Interview: Matthew Coleman

by Sean McGahey

Matthew Coleman is a latter-day Divine Marquis for the hipster Offbeat Generation. A ballsy Ronald Firbank with knobs on and a broad grin on his bewhiskered chops. He is the bastard offspring of Valmont and Sid James; the missing link between libertinage and the saucy seaside postcard. Think Philosophy in the Bedroom shot by the Carry On team — with the dodgy philosophy tossed over the end of the pier. Think priapic prose and textual harassment. All hail the Lord of the Unbuttoned Flies!

Andrew Galix

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/

SM - What do you think of the more alternative, cultural phenomenon of the Internet based lit-Zine scene? Is it a good thing? Or is it killing off the traditional paper based publishing industry??

I think it is a good thing, a damn magical thing in fact. I say this as anyone can do it no matter where they live. It can reach right around the world and back again from Timbuktu to Honolulu. A word whore from Kentucky can write a poem based on a man with a third eye and a coke can cock and be read in Kyoto the same hour that it is published online. It hardly costs a thing and it is instantaneous. Sure this has some negative aspects to it, but it certainly has many positives to boot. It is the massive audience one can reach and the distance one can cut down that really makes it shine. And this is perhaps the crux of it – to tap into the world, the entire world, and pour words (if done rightly) into all the many minds wired into this gargantuan internet trip.

I hope to hell that paper based publishing never dies. I adore it. I love it, and there is nothing finer than holding something in your hands that has one of your stories slapped inside. But not everyone can do it, and I say this as it costs money (even if a little it is still some and not all of us have a little to splash out) and the organization behind the thing is a mind fuck, plus one has to try and get it out there, into people’s hands, which is a ball ache in itself.

SM - What role has the Internet played in your writing?

The internet has been essential for my writing, and without it I would be fucked. It is an incredible thing where I can reach out to so many people and piss my words out and onto their face (Haw haw haw, what an image!).
Myspace has been a very fun experiment in this regard. I publish porn or erotica on my blog and can read what people think in the comment section. This is a very fine way to test my writing with readers, to see what works and what doesn’t. Plus the internet has put me in contact with some of the finest minds of the here and now. We have connected, we have corresponded, and quite a few of them I have ended up meeting and getting drunk with, others still I’ve been involved with literary nights in London (even if it is just turning up and drinking like drunks) so I think it is a truly wondrous thing.

SM - There’s quite a bit of dialogue in what you write. You seem to have a good ear for dialogue. Is that something natural? Where did you develop that?

I am a film nut. I always have been and always will be. And this has helped hugely I think. I never read a book for pleasure until I was 19 (I say this as I was never inspired and turned on and therefore never gave a hoot about books) so I got my story kicks from cinema. I have immersed my crop in film from an early age and have continued to be obsessed with it ever since. So perhaps, I assume, that all of these films have imprinted themselves onto my cranium and (even if only subconsciously) have helped my word flow when writing characters jabbering to one another.

SM - Is what you write about purely literary, or is it a depiction of a certain world you’ve been a part of?

Oh, it is a pastiche of things – reality and fantasy, though it depends on what I write. Some stories are based on actualities, with a writer’s narrative twist to it, others are made up to try and kick certain reactions out of people.

SM - Do you ever write autobiographically?

Yes, a few of what I’ve written have elements of my life in them. Both of the novellas I’m working on right now have a lot of my experiences in them, more so with the second novella though. It has been a strange experience writing them as they deal with two past loves that I went through (the blindness and obsession of love) as well as its aftermath, the reverberations that tear one apart once they are over. I am a very sensitive individual so they fucked me up for a long time when they were over. Sometimes I had to stop writing as the memories that I was pulling out of the murky shadows were very painful ones. I would come to a sudden standstill and just stare ahead of me lost in my own thoughts. It becomes very sad sometimes, it really does. At other times, whilst writing them, it would seem as if it was not me who lived through some of those times, as if I were writing a story from a film I had seen so long ago and had been made to recount.

SM - Do you write a novel/short story for a reaction or do you write novels/short stories for personal reasons?

I write because it’s something I love to do. I adore the whole process and I can find myself in ecstasy when I’m sitting there and thrashing out words as they pour from my mind and down through to my fingertips. It is like a drug. I feel electric, alive, and I mean really alive and in tune to something inside of me that I cannot describe. I also write to provoke people, to pry a reaction out of them, in which case I will try and push something wretched into the light of day whilst laughing loudly to myself. I get perverse kicks when someone writes to me and says that they felt sickened by something that they’ve read of mine or were even highly aroused and had to masturbate. Jesus, now that’s a trip, to have someone write to you and say that your words got them so heated that their hands fell between their thighs in the white heat of the moment. My God, now there’s interaction with your readers!

Ah, the joy of words, what a wonderment it all is!

SM - Top 5 books you\’d rescue from a burning building?

Sean, this is an evil question, a damn mean one! Five books, five books only! You swine! Remember Sean that I have large hands and can grab stacks of books and pull them deep into my arms. Yes Sean, I have a huge reach, over six foot from fingertip to fingertip when I stretch out as if I’m on an imaginary cross. So if we bare this in mind then I can get stacks of books. Yes, more than five, a hell of a lot more than five, heaps of books in fact all flapping about in my giant arms as I skip out of the burning building to cheers from the open jawed onlookers crying out, “YOU NUT! YOU NUT!”

