DBC Pierre: unplugged
Lumière's Associate Editor ALEXANDER BISLEY talks reviews, drinking, Arnie and symbols with DBC Pierre.
DBC PIERRE bursts in the lobby at the Intercontinental, Groucho Marx style. “We should do this in the elevator,” he mocks the insipid elevator music, vigorously miming slashing his wrists. “Have you got any amphetamines?” he asks the amused waitress before settling on a frothy coffee and a brownie garnished with berries and cream. “I eat very daintily, like a cat.”
“He doesn’t change at all does he?” Pierre smiles genially to my photographer sister fourty minutes later. Stimulated by the interview I’ve slipped into the idiosyncratic sideways look I sometimes give when thinking. Not only does Dirty But Clean remember our 2004 beer at Fidel’s: the conversation, the photo, the random old Aussie couple; but he remembers a personal tic that puts some people off. That interview was one of the last of thousands in the seven month media snafu – “They’ve completely sucked me dry” – after he won the Man Booker Prize with Vernon God Little.
“Reality is implausible,” the animated satirist takes Phillip Roth’s contention about American reality out fictionalising fiction one step further. Ludmilla’s Broken English, Pierre’s new narrative-buster, tells of two recently separated British conjoined twins, Blair and Gordon (or Bunny) and their adventures with Ludmilla, a beautiful Ubli (fictional ex-Soviet state) mail-order bride. Pierre wants the novel to be read symbolically – symbols such as Westerners exploiting foreign resources. “I reckon it’s a much hungrier, harder, cannier world than we give it credit for. We’re lording around imagining we’re going to organise them and bring them freedom and democracy and all this bollocks. The words don’t exist in a lot of languages for the concepts we’re trying to convey. I think if we didn’t have a lot of guns we’d be eaten alive.”
Pierre, dressed in blue, enthuses about the stream-of-consciousness approach; this won’t be the most linear feature. Admittedly The Scotsman trousers-down, six-of-the-best Scottish thrashing for Ludmilla wasn’t the only savaging, but on the whole the major reviews have actually been reasonably good. “Dizzying new fable... Weird and wonderfully outrageous,” The Age wrote. Most detractors have acknowledged his strengths. The New Statesman: “Pierre has a miraculous ear, but until he has found his plot, he should probably cut his hatch”. The Times: “On the whole, however, he carries the reader by sheer effrontery”. The Independent: “Smashing at texture, he’s not hot on plot”. I didn’t find Ludmilla as outstanding as Vernon, but it’s a goodie, and there are brilliant things about it. Try this: A Brit hen party “scuttles away like a bashed insect in spasm”. Private Eye’s Literary Review suggested that Pierre had the book “dictated to him by aliens while being gang-probed in their space capsule”. “That’s actually what happened,” he jokes. “I’ve told you life isn’t plausible any more. Good on ‘em. I’m very chuffed to be in Private Eye.”
He ain’t worried about critical slings and arrows. “I keep the characters strong enough that if they were alive themselves they would be able to carry that [criticism]. You never see me writing Victorian widows or anyone sensitive enough to be crushed by a review. Ludmilla would tell these reviewers where they could stick it, and so would Vernon, and so each of them would be able to defend themselves so I feel that I don’t need to worry about them.”
Vernon, which has sold over 750,000 copies, tells of schoolboy Vernon Gregory Little’s troubles after his best friend Jesus goes Columbine at their high school in Martirio, Texas. “If I’d had one when I was eleven, God knows what I’d have done.” It was surprising post-Columbine, how the American Right didn’t look at the obvious problem: gun control. “It wasn’t guns, Charlton Heston saw to that, it was beautiful: ‘From my cold, dead hands,’” No sense of irony, I posit. “You hit the nail on the head. Back in the 70s they still had their tongue a little bit in their cheek in America and consumer culture generally. That’s completely gone now, they’ve lost their sense of irony that redeemed them from all of this, and now we actually believe it. It’s not just them, it’s us, and the British, if anything, are worse.”
