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This Issue 11/18/2004

Also in this issue

• From the editor
• Cheap shoes, cheap gal
• Grin and beer it
• Jerry Bruckheimer is a Garish Assclown

The whole class ridicules a student who has fallen into a creative mode. We make sure they don't do that again! It's very easy for the kids to let go of conventional notions of artistic individuality as typcially configured by our culture, once they permit themselves to do so. It took a few weeks, but now I feel that the students are finding themselves writing in ways they never knew they would. Each has produced an enormous body of high quality work. And best of all, with uncreative writing, you never have writer's block!

Was there a time in your life when you were "creative"? What brought you to pursue uncreativity?

I was trained as a visual artist, and in the visual arts, standard notions of creativity were challenged 100 years ago. In most good art schools today, the training doesn't center around technical achievement, but rather on conceptual strengths. I went to school in the wake of punk rock, which said that you don't need talent to be an artist, you need passion; skills -- and by extension, rote ideas of creativity were anathema.

How did you come to writing?

For many years I lived in the art world as a conceptual artist, a text-based artist and a sculptor. Slowly and organically, over the course of 20 years, my practice morphed into writing. Today, I only write.

I've just published a book of the first collection of interviews with Andy Warhol called I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, which was fascinating in that he was really the master of uncreativity. Of course I find him and his attitudes very inspiring. As for my own writing, I've published seven volumes of poetry and have two forthcoming, one called Spring, which is a collaboration with the painter James Siena, and the other is called The Weather, which is simply a transcription of a year's worth of one-minute weather reports from the local New York all-news station.

I do a weekly radio show on WFMU in New York City called "Anal Magic," which is a freeform experimental show where basically anything goes. I've also been engaged for the past ten years editing UbuWeb (ubu.com), the Internet's largest resource for avant-garde materials. This dovetails with my activities at PennSound here on campus, where I'm a senior editor. PennSound is a an initiative of CPCW, Kelly Writer's House and the Penn Library that aims to archive an enormous amount of poetry readings, sound art, sound poetry, experimental music, radio plays, etc.

Do you ever get mistaken for the smooth jazz saxophonist Kenny G?

On WFMU, my "stage" name is Kenny G. I often receive e-mail intended for him. I have hundreds of these letters. Many of them are hysterically funny. I'm going to publish them one day.

Ever lie awake at night with guilt?

I do. Every night. I haven't slept in months.

What makes writing particularly amenable to "theft"?