Questionless Interview with Matthew Gavin Frank

(photo of Frank [in mask and sexypants] and Passarello by Christina Olson)

On Monday, poet and essayist Matt Frank published an Answerless Interview with Elena Passarello. Here are a few answers--though not necessarily answers to the questions published earlier in the week. These are queries Matt sent via telepathy; or via extinct carrier pigeons; or via whispers out the window of his house in the Upper Peninsula, that traveled 2086 miles to my Oregon window. In place of his voice, I imagine a Dead Moon guitar whammy at each asterisk.

Matthew Gavin Frank: *

Elena Passarello: I always wanted to snag a porn star. A lady porn star. I wanted her to appear in the book, talking very honestly about the noises of pleasure she makes for the camera and what she thinks about when she makes them. I have this hunch that she’s a real technician about it. But I don’t know what would've happened; the interviewees’ responses always surprised me. What it comes down to is I wasn’t really bold enough to find any porn stars. I never called anybody. Really, who do you call? The front desk of Vivid Pictures? Maybe that’s exactly who you call. I did find a few interviews with well-known starlets, but they all seemed so fake. They didn’t want to spoil the illusion that all their sounds were totally organic.

MGF: *

EP: That’s an easy one. Betty Carter on The Cosby Show. It was that episode when Vanessa started that singing group—the Lipsticks—with her friends and then Cliff and Claire made them go take voice lessons. I’ll never forget what it was like to first hear Carter open her mouth and sing.

MGF: *

EP: There’s been a lot of that thing where people bring up interesting voice anecdotes because they know I wrote a voice book. I like it because I’m still pretty fascinated by all the extreme things a voice can do—the book didn’t wear that out of me. I bet you’ll probably get a lot of squid emails from strangers once your big squid essay (Garg! Can’t wait! Is it 2014 yet?) comes out. But sometimes a person will pass along a story, and it will kill me that I didn’t hear about it when I was making the book. Like ASMR—people who get a physical charge from soothing, Bob Ross-style voices. I’d love to have included an essay on that. Or a few months ago, a student stuck his head in my office and mentioned that Merry Clayton is rumored to have given herself a miscarriage while recording the vocal track for “GimmeShelter.” Oh, for a time machine.

  

MGF: *

EP: Well yes, I’ve been thinking about him a lot since Wednesday. I read about him a bit when I was making the book. The Sopranos production team miked him so as to showcase his nose-breathing. I love how he chuffs like a tiger. And he had a dialect coach for the show, which I was sort of astounded by, since Park Ridge, New Jersey can’t be that far from Essex County. There was something that he wanted to do perfectly. But that tight, almost comical timbre he gets, his throat way up. There’s so much Cagney in it. And he’s got that loose mouth and tongue. It’s lovely. He had a lot of scary variations of that classic Tony speech in the 80 hours of his performance, too. I’m surprisingly sad about losing him, losing the opportunity to see what his voice could do next.

MGF: *

EP: There was this draft of the manuscript in which Judy Garland narrated between the essays. There were these interstitial monologues of “Judy” saying things like “Hello, lovers. Allow me to take you on a tour of my laryngeal cavity.” It was just awful. Nobody can speak for Judy Garland. Have you ever heard the drunken tapes that she made for her (never written) autobiography? Oftentimes it seemed that Judy wasn’t even speaking as herself.

MGF: *

EP: When I was 25, I wrote this essay that I thought was going to be hilarious, about this John Denver-looking hippie guy who used to pitch a tent in the recess yard of my elementary school and teach the kids about loving nature or whatever. I thought it would be some kind of wry Thurberian profile of this weirdo. I read it at a nonfiction festival in Pittsburgh and folks hardly laughed, and then my boyfriend was like, “that’s hands down the saddest thing you’ve ever written.” That still happens. A lot. I’ll get started on something that I think is going to just bop along and be zippy and adorable, and it will end up more of a gut-puncher. That essay about winning the screaming contest is pert sad, and what could be sad about winning a screaming contest? And I thought the Galapagos tortoise was going to be full of yuks, and it turned out as the weird saga of this poor, trod-upon, Thomas Hardy-type lady. Why do you think that is? Why do so many of  all my jokes turn into sob stories? Does it happen to you?

