RM: Is there a way that the financial success of a book like Why Do Men Have Nipples? makes possible a book as uncompromising as The Sugar Frosted Nutsack?
ML: I’m completely irresponsible with money. If I have it, I just run through it as fast as possible. I don’t know if you had this feeling, but when I first started thinking about writing seriously, and thinking of myself as someone who always had a project like a poem to write or something, I would have been just euphoric to see my book in a bookstore. I couldn’t even imagine what that would be like. So I still feel that way, really. I love doing this, and I think that the further I got from it, the more I eventually loved it when I came back to it. It’s so amazing to me that text — this kind of uniform grid of little glyphs, these black things — can provide such a phantasmagoric experience to someone deciphering them. I mean, it’s just so mind-bogglingly wonderful to be a part of that.
A funny thing happened to me in Los Angeles. Maybe three years ago, I had been working on this movie and I think I was there to help with the sound mix or something. I was coming back and I was walking to get my car. I was staying at this funny hotel in Culver City, it was a hotel where all the Munchkins had stayed when they made—
RM: I was just there. I know that hotel. It’s crazy. It’s like a ghost hotel.
ML: Yeah! And they have all those pictures of Munchkins on the wall. And I’m small, so there seemed to be something meaningful to me about being in the Munchkin hotel. I mean, I’m not that small. And I’m a strong Munchkin; I work out. So I was walking to get my car, there had been some construction there, and I’m crossing the street in the morning, it’s like seven o’clock, to take this car to LAX, and I get hit by a car. And I mean really hard. I don’t know if you’ve ever been hit by a car but it’s a kind of stunning thing. Time does slow down a little and you have a moment to think, What the fuck was that? It’s so violent, you can’t imagine — it’s unimaginable. So for a second, you just think, I don’t know what that could’ve been. Then you say, Oh, that car hit me.
I saw that accident as Los Angeles saying, Enough of you. And it was mutual. I really do think of the world as a kind of cryptogram, a word I notice you use in your wonderful piece about Artaud that I adore. I am very hermeneutical. I’m interested in trying to tease out significance from everything. So I came back after the accident, and I couldn’t really walk and I was in bed and I just started reading. I read Moby-Dick; I read a beautiful book, Jude the Obscure; I read The Mayor of Casterbridge.
RM: I love that book.
ML: I thought, This is what I love doing. It sounds trite, but it was a signal event in my life. So I lay in bed thinking about this.
When I was a little boy, I saw that movie Mothra, which I talk about in the book. In the movie, there are these two little girls. As an eight-year-old boy, I thought about that endlessly — I have to be honest — what that would be like to possess them in my room. In benign ways, I would be nice to them but they would still be mine.
RM: Maybe we should explain Mothra for those at home: Mothra is an installment in the Godzilla series, and it involves a very large caterpillar-like thing that can be summoned by two Japanese damsels who are kept in a tiny little cabinet, sort of a cabin of wonders.
ML: Or like a little terrarium.
RM: And they open it up, and the two little girls are standing there, and they sing.
ML: There’s a song they sing. You can get it on YouTube. My memory of it is that they weren’t little girls, actually; they were miniaturized little Japanese pop star girls with sleeveless ’60s dresses. But I became really fascinated with that idea of just having little ones to play with. This is not far from an incipient ambition to be a writer, to want to have little helpless creatures you can do things to.
RM: We’re actually dancing around the subject of the book in some ways because it’s hard to talk about. But let’s try to touch upon it briefly. A part of what you’re saying is that a novelist is sort of a puppet master, let’s say. And what’s immediately apparent to someone who’s read widely in the classics is how the contour of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is very much like the mythical narratives of Ovid or Hesiod, or the Old Testament or Mahabharata or something like that. Was that point of origin completely conscious on your part?
ML: I think that one of the things that makes this book unique is its even mix of what seems absolutely spontaneous and things that seem rigorously worked and analyzed. I always find that fascinating about mythology. Sometimes myths seem like something a kid made up to entertain an adult: Oh, there was this bird, and it had one lead wing, and one wing made out of popcorn, and the popcorn wing was eaten by people who just came out of a movie theater, which just showed the origin of the universe. Myths have that improvisational quality to them. But they also have a graven quality, a quality of having been hammered out of timeless verities. So I really like the interplay of both.
One of the things that I really wanted to play with in this book was how incidents and phenomena that are completely incidental and trivial and fleeting can take on a kind of lapidary significance. And I think this is true in the mythmaking of families. In my family, there’s a story that’s endlessly told about an uncle of mine. At his shore house, my grandfather would make a pitcher of martinis every day, a pitcher of clear liquid — and my uncle came in one day late in the afternoon, hot and thirsty from playing tennis, and just chugged this pitcher, thinking it was water. And then his eyes rolled back and he just collapsed backward. Now everyone loves this story for some reason; it’s as if there are bards who will continuously tell this story at family gatherings. It’s a myth made out of an incident from an afternoon.
RM: That actually leads me to a completely different tangent, which is — unless I miss my guess — Ike’s biography is very similar to yours. Is the sort of virtuosic and astonishing act of imagination that is the entire heavenly cast that you provide in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack compensatory for the fact that it’s the most autobiographical of your work?
ML: Well, I can’t accept the premise of that question with any humility. Thank you. That’s a very sweet question. I think what you said is absolutely true. I think — whatever this means — that this is the most honest book of mine in a number of ways. I think this is a very generous book, but that’s not unusual. I have always thought of what I do as an enormous act of generosity, trying to give the reader the most amazing experience possible. Wouldn’t it be great if I could delight someone and blow someone’s mind in a completely unique way — wouldn’t that be wonderful? I’ve never understood various interpretations of what I do as being aggressively ironic or hermetic or elitist or any of the various things that people can say about it, because my impulse is just to give the reader enormous pleasure. It’s really shamelessly seductive and flirtatious. This book itself is an incantation of seductiveness, and it’s also honest in all kinds of ways. It’s honest about the kind of bedeviling thinking with which I am — for lack of a better word — afflicted, which is always to think that things mean more than what they seem, which makes life infinitely more complicated. And for there to be no outside.