SOS -- An Interview With Mickey Z. (Adam Engel)

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Adam Engel -- Dissident Voice

Oct. 4, 2008 -- We have recordings, but no music; we have movies, but no film; we have books, but no literature.
Remember when we were in our teens and early 20s, the incredible gamut of living authors to choose from? Pynchon, Gaddis, Vonnegut, James Baldwin, Delillo, Salinger, Brautigan, Cathy Acker, Roth, Bellow, Malamud, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, Grace Paley, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Audre Lorde, Charles Olsen, Jack Spicer, Allan Ginsberg, A.R. Ammons, Burroughs, Coover, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman and on and on and on? Ever been to a bookstore lately? Check out the “new” poetry and fiction? Like the soulless music, the childish movies and TV shows, etc. there’s nothing but “dead grandma” stories, straight “narratives, up-lifting “personal dramas” for the Oprah crowd…

I’m bored. I need something to READ.

I guess I wouldn’t be chewing such sour grapes if there were enough real publishers to give readers and writers an actual choice beyond the .current “marketable” 19th century-style novels with 20th century signifiers offered up by B&N (remember when there were OTHER bookstores?) Jane Austen and the Brontes wrote great books. Why do so many of “today’s writers” try to re-write them, as if two centuries of industrialization, modernism, technology, insane wars etc. hadn’t passed?

On the other hand, there’s Mickey Z.’s CPR for Dummies. Not so much an “experimental” novel, but a novel that wisely follows the legacy a century of modernists and post-modernists left to him. Wry, dry humor; “real” events interposes with fictional lives; a Henry Fielding-type “performance” by the author/narrator. It’s everything a novel tackling the mystifying “real world” of today SHOULD be. It is thoroughly original not so much in formal invention -- considering his predecessors, which he learned from as every good writer does -- but in personal style. It is a novel that could only have been written by one person: Mickey Z. Which is how all creative works should be: unique, alive. But most aren’t.

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