MGF: *

EP: Yeah, no, I get that. Totally.
  

MGF: *

EP: What is The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire? Now I’ll take “Potent Potables” for $1,000, Alex.

MGF: *

EP: A grad thesis I just read had a story that spelled an owl hoot who cooks for you? Who cooks for you now? It made me think of the Rebel Yell. That creation of speech is such a telling detail, I think. Can’t you imagine growing up, thinking that something in the trees was asking that? I used to think that my inkjet printer, as it slung itself back and forth, was saying Help meee! Help meee! Help meee! You should ask your [massage therapist] wife how she would spell the sound of a lower trapezius popping when she sticks her glorious elbow in the sweet spot.

  

MGF: *

EP: Starting an essay is like starting a 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzle the first day of a blizzard, if you didn’t have a box with the finished puzzle picture on it and were just fumbling through all the pieces, trying to make find match-ups. There is a kind of companionship in a task of that size; there’s also a comfort in the idea that the image exists somewhere in the finite pieces of language, form, research, mojo. I write the essays one at a time, and I spend a month or thirteen just drowning in the subject. I check all the books out of the library and scoot around the internet and make little cocoons of pictures and clips all around my workspace and I make playlists and listen obsessively. I rarely know where I’m going when I begin. It's alarmingly inefficient. I’ll just search and search until I get a corner section to this puzzle.

I find such terrific companionship in uncovering these key facts (or factoids) that fit the yet-to-be-determined purpose of the work. This happened when I learned that Howard Dean was born the same year as four very famous rock screamers (Osbourne, Cooper, Tyler, and Plant) and that Dean’s scream hit the same note as the one Plant hits at the very end of “Communication Breakdown.” (I figured it out with a pitch pipe and a keyboard). I was all bogged down in researching meme theory and three decades of Iowa caucuses, but when I found out that thing about the singers and the notes, I felt I’d found this pivotal hinge in whatever the hell I was doing.

MGF: *

EP: Well, for starters, why hasn’t somebody written an imaginative essay about that concert The Cramps gave at a mental hospital? I’ll race you for it. Ready? Go.

  

MGF: *

EP: Two things I’ve read recently sort of answer that question. This is a quote from a scholarly article about bestiaries—these ancient encyclopedias of the known animal kingdom: “Saint Augustine himself stated that it was of no consequence whether these animals existed; what mattered was what they signified.”
And this is from a footnote to John Valliant’s book on vengeful cats in farthest Russia, The Tiger (which you should totally read the next time you want to give yourself heart palpitations): “Arseniev’s account of his adventures with Dersu Uzala reflects a tendency among many Russian writers to use facts not as inflexible units of information, but as malleable elements that may be arranged, elaborated on, or added to….[T]he notions of ‘truth’ and ‘fact’ have been so aggressively stifled in Russia since Czarist times that its effects have impacted the collective psyche of the country.”

MGF: *

EP: I guess they mean that facts don’t have just one purpose. They don’t exist simply to be verifiable, or to unilaterally inform us. They certainly aren’t always true. I see them as a medium that I work in, like paint or marble or textiles, and that work naturally varies. And it varies even greater from practitioner to practitioner--not everybody who works with the same medium creates the same product. So people who spout out these fist-banging, commandment-style definitions for all of Nonfictiondom-- “WRITING THAT USES FACTS IS EXACTLY THIS!”-- are essentially saying the equivalent of “OIL PAINTINGS ARE EXACTLY THIS!” which I find kind of baffling.

  

MGF: *

EP: Off the top of my head? Well, sometimes, facts are just opportunities for hipper vocabulary. Like a few questions ago, I looked up Park Ridge because I wanted a more exciting noun than “hometown.” They can also support a syntactical style-- a couple dozen factoids, listed one after the other, can extend a moment into the air and make it levitate for a while. Or if a sentence needs five extra beats, I dig in for a deeper fact related to that sentence (that’s why I had to figure out the name of that butt-pinching monkey). There are times in which I use facts—cold ones, like my height or the frequency of a note, or the amount of tiles on the Capitol floor—to distance an essay from its more nebulous emotions. I could go on.

