Thanks to Jeffrey Allen for tagging me for The Next Big Thing self-interview series. Below are my responses on my new book, White Noise, forthcoming later this spring from Apostrophe Books.
White Noise.
I'd long been obsessed with the old Usenet bulletin board Internet discussion groups, especially the way these groups provided a home for people to discuss the most mundane or even arcane interests and hobbies. I was struck by the enormous accumulation of language on Usenet forums -- mounds of words piling up -- and wanted to sculpt something out of this language. Around 2002 or 2003, while rereading Bernadette Mayer's amazing poem, "X on page 50 at half-inch intervals," I got the idea for what would become White Noise. Bernadette drew an "X" on page 50 of a book, and then she collected all the words intersected by the lines of the "X" into a poem -- a perfect melding, I thought, of chance operations and willed composition.
So I decided to make something new from her "X" method, using Don DeLillo's White Noise as my source text.
After drawing an "X" on a page from DeLillo's novel, I fed the first three (sometimes four) words that intersected the lines of the "X" into Google's index of Usenet forums, which dates back to 1981. I took a short excerpt, anywhere from one to five sentences in length, from each Usenet posting and copied the excerpt to a separate page on my website (www.starve.org). Once the web project was completed, I rearranged the one- to five-sentence excerpts I had culled over the past five years into a fractured, associational narrative that eventually became my White Noise.
It's a hybrid text of poetry, prose fragments, short plays, and outrageous endnotes.
When I was composing the short plays (inspired by Lorine Niedecker's radio plays), I definitely had actors in mind. My image of these actors actually guided what material I appropriated for the plays and how I shaped the material.
The "Grandmother" character in the plays has to be Irene Ryan. I always saw the "She" character as Chloe Sevigny, and the "He" character as Kyle McLaughlin. I dream Guy Maddin's voice narrating everything else in the book.
I think the publishers, Mark Tursi and Richard Greenfield, put it best, so I'll quote from their book announcement: "Tony Trigilio's White Noise blends the political and the personal in an unsettling amalgam of prose fragments that have been disassembled and reassembled through a variety of strategies that are almost Oulipian in their peculiar constraints and methodology."
I'll quote Mark and Richard again: "From a unique 'deformation' of Don DeLillo's White Noise to a collocation of speech culled from Usenet bulletin boards to scattered material originally posted on the web, Trigilio stitches, reassembles, and re-weaves the rhetoric of fear and politics with the language of literature and personal narrative."
The book was the winner of the 2011 Apostrophe Books open reading competition. It will be published later this spring.
I collected the Usenet fragments from 2004 to 2009. In the summer of 2009, while I was still drawing an "X" every Monday on a page from DeLillo's White Noise, I traveled to San Diego to visit my cousin Michael Trigilio and his partner Trish Stone. I used this trip as a kind of writing retreat to start assembling the appropriated fragments into some kind of coherent but dislocated structure. The material truly came together as a book when I was in San Diego. I spent the rest of 2009 and most of 2010 refining the manuscript.
Bernadette Mayer and, of course, Don DeLillo.
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