« Back to Beat the Dust home page
|
| Author: |
Dan Fante and Tony O’Neill |
|
| |
Tony O’Neill author pic © Nicolas Guerbe
Dan Fante began his writing career in his mid-forties after many years as a drunk. “I went to a Christmas party in 1964 and sobered up sometime in the first week of January 1986,” says Fante. He writes poetry, plays, short stories and novels, his most recent being the latest in the Bruno Dante series, 86'd, which came out on Harper Perennial in 2009. Read it, it’s worth it for the superglue incident alone…
|
| Submission Date: |
| 15 Jan 2010 |
Category: |
Interview
|
In Chap-book
|
|
|
Dan Fante interviews Tony O’Neill
Dan Fante (DF): You've been married before and have had other relationships. Compare your current lifestyle and relationship to your previous ones.
Tony O’Neill (TO): Many less drunken late night car chases, death threats, suicide threats, overdoses, almost no incidents of cracked out gunplay, and many fewer evictions.
DF: You live in New York City. Does living in a New York environment help your writing? If so, how?
TO: It helps me because New York is totally dead, and so I don’t get distracted. When I go back to LA and I see how available everything is right out in the open – hard drugs, cheap liquor, etc etc, I realize that I would have probably never written a word if I hadn’t left. People say there’s a scene in New York, but the scene bores me, and most of the new wave of New York writers who are considered hip at the moment totally bore me. This is a good thing – I spend my time writing instead of hanging out and drinking.
DF: You co-authored an American football book. How was it for you as a writer, being from the UK, to take on a book about a sport you've never played?
TO: Ha – it was interesting. They way I sold it to the subject was this – you can teach me all about football. You couldn’t teach a football guy all about being a junkie. You have the football skills; I have holes in my arms, so let’s meet in the middle.
DF: Franz Kafka once wrote: "A good novel should have the same effect as a blow to the head." What is your goal as an author? What is your message to the reader?
TO: My goal is always to make the reader feel something. A lot of stuff bothers me about literature and the scene right now – a lot of the new stuff coming out is all tricks, and no soul. I suppose I write for the people who don’t want their books to be perfumed and sweet, and aren’t afraid to get some dirt under their fingernails. I suppose my message to the reader is a message of freedom. That there is another way, an escape from the tyranny of the work week, of being sane. In my autobiographical writing, it’s never about warning people off my path – it’s about lighting the path, and showing people that the less traveled paths can be much more interesting, exciting and thrilling than playing it safe. The fictional stuff is about that too. It’s my way of celebrating my favorite personality types – the bastards who aren’t afraid to go insane.
DF: You've been a successful musician. What influence has that career had on your writing?
TO: It taught me to be suspicious of anyone who tells you to sign papers in exchange for becoming either rich or famous. I never made much money playing music. I was always broke. I barely made my rent, I could barely afford drugs, I could barely afford booze and I had to rely on hand-outs for food. But it did pull me out that whole school–college–work thing early on, which I think was good for me. It got me used to instability, no money, but the exhilaration of scraping by doing something you believe in. It also ruined my employment prospects early on, so now I write very much without a safety net, which is a good thing. The best motivator for a writer is fear.
DF: Tell me about your favorite music and what it is about that music that inspires you?
TO: I have fairly wide tastes when it comes to the types of music I listen to. I hate pop shit. Music has to speak to me in the same way that books or any art has to. I have to feel something – some pain, or some joy, something real. I musically came of age in the whole Britpop thing, so I still have a soft spot for that stuff – the Charlatans, Pulp, Elastica, that whole thing. But I like old rock and roll like Gene Vincent, Little Richard and Hasil Adkins; I like Howling Wolf and Bukka White, Sun Ra and the MC5, Suicide and Johnny Thunders, and a bunch of other stuff. The best music of all is the clack of the keys when I'm getting off a really good piece of writing.
DF: If you weren't a writer what would you be doing today?
TO: Honestly, I’d be bumming around trying to make it in some other discipline of the arts and probably failing. I think that the honest answer is that I might be dead or possibly one of the living dead.
DF: Writers inspire other writers. Tell me who the writers are who have had the greatest influence on you and your work, and why?
TO: Herbert Huncke was the first writer who really grabbed me in terms of giving me clues towards how I wanted to tell stories. Alexander Trocchi’s artiness and political thought is inspiring to me. Your own work has been a big influence and I have talked about that in many interviews so I won’t embarrass you by doing it again here. William Burroughs I think happened upon something very powerful in his writing, although he’s a dangerous writer to be influenced by because even the slightest bit of Burroughs-aping can be detrimental for a new writer. He was one of those weird ones who burned a trail that is wonderful to admire, but almost impossible to follow without falling into being a hack copyist. Donald Goines is a big influence on me, in so far as his ability to crank out work in the face of personal adversity and tell a story with no frills and fuss. Jim Thompson for many of the same reasons as Goines, but I always admired the way Thompson would stick in the sickest, weirdest detours into what were really straight-ahead thrillers – like the whole part with the vagina farm in Savage Night and that book’s completely surreal ending. I think that a lot of modern writers are fakes and frauds. If you only followed what was going on now you’d get the impression that writers are a bunch of pussies, so there aren’t many current writers who are influencing me at the moment. I should be influencing them.
DF: What is the future of the small press in America? And the future of book publishing in general?
TO: I actually think that the small press is in good health. I just put out a chapbook with Black Bile press up in Canada, and I think it’s important that writers who have started putting books out on bigger publishers should keep engaging with the smaller presses. I think for small presses, the digital revolution has made things easier. As for the big publishers they seem to be hurting, but it would take a much smarter guy than me to tell them how to fix it. Maybe if they spent less money signing moronic memoirs by airhead idiots like that girl from The Hills or Screech from Saved By The Bell and concentrated on their job of nurturing new writers, they’d be doing better. I was gonna throw Sarah Palin in there, but then again that particular idiot has sold enough books to keep Harper Collins in caviar and champagne through the next fiscal year. I gotta say that Harper Perennial are doing a pretty good job of concentrating on signing new, interesting writers and not television personalities, so I don’t want to tar ‘big publishing’ all with the same brush. It’s not that they’re all morons. Just most of them.
DF: Being a writer is not exactly like striking gold. Why keep doing it? What drives you?
TO: I think it’s the same for every writer – this weird mix of delusional self belief, fear of getting a real job, a borderline personality imbalance of some kind, and a terror of dying without ever having left anything worthwhile behind. Basically if I couldn’t write, somebody might have had me committed at this point.
One of Tony’s favourite youtube videos: SONNY BOY WILLIAMSON - Your Funeral and My Trial.
Stand-out lyric: “I'm beggin' you baby, cut out that off the wall jive / If you can't treat me no better, it gotta be your funeral and my trial…”
|
|
|
|
|
« Back to Beat the Dust home page
|
|
Contact me