"Marjorie Perloff, in a recent review of my work, said she felt that the
conspicuous recycling of the language(s) in my prose seemed to indicate
my desire to wrest linguistic significance back from its banalization in
mass media. I think that's true -- and I don't think that that's in
contradiction to the fact that I love the junk food brain fix of soap
operas, tabloids, and made for tv mini-series. Quite the contrary, it's the
fact that these forms work, that I do find them seductive, which fascinates
me -- I don't have critical
disdain for them. I'm their ideal viewer, totally identified and immersed,
inhabiting those cliches. It's just that in my work the cliches come out
inverted, in some recombinant prose in which the mutation is neither parodic
nor pastiched, rather, a marbled effect of compression, condensation, and
displacement. The challenge is to preserve the imaginative interior life --
and with it some illusion or actuality of subjective agency -- or at the
very least, to provide a contemporary linguistic experience which is both of
and distinct from that which the media matrix provides."
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Matthew G. Kirschenbaum University of Virginia
mgk3k@virginia.edu Department of English
http://faraday.clas.virginia.edu/~mgk3k/ Electronic Text Center