Interview with Lee Konstantinou
When he isn’t evoking a smart, funny cyber reality that one could easily mistake for our future, Pop Apocalypse author Lee Konstantinou polishes off doctoral dissertations, loiters in the Mission District, imagines future futurist fiction, and shotguns espresso in the back of the BART or takes his caffeine by intravenous drip. We were lucky to have him take time out from his hectic schedule to drop by our virtual offices and respond to these questions. Thank you so much for your time, Lee.
Lee: Thanks, Alex. I’m always looking for excuses not to work, and I appreciate this chance to chat.
Alex: Some say the next war will fought over water and others say salt. Is it possible it is being fought right now over intellectual-property rights, and if so, does Omni Science Corporations’s CRAP stand a chance against Google, Amazon, the Chinese Government, Facebook, Microsoft and all the other major players?
Lee: I do think one of the great political questions of the near future will be how we manage intellectual property, support creativity, and structure our cultural life in the age of the digital network. We’ve deceived ourselves—chanting slogans like “Information wants to be free”—into thinking that the Internet as it is now constituted will more or less carry forward into the future indefinitely. I foresee a different future, which I use as the foundation of Pop Apocalypse, hopefully in a way that seamlessly integrates world-building into the lives of my characters, organically generating the problems they face.
The great bonanza of “free” content, the frontier-like nature of online life, is a short-term phenomenon, an artifact of the fact that the real power centers of our society are still adapting to the new situation, still working through the technical and legal details of what they’d prefer the future to look like. I think the system is going to phase-change into some new configuration, sooner rather than later.
One model of that future, the one I obviously prefer, envisions the Internet as a public utility—everyone can freely use the Internet or use it at a nominal price, but everyone has to pay taxes to support it, whether or not they use it. Artists and writers and musicians will need to find ways of getting remunerated for their work, which presents more difficult problems, but there are workable models of how this might happen. Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Research has put forward a few proposals that make sense to me. The University is another natural site for keeping artists clothed and fed and paying rent on a semi-regular basis. The possible alternatives are boundless, I think, if we put our minds to work thinking them up.
The other model is Rupert Murdoch’s model, the model of the RIAA and MPAA, the iPhone/iPad/telecom company model. This is more or less the model of the “mediasphere” in Pop Apocalypse. New technologies will make it ever-easier to build privatized walls around content, to filter and meter information flows, to block access (at the level of the server, the ISP, or even the individual device) on the basis of intellectual property law and state-sanctioned data “enclosure.” The Internet filtering we decry now in places like China will become not the exception but the rule—though it is a rule that will fly under the benevolent banner of protecting intellectual property producers and artists from menacing pirates and poachers. This filtering will be ubiquitous and will be simply taken for granted by the next online generation.
This second model seems to me to be the more likely of the two futures unless we decide to stop it from happening.
The bottom line is that cultural producers, like any other kind of producer, must be remunerated for the value they add to our lives. The question is how? Under what set of norms and institutional structures? In the medium term, Amazon, the Chinese Government, Microsoft, the U.S. government, and even Google will view Omni Science—and its CRAP—not as a threat but rather as a natural ally, since, in the world of the novel, they’ve created the technical means through which to control and manipulate information flows. In the long run, it’s up to us to create a working alternative.
Alex: You have some fun with doubling in Pop Apocalypse, and I believe I read Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock is a more recent novel you’ve enjoyed. When I think doubling, Poe’s “William Wilson” and Dostoyevsky’s The Double come to mind, but I’m wondering if you have any favorites among the classics of the literature of the double?
Lee: I love Roth’s Operation Shylock and doppelganger literature more generally. The double story is both weirdly gripping and infinitely pliable. The double can be an allegory of just about any kind of content. I mentioned a few of my favorites in the interview section at the back of the novel, including Joseph Conrad’s novella The Secret Sharer and Charles Johnson’s Dreamer, a strange short novel that imagines the existence of a fictional body double of Martin Luther King, Jr. An unusual variation on this theme is “false doppelganger” fiction. Richard Powers’s affecting novel, The Echo Maker, is about a character who, because he suffers from Capgras syndrome, falsely believes that his sister has been replaced by a double. I’ve been meaning to read Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances, another novel about Capgras. I might only add to this distinguished list the underrated film, Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991).
Alex: I know you attended Cornell University as an undergrad. When you studied there did you ever imagine attending lectures by Nabokov or wandering into a basement bathroom to find Thomas Pynchon’s graffiti scrawled on the stall divider?
