interview with ben latini

Ben Latini writes on the blog which is called Big Hairy Word Monsters. Here is an interview I had with him. He interviewed me first, so now we are even. Somewhere in the interview, Ben talks about keeping a special place in his heart's bookshelf for Charles Bukowski.

Me: You were doing this thing on your blog a while ago which was  mashups. You cut-and-pasted sentences from novels, and your own  stories, and put them in a random order. What were you trying to work   out in your head by doing mashups?

 

 

Ben: It really wasn't "random order".  I tried to use material that already existed as a source from which to draw for experimentation.  I wanted to mess around with odd juxtapositions and focus on the sounds off the words...aural texture...the way words bounce off of each other.  I'm sort of fascinated by the fact that text is so easy to manipulate.  I take someone's story, and in my hands...it becomes a whole new thing. You can't do this sort of thing in the same way with other art forms.  I could try to incorporate someone else's footage into a film I make, but it won't mesh exactly.  I don't have the same lighting setup, the sound may be a bit different.  But in writing, we all start with the same words and letters (assuming we're talking English speakers of course).  Your work can integrate into mine seamlessly if I work to make it do so.  I don't need a budget...I don't need to hire actors.  There's a whole world at my fingertips and I can instantly make anything happen in this word-universe.  And what's amazing...is that when I did these mashups...the core of the material I drew from was still there.  I could still feel the essence of the subject pulsing through the words.  Mostly, though, I was just excited to have come across a new way to come up with material for my writing.  I'll never have writer's block.  Because, if I want to write, I'll just do it...ideas are floating in the air.  Everything is an idea for a story...so, you just try a whole bunch of them out and see what works.

 

 

Me: There is also a blog post where you said that your aspiration, as  an English major, is to, "Probably become a homeless guy". Could you  type a few sentences about your thoughts related to the difficulties  involved in trying to make money from creative writing?

 

 

Ben: I think it's silly to hope to make a living at creative writing.  A beautiful idea...but a silly one. The window of opportunity gets smaller everyday.  I think it's actually presumptuous and wrong to want much money for your writing.  Now with the internet...there's so much content that is free, it doesn't make sense to think you'll be able to keep charging people for it.  I think honestly that all literature should be free.  Writers should have regular jobs and not be sitting in a room cloistered from everyone else's experience.  In order to make literature a thriving community with millions of participants and a consistent level of excitement about the writing coming out...I think we need to make it all availible and free.  Everyone can watch the same shit on tv...but they can't always get ahold of the same books.  I don't want writing to be someone's job...I want it to be something that bursts out of someone out of someone and can't be contained...something so forceful it seeks every outlet that it can insert itself into.  I want literature to be a big deal like it was in the days of yore.  Plus...if we didn't have the money or prestige of the big publishers to tempt us...everyone could write whatever they wanted and they wouldn't hold back on sharing it with us.  I used to think I wanted to be published by a "big-time" press someday, because I'd be validated and be able to comfortably call myself a writer.  But now I don't think you should wait for someone else to tell you you're a writer.  Just write and try not to think about the extraneous industry stuff which only gets in the way.

 

 

Me: Let's say that you have your own religion (which you might  already, I don't know). What are the central pillars of Latinianity?

 

 

Ben: My philosophy is that life is just the process of keeping busy and amusing ourselves until we die.  So we don't need to take it as seriously as most people seem to, and we don't shouldn't it matters whether or not we live some certain way.  This isn't a negative existentialist bent though.  I actually see this as a positive.  It feels to me like freedom.  I assume there's no God or heaven, because I don't want to owe anyone.  I believe in humanity...that people, overall, are good, or at least interesting.  Death is very scary to me, but then again, so is life (I have anxiety issues).

 

 

Me: Type a list of your favorite poets at the moment and why you like them.

 

 

Ben: I actually read most poetry with ambivilance.  I study it, and find it stimulating...but I often don't value one poem over the next.  Poetry is too abstract for me to feel like I have any criteria to make value judgements.  Once in a while, a particular poem will strike me somehow... but I can't say I consistently like many poets.  However...there's room in a special place in my heart's bookshelf (can't believe I just said that) for:

 

• Charles Bukowski because he writes from in front of the curtain...I look at the page and I can see exactly what he's doing.  I can see the poem, smell it and roll around in its mud.  Plus, he's funny without seeming like he's trying hard to be funny.  It puts me inside of a moment...where as most poems make me feel like I'm looking at some dissected and fractured pieces of a moment through a layer of glass.

• Mike Young, because his imagery is interesting...his poems are dense...he blends the most bizarre and mudane moments of life and tosses them to us in off-speed chunks...they're hard to get a hold of...but in a good way.  I feel like...he knows what he's talking about...has such a mastery over his subjects that he can present it in a jumbled fashion and I'll still feel the heart of the piece as though I know exactly what he means.  And he writes these great prose poems, which he calls prose flurries...neither too prosey nor too poemic.

 

• Ellen Kennedy, for being funny and unnerving.  When I first read her...I liked the way she wrote in complete sentences, but wrote things that were surreal, so that she could escape the mundane and still have a dose of some brand of poesy in her work.  She was the first of the so-called "Wal-Mart Realists" that I read, before I realized that basically everyone on the interent writes like that.  Still I find her more amusing and interesting than most all of the others who write in that style.  I only wish she'd write more.

 

Me: Are you happy that blogs and the internet exist, both in the context of promoting your writing, and also in a wider social context? You can type about either.

 

Ben: I am very glad blogs exist.  I can easily find interesting people to correspond with (not always easy to do with the limited selection presented to us in "real life")  And I love the internet...because it can keep me company in so many ways, while allowing me to avoid too much real social contact which I'm not always comfortable with or interested in.

As for a wider social context...I try not to think too much about society as a whole, because I don't feel I'm responsible for what other people do.  I'd rather not think ill of the direction society has chosen to take, because, frankly I'm not dynamic enough to effect change.  I just try to accept the idea that everything will work out.  If it doesn't...we'll just change our definition of "things working out"...no problem!  But yeah, There isn't much of an audience for creative writing in my hometown.  I'm glad I can make my writing internationally available.  Not because I think my own writing is so important, but just because I want to be read.  I almost feel like I'll know when I've received what, to me, is an adequate amount of recognition, and then, I could stop writing and go live in a cave.  that's not to say that I'm only writing for recognition, but it is to say I feel like I may stop at any time.  It's like when you're throwing up, and afterward, you feel better...I think there's something I'm working toward with all this thinking and typing and submitting and posting and eventually, I may just hit the nail on the head, and I'll have something I can point to and say, "that's what I'm all about."  "that's my point."  Then I'll be able to walk around feeling light.