Pierre’s politics are pointed. “Noam Chomsky’s old bugbear manufacturing consent has to have reached its zenith with this Iraq debacle now, the pack of transparent, fucken boldfaced lies that we’ve been sold. And lies that you know are lies just by watchin’ them tell them. I didn’t know if fucken Iraq’s got weapons or what, but when he [Bush] said it I knew they didn’t... The underestimation of intelligence is extraordinary, and it fucken makes you fear for liberty.”
Italian literary icon Fernanda Privano, imprisoned three times by Mussolini’s Fascists, is one of Pierre’s many fans. She told Pierre she believes fascism’s around the corner; he has a similarly dark worldview, citing the likes of the Patriot Act. “Admittedly she’s living with Berlusconi, that’s about as bad as it gets.” Speaking of Pierre’s political dislikes, Arnold Schwarzenegger. “It’s quite scary to think that it’s only sixty years since the last Austrian strong man was put away. And I suspect this one has less intelligence than his Austrian predecessor. Very weird.”
Privano also told Pierre to be very wary of the media. The Booker plucked the first-time author, whose colourfully dodgy past includes failing English at school, from obscurity to unrelenting attention. Pierre emigrated to a sleepy Irish mountainside to escape the hustle and write Ludmilla. The Leitrim Observer doesn’t give him any grief. “There isn’t a books’ section... If I stayed in London I’d just be down at the pub, I wouldn’t be able to get any writing done. I started late writing and so I feel I have to make up some time and do some work.” Ludmilla’s a fast turn-around for a post-Booker (“The publisher was up my arse excessively”) – in contrast, what’s Keri Hulme done since The Bone People?
The enigmatic mysterio’s eyes glint and dart with mischief, his gestures are as exuberant as his rhetorical flourishes. Charismatic and hilarious, Pierre describes himself as a frustrated musician, “a Russian composer trapped in the body of a cartoonist.” He wrote a fascinating piece for The Guardian on how classical music helped him through his darkest, suicidal period. Rachmaninov’s Isle of the Dead is now his favourite piece to write to. He has an uncanny ear for accents, vernacular and colour, bringing extra resonance when he reads Ludmilla (As he also does at an enjoyable NZ Book Council event later that evening.) Ubli is “the language most exquisitely tailored to the expression of disdain”; terms like “smack your cuckoo” and “cut your hatch” deserve to enter the lexicon.
Pierre digresses on humour. “Dogs have it. Do things just to get a laugh. They trick you.” His accent is a curious, lived-in melange of Australian bloke, urbane Londoner and rural Irish brogue, spiced with the occasional Mexican flourish. He grew up a rich, idle lad in Mexico (“didn’t have to lift the toilet seat for God’s sake”), spending a significant amount of time going over the border to Texas and indulging in dubious activities. Before he wrote Vernon, Pierre had burnt out in an orgy of bacchanals: partying, drug-taking, gambling, lying and racking up tens of thousands of dollars in debt from his friends.
“The passion without explaining the passion, it’s as about enjoyable and illuminating as an autopsy or a snuff movie,” I reviewed The Passion of the Christ in The Dominion Post, and copped flack. “That was inflammatory,” Pierre says, “it’s great to get a reaction.” He elaborates the worst thing imaginable for him is a reader responding with the “meh” shrug. “It’s doing it’s job when it inspires some bloody conviction, when it gets people one way or another. These are all big ideas both of us deal with.”
The Kazakhstani Government has responded furiously to satirist Sacha Baron Cohen’s hilarious Kazakh journalist Borat, banning his website, threatening legal action and launching an expensive advertising campaign to refute that national pastimes include quaffing horse urine and gypsy-catching. “He’s brilliant,” DBC laughs about SBC, and confirms he isn’t itching to book tour the Southern Caucuses. “There’s a lot of Kalashnikovs up there”. Vernon sold to Georgia for a $200 advance. “They’re not expecting to recuperate it,” he laughs. Moscow has bought Ludmilla. DBC was looking forward to going there with Vernon, but alas “They don’t speak to the outside world” .