Lee: Oh yeah, all the time. Maybe it’s because of the bad winter weather, but Cornell is a great place for writers, and has a very rich—and intimidating—heritage. Nabokov, Pynchon, Morrison, Vonnegut, A.R. Ammons, Lorrie Moore, Junot Díaz, William Vollmann. If you’re at all interested in writing or literary life it’s hard not to be a little bit in awe of Cornell.
Once, during my junior year, I wandered into the office of Epoch (Cornell’s literary magazine) looking to find a copy of the 1959 issue that included Pynchon’s short story “Mortality and Mercy in Vienna,” the only published Pynchon short story not included in Slow Learner. The guy who met me at the door gave me a knowing look and said something like, “Oh, one of you!” and handed me a photocopy of the story, which they seemed to have a bunch of on-hand, waiting for people like me to show up.
Alex: What is “contemporary postironic literature,” and is it available at affordable rates in any particular places in the Mediasphere?
Lee: By the time the mediasphere rolls around, we’ll be a few more “post-”’s down the line. Postirony is a term I use in my academic writing to talk about a range of contemporary artists (working in literature, film, comics, and music). The postironic sensibility or movement or ethos has been discussed in a scattered way, under a number of labels, including “neosincerity,” “New Sincerity,” “mumblecore,” “postpostmodernism,” and so on. My core idea is that whatever it was that we meant by “postmodernism” is no longer the state of the art in the arts. Around the late 1980s, writers, filmmakers, musicians, and others decided to put irony back on the shelf. For writers who loved the tradition of metafiction, writers like David Foster Wallace, moving forward meant grappling with postmodern irony, wrestling it to the ground. The book project I’m working on now traces the postmodern lineage of irony from the late forties through the present day, moving from the hipster through the punk to the coolhunter.
Alex: Pop Apocalypse includes Riot Zones in the background of its scenes, and in part these indicate a vast discrepancy between rich and poor. Based on what you see in the world today, do you feel we already have “Riot Zones,” or are there areas where we can expect them soon?
Lee: Everything in Pop Apocalypse has some seed in our world, including the Riot Zones. The specific inspiration for Riot Zones was the rioting in the suburbs of Paris in 2005. I was in England that summer, doing research at the British Library, and remember reading a news article—I think it was in the Guardian—about car-burning statistics. At its peak, rioters burnt something like 1,400 cars. A few days later, only 600. By day twenty, the numbers came down to about 150. Thinking about the aggregate decline in car-burnings, I decided that the idea of “managing” or “forecasting” riots—and violence-riddled economically devastated favela-like zones—using statistical or probabilistic social scientific tools came to seem both horrifyingly plausible and disturbingly funny. Ergo the Riot Zones and the Terror Forecast.
Alex: Twice in the interview in the back of the novel, you allude to having “stolen” ideas or plot points from other writers. To me, it sounded like you were being modest and literary allusions are also a great form of flattery. All the same, I’m wondering if you’ve ever considered a definition of genuine literary plagiarism, and what you think it would be.
Lee: That’s a hard question. When I’m in the classroom, I define plagiarism for my students pretty conventionally: as unattributed words, phrases, or ideas taken from another source and passed off as one’s own. In the arts more generally, the definition is not so clean. For a host of reasons, I’m skeptical about the great excitement generated by “collaborative” or “aggregator-driven” or “social” content production. I’m unimpressed by the “mash-up” and by “remix” culture more generally, but I recognize the basic point that writing and art originates with and in relation to previous models, texts, and experiments.
Alex: I’ve also noticed that you’ve packed the P.S. section at the back of your book with great information, including a “Buy” rating for Eliot Vanderthorpe, Jr. Could the same be said of Lee Konstantinou or do you wind up day trading yourself several times during regular NYSE hours or even past the closing bell?
Lee: I can only recommend that people go long on Konstantinou. The short sellers will come to regret the positions they’ve taken. I’m also glad to say that I’ve also recently been chopped up and included in a triple-A tranche CDO, offered for a limited time by Goldman Sachs, though if you’re feeling nervous you can also take out a CDS on my Name once AIG repays its TARP money. In short, the future of my Name is bright, bright, bright.
Alex: Speaking of your Name, here’s a passage from your novel, Pop Apocalypse, on page 18: “Analysts aren’t sure of how your shenanigans are going to impact your Name’s value in the long run. Look here. Immediately after the footage aired, the price your Name could demand from the mediasphere skyrocketed. I’m talking a median of more than fifteen hundred dollars per minute. The illegal sites popped up shortly afterward, cutting into the official value, but you’re still raking it in.”
