Print Screen is a fascinating series at the Film Society of Lincoln Center that pairs acclaimed authors with films that have influenced them. This Spring they feature Jacob Wren talking about director Abbas Kiarostami’s seminal work Close-Up. 

Wren’s new book Rich And Poor (Bookthug) travels through the mind of a disenfranchised man who decides to kill a billionaire as a political act. The book is told through both the eyes of the assassin and the rich man. Kiarostami’s Close-Up is a fictional film about actual events with the people who experienced the events, thus. Both Wren's book and Kiarostami's film are driven by unreliable characters and events that ultimately play upon the idea of what is art and what is truth in art. 

I recently had the chance to talk about his new book, art, politics, literary cliques, and film. 
                                                                                                                            —​Jacqueline Valencia

Jacqueline Valencia: I literally just finished reading Rich And Poor and re-watched Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up as well. What brought you to do this for the Lincoln Center?
Jacob Wren : Rachel Rakes invited me to be part of this series I’ve never seen, but seems really awesome.
 
JV: There is an unreliable narrator in the movie and in your book. What I enjoyed about that is that the man pretending to be the filmmaker and in turn the filmmaker making a movie about that it’s a duality seen in your book, Rich And Poor.  These two works explore duality.
JW: It was only when I finished Rich And Poor that it became so clear to me that there were two unreliable narrators. I went back and forth between them. But I do think there is some sense in which all my writing is about paradox or embodies many paradoxes of living that makes it clear that there can’t be a reliable narrator. We’re all unreliable narrators of our own lives. Philosophizing and trying to theorize about life is a kind of unreliable activity.
 
Rich And Poor is a book about many things, but one of the things it’s about is what we do about capitalism. How can we change it in some way, or can we or is there any possibility, or what are the possibilities? Capitalism seems so overwhelming. Any idea you have to change it or defeat it one can’t be sure it will work. Also, capitalism seems to be able to absorb so much of the opposition. It takes that opposition and makes it a part of capitalism and you can feel it’s hopeless.
 
I think this puts us in a position of being unreliable, or unknowing, or unsure.
 
JV: It’s a pretty circular thing because once you make a call to action it gets easily appropriated without one realizing it until it may be too late.
JW: Yeah or it might change things, but not exactly the things you want to change. You’re entering a very unpredictable space.
 
JV: I noticed the line: “Someday a real rain will come and wash all the scum from these streets.” It’s from one of my favourite films, Taxi Driver.
JW: * laughs * Yeah.
 
JV: What inspired you to write Rich And Poor besides the idea of capitalism because this reads a lot like the characters in Taxi Driver (Travis Bickel, the disenfranchised taxi driver and Palantine, the politician).
JW: I would say that the origins of Rich And Poor were reading David Graeber’s book Debt: The First 5000 Years and a lot of the discourse around Occupy Wall Street and this refocusing of leftist attention on the one percent. Also, how capitalism became less of an abstract.

I was raised to think that capitalism was this abstract post-modern machine, in that Foucault sense, invaded all of our discourse and our ways of understanding the world totally. Capitalism may be that, but it’s also rich people getting richer. And refocusing capitalism on the idea of rich people getting richer and well with all the rich people I was thinking, why don’t we just kill them? It’s probably just a few hundred or a few thousand people. Why not the French Revolution?
 
This unnamed protagonist who decides to kill one specific billionaire—it’s a classic cinematic image for the loner who wants to do something good in the world, but maybe where we question him is in Roberto DeNiro in Taxi Driver.
 
Jacqueline: There are many layers in watching a film. We have the film that is presented to the viewer and the film that continues playing in the viewer’s brain after they’ve left the theatre. This is one of things that really got me about Kiarostami’s Close-Up. I forgot who says it, but the line that stuck with me was: “Spite is a veil to conceal art.” Some of the passages in your book also stand out in much the same way.
 
My point is, I wonder if Kiarostami had that in mind, the idea of the film as an extended part in a viewer’s mind.
JW: Yes. Close-Up is such a film about art and what power it has in the world or what power it doesn’t have in the world. And the way art is or isn’t a lie or is or isn’t truth.
 
It’s a Tolstoy quote: “Ill will is the veil that covers art.”
 