Which dead authors would he like to drink with? “Not Ernest Hemingway or Pound anymore, ” he makes libellious, colourful allegations against Hemingway’s sexual practises, quoting Hemingway’s confidante Fernanda Privano. The Marquis De Sade and Niccolo Machiavelli, to learn about “Contract negotiation”.
He still hasn’t found the literati. “I’ve met some great authors. I haven’t met an establishment. I’ve drunk with the great and the good, there’s not a clique, they’re all cool.” Pierre praises Banville, Motion and Pinter and co. Pinter, who shares a similar political outlook, has given him wisdom. “Some great quotes. The best ones I can’t repeat. They’re about my publishers. A: Because they’re about my publishers. B: Because in mixed company the language is far too strong.” (That said, he praises his in touch, pub savvy, “not academically messed-up” editor Lee Braxton.)
Contrary to popular belief, Pierre says “I can’t drink and write. It’s a great sadness... I’m a big drinker. I’ll come out and have a massive session.” After long stretches dry (three or four weeks), he gets “absolutely lashed off my head.” This fits in with his general approach. “When the muse comes along you’ve got to charge it.”
What does the future hold? “An utterly, utterly, utterly decadent, benchmark sexually excessive novel, while I still can. The pendulum shifts a little bit and they might stop me doing it. I’ve found a way I can do it where the reader is on the correct side of the moral fence...”
Key Questions:
Favourite vodka? Kalashnikov
Full English breaky skills? Very good. Very, very good
Favourite last line in a novel? I have a favourite first line – “Granted, I am a patient in a mental institution”
What wanna be when kid? Write comics
Favourite karaoke song? Country Roads
Most fun had with clothes on? Dry humping. That’s an obvious one
DBC PIERRE bursts in the lobby at the Intercontinental, Groucho Marx style. “We should do this in the elevator,” he mocks the insipid elevator music, vigorously miming slashing his wrists. “Have you got any amphetamines?” he asks the amused waitress before settling on a frothy coffee and a brownie garnished with berries and cream. “I eat very daintily, like a cat.”
“He doesn’t change at all does he?” Pierre smiles genially to my photographer sister fourty minutes later. Stimulated by the interview I’ve slipped into the idiosyncratic sideways look I sometimes give when thinking. Not only does Dirty But Clean remember our 2004 beer at Fidel’s: the conversation, the photo, the random old Aussie couple; but he remembers a personal tic that puts some people off. That interview was one of the last of thousands in the seven month media snafu – “They’ve completely sucked me dry” – after he won the Man Booker Prize with Vernon God Little.
“Reality is implausible,” the animated satirist takes Phillip Roth’s contention about American reality out fictionalising fiction one step further. Ludmilla’s Broken English, Pierre’s new narrative-buster, tells of two recently separated British conjoined twins, Blair and Gordon (or Bunny) and their adventures with Ludmilla, a beautiful Ubli (fictional ex-Soviet state) mail-order bride. Pierre wants the novel to be read symbolically – symbols such as Westerners exploiting foreign resources. “I reckon it’s a much hungrier, harder, cannier world than we give it credit for. We’re lording around imagining we’re going to organise them and bring them freedom and democracy and all this bollocks. The words don’t exist in a lot of languages for the concepts we’re trying to convey. I think if we didn’t have a lot of guns we’d be eaten alive.”
