Heti v. Hickey (and other Q&As of note)

I've read a few fine Q&As, lately. Here are three of them:

1) Toronto-based author Sheila Heti interviews controversial art critic Dave Hickey, in the current issue of The Believer. Excerpt:

DH: Anyway, the art world is way too big right now. The art world I came up into was very much like the jazz world I grew up in, which is to say, a relatively small thing. If you got to go see Miles Davis in a little bar on La Brea, that was great, and you didn't sit around saying, "There was no coverage in the New York Times! Miles is not going to get any reviews!" You know what I'm saying?

SH: Sure, it was for yourself. You were happy.

DH: Right, you were happy to be there, and if the art world today shrunk down to the size and scale of the jazz world, I would be happier now. Things would be freer and a lot less tedious.

SH: I suppose the schools have something to do with the change -- the craziness that you have to get an MFA to be an artist.

DH: Thirty-five thousand MFAs a semester, 90 percent of whom never make another work of art.

SH: And do you think that that kind of system produces --

DH: Almost no one. Idiots with low-grade depression. When I opened my gallery in the late '60s, Peter Plagens -- who's now the critic for Newsweek and still shows his paintings -- was the only artist I represented who had been to graduate school. The MFA thing is an invention of the '70s. Its raison d'etre is evaporating.

SH: Which is?

DH: Training sissies for teaching jobs. Well, the official raison d'etre was to create an intellectual and pedagogical justification for the most frivolous activity in Western culture, so you go back and read things from the past. It's the traditional Renaissance desire that artists should be taken seriously, and that art not be a practical but a liberal art. But I tend to think it's a practice, like law or like medicine.

2) Last Sunday, I produced an audio slideshow based on a chapter in "The Complete 'Dream of the Rarebit Fiend,'" a collection of Winsor McCay's vintage newspaper comic strips, edited by Ulrich Merkl. Earlier this week, Steven Heller interviewed Merkl for Voice, the AIGA's journal of design. Excerpt:

Heller: What did you learn about McCay while compiling this material that you didn't know already?

Merkl: My most surprising discovery -- apart from hundreds of never reprinted "Rarebit Fiend" strips -- is that Winsor McCay incorporated real daily life in almost every episode: from fashion, sport, politics and work through to prominent personalities, architecture, technical progress and many other features. The strip is a mirror on the United States and New York City in the early 20th century. You will find everything: automobilization, baseball, vaudeville, alcoholism, people with German accent, tramps, fraternal organizations, New York City landmark buildings, the quest for the North Pole, elections, women's hats and clothing, horse racing and, and, and... The strip is an encyclopedia of everyday life and a fantastic reference work and collection of material for anyone interested in the early 20th-century history and culture of the United States.

Heller: How does this strip compare with McCay's classic "Little Nemo in Slumberland"?

Merkl: "Little Nemo" was addressed to children and mainly lived from its spectacular layouts. "Dream of the Rarebit Fiend" has a darker side, is more inventive, and is devoted to decidedly adult nightmares and phobias, making it one of the weirdest, most amazing and shocking comic strips of all times -- simply "the most bizarre newspaper feature in American history," [according to] Jeet Heer. I think "Rarebit Fiend" is the better strip, overall. Visually, "Little Nemo" is tops, even though "Rarebit Fiend" also has its share of wonderful visuals. But "Rarebit Fiend" definitely has the better ideas -- indeed, so many "Nemo" strips are just reimagined from "Rarebit" originals -- and the more enduring content. Its imagery and ideas reflect the unconscious life and the psychology of dreams with a startling reality that’s somewhat lacking in the more fanciful "Nemo." "Rarebit" is still, even today, shocking and horrifying and brilliant.

3) I've been following the career of Matthew De Abaitua for years. Formerly the deputy editor of The Idler, an excellent British magazine, in recent years he's been a top-notch short-story writer, and a presenter on "SF:UK," a BBC history of British science fiction; he's currently the editor of the BBC website Channel4.com/film. Earlier this week, De Abaitua was interviewed by Sam Jordison for 3:AM magazine about his new science-fiction novel, "The Red Men." (I've praised "The Red Men" in Brainiac.) Excerpt:

3:AM: I detect a really strong yearning in the book to escape. It features all these wild places like Iona… There's a dream of rural isolation at the back of the book, I guess.

MDA: I think anyone who lives in London constantly questions whether they should be living there. Particularly when you get to a certain -- you know, Nelson the narrator is in his early 30s, he’s got a child. That questioning is part of the urban experience.

And I do love Iona. The other reason I included it was to do with it being a crazy place to have a meeting. It's in Iona that Nelson and his co-workers are introduced to the technology and this seemed right because Iona has such a rich religious history (being the place in which Christianity was introduced to Britain by St Columba) and the business people in "The Red Men" do have a peculiar religious viewpoint based around Gnosticism. It seemed appropriate to have a place with Christian overtones to introduce their vision. There's a kind of shadow narrative behind the businessmen that follows the rise in Christian fundamentalism… But I only wanted to partake of that, I didn't want to reference it directly.

3:AM: Isn't there some commentary in that the Americans in the book are far more zealous and dangerous in that regard?

MDA: Yes, Nelson realises that the project he's been working on might be put to uses that he didn't anticipate. There was a point when I was writing the book when I thought that one of the statements I wanted to make -- or ideas I wanted to get across -- was to imagine that everything that happened after 9/11 happened -- and then you had a really weird dream about it. "The Red Men" is that nightmare.

I was interested in this thought pattern -- you see it in things like "Donnie Darko," which was released just around 9/11 (obviously it was made beforehand) -- but it's like 9/11 in that it's about a split in the time streams caused by a plane crash. And also Michael Moore says in "Fahrenheit 9/11," imagine if we'd woken up and Al Gore was President.

There was a sense that during that period -- while all that was unfolding -- that we'd gone down the wrong time stream… And I wanted to write a book about having gone down that time stream and dreaming about it afterwards… That's what "The Red Men" is.