Celebrity “branding” is a central concern of Pop Apocalypse and you provide a wonderful satire of celebrity appeal and global markets working together. As readers, we get some insight into your theories within the novel. It seems as if a star can gain appeal and get richer “behaving badly” if it is done in the right way and packaged to the right target audience and also that a star without necessarily having a specific talent or aptitude (i.e. being an heir or heiress is enough) has a market share that is constantly in flux. Could you add to or clarify your theory of “celebrity branding”? I’m worried I have not done it justice in this paragraph.
Lee: Your paragraph sums up my take on branding pretty well. I read a bunch of branding and marketing books in preparation for a dissertation chapter I was writing on the practice of “coolhunting,” and this reading formed the basis for some of Pop Apocalypse. Then again, all you need to do to conduct “research” on branding is turn on the TV or keep your eyes open walking down the street.
We already live in a world where celebrities plan to release sex tapes in order to increase their media exposure, where they hire image consultants, where they sell shares of their future earnings to capitalize themselves. Much ofwhat Pop Apocalypse depicts is a kind of formalization or “rationalization” of the system that already exists today in a piecemeal form.
Alex: Although I’d love to know some of your thoughts on current mediasphere projections of political stars such as Barack Obama and Sarah Palin as well as athletes like Tiger Woods and Ben Roethlisberger, I was hoping you could apply your theory to the literary marketplace, and so I offer this case for your consideration.
Critic James Woods, in a minor literary journal (The New Yorker), more or less tears apart the novels of Paul Auster by describing them as thematically repetitive and full of clichéd language. Based upon your ideas about “branding” could such mainstream bashing aid the sale of Auster novels among his loyal readers? Is it good or bad for Auster’s business? Good or bad for James Wood, who has in his own right become something of a critical celebrity (not quite a Christopher Hitchens or Edmund Wilson but headed in that direction perhaps). Please elaborate.
Lee: The answer depends on how you’re using “good” and “bad.”
As you rightly suggest, any review in the New Yorker is in a sense a good review. By the time you’ve been reviewed or published there, you’ve “made it” in the contemporary Anglo-American sphere of literary prestige; you’ve hit the jackpot. I also agree with you, Alex, that both Auster and Wood have something at stake in the review you link to.
After all, why would James Wood want to tear apart Auster if Auster didn’t already have a loyal following of readers? Any answer to this question should begin from the recognition (1) that Wood is himself a human brand—an antiquarian brand whose “values statement” might be, “Last bastion of literary value in a barbaric world!”—and (2) that that brand depends on Wood’s claiming for himself the ground of the “literary,” defining it in whatever way best suits his own extraordinarily narrow vision of the public sphere of letters.
I mean, have you read How Fiction Works? There is almost no discussion of plot, barely a hint that literature might rightly be a vehicle for representing something in the world beyond the workings of an individual mind, a mind stripped of almost all content, a stupid “noticing” machine. Wood seems to reject the idea that we ought to read as a way of thinking about “themes” or “issues” relevant to our lives, and fails to recognize that the tradition of writing he celebrates (the books on his shelf) is a stiflingly narrow and highly conventional subset of literary history, an over-proud mote within a vast and weird universe of prose.
For Wood, the presence of someone like Auster is a threat, I think, because Auster’s popularity signals that there are many readers who are drawn to the allegorical and “generic” modes of Pynchon, DeLillo, Colson Whitehead, the Zadie Smith of White Teeth and Autograph Man, writers of what Wood decries as “hysterical realism.”
Well, whatever problems we might have with Wood—and I should say, despite my various criticisms, that I am often in agreement with his individual reviews and enjoyed his novel, The Book Against God—we should give him credit for being a good self-promoter and a powerfully branded critic. There’s something we can learn from his success, I think, even if it isn’t what he’d like us to learn.
Alex: In closing, please tell us about your next novel and when you hope to have it available to readers.
Lee: My next novel is a sort of thematic sequel to Pop Apocalypse. It’s set in the same world, ten years later, but features different characters. Its tentative title is Hamsterstan, and it’s about reality television, massively-multiplayer online gaming, surprisingly intelligent hamsters, and Afghanistan. I should have a complete draft of the book by midsummer, if all goes as planned.
Alex: Thanks so much, Lee, and best of luck in the “real world” as well as the ones you’ve created; I’m a bit apprehensive about surviving this future of massive multiplayers, rodent media, and reality branding. Click Pop Apocalypse when you’re ready to read Lee Konstantinou’s first novel.
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