Google, recently, when his company was about to blithely violate everybody’s privacy rights with this face recognition software to put in people’s mobile phones, said something like, “If people aren’t doing something wrong they shouldn’t care if complete strangers can find out everything about them”—you know, by pointing their phone cameras at you in a crowd, and downloading your identity, and anything else about you washing around on the Internet--god, somebody responded to that very cleverly in The Guardian or The Independent a couple weeks ago, but I can’t remember what they wrote. Anyway, publishing.

The tweak here is that the contracts, unless you’re a big enough name to push through extremely detailed demands before ever signing one, completely stack the deck against the author. You have to live up to your end of the bargain but they don’t remotely have to live up to theirs. And this is part of a paradigm shift that obtains in other areas of the culture industry, where people who can’t make the actual book or painting or film themselves can totally control what the final product reads like, looks like, whatever. I’m not speaking about input, one expects to get input. One doesn’t expect to reach a fairly high level of proficiency after decades of refining one’s craft and then have someone come in and wreak utter havoc with what you’ve labored over for months or years. Since nothing remotely like this had happened to me before, I thought it was entirely because I’d picked a lousy agent and he’d found a really rotten editor for me to deal with. That was true enough, but it’s also, apparently, happening to a lot of people all the time now. I mean to real writers, not some dipshit 20 year old who can barely write his or her name on a check.

With magazines, it’s also complicated. Either you work for big bucks for Conde Nast and have them completely rewrite everything you turn in, or you work for less remunerative venues where, in the last few years, 1500 words have come to be considered a feature article. To me that’s a caption. And even if you have a good editor, they have people pushing in on them, demanding last minute cuts so some designer can jerk himself off giving pages his special sparkle, with lots of white space, and sometimes even the good editors feel they have to edit these micropieces to death. Take your voice right out of the equation, suggest little word changes, strike out sentences, until you no longer have any idea why you bothered to write the thing in the first place, since any entry-level job slinging burgers at McDonald’s would be more remunerative, if you factor up the time you spend making beetling little changes to what was perfectly all right in the first place.

DK: Is this because the publishing industry is in a state of panic, because of e-books and the Internet, market pressures—what do you conclude about it?

GI: If it’s panic, it’s the kind of panic in which complete irrationality ensures a disastrous outcome, because in this instance, the publisher advertised the book in its Spring, 2007 catalogue. It’s now supposedly appearing in Spring, 2010. Between 2007 and 2009, there were myriad Warhol retrospectives, major conferences, huge auction sales, and other such things that would’ve provided a marketing bonanza for anybody who knew what they were doing with such a book. But just to make a picture for you, I had lunch with this editor twice. On one occasion she made me a present of several books she’d edited—not fluff books but serious ones--and told me she’d basically had to write them herself. No writer wants to hear that said about any other writer’s work. For one thing, you kind of glom that that’s what this person’s going to end up telling the entire publishing industry and anybody else about your book, and proceed to manipulate things so that it’s halfway true. Of course, then they instill an imperishable hatred against them in the writer if he or she cares fuck all about what appears with his or her name on it; if you live for your work, someone who fucks with it that seriously is setting themselves up for very bad things down the road. Karmically speaking.

I worked with one editor at a major house who did, in fact, write many of the very commercial, non-fiction type of books that she often commissioned to bring home the bacon, getting “the raw data,” so to speak, from, say, a cosmetologist hawking a line of “topicals” or what have you—in other words, roughly outlined books from people who can’t write and have no particular investment in writing as a craft but just want to get a big commercial book out and make a ton of cash. Okay, I don’t have any problem with that, it makes perfect sense. That editor wasn’t a subliterate hyena, she spoke impeccable French, educated in Switzerland, she had a solid literary education, she could write a good clear commercial sentence. My books she didn’t interfere with at all, she’d give me a scattering of notes, I did three books with her and her notes were intelligent and I welcomed her suggestions, partly because I was being treated with respect, and they made sense. And it was understood that if I disagreed with her, my book, my game. That’s different than being threatened with lawsuits if you don’t knuckle under to editorial demands—which, by the way, didn’t come directly from the Warhol book editor, they came from my agent, the person who’s supposed to stick up for you. I’m referring to the threats, not the demands, which were the three-year-old-late editor’s maulings, and…idiotic. Not every single one of them, but she’d made such a mess of the whole thing that that was irrelevant. And, as I had no choice in the matter, I had to perform this lobotomy on my own book. As a result, it’s been dismissed as “a hagiography” by Newsweek—an exaggeration even given what’s gone awry, but not entirely unjustified, everything considered--way in advance of publication, and I can’t see any way in hell that it’s going to have any interest for anybody, since anybody who knows anything about the subject will dismiss it as boilerplate tripe about Warhol, stuff you’ve heard and read a million times—that’s what it was turned into.

DK: Doesn’t it worry you that if what you’ve described really is common practice now, the artist will become obsolete?

GI: If I thought I had many decades left to live through, I suppose it would, but I can’t answer for the future, or speculate even—it’s going to be other people’s problem, and it will get worse. I met Ingrid Caven for a drink a few months ago in Paris, and—just to make it clear that this isn’t a strictly American phenomenon, even if the brutal style of it is—she told me straight out, rather merrily, “They think people like us are the devil now.” She had some concert bookings cancelled when the places she was booked learned that she wasn’t going to sing her old repertoire, the songs Fassbinder and Enzensberger and Wondratchek wrote for her, which in fact isn’t what she’s been singing for years—though I think she’s doing something new with Enzensberger, which will be fascinating-- she’s gotten very involved with electronic music, with experimental sound, also with variations on things by Schubert and other composers, and that’s well known, but now the cultural bureaucrats want only the completely familiar, what they can grasp. The whole culture industry is stalled and keeps re-looping the past. My guess is that the people running it are stupid enough to ditch even the 5%, and then they’re finished. Ingrid thinks what we will have to do is move forward on a small scale, with the internet maybe, whatever little vectors we can use, find these little islands of opportunity for self-expression. While the stupidity of the mainstream lumbers on to its inevitable end in the La Brea Tar Pits.