Photo by Gary Leonard
Jack Skelley is the author of the new collection Insterstellar Theme Park: New and Selected Writing. His other books include the forthcoming Fear of Kathy Acker. Also a journalist, editor, and musician, he is based in Los Angeles.
Q: How was your new book's title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: I love that question! Thank you for asking it! Interstellar Theme Park, which is also the book’s title poem, is a variation on “Interstellar Overdrive,” the spacey instrumental from Pink Floyd’s first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
I wanted to join galactic travel with amusement park lands and attractions, which are a lifelong obsession. I guess you could translate the title to “cosmic Disneyland.” These concepts extend through the book. For example, there is an entire Disneyland chapter, with stories, dreams, and poems.
The title even has a literary lineage. Cyberpunk author William Gibson’s 1988 Mona Lisa Overdrive is another variation on Pink Floyd’s song. And my own band Lawndale performs “Interstellar Caravan,” a medley of “Interstellar Overdrive” and “Caravan” by Duke Ellington. I love musical and verbal mashups!
Q: In the introduction, you note that the book's contents span four decades of your writing career. Do you see any changes in your style or content over the course of the decades?
A: The continuity of content has congealed. Its themes swirl around pop icons in the broadest senses: mythologies past, present and future. Subjects include movies, advertising, religion, cartoons, sitcoms, rock music and celebrities.
The Intro states: “One lifelong, obsessive theme persists: a perverse celebration of pop iconography. It manifests in love/hate liaisons with commodity culture, or elevates to symbology the preposterous yet tenacious expression of the mythic in the personal – the poly-verse of sexual personae that holds and molds our identities.”
In his blurb, writer and editor Tony Trigilio listed some of these manifestations: “…a mock-epic mocking Elon Musk, a supplication to ‘Botox Jesus’ for the miracle of migraine relief, a Mary Wollstonecraft so “busy inventing Goth” that she bequeaths us punk rock, the distorted echo of Meat Puppets guitars heard in a lover’s gurgling stomach, twelve Lady Gagas performing ‘Lady Madonna,’” etc.
Stylewise, there are verse forms – an unrhymed sonnet set in the Space Mountain ride and a villanelle about The Beach Boys – alongside prose poems and straight-ahead narrative fiction.
I’d say the writing has become more dense over the years: It’s a pleasure to toy with etymology through sound associations, compressing them into music-like sentences. But these more experimental writings are also grounded in well-known themes. I hope people hear and “get” the word-play.
Q: How did you decide on the order in which the material would be presented?
A: My instinct was to organize it chronologically, somewhat customary for “new and selected” volumes. But my dear friend – the superlative poet Amy Gerstler – urged me instead to scatter everything on the floor and then group by affinities.
This resulted in eight sections in which the stories and poems are in conversation with each other, allowing longtime themes to assert themselves – the pop-sexual iconography discussed above – and the book to unify.
I then asked astounding artist Erin Alexander to create collages for each section, keying off her cover art. BlazeVOX did a fantastic job with the printing and reproductions. I am super happy with how it all hangs together!
Q: The writer Dennis Cooper said, “In Skelley's world everything and everyone is volcanic. Cities become backlots; celebrities become saviors.” What do you think of that description?
A: This quote originally referenced sections of my novel, Fear of Kathy Acker, which is partly about the Hollywood machine manufacturing pubic dreams and personal myths. But one could extrapolate that to my literary output as a whole. One word that encapsulates this is apotheosis. A warped form of god- and (especially) goddess-making happens throughout much of the word play.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m collaborating with Semiotext(e) editors Chris Kraus and Hedi El Kholti on publishing Fear of Kathy Acker, my years-in-the-making novel. It will publish in April 2023.
It’s a humbling honor to work with the founders of this press who have been so influential in bringing new forms of narrative to the literary world, and who have done more than anyone else to bring French theory to English readers. This was especially true of Semiotext(e)’s third founder, Sylvère Lotringer, who passed away in November 2021.
Of course, that’s only a slice of the range of this amazing press. In some ways, Fear of Kathy Acker is an outlier compared to the rest of its catalog. But in other ways it fits in nicely. Chris Krauss’ incredible novel I Love Dick extrapolates from Acker’s approach, and she wrote a personal-tinged, critical biography of Acker. Both those books are on Semiotext(e).
Here’s some of the catalog copy: “FOKA depicts Los Angeles through the eyes of a self-mocking narrator. Shifting styles and personae as he moves between Venice and Hollywood, punk clubs and shopping malls, Disneyland and Dodger Stadium, Jack Skelley pushes the limits of language and identity while pursuing – like Kathy Acker – a quixotic literary mix of discipline and anarchy. In this adrenalized, cosmic and comic chronicle of Los Angeles, Skelley’s ‘real-life’ friends make cameo appearances alongside pop archetypes from Madonna to Billy Idol.”
This is the first-ever complete edition of the book, which over decades has appeared piecemeal in chapbooks and magazines. It will be contextualized through new essays, playlists, and even a map of 1980s Los Angeles.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Just that I’m thankful to you for letting me talk about it! And to all the people who support and inspire writing. Literature is a flicker in the dark void of time, nature, and human horrors. So I try to remember to be grateful to the individual souls who read and who care.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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