Pierre, dressed in blue, enthuses about the stream-of-consciousness approach; this won’t be the most linear feature. Admittedly The Scotsman trousers-down, six-of-the-best Scottish thrashing for Ludmilla wasn’t the only savaging, but on the whole the major reviews have actually been reasonably good. “Dizzying new fable... Weird and wonderfully outrageous,” The Age wrote. Most detractors have acknowledged his strengths. The New Statesman: “Pierre has a miraculous ear, but until he has found his plot, he should probably cut his hatch”. The Times: “On the whole, however, he carries the reader by sheer effrontery”. The Independent: “Smashing at texture, he’s not hot on plot”. I didn’t find Ludmilla as outstanding as Vernon, but it’s a goodie, and there are brilliant things about it. Try this: A Brit hen party “scuttles away like a bashed insect in spasm”. Private Eye’s Literary Review suggested that Pierre had the book “dictated to him by aliens while being gang-probed in their space capsule”. “That’s actually what happened,” he jokes. “I’ve told you life isn’t plausible any more. Good on ‘em. I’m very chuffed to be in Private Eye.”
He ain’t worried about critical slings and arrows. “I keep the characters strong enough that if they were alive themselves they would be able to carry that [criticism]. You never see me writing Victorian widows or anyone sensitive enough to be crushed by a review. Ludmilla would tell these reviewers where they could stick it, and so would Vernon, and so each of them would be able to defend themselves so I feel that I don’t need to worry about them.”
Vernon, which has sold over 750,000 copies, tells of schoolboy Vernon Gregory Little’s troubles after his best friend Jesus goes Columbine at their high school in Martirio, Texas. “If I’d had one when I was eleven, God knows what I’d have done.” It was surprising post-Columbine, how the American Right didn’t look at the obvious problem: gun control. “It wasn’t guns, Charlton Heston saw to that, it was beautiful: ‘From my cold, dead hands,’” No sense of irony, I posit. “You hit the nail on the head. Back in the 70s they still had their tongue a little bit in their cheek in America and consumer culture generally. That’s completely gone now, they’ve lost their sense of irony that redeemed them from all of this, and now we actually believe it. It’s not just them, it’s us, and the British, if anything, are worse.”
Pierre’s politics are pointed. “Noam Chomsky’s old bugbear manufacturing consent has to have reached its zenith with this Iraq debacle now, the pack of transparent, fucken boldfaced lies that we’ve been sold. And lies that you know are lies just by watchin’ them tell them. I didn’t know if fucken Iraq’s got weapons or what, but when he [Bush] said it I knew they didn’t... The underestimation of intelligence is extraordinary, and it fucken makes you fear for liberty.”
Italian literary icon Fernanda Privano, imprisoned three times by Mussolini’s Fascists, is one of Pierre’s many fans. She told Pierre she believes fascism’s around the corner; he has a similarly dark worldview, citing the likes of the Patriot Act. “Admittedly she’s living with Berlusconi, that’s about as bad as it gets.” Speaking of Pierre’s political dislikes, Arnold Schwarzenegger. “It’s quite scary to think that it’s only sixty years since the last Austrian strong man was put away. And I suspect this one has less intelligence than his Austrian predecessor. Very weird.”
Privano also told Pierre to be very wary of the media. The Booker plucked the first-time author, whose colourfully dodgy past includes failing English at school, from obscurity to unrelenting attention. Pierre emigrated to a sleepy Irish mountainside to escape the hustle and write Ludmilla. The Leitrim Observer doesn’t give him any grief. “There isn’t a books’ section... If I stayed in London I’d just be down at the pub, I wouldn’t be able to get any writing done. I started late writing and so I feel I have to make up some time and do some work.” Ludmilla’s a fast turn-around for a post-Booker (“The publisher was up my arse excessively”) – in contrast, what’s Keri Hulme done since The Bone People?
The enigmatic mysterio’s eyes glint and dart with mischief, his gestures are as exuberant as his rhetorical flourishes. Charismatic and hilarious, Pierre describes himself as a frustrated musician, “a Russian composer trapped in the body of a cartoonist.” He wrote a fascinating piece for The Guardian on how classical music helped him through his darkest, suicidal period. Rachmaninov’s Isle of the Dead is now his favourite piece to write to. He has an uncanny ear for accents, vernacular and colour, bringing extra resonance when he reads Ludmilla (As he also does at an enjoyable NZ Book Council event later that evening.) Ubli is “the language most exquisitely tailored to the expression of disdain”; terms like “smack your cuckoo” and “cut your hatch” deserve to enter the lexicon.