MGF: *

EP: It’s so hard to pick a favorite. Sharapova’s is classic. She really was a vanguard for the sport, with her alley-oop whoop.  But Serena’s got her own screamy rocket noise going. Did you see the French Open final? When Sharipova and Serena would get a good volley going, shit would get funky! They sounded like the two-screamloop DJ EZ Rock made for “It Takes Two.” I was Roger Rabbiting around my living room. Rafa Nadal has that big boy exhale—he can totally hang with some of the most impressive ladies. And I’m keeping my eyes on a few other women players: Victoria Azarenka, Svetlana Kuznetsova. They make solid voxes in Belarus.

  

MGF: *

EP: Well, you, for starters. You’re a great reader, Matt— so much music and vigor! I’m reminded of the happiest guy in the pub leading the room in a bawdy shanty. It’s a real collective energy that you make in the room. Charles Baxter, on the other hand, is a much stiller and more wry reader, and he brings the house down, too. He’s great at building to a laugh line. I just watched James Arthur boldly and sweetly recite a dozen poems from memory at the bookstore here in Corvallis, and he was mesmerizing. What y’all three have in common are how very generous and considerate you are at the podium. So many of the public readings I see are not considerate. They are quiet, or under-rehearsed, or they don’t pay attention to time, or they shut out the audience. So many seem to have neglected to consider the very real parameters of public presentation. If you’ve agreed to go up there and share your work in front of a group, then you should do some work to create your pages for them—think about time, volume, vocal liveliness. It’s good manners, and it’s not rocket surgery.

MGF: *

EP: You already know the answer to that. I told you at that GWAR show. Or was it that Halloween party in ’08 that nobody came to in costume but you? Or that time you showed up with a paper bag full of popcorn that had POPCORN written on the outside in Sharpie? Or maybe it was the party in 2010, where nobody was dressed up but me. I went as Rosie the Riveter? Anyway, we’ve been over this. Next question.

  

MGF: *

EP: I was 22. I was in the middle of that summer where you just wander around and volunteer for medical studies and do Shakespeare in a Pet Cemetery. I'd just graduated from college and I'd already forgotten everything. So I was loitering down on Forbes Avenue, and this big white Ford F-150 drove by. I saw the passenger window roll down, and it was him! He stuck his head out, and said, Good writer. Almost like good doggie. Not yelling across the street or anything, just this pert, mezzoforte declaration. I didn’t even know if he was talking to me, so I didn’t really wave back, I just sort of lifted my wrists at him. I made jazz hands at him. I remember thinking, “Oh no. This is going to make me set some kind of life goal.” 

Come to think of it, I believe I was actually wearing a sweat suit. 

MGF: *

EP: This is a sort of icky admission, and I’m only telling because of how sweetly you asked me. But in the middle of a few research-heavy essay projects, I’ve realized that I’m just writing about myself. I’ll be drowning in all this context or information about Judy Garland, or Harriet the tortoise, or Brando, and something will make me realize that the whole topic that got my writing motor running was just a ruse I played in order to think about me in some other capacity, or to write more eventful autobiography. I told you this was icky. The easy impulse upon realizing this is to begin injecting the “I” into the piece, to find stories from my life that mirror that of the researched subject, and then make a braided essay that volleys between the “I” and the “they.” That’s what happened in the essays about Brando and Myron Cope. 

But I really tried to avoid that impulse in most of the essays, and to keep working as a kind of embarrassingly biased biographer. I talk to myself about myself as I draft, but I keep writing in the third person. Like my essay on the cuckoo bird is really about what it feels like to sound like and express yourself like a parent that you never lived with. I figured that out, early on, and still kept essaying through the lens of this wonky Nature Channel report. It adds a tension in the essaying that interests me.

  

MGF: *

EP: Ah, yes. I’ve heard that you like to ask people this. It’s as good a note to end on as any, I guess. So. If I have to cut it off myself, and then cook it and eat it, I’d set the price in the mid-to-high six figures. If I could be anesthetized and then get somebody—Like Adria or Achtatz, or maybe you?—to cook it, I’d do it for eighty or ninety grand. 

Elena Passarello is the author of Let Me Clear My Throat, a collection of essays on famous human voices (Sarabande Books 2012). She teaches in the MFA program at Oregon State University and in the low-residency MFA program at Murray State University. She is a-Twitter as @elenavox.