Yep, Beat the Dust has broken its own rules this month, devoting the whole of the May edition to the previously unpublished work of the father of all underground writers, Mark SaFranko. Writer Dan Fante, who wrote the introductions to Mark's cult novels Hating Olivia: A Love Story and Lounge Lizard, described him as "one hard-nosed, kick-ass, American original." He is a writer in the broadest sense of that word - a great novelist, poet, short story writer, playwright and song writer. This edition of BTD then is about giving readers a unique opportunity to experience the breadth of Mark's writing talent.
MARK SAFRANKO, FEATURED WRITER - MAY 08 ISSUE
Author:
Zsolt Alapi interviews BTD's May featured writer Mark SaFranko
Interview reprinted here with the kind permission of The Danforth Review. Mark's novels you can buy directly from the publisher Murder Slim Press.
ZA: In Lounge Lizard, Max speaks out against the writing of Joyce, Nabokov, and the Beats, to name just a few. To what extent does his taste in literature reflect your own? SaFranko: I happen to love much of Nabokov, especially Laughter In The Dark and Lolita, among others. Same for Joyce. What I was speaking against here was tiresome academic prejudices, the prejudices that proclaim a certain artist the greatest this or the greatest that. My reading tastes are surprisingly catholic, actually, and include the likes of writers from Proust and Casanova to Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendell. As for the Beats, I never found myself engaged by any of them. Perhaps this is my failing. On one level, I suppose that I view them as Ivy Leaguers masquerading as rebels. Once you’ve passed through an Ivy League institution, you’re never truly an outsider. You might think you are, but the world doesn’t see you as such, even if the perception is unconscious. The doors always swing open for those guys. But on the whole I’ve found the Beats pretty much boring and unreadable.
Submission Date:
19 May 2008
Category:
Script
In Chap-book
Title:
the promise
Excerpt:
The first three scenes of a play produced at the Millennium Forum Theatre in Derry, Northern Ireland in 2003.
ZA: In his introduction to Lounge Lizard, Dan Fante talks about being "pissed off" at the American publishing industry for failing to acknowledge your talent. Why do you feel it has been difficult for your work to be published in the U.S.? SaFranko: God bless Dan. But first of all, it’s only been my novels that have been unwelcome in the United States. I’ve published well over 50 stories in many different types of American magazines, from the commercial and mainstream to the marginal and offbeat. My plays have been seen on many New York and Irish stages over the years. But when it comes to my novels, no. I think that the reasons for this are complex. First, I don’t fit the profile of the typical successful American novelist. No MFA, no writing workshops, no Ivy League degree. Moreover, the writers I’ve admired are either European, Simenon and Balzac and Hamsun, or American exiles, like Highsmith, Paul Bowles, Henry Miller. If the editors at the big houses are largely young females and I’m seen as a misogynist, that’s not a great match, right? If the vast majority of readers in the US are women –- and that’s a fact – then I don’t fit into the plan. If most of the books published by men in America are "ladies’ books" – in other words really intended for a female audience whether or not they’re written by women or men – then I’m in trouble. Those, I believe, are at least some of the reasons I’m not wanted in the US. What’s enormously frustrating for me is that the vast majority of my novels, another eight or ten, haven’t been able to find a home. And that’s a lot of unread work.
Submission Date:
19 May 2008
Category:
Poetry
In Podcast and Chap-book
Title:
hard logic
Excerpt:
Can we ever understand the pattern of a life? Or is it a rank illusion to s...
ZA: Your novels are graphically sexual. Did you intend the sex to be erotic or pornographic? SaFranko: In Hating Olivia, the sex descriptions were intended to add to the honesty of the narrative. So many times I find so-called "sexually graphic" descriptions in literature to be little more than superficial. In Lounge Lizard the point was to demonstrate that an addiction or obsession can twist what should be pleasant into something less. But then sex in itself is an animalistic ritual, isn’t it? So why the window dressing? Rather than either pornographic or erotic, the intention was actually something quite different – to portray a facet of a single character at a given point in time. Incidentally, outside of the Zajack novels, you wouldn’t find much sex in any of my work.
ZA: How would you want people to remember Mark SaFranko, the writer? SaFranko: As multifaceted. I’m a playwright, a short story writer, an occasional poet and essayist as well as a novelist. I’m a songwriter and musician. I’ve worked as an actor. Sometimes I paint. I’ve always been fascinated by artists who have successfully crossed back and forth between disciplines: Noel Coward, Bob Dylan, Anthony Burgess, Da Vinci, Cocteau, Paul Bowles, Charlie Chaplin, etc. I’ve simply not been able to prevent myself from succumbing to the lure of the guitar, or the paint brush or whatever. Nevertheless, I get out of bed seven days a week and go straight to the typewriter, even when I have to report to a bad job. Writing is the core for me. But of course there’s this: once I’m dead, will I care how or if anyone remembers me? I don’t think that anyone, Shakespeare included, could take himself that seriously.