I am going to be mean Sean, yes, that’s right, terrible mean and instead of naming just five stinking books I am going to write out some books that have moved me in the past: ‘Wisdom of the Heart’ By Henry Miller, ‘Hunger’ & ‘Mysteries’ by Knut Hamsun, ‘Forbidden Colours’ by Yukio Mishima, ‘The Lover’ & ‘Moderato Cantabile’ by Marguerite Duras, “Spy in the House of Love’ & ‘Henry & June’ by Anais Nin, ‘The Story of Eye’ by Georges Bataille, ‘Nausea’ by Jean Paul Sartre, ‘The Trial’ by Franz Kafka, ‘Helen and Desire’ by Alexander Trocchi, ‘The Sheltering Sky’ by Paul Bowles, ‘The Mandarins’ by Simone de Beauvoir, ‘Invitation to a Beheading’ by Nabokov, ‘Ask the Dust’ by John Fante, Arabian Nights, anything by William S Burroughs or Hermann Hesse or Hunter S Thompson or Charles Bukowski that I have room for in my giant arms as I leap out of the flickering flames - that was such a cheap answer!

SM - Top five films:

‘Ikuru’ by Kurosawa, ‘Le Mepris’ by Goddard, ‘Dr Strangelove’ by Kubrick, ‘In the Mood for Love’ by Wong Kar Wai, and every time I am bummed out it would have to “The Big Labowski’ to slap a smile back on face.

SM - Top five books you’d happily burn!!

Oh, I haven’t got any specific books in mind, there are too many to name! There’s been a staggering amount of shit published when a particular genre is ‘Hot’, a kind of Hollywood way of doing things where once something works and becomes a best seller then they will pour out heaps of novels of the same ilk, most of which are predictable with no balls hanging between their spines. A lot of the modern best sellers I just can’t stomach – most are too formulaic for my guts to be able to digest. Call me a snob, if you want, but I’m still wading through the hundreds of books from the past masters.

SM - If you could have a beer with any writer dead or alive who\’d it be, and why?

Henry Miller, Hermann Hesse, Georges Bataille, Franz Kafta, William Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre and Camus, De Sade, Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Anais Nin, Vladimir Nabokov. Ye Gods, there are so many. Each one of them have filled me with rapture from reading their words and submersing my mind in them. I have held their books in my hands and have had the sensation that fireworks are going off between the pages - brilliant fireworks so dazzling and spectacular that I break down and weep. I need the intensity in life, I need to FEEL, to HEAR, to SEE, and each and every one of those names has helped me one to achieve this in one way or another.

OK, Ok, shut up, I know, I know, I’m babbling here and stepping sideways from the question, and I cannot give another cheap answer… If it would have to be with one writer only then I would say, every time, let it be with the maestro Henry Miller. There is something about that man that sets my heart on fire. He burns right through me and his words go off behind my ribcage like dynamite. His perception, his way of life, his being, everything about him tears me apart and re-builds me. Any man who says “the aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware” is a damn legend and well on the right track to a higher state of thinking. I have devoured everything that he has written with relish and gusto, he has sustained me and fed me, he has drowned me and pulled me this way and that and shaken me to my very core. Yes, for the love of god, it would have to be with Henry Miller – and what a piss up it would be! Mon dieu! 

[On a side note you should wrap your eyes around this thirty-minute monologue I stumbled across recently. What a feast! . . .

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=henry+miller+bathroom&search=]

SM - What are you currently working on?

Well, Andrew Gallix and myself are editing a collection of short stories swirling around the ‘Offbeat Generation’, which will be published by the marvelous Social Disease. As I juggle this I have two novellas I am currently working on, a collection of short stories and poetry under ‘The Provocative Pages’ banner that will be illustrated by wonderfully talented Ruth Bartlett. I am also part of the Visual Development Unit, which is a creative collective putting out all sorts of moving images and music videos. (Writing this all out in this manner makes my mind swirl! I can’t keep still, I really can’t! But I’m first to put my hands up to this. Yes, that’s right, and I am powerless to stick to doing just one thing, I cannot do it. I have tried and it drives me nuts.]

SM - Anyone else on the scene you\’d recommend?

Zsolt Alapi, Noah Cicero, Joshua Cohen, Paul Ewen, Steven Hall, Andrew Gallix, Stewart Home, Heidi James, Travis Jeppesen, Mike Meraz, Ben Myers, Tony O’Neill, Joe Ridgewell, Lee Rourke, Mark Safranko, Ellis Sharp, Adelle Stripe, HP Tinker, Steve Vermillion,

SM - What is the one thing you truly want people to get out of your work?

A reaction, it doesn’t matter what shape it comes in or what shade of emotion it is, but if someone can read something of mine and feel something then I euphoric.

SM - If you were asked to pen a screenplay for one of your stories, would you be interested in doing it? And who’d you pick as director?

Well, the novella I am working on right now (novella number 1) is going to be turned into a screenplay (co-written with Nikki Hamilton) when it’s finished, though this is a long way off. And like the fool that I am I have a powerful lust to direct it, and will, with the right thrust.

Other than that I would love to see a young Sam Raimi make a short film out of my story about a talking vagina with Bruce Campbell as the main protagonist. Now that would make me laugh like a lunatic.

Selah.  
 

 

 

 

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~ This piece was posted on Friday, July 20th, 2007 and was filed under Blog, Writing, Interview, Featured. You can make comments on it below. ~