I take the books left for free recycling mainly for their smell,
I stick my nose among the pages, into business not my own,
然后漫步在别人的家里，
peeping into their kitchen and their bedroom. But once
their smell has faded and the book’s imbued with mine,
John Cheever的姿态名单，虚构遭遇与Nancy Regan，以及铁杆朋克小型化。
版权©Laura Owens.
当他开始发布小说时，加里印第安纳曾在三十多岁时，这可能会占他广泛的侧链。多年来，他写了并对剧院，歌舞表演和Arthouse Cinema进行了。从1985年到1988年，他每周保存艺术世界的自负，作为批评者Village Voice, and he is now an artist himself: one of his video pieces,斯坦利公园(2013), which appeared in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, was shot in the ruins of a prison in Cuba, a country Indiana has visited since the late nineties. The piece, which inflects left-wing politics with black comedy, includes a snippet of Josef von Sternberg’s 1941 melodramaThe Shanghai Gesture. In 1951, a group of surrealists riffed on scenes from that film in a game of exquisite corpse that became one of the inspirations for Indiana’s 2009 novel,The Shanghai Gesture. Indiana’s fictions take many forms—true crime, picaresque, noir, lament—but all are driven by the engine of his ruthless sensibility. His characters dash through mazes of deceit and exploitation; cruelty is a central theme.
Indiana’s first novel,Horse Crazy(1989), sets a miserable love affair in a New York wracked byAIDS，并担任撒上偷看的七十年代和八十年代波希米亚被称为“市中心”，印第安纳州的一部分和拒绝魅力;他的罗马àclefDo Everything in the Dark(2003) is a fractured dirge for that milieu. The past few years have seen a kind of Indiana renaissance. Semiotext(e) has reissued his American crime trilogy,Resentment: A Comedy（1997），Three Month Fever(1999), andDepraved Indifference(2001)—each concerns a famous murder case, but ultimately is about what happens when inner agony collides with mass delusion—and has published a volume of early plays, short fiction, and poems,Last Seen Entering the Biltmore(2010), as well asVile Days（2018），一本厚厚的书语音列。七个故事新闻已重新发布Horse Crazyand Indiana’s second novel,Gone Tomorrow(1993), and will put out a collection of his essays,Fire Season, in 2022. These days he often meets young people who tell him they love his books.
A small man, Indiana makes prodigious use of his hands and arms, slicing the air for emphasis or illustrating an idea with a twirl of the wrist. He can conduct whole conversations in a mode of rich, elaborate irony, yet he’s also insistent in his opinions and extravagant in his disdain—a mix of prince and punk. Language comes blooming out of him without prompting and without reservation, and he delivers even the most offhand joke or anecdote with wicked relish. But he did not enjoy being interviewed. I suspect that the very enterprise—the pressure, the invasiveness, the sacramental grandiosity—smacks of a gilded literary culture to which he’s vigorously opposed. During our conversations he frequently broke off to deplore the way he thought he sounded. On one occasion, he took refuge in a long telephone call with a mutual friend of ours, counseling her about her Ambien dosage.
This interview began at a bistro in Paris, where Indiana made a stop after visiting his friend the painter Laura Owens in Arles. It ended in the sixth-floor walk-up on Eleventh Street where he has lived and worked since the eighties. The basement of the building, where Patti Astor’s Fun Gallery opened in 1981, now houses a psychic. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves dominate every wall in the apartment, except for the kitchen’s; his current reading is on a cocktail trolley by the bed. When I picked upConsiderations on the Assassination of Gérard Leboviciby Guy Debord, he said he loved Debord’s “alcoholic style”; I spotted two copies of Amiri Baraka’sDante地狱的系统. More books are always arriving, in packages addressed to Gary Hoisington, the name given to him when he was born, in 1950, in Derry, New Hampshire. He has had cause to regret the pseudonym he chose on a whim. “Oh, hi,” John Ashbery said when they were introduced. “I’m Lowell Massachusetts.”
面试官
You belong to the category of writers who have also been actors, which includes Mae West and Sam Shepard. What were your strengths as an actor?
GARY INDIANA
我没有接受过培训，我当然没有专业的技术。由于我的方式，董事会给我一个，而不是我能假装的方式。衣柜通常会有一半的工作。我更有一种特殊效果 - 他们想要我的个性，或者我是如何看待时间的。当我表演时，我有 - 这可能会有所作为，我喝了多少 - 一种恶魔放弃的质量。
面试官
In Valie Export’s爱的做法，你在浴袍尖叫。
印第安纳州
In Christoph Schlingensief’s恐怖主子2000., I’m also just screaming, mostly. That was one of my bigger roles. The film was based on real events that took place just after the reunification of Germany. I was a social worker helping Polish refugees get settled, and Udo Kier was the head of a gang of terrorists. They burst onto the train where I’m singing this song of welcome, and he shoots me with a machine gun.
面试官
Were you serious about acting?
印第安纳州
I liked doing it. It was fun. I got to go to Europe and hang out with a lot of really fabulous people I’d admired my whole life, like Delphine Seyrig. She and I met on the set of Ulrike Ottinger’s filmThe Image of Dorian Gray in the Yellow Press. I played a spy, always in a kitschy Bavarian costume.
面试官
租男孩(1994) has an epigraph from Werner Schroeter, andGone Tomorrowtakes place on a film set. Some of your novels remind me of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Did your work in film affect your writing?
印第安纳州
All the time I was acting I was also writing. I was always around directors—people I’d interviewed for some publication or done some writing for or whom I knew socially. I derived part of my sensibility from them, especially from Fassbinder. There was a merciless realism to his view of things. If you look at八小时不一天, you can see that he was very energized by a vision of how society could be better arranged. People think his films are cynical, but they’re not—they depict a cynical social order that really enraged him.
I got a lot from Schroeter, too. A truly magical human being. Werner obliged me to read all three volumes of Ernst Bloch’sThe Principle of Hope. He also obliged me, less productively, to rehearse错误的喜剧在德国pre-Schlegel翻译好几个月。He hired a dialogue coach for me, an embittered actor who was in some detective series on TV, and he really hated me. He would preface every session by demanding, “Why is Werner Schroeter having you, an American, do this play at the Freie Volksbühne when you don’t even speak German?” I was to deliver this really long speech right when the curtain went up. I would tell Werner, “I can’t learn German, I can’t,” and he would say, “Anybody can learn German.” Finally I quit, and he was angry with me for a long time afterward. When I went back to Berlin to watch the production, he’d cut the entire speech down to three lines. I could easily have done it.
Rachel Cusk photo courtesy the author.
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