JV: The unnamed billionaire in Rich And Poor starts a poetry foundation. He forms it as a kind of conceit or way for him to find out what poetry or art is. And sometimes he gets it and sometimes he doesn’t, especially when it comes to activism. It’s really interesting especially with current controversies within the poetry community. What did you want to explore in including that?
JW: I would say all of my books are somehow about the relationship between art and politics. There are positive and negative relationships there. This is one cynical relationship between art and politics.
 
JV: How about art and politics within Close-Up?
JW: That’s fascinating because you have the con man who is somehow using the power of art to gain something. He’s trying to gain symbolically a sense of self in the world and a sense of power. Then there is the financial aspect to it too where he’s trying to get money.
 
JV: Do you really think he was trying to get money though?
JW: No, I mean, he probably wasn’t out to get money. He does need money. He’s using everything at his disposal. And he is an autodidact and I’m also an autodidact.
 
The politics in Close-Up are very complex and very paradoxical.
 
JV: That’s why it leaves you still thinking after you’ve left the film. This goes back to your book. I think that after a reader reads a book, like a viewer finishes a film, there’s another book inside the readers brain. So as I read your book and I do a bit of activism, it seeps in there and resonates. There’s a big aspect of activism in your book. What do you think will be the next activist wave in poetry or literary culture?
JW: I’m really bad at predicting the future. Whenever I try and predict the future I am always wrong. Definitely we are living in a kind of golden age of protest in the moment. There’s been an enormous degree of powerful effective protest all around the world in the past ten years. Not quite sure when it started. This protest also connected to the fact that the injustices, let’s say economic inequality, are not only becoming greater but more visible and more obvious.
 
I grew up in the eighties and I think of shows like Lifestyles of The Rich And Famous  where this kind of wealth was cast in a positive way. Maybe that can still happen now, but I think people would be more disgusted about it now than they were then when it was romanticized or sensationalized and made for pure entertainment.
 
JV: I think that nowadays people aren’t listening to the people who are doing the real work out there. I think poetry is very political by nature,  but through all the cliques and the award-world spectacle, we don’t hear or get to read beyond what is told to us. There are so many writers that don’t get heard for various reasons (racism and sexism). That’s my biggest problem with the world of literature.
JW: I always think the art institutions, the publishers, maybe who are now called the gatekeepers ... what am I trying to say? The most political work is often not the most successful, sadly.
 
JV: I guess what I’m trying to say is that we romanticize what we do get to hear, but don’t hear the rest of the people out there. Not everyone is getting their say.
JW: There’s a lot of people out there with a vested interest in keeping the status quo in place. When you have a desire to change the status quo and you don’t see a change, you’re pushing uphill. That’s why it’s so important and that’s why it’s so difficult.
 
JV: Do you think Rich And Poor is a political work?
JW: Yeah. I mean, almost to a fault. It’s very obviously about politics in complex ways.
 
JV:  It feels and reads like an activist work or a manifesto of sorts, which I enjoy and why I mention whether you think it is political or an activist work.
JW: I hope so, but there’s a danger in activist art to become simplistic. I struggle so much to do something that is both activist and political, but still full of paradox resonance, questions, and being unsure and see if you can have both at the same time.  

JACOB WREN is a writer and maker of eccentric performances. His books include: Unrehearsed Beauty, Families Are Formed Through Copulation and Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed. As co-artistic director of Montreal-based interdisciplinary group PME-ART he has co-created the performances: En français comme en anglais, it's easy to criticize (1998), the HOSPITALITÉ / HOSPITALITY series including Individualism Was A Mistake (2008) and The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information (2011) and Every Song I’ve Ever Written (2012). He travels internationally with alarming frequency and frequently writes about contemporary art.



RUSTY TALK WITH JACOB WREN

Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively or being creative?
Jacob Wren: I don’t know if I have a first memory. But I do know around age thirteen I started suffering from terrible insomnia. Some nights I didn’t sleep at all, while most nights I slept very little. And basically I just filled the endless, sleepless nights with reading and writing, for more or less ten years, until I realized that the simple cure for my insomnia was rigorous physical exercise. Still, to this day, I associate writing with the strange, hallucinatory state that comes from having barely slept for weeks on end, as a kind of unreal trance, almost like a dream. It was during those nights, lying awake, almost too tired to move, that I first trained myself to write.

