Ask The Author: Alexander Allison
[admin / May 30th, 2012 / Interviews ]“A New Person” from Alexander Allison appeared in the March Issue.
1. What if I wanted to pity your narrator in “A New Person?” What would you do about it?
Pity is powerless and self-abasing. Pity seems like a condescending emotion, a lazy feeling. Rather,I would encourage compassion and sympathy for Robin. The most powerful forces for good come from when one makes the effort to understand life from a position of otherness. David Foster Wallace’s polemic, ‘This is Water’ deals with this matter rather wonderfully.
2. Are you no more fucked than the rest of us?
I anticipate that the next decade of my life will be a process of recovery from what I’m doing tomyself now. Culture is all that keeps me sane. Culture allows me to fuck back.
3. What would you sculpt a robot out of?
I would sculpt a robot out of my many discarded narratives. It would be a lumbering, over written beast, yearning after something indistinct and musty.
4. How much of your gender are you?
I believe that the individual is gendered, and does not stand in relation to arbitrary qualifications for masculinity or femininity. My gender situates me and shapes my interactions with all external reality. In this sense, I am entirely my own gender. To profile me on an objective basis would be to identify a heterosexual man-boy-child, but I don’t know what value this would be.
5. Where did “ANew Person” come from?
The story is part of a larger project that I’ll be working on full time from September. The contentis inspired by various thinkers on gender (see Judith Butler, Doreen Massey,Luce Irigaray) and an abundance of cannibal related content in the media.
A suitable analogueto the character of Robin can be found in Frank Hinton’s forthcoming novel,‘Action, Figure’ (Tiny Hardcore Press). Frank is a close friend and a truly wonderful writer and human being.
6. If you couldswitch genders at will, would you? Why?
Having a differentset of genitals seems like it would be a lot of hassle. I’m still getting used to the sight and feel of my own.