THE SPIDERED WEB OF polycarp kusch

Before I killed off the Hertzan Chimera pseudonym, I interviewed a whole heap of out-there hippied and social reprobates for my Stoker-recommended non-fiction paperback SPIDERED WEB from Cyber Pulp Books. Creator of the New Absurdist and all round good egg, Polycarp Kusch was one of the most entertaining guys - boy, does he have some stories to tell. Anyway, here's the interview with this absurdist master, originally entitle Purple is not a Letter...

A perfectly filthy day in the Belvaros section of Budapest, Hungary. Ahhh how the grey overcast clouds trap the car exhaust and keep it down in the streets where the people need it most. Hertzan Chimera takes shelter in the decaying Pushkin mozi café, choking in cheap tobacco smoke and wondering if the patched-up machine gun holes in the walls are of nazi or soviet era calibre.

Polycarp Kusch is there in his corner, wearing his thongs with his head shaved down close because he's apparently not bright enough to know it's winter and that shoes and hair keep people warm. His brain throbbing under his semi-transparent skull going ak-ak-ak ak-ak-ak and a roll of 50 forint pieces stuffed at an odd angle in his pocket to boost his confidence with the iridescent red haired Barbie dolls that seem to run in packs and own the utca-s and körút-s here. Who could resist an opportunity to spend a few moments in the presence of Hungary’s most alluring social realist.

Initially, Polycarp Kusch is suspicious but a few drinks later and ... no wait… more drinks and…no… that's not an interview, that's him lighting a cigarette… and finally…

This interview may never have taken place were it not for the weather.

HERTZAN CHIMERA: Polycarp. Do you mind if I tape this?…

Polycarp Kusch reels back reliving a scene from his junior high school PE class, frightened that Mr Chimera is going to masking tape his butt cheeks together, but relaxes upon seeing the handheld recording device.

Ok…. Tell me something about a friend of yours, Comrade Daniil Kharms.

POLYCARP KUSCH: Well after being exiled twice, having his writings banned and eventually dying of starvation in a soviet "psychiatric" hospital, I think Mr. Kharms would take some offence at the title Comrade, but anyway…

Kharms is the master of the Incident, the incredibly short bizarre - short story. He was also a man who believed it to be bad luck to ever use the same name twice. So he is Kharms, Harms, Charms, DanDan, HarmsDanDan and a hundred others variations. He also had an amazingly bizarre attachment to the aroma women put off when sexually excited. But then who doesn't?

When I first started writing, my stories were incredibly short, which I saw as a personal flaw. I was still living under the delusion that the novel was the great literary form to aspire to. Then I discovered Daniil Kharms.

Kharms taught me three basic points of writing:
1) Write 3 pages a day, even if they suck.
2) The vision is more important than the number of words needed to express it.
3) The mundane will always expose the most fascinating part of ourselves.

If I get blocked up when I'm writing, it's usually because I'm taking the whole matter, including myself, way too seriously. I'll sit down, read Kharms and it's completely cathartic. Who was it that told writers their words had to make sense? High school English teachers should be taken out and shot.

I really wish writers could enjoy the same freedom of expression as painters and composers. There was never a truly grand abstract period to literature that could be paralleled with John Cage musically or to Jackson Pollack visually. I think the closest we've gotten to that was the dadaist tone poems, then one step up to Joyce and then right back into sentences full of words that people know, arranged in ways they're comfortable with, telling the same stories over and over. I'm not saying that conventional storytelling is bad. It just doesn't have to be our only option.

But back to Kharms… Find him! Read him! He's all over the net in every language you can imagine. I even saw one site where he's been translated into Esperanto. My greatest goal is to one day be translated into an absolutely synthetic language like Esperanto. Let's have a show of hands on who speaks Esperanto… Anyone? Anyone? Anyone at all?

HERTZAN CHIMERA: Is it always like this round here, the weather?

POLYCARP KUSCH: No no no, the only place on the planet to be come springtime is Budapest. So beautiful, it could almost make you believe there's hope for people. But the crappy winters in central Europe give a nice contrast, a reason to stay inside and drive up Nintendo's stock value. There is a sense of continuity with everything here that doesn't exist in the US or that I never found living there. And living in a country that doesn't have the highest state-of-the-art street sanitation techniques really makes one appreciate the colder heavier air of winter that keeps the dog poop smell close to the ground instead of rising up and coming in through your windows like it does in the summer.

HERTZAN CHIMERA: Freedom is very important to us all but this shines through in your writing. There is an ethos, yes?