KM: Why did you become an artist/writer and what keeps you going?
JW: To be honest, the only thing that has ever really interested me was art (in all its many forms.) I wish I could become interested in something else, since I feel, as a human being, at times this overemphasis on artistic interests makes me a bit narrow, as well as making my interactions with other people often rather difficult. (I mean, I do my best.)

At the same time, I find it very hard to maintain any interest in art and often don’t know exactly what keeps me going (except that I have no idea what else I could possibly do). Sometimes I remind myself a bit of this apocryphal story of a Russian who moved to New York but never learned English. Gradually, over the course of his life, he forgot how to speak Russian, yet still never learned English, so in the end he spoke no language at all. Gradually I am becoming less and less interested in art, while not really becoming interested in anything else, so in the end I’m kind of nowhere. Like a priest who has lost faith. But that makes it all sound more dire than it actually is. Still, I think it’s important that we talk about these things, since hardly anyone ever does.

I have often said that I don’t particularly relate to people who make performance, or write, or make art, but I do relate to people who make performance / writing / art who think about quitting every fifteen seconds. Those are really my people. I call us the ‘boy who cried wolf set’. Because, for me, if you really look at art today, at what it means, at who it reaches, at what is considered successful or important, it often seems like a complete waste of time. If I had any talent for it, or drive towards it, I would definitely quit art and become an activist, since the world’s problems are now so overwhelming, immediate and tragic. But, for better or worse, I can’t seem to get myself to do anything else: all I can really do is write. (Well, I also make performances, but that becomes harder and harder as the years roll on.)

KM: How would you describe your writing process?  How does your blog A Radical Cut in the Texture of Reality fit into this process?
JW: I mainly feel like I don’t really have a process. I just have ideas and write them down to the best of my ability. Often I try to write every morning, but then, at other times, I am stuck for months on end and write very little. I usually do a first draft in a notebook, and then type it up as I go. Sometimes there is a little bit of re-writing as I type it into the computer, but mainly the second draft just allows me to think more about what I’m doing.

I definitely started my blog, in 2005, because I had almost completely stopped writing and was looking for a way to start again. It’s always been difficult for me to get published—I suppose what I write doesn’t quite fit anywhere (maybe it’s a little bit easier now, I’m not sure)—but at the time being able to just post what I was writing on my blog, as I went along, gave me more of a feeling that I was actually doing something. I would tell myself: just write one paragraph and post it, then at least you will have written one paragraph. It kind of made me feel like writing was possible again, after having felt it was basically impossible for many years. (Mainly due to too many rejection letters, or more precisely to the fact that I’m a little bit too sensitive to such things.) Now my blog gets about 2,000 hits a month, so that must mean someone is reading it, but I don’t really have any sense of who is reading it, why, or what they think. There are hardly any comments.

I spend so much time on the internet (mainly on Facebook and listening to music), and I know this has deeply affected how I think about art, about writing, and also how I practice it. It is difficult for me to really analyze what this change might be, it has all been so natural and intuitive, but I know there is something about the shuffle feature on iTunes, and about the seeming randomness as one clicks from one link to the next, that has been completely folded into my aesthetic.

KM: What or who influences your writing?
JW: I keep an ongoing list of favourite books: Some Favourite Books

And recently I have added a list of visual artists: List of Artists

But mainly I just want to devour everything. I want to have an overview. I want to know what is happening in art today, and everything that has ever happened in art before, and I want to use all of it while at the same time making it my own. I want to speak about the world, about the world today and about history, about ideas, thinking, philosophy, theory, and about my own subjective experiences. I want to struggle with it, admit to failure, be upset that I am not as good as the artists and authors I love but keep trying. I wish the mainstream was more open and more interesting.

KM: Can you discuss the relationship between writer and reader or audience? Who would be your ideal reader? I’m interested also in terms of your blog and its readership. Does that audience inform your work in any way?
JW: I have a sort of double life, half writing, the other half performing. When you perform the audience is right there in front of you, and all of my performance work is about trying to honestly deal with the fact that the audience is right there in front of me, about the paradox of trying to be yourself in the deeply unnatural situation of a room full of strangers watching you.