Submission Date:
19 May 2008
Category:
Audio Recording
In Chap-book
Title:
apology (love lives forever)
Excerpt:
The first of two songs available here, apology is semi-autobiographical and from the 2007 album STRANGERS IN MY BED (River Jack Records, 2007). It's available to download on iTunes. Vocals, six and 12-string electric and acoustic guitars, bass, drums, all Mark SaFranko.
ZA: Your writing is both dark and provocatively sexual. What’s your take on love and relationships? SaFranko: Sexual attraction is a sort of madness that passes. The rest is very complicated. I don’t mean to be flippant here, but that about sums it up. Love and relationships are treacherous ground that any person of complexity never negotiates without extreme trepidation.
ZA: You said in an interview that you are interested in characters who are "in trouble," mostly with themselves. How does your fascination with obsession figure into this, particularly through your depiction of Max Zajack, the protagonist of Hating Olivia and Lounge Lizard? SaFranko: Obsession is a wonderful literary device. I think of a book like Of Human Bondage, probably the best novel of sexual obsession ever written, and how once it hooks you, you can’t put it down. If readability is a literary virtue, this is a good thing. Being an obsessive type myself, it’s natural territory for me.
Submission Date:
12 May 2008
Category:
Short story
In Podcast and Chap-book
Title:
lost in the crowd
Excerpt:
Randall Hughes is absorbed in a Times feature on an upcoming retrospective of one of France’s most fabled auteurs when he happens to glance up for the first time. It’s half-past two in the afternoon. The crowd has grown more teeming since he arriv...
ZA: How much of Max is based on your own lived experiences or psychopathology? SaFranko: All of Max has at least some basis in my own experiences. Sometimes there is distortion, exaggeration, for effect. On the other hand, a great deal, perhaps the most important material, is left out, sacrificed to pace. Both Hating Olivia and Lounge Lizard were significantly longer books before I took the butcher knife to them. As for my psychopathology, only a shrink could answer that.
ZA: Max is an aspiring writer, although failing at his craft. Despite this, his comments on writing and "authenticity" pervade both Hating Olivia and Lounge Lizard. To what extent did you intend the reader to accept his voice as "authority" on the creative process and writing? SaFranko: None whatsoever. I would never expect anyone to follow my advice regarding anything. Everyone is different. So this is just Max talking to Max. That said, you can always tell a real artist from a long way off, can’t you?
Submission Date:
12 May 2008
Category:
Poetry
In Podcast and Chap-book
Title:
the flies
Excerpt:
Being the sort of person who writes plays and film scenarios I know my f...
ZA: Both Hating Olivia and Lounge Lizard echo Henry Miller’s Sexus and Charles Bukowski’s Women. How were you influenced by their writing? In what ways do you think your writing (and sensibility) differ from theirs? SaFranko: You’ve made astute connections here, Zsolt, especially in the case of Sexus, which is my favorite Miller work, along with Tropic Of Capricorn and a short, late essay called Mother, China And The World Beyond. I discovered Miller much earlier than Bukowski, but love the work of both men. There are obviously things inside me – a contrariness, a dissatisfaction with everyday life, among many other things -- that respond to the world-views of both, as well as that of other so-called "confessional" writers such as Celine, Philippe Djian, and Mohammed Mrabet. Our individual pasts and experiences make for differences, however. Perhaps my cynicism is more thoroughgoing than either Miller or Bukowski. And that may be a product of the age.
Submission Date:
12 May 2008
Category:
Script
In Chap-book
Title:
seedy, scene one of a play awaiting production
Excerpt:
Cast of Characters
Eddie Tilsen:
A middle-aged, unemployed actor. Handsome at one time but has gone to seed. An arch, sometimes artificially charming and winsome personality, developed from years of t...
ZA: Both of your novels satirize the American Dream; specifically, Lounge Lizard is a vicious indictment of the Reagan years and the "ME" generation. Do you consider your writing to be, to some extent, social criticism?
SaFranko: I would say yes, insofar as you’re reading the inner life of an outsider, a malcontent who happens to be stuck inside a machine that’s antagonistic, or at least not sympathetic to, his deepest self. Max is a man out of step with the world. But at no time does anything political interest him, or me, in the least, which is not to say either of us is unaware of what’s going on in the world. So that’s a modifying element here. I suppose you could call it informal social criticism.
Submission Date:
12 May 2008
Category:
Novel extract
In Podcast and Chap-book
Title:
no strings attached - chapter one of a novel awaiting publication
Excerpt:
Clever, I remember thinking at the time. Very, very clever. Because I had it all figured out. At least that’s what I told myself. You know how it is. Y...
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