Ben Segal is the author of 78 Stories (No Record Press) and co-editor of the anthology The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature (Lit Pub Books). He is also the co-author, with Feliz Lucia Molina and Brett Zehner, of the forthcoming epistolary novel The Wes Letters (Outpost19). His short fiction has been published by or is forthcoming from Tin House, Tarpaulin Sky, Gigantic, and Puerto del Sol, among others. He currently lives in California.
His story, "Yes Hog," appeared in Issue Fifty-Three of The Collagist.
Here, Ben Segal talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about mash-ups, metafiction, and blockbuster movies.
What can you tell us about the genesis of this story (how/why/when you began to write the first draft or to conceive the initial idea)?
I think you guessed it a few questions down when you ask about mash-ups. I was thinking about what would happen if you made a mash-up not of the actual content of previously existing works but of their logics. To do this I needed to pick a couple of movies that work based on very clear premises. Both Yes Man and Groundhog Day rely on a specific idea, a hypothetical situation that catalyzes all of the narrative. That made them good candidates for this kind of logic mash-up. I also thought it would be pretty funny to take a pair of comedies and run them into the darkest inevitable logical conclusion I could imagine.
The story is organized into numbered sections, the first of which is not 1 but 0. This introductory section explains the conceit of the piece beginning with the phrase “In this story.” What made you decide the story should start with this Section Zero, rather than diving in medias res? In your mind, what is the advantage gained by opening the story on such a “meta” note (with the story acknowledging itself as a story)?
I probably like metafictional maneuvers too much but I really felt like it was important to lay out the cards early for this. If you don’t explain the logic of the world in the story, then it’s just this weird fucked up set of Jim Carey torture vignettes. By using a Zero section, I can set the meta stuff outside of the text proper and use it as a framing device that basically very overtly and honestly says: this is the set piece I’m working with, these are the ideas that this fiction works through. It lets the story exist as a story and as a story about a story. I like being able to bake that multiplicity into the text. Or I’m just too old-fashioned and neurotic and feel like I need to explain the performance of writing or else it’s manipulative and dishonest and disrespectful of the reader. The answer is something like that.
Your story is a kind of “mash-up,” for the way it combines the main character of Yes Man with the cosmic joke of Groundhog Day. Do you understand any of your other writing as a process of juxtaposition? (Are you at all interested in “mash-ups” in any other media?)
I kind of addressed this earlier but yeah, totally. I was thinking about mash-ups. I was also thinking about appropriation in general, conceptual writing, etc., and how I could appropriate without taking any actual material. What’s cool about this story, to me, is that it’s a mash-up in a different medium that uses none of the physical material from its sources. It doesn’t even use scenes from the two movies. It’s a mash-up that is written from whole cloth but unmistakably still a mash-up. Or that’s the idea. And I’m realizing that it’s pretty perfect for it to appear in a magazine called the Collagist.
I think this story can also be read as part parody. I first detected the biting sense of humor with which you would treat your cinematic source material when I read the lines, “I think he also falls in love. Then the movie ends.” Was it your intention to skewer trite Hollywood storytelling? Or do you see the tone of the story as less sardonic and more playful?
The tone turns. It starts off just really honestly saying: This is the wager of the piece, these are the sources, I don’t know much about the sources though. Then the story kind of has a descent into the terrible and absurd. Then finally, I hope, the story ends a little more thoughtfully than you’d have expected. It sort of says: Hey, here’s this trashy entertainment and let’s have fun playing with these premises but oh look they actually give us a way to think about ideas like sacrifice and eternal return.
It’s definitely not meant as an attack on Hollywood or a celebration of Hollywood either. Movies are important and pervasive narrative delivery devices and I was interested in taking these blockbuster cultural artifacts and using them for my own ends.
What writing projects are you working on now?
Right now I’m working on too many things. One thing I’m working on is trying to get people to read The Wes Letters, the collaborative epistolary novel/collective memoir thing I wrote with Feliz Lucia Molina and Brett Zehner. We’ve been giving readings and are planning to do several more this summer. Feliz and I also are working on another collaborative project, a trilogy of serial prose poem books called The Middle, The Beginning, and The End. So far we’ve only written The Middle. And then, on my own, I’m still making short stories, slowly, and even more slowly these will maybe amass into books.
What have you read recently that you want to recommend?
I want to recommend many things but most recently I read Insomnia and the Aunt by Tan Lin and The Summer Book by Tove Jansson and both were very enjoyable in very different ways. One thing that they share is a tendency towards the understated and domestic. These are often qualities that bore me, but in these cases I enjoyed those kinds of simplicity and the way said kinds of simplicity opened subtly to their own complexities. This is so boring to write out. All I’m saying, I guess, is that I recommend these books even though I can hardly say ‘quiet domestic realism’ without sarcasm. They are good though, and more than just quiet domestic realism.