I’ve always like the Gertrude Stein quote: “I write for myself and strangers.”

When I was revising my last book, I showed it to a bunch of friends for comments, and I listened to all of their comments, and later, when the book came out, realized I had completely ignored basically all of their suggestions. I had asked for their help, and then completely ignored everything they said. (Well, I’ve always been stubborn.) And I feel this is so often the way between me and readers, I listen to every comment I get, think about it, try to take it in, fully absorb it, but never directly respond to anything anyone says. Nonetheless, I very much hope it is all in there anyway, somewhere in my head, affecting what I think, how I see what I’m doing, in some completely indirect way making the work better.

KM: What is the best piece of literary advice you’ve gotten that you actually use?
JW: As I’ve already suggested, I’m so bad with taking advice. But I really liked reading what Alain Badiou once said in an interview. He said the only rule for activism is: keep going. And I guess that’s mainly what I try to do now, keep going, which also means not making too many compromises, trying to offer up something different enough from everything else out there, trying to see the world a different way and put it into words. But, then again, I also constantly want to quit. Which is maybe why the advice is so important. Keep going.

KM: What is your favourite or funniest literary moment, if you have one?
JW: I actually can’t think of anything at the moment. Hopefully that means there are many favourite, hilarious literary moments to come. Maybe the future will be full of them.

KM: What are you reading at the moment?
JW: I just started reading The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal by Sean Mills. I believe I must be reading it because I live in Montreal. So far it’s fascinating.

KM: What projects are you working on in 2013?
JW: I am writing a new book entitled Polyamorous Love Song. Here is a short synopsis: It is a book of many different narrative through-lines. For example: 1) A mysterious group, known as The Mascot Front, who wear furry mascot costumes at all times and are fighting a revolutionary war for their right to wear furry mascot costumes at all times. 2) A movement known as the ‘New Filmmaking’ in which, instead of shooting and editing a film, one simply does all of the things that would have been in the film, but in real life. This movement has many adherents. Its founder is known only as Filmmaker A. 3) A group of ‘New Filmmakers’, calling themselves The Centre for Productive Compromise, who devise increasingly strange sexual scenarios with complete strangers. They invent a drug that allows them to intuit the cell phone number of anyone they see, allowing phone calls to be the first stage of their spontaneous, yet somehow carefully scripted, seductions. 4) A secret society that concocts a sexually transmitted virus that infects only those on the political right. They stage large-scale orgies, creating unexpected intimacies and connections between individuals who are otherwise savagely opposed to one another. 5) A radical leftist who catches this virus, forcing her to question the depth of her considerable leftist credentials. 6) A German barber in New York who, out of scorn for the stupidity of his American clients, gives them avant-garde haircuts, unintentionally achieving acclaim among the bohemian set who consider his haircuts to be strange works of art. And yet each of these stories is only the beginning.

And we are also beginning a new, ongoing internet/performance project entitled Every Song I’ve Ever Written. Here is a description:

From 1985 to 2004 Jacob Wren wrote songs. Lots and lots of songs. At the time not very many people heard them. Every Song I’ve Ever Written is a project about memory, history, things that may or may not exist, songwriting, the internet and pop culture. On the website everysongiveeverwritten.com you can listen to, and download, these songs.

In a way, because hardly anyone heard them, these songs don’t yet exist. If you are reading this, we would like you to consider recording your own version of one of these songs, changing it, making it your own, then sending it to us. We will post every version we receive.

There will also be performances and events. Solo performances will feature Jacob performing all of the songs in chronological order (it takes about five hours.) Band Nights will feature a series of local bands in different cities performing one of Jacob’s songs each. After each version, Jacob will interview the band about what it was like to cover the song, and the band will interview Jacob about what it was like to write it.

We are not doing this because we think these are the best songs ever (we hope at least a few of them are good.) We are doing this because hardly anyone heard them at the time, and we are wondering if there is some new, strange way to bring them out into the world. In doing so we hope to raise a few questions about what songs mean on the internet, about what songwriting is actually like today, and also take a sidelong glance back at the recent past.

LINKS
Radical Cut in the Texture of Reality
Every Song I've Ever Written
PME-ART
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Goodreads
Le Quartanier