Pierre digresses on humour. “Dogs have it. Do things just to get a laugh. They trick you.” His accent is a curious, lived-in melange of Australian bloke, urbane Londoner and rural Irish brogue, spiced with the occasional Mexican flourish. He grew up a rich, idle lad in Mexico (“didn’t have to lift the toilet seat for God’s sake”), spending a significant amount of time going over the border to Texas and indulging in dubious activities. Before he wrote Vernon, Pierre had burnt out in an orgy of bacchanals: partying, drug-taking, gambling, lying and racking up tens of thousands of dollars in debt from his friends.
“The passion without explaining the passion, it’s as about enjoyable and illuminating as an autopsy or a snuff movie,” I reviewed The Passion of the Christ in The Dominion Post, and copped flack. “That was inflammatory,” Pierre says, “it’s great to get a reaction.” He elaborates the worst thing imaginable for him is a reader responding with the “meh” shrug. “It’s doing it’s job when it inspires some bloody conviction, when it gets people one way or another. These are all big ideas both of us deal with.”
The Kazakhstani Government has responded furiously to satirist Sacha Baron Cohen’s hilarious Kazakh journalist Borat, banning his website, threatening legal action and launching an expensive advertising campaign to refute that national pastimes include quaffing horse urine and gypsy-catching. “He’s brilliant,” DBC laughs about SBC, and confirms he isn’t itching to book tour the Southern Caucuses. “There’s a lot of Kalashnikovs up there”. Vernon sold to Georgia for a $200 advance. “They’re not expecting to recuperate it,” he laughs. Moscow has bought Ludmilla. DBC was looking forward to going there with Vernon, but alas “They don’t speak to the outside world” .
Which dead authors would he like to drink with? “Not Ernest Hemingway or Pound anymore, ” he makes libellious, colourful allegations against Hemingway’s sexual practises, quoting Hemingway’s confidante Fernanda Privano. The Marquis De Sade and Niccolo Machiavelli, to learn about “Contract negotiation”.
He still hasn’t found the literati. “I’ve met some great authors. I haven’t met an establishment. I’ve drunk with the great and the good, there’s not a clique, they’re all cool.” Pierre praises Banville, Motion and Pinter and co. Pinter, who shares a similar political outlook, has given him wisdom. “Some great quotes. The best ones I can’t repeat. They’re about my publishers. A: Because they’re about my publishers. B: Because in mixed company the language is far too strong.” (That said, he praises his in touch, pub savvy, “not academically messed-up” editor Lee Braxton.)
Contrary to popular belief, Pierre says “I can’t drink and write. It’s a great sadness... I’m a big drinker. I’ll come out and have a massive session.” After long stretches dry (three or four weeks), he gets “absolutely lashed off my head.” This fits in with his general approach. “When the muse comes along you’ve got to charge it.”
What does the future hold? “An utterly, utterly, utterly decadent, benchmark sexually excessive novel, while I still can. The pendulum shifts a little bit and they might stop me doing it. I’ve found a way I can do it where the reader is on the correct side of the moral fence...”
Key Questions:
Favourite vodka? Kalashnikov
Full English breaky skills? Very good. Very, very good
Favourite last line in a novel? I have a favourite first line – “Granted, I am a patient in a mental institution”
What wanna be when kid? Write comics
Favourite karaoke song? Country Roads
Most fun had with clothes on? Dry humping. That’s an obvious one
» Images courtesy of Catherine Bisley.
See also:
» Imogen Neale's BFM interview with DBC Pierre [Part 1] [Part 2]
See also:
» Imogen Neale's BFM interview with DBC Pierre [Part 1] [Part 2]
allen blanks wrote: