Austinist Interviews Benjamin Kunkel

We wanted to create this magazine in part because going to college in the ‘90s, coming of age intellectually in this era of, by then, relatively stale post-modernism it was easy to feel like there was nothing new under the sun and that you could only recombine things that have already been done. I think n+1, particularly the title, expressed hope more than a conviction that something new could be done, that there could be some progress or advance in intellectual life. Which sounds very solemn, I think that if you actually read the magazine you’ll see that we usually have a sense of humor about taking ourselves too seriously.

What kind of presence, physical presence, does n+1 have in Texas? I’ve noticed that the web-site doesn’t list any retailers that carry it in our enormous state.

Yeah, that is very out of date. In fact, BookPeople was one of the first stores to carry us. Distribution, when you’re a small magazine, is just a nightmare. I hope they’re still carrying us and if they’re not, people should come in and demand it, pull out their six shooters…

And spit some tobacky on the counter? A new issue is coming out soon and you can subscribe?

Yeah, in fact it should be arriving here to anyone who subscribed in Texas in a matter of days. It’s a good issue.

Are you apprehensive about being in Texas? Does Texas scare you at all?

NO! Texas is, in my experience of the past few hours, very humid. I’ve always heard great things about Austin. I’m not apprehensive about it at all. I grew up with a strong prejudice against Texas and Texans because I’m from Colorado. They were alleged to be the people who came in and were rude and drove big cars and didn’t know how to drive on the ice and bought second homes. I think it’s clear that it’s not just the Texans now. I don’t know who kids in Colorado grow up hating today. But not the Texans I’d imagine. I’ve long since overcome my anti-Texan feelings.

Well that’s very nice of you. Now for some hackneyed questions: you’re on a book tour, traveling a lot, what are you reading?

I’m re-reading for the first time in a long time Samuel Beckett’s trilogy, which I’m finding to be the most lunatic novels I’ve ever read. I think when I first read them, I kind of read them as a pretentious teenager for that reason: there was nothing more pretentious that I could find to read. And I didn’t have enough knowledge of literature to know how bizarre these books were. I just figured maybe there were lots of novels people have written that were angry and vile and senseless. They’re pretty magnificent, but I’d forgotten how nasty they are. To say scatological hardly gives you any idea. There’s a lot of stuff that is no more sophisticated than anything the Farrelly brothers have come up with. It’s probably less sophisticated. So, anyway it’s been a bit of a surprise to return to him and find that he’s much stranger than I’d remembered and maybe than other people remember, because I think he’s an author who’s kind of honored in the breach and people are like “he’s a great novelist… [whispered] who I never really read.” Yeah, I’ve been reading a lot of him.

Do you like anybody in contemporary fiction? Is there anybody that’s turning you on… if I may be “creepy”?

There’s this writer named John Haskell, whose book American Purgatorio I thought was great and it was probably the best new American novel I’ve read in recent years. At n+1 we just assembled this fiction portfolio of interesting people… I don’t read too much in writers of my generation when I don’t have to really, just to kind of keep them from interfering with what I like to hear as my own sound. I just read, in manuscript form, Neil Freudenberger’s first novel, which is supposed to come out in the Fall, and I thought that was really great. So there’s two. There are other people too, I guess there’s so much to read. I like reading stuff that I feel won’t interfere with what I’m trying to do.

It’s nice to go old school. You’ve sort of become, I’ve noticed in some interviews, an expert on the indifferent, apathetic male. Is that something you would have imagined coming from this book?

No. In fact that is maybe the one unwary thing that I have done in the last year is to sit down with a reporter for dinner and to have, over the course of dinner, a couple drinks and to pontificate about relations between men and women which is you know about the stupidest thing you can do because no one agrees about these things… there’s nothing you can say that won’t scandalize some people. And of course this is not what I want to be: some love pundit. I was asked to go on a radio show on Valentine’s Day as if I know anything, I mean anything more than the average guy walking down the street in Austin, or anywhere else, knows about these things… and I declined. I don’t want to claim any expertise and I’m sure my girlfriend wouldn’t allow me to claim any expertise in these matters.

We were really intrigued by the term “romantico-sexual.” It pops up a lot in Indecision. Did you coin that phrase?

Actually it was one of my ambitions in life that it would gain a widespread currency, well, maybe I shouldn’t say that… yet, I believe I coined that… although I have a friend who thinks we coined it together when we were back in college. We were reading a fair amount of Foucault and it seemed like the sort of thing that Foucault might say. It seemed like sort of a joke Foucaultion term. But, even though it’s a jokey term it seems like a useful one.

Maybe that’s my only credible bid to immortality: that the OED someday will say “the first use of this term found in English is in this since pulped book by this dead guy.”