![]() I’m always unlearning who I think I am, what I’m about. That guy becomes a little more unfinalizable for me every day. He made his lifework out of researching Heraclitus’s philosophy.Īnd so to your question, which is really my question: Who is Lance Olsen? The answer is clear: I have absolutely no idea. Bowie is emblematic of that in so many ways. We could put it this way: texts exist in a perpetual state of change. If we pay attention, look and listen, we notice no human becomes finalizable until they are deceased–and then, of course, the narratives we create around them continue to be written, unwritten, and rewritten … if they’re lucky … if they’re remembered at all. But Bakhtin reminds us that every text, organic or otherwise, refuses finalizability. Our instinct seems to be to simplify, pare down into stability, knowability. When we first meet a text (and we should recall people are a subset of texts), our usual instinct is to categorize it, finalize its being, its meaning, in order to make it easier for us to pretend we can control it. Identity–which, from a certain perspective, is to say the past–is such a troubled place. Read five biographies of Bowie, and you meet five different Bowies. Which is to say, like much of my writing, it’s an exploration into Bakhtin’s notion of unfinalizability. In other words, it asks: Who is any of us? ![]() At its core beat questions about how we read others and how we are read by them. It’s slated to appear from FC2 next February and is a prismatic exploration of Bowie through multiple voices and manifold perspectives–the chameleonic musician himself, an academic trying to compose a critical monograph about him, friends, lovers, musicologists, and so on. Lance Olsen: I just finished a novel, while a fellow at The Bellagio Center, about David Bowie called Always Crashing in the Same Car. Yannicke Chupin and Brigitte Félix: Let us start with this: “I think I’ve heard of Lance Olsen. ] Anti-Oedipus Press, Fort Wayne, IN, 2014, p. 132. The interview ends with a video recording especially made for Transatlantica by Andi Olsen of Lance Olsen’s reading of a passage from Skin Elegies. The collaged photograph and the video montage are respectively Andi Olsen’s and Lance Olsen’s creative answers to the question we asked them: “what does seeing mean to you?” We are very grateful to Andi and Lance Olsen for their time, for offering so many insights into the way they work together, and especially for gifting Transatlantica with two original works that we “commissioned” to illustrate the interview. ![]() The interview focuses on writing and publishing innovative fiction, on Lance Olsen’s more recent fiction (Theories of Forgetting, My Red Heaven, Skin Elegies), and on the artistic collaboration between Lance and Andi Olsen, a deeply original aspect of Lance’s writing that is inseparable from Andi’s visual creations. Over the years, Andi and Lance Olsen have become close collaborators in a number of joint creations, like the ongoing project There’s No Place Like Time associating Lance’s novel Theories of Forgetting (2014) and a multimodal installation. Andi Olsen is a visual artist, using video, photography, texts and objects in her assemblages and installations. He is the author of more than thirty novels and short-story collections as well as of works of nonfiction, including the personal memoir ] which is discussed in the interview. Lance Olsen published his first novel in the early 1990s, and his literary oeuvre is characterized by its sustained exploration of experimental writing practices. The talk referred to several times in the interview is the keynote lecture Lance Olsen gave on that same day entitled “ Carnage Carnival: The Narratological Politics of What the Fuck?” 1 This interview with Andi and Lance Olsen was conducted during the AFEA annual conference in Bordeaux on June 1 2022.
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