POLYCARP KUSCH: Freedom and openess generate a fair amount of crap because we can't seem to get used to the idea that others might actually listen to what we have to say if we don't make it as loud and obnoxious as possible. I will most surely admit that. Small children will randomly say 'Turd' into the telephone simply for the shock value they think the word possesses (and for that matter, the power we've gifted it). Writers will write about their bent on “fucking” or use new words they've just learned or made up. Who's to judge what’s good bad or otherwise other than the reader? What doesn't generate crap? No one stops eating because crap continues to come out, even though we all realize the causal connection.I believe everyone is an artist, so far as everyone has their own vision of the world. It's inescapable. Hemmingway speaks to some, Handke to others and 73 year old waitresses have stories to tell as well that would connect with readers given the chance.It's getting to the point where I don't even see writing as a valuable form of expression. Time is too tight in people's minds now. To invest one's self in a day's reading of a novel, it better be a damn good novel. So we look to others to tell us what's good before we even start. What is worth my valuable time? We waste our lives on so many things we never even bother to think about. Why with art do we demand a guide and handhold?

HERTZAN CHIMERA: You have a bouncing baby boy called ABSURDISM! excuse me but what the fuck is that all about?

POLYCARP KUSCH: Unfortunately, the Absurdism! site is now gone, but the goal was to have an editor free environment where writers could post whatever random bits of themselves they wanted for public exhibition, in stark contrast to the inhibition in writing generated by editors of the old guard of print media who are now carrying that vision into cyberland.

The grand reward of writing is others reading it and seeing our small piece of the picture. Awards are lovely, free advertising, but they've outscoped themselves in importance. Again another dilation device for the time impaired. Well that won that, I can spare myself a minute to see. That writers would lend themselves to give out writing awards shocks me. It's the frat house mentality of I had to go through the initiation, so why shouldn't you. Petty bullshit.We can do it all ourselves now, and that's got to put a scare into publishing houses who pick and choose who gets paid and promoted. So Absurdism! was meant to put writing back in the hands of those who wanted it, those who felt it valuable and had the time.

HERTZAN CHIMERA: You support absurdism and you say your work is absurdist but it smacks of the most horrific socio-realism this interviewer has ever had the pleasure of reading.

POLYCARP KUSCH: Social realism is such a great term. If the real world itself wasn't so freak'n absurd I'd switch over and use that, but then I'd have to change all my business cards too.Truly, I don't care what you call it, I just want to be read and have that mean something after the book goes back on the shelf. I've read people, put the book down and couldn't remember it one way or the other. I'd love to have a copy editor go over my stuff and help me define what's the style I'm shooting at and what are just grammatical mistakes. Things tend to fall out intentionally in two different ways: one I like to write in sentence fragments, the other is writing incredibly long, unpunctuated compound sentences. I read too much Joyce and like it too much. My narratives become dialogs and I write them either broken or running on and on. How things fall out unintentionally, read it and tell me.I think most of the time it works to put across the characters I'm trying to build, but sometimes... it doesn't. You can't win all the time. Spelling... I'm just a moron with a bad keyboard and an attention span too short to run a spell check before transforming to pdf.

HERTZAN CHIMERA: To say I am besotted with your straight-forward, vile, insane, touching, brutal, architecture of words would be the #1 understatement of all time. I have read your collections MACABRE and A BRIEF COMPILATION and need to know what’s next on the horizon?

POLYCARP KUSCH: My main project over the past few months has been trying to find aluminium foil in this country. I don't believe it exists here. And some of those zip-lock freezer baggy things. I like those too. They're great for meat. Ask me more about this later because now you've got me obsessing on food storage.

HERTZAN CHIMERA: Will the real Polycarp Kusch ever stand up and admit his identity in a criminal line-up?

POLYCARP KUSCH: The polycarp is an invention that allows me to actually live the fictional account of my own life. A kind of imaginary friend that would come to your house, wipe his ass on your hand towels and then wait patiently to see what kind of moustache you come out with after washing your face. So the answer there would be no.

Salvador Dali has one of the best quotes, "Everyday I awake to the greatest joy possible… that of being Salvador Dali." I wake up in the morning and say, "I invented the letter D" or "I'm so freak'n famous I can't stand myself. What do you mean you've never heard of me?" and then I tell people that again and again until they either believe it or tell me to shut the hell up and I move on to my next fixation.

It's much easier to write fiction if you just live it. Then it's a simple matter of transcribing the thing. I'm not a writer; I'm a clerk typist. And by the way… polycarp kusch is not capitalized...

HERTZAN CHIMERA: (yawning) I'm sorry… what were you saying? Never mind. Probably wasn't all that important anyway. So, my pager's about to ring and I've got a train to catch to get out of this god forsaken place, but two more quick questions. Where can people download these e-books of yours? And I've heard you've found the cure for cancer? Please fill us in on both.

POLYCARP KUSCH: Well, the good folks over at dreampeople.org have been nice enough to post my books up for download until the other good people (the ones hiding in the pentagon bunkers) clear my application for a new absurdist site.

About the whole cancer thing, I don't see why these so-called researchers haven't seen it. Curing cancer is a simple matter of…

At this point in the interview the tape ran out and polycarp turned into a basking shark and chased me out of Budapest. Good job I had on my jogging shoes. Schlop schlop schlop...


(c) Mike Philbin 2003

http://www.mikephilbin.com