Link: http://www.technicolor.org/in stereoscopic vision
an interview with alex kleeman
Alexandra Kleeman has graced the number one position of RBJ's Top 100 List for as long as anyone can remember.
Her online journal, Technicolor.org: In Stereoscopic Vision, has been in existence since September 2000, for as long as RBJ has been around.
One thing is certain, her journal writing has achieved an eloquence and wit that many readers have long admired, with a certain maturity that belies her youth.
Currently a student at Brown University, she continues to write for several projects, one being the university's Watershed Journal, having written a lyric essay entitled, "The Abridged Ocean". She has also been a featured DJ at a few college radio stations.
Alex once told me she was working on a novel, and with that I am getting the feeling that she could very well become an immensely popular novelist and writer one day.
Despite her busy academic schedule, Alex recently granted me the opportunity to interview her...
. . . .
Randomguru: Many of us have been reading your journal, like, forever it seems. In a way, we've watched you grow up into a fine writer, and now you are currently at Brown University, studying...?
Alex Kleeman: Right now, I'm hoping to complete a double-major in literary arts (which is creative writing) and cognitive science (which is a chimera of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience). The cognitive science is a pretty new addition to my life, I had never even considered it until this summer, but the combination of these two majors feels "righter" than anything I've hit upon before. Before cognitive science, I got my science fix through biology, which made me a lot happier in many ways. It's much easier to make other people share your enthusiasm for biology: you just tell them some awesome fact about the eel lifecycle or so on, and then you bask in awe, together, at the strangeness of organic life. The mind is not nearly so straightforward. It is a very large very tight knot, and you look at it and cannot tell whether it is orderly and methodical but so complex that the order is not easily apparent, or whether it is just a mess, and in any case the question is a little futile because you're never going to be able to untie the knot completely.
Randomguru: So, given your double major status, what do you want to be when you grow up? In other words, what are your plans after unversity life?
Alex Kleeman: My current plans consist of some sort of graduate school or another. Either trying to find an MFA program in writing, or going through the MA/PhD/postdoc thing in cognitive science, if they'll have me. Because I am almost entirely certain I want to do graduate school, I manage to appear pretty put-together and calm when I am asked about my future plans. I'll probably have a heart attack two years from now when I have to decide on one path or the other. Or maybe I'll flip a coin?
Randomguru: Are you still working on a novel? Can you tell us a bit about it? Or is this top-secret stuff? If so, can you give us a few hints as to what you're working on?
Alex Kleeman: I gave up fiction when I left high school, pretty much--I am no good with plot development and contouring, probably because I am the sort of person who spends 3/4s of her lunch break walking around as she agonizes over what she wants to eat, growing steadily hungrier and faint from the walking. Right now, I am working on a piece of experimental prose poetry that will use anatomical and surgical language to talk about how I feel (feel in the internal rather than external sense) about the body. I've been spending a lot of time in the medical stacks at the library, and it's been good (all the information! All the diagrams!) and bad (the books smell like formaldehyde), but I'm really looking forward to dragging my pens and paper to the ocean sometime this summer and really writing it.
I should also be working on a screenplay that I actually started in high school, that is closer to what I write about on my weblog. It's a romantic comedy with a split screen, so that both halves of the relationship can be observed at once. I really want to resuscitate this screenplay, but there are already about 40 pages and I'm not sure what to keep, what to toss, etc.
Randomguru: Last but not least, who are your favorite writers and influential people? And what are your favorite books, and why do they inspire you?
Alex Kleeman: Aristotle because he never tries to lead the reader to his conclusion, every inquiry is an actual inquiry. The poet Rosmarie Waldrop because her sentences form a choir that sings vertigo. My friend Katherine because she is able to locate the core significance of anybody and likes to walk around when she talks on the phone, so that the scenery changes. George Orwell because he wrote with a sort of lion-sized honesty about actual issues that he actually cared about. The musician Joanna Newsom because she sings without suspicion, and plays a really large harp.
I'll keep it to two favorite books, so that you do not melt into puddles of boredom. "The Next American Essay" (edited by John D'Agata, published by Graywolf Press) is a collection of essays that convinced me that experimental writing is not simply normal writing pushed to the point of unintelligibility. If you are interested in essays that are dense and lyrical as poetry, or in poems that are long but contain information or plot, this book will show you things you have only hoped for, vaguely, after finishing a book of good but unexceptional fiction. The book that has probably had the greatest impact upon my personal life is "A Fairly Honourable Defeat" by Iris Murdoch, its message is basically that all human relationships unravel without open, honest communication and intuition. It's a simple theme, and not all that unusual, but the book has bible-like significance for me, so there you have it.
Randomguru: Thank you, Alex, for giving me the opportunity to interview you!
Alex Kleeman: Thank you so much for asking me these questions, Carlos, and for connecting me for however many years it's been to a very kind and quirky community of webloggers. Here's hoping for continuation...
