brianrayfiction.com Blog

July could be the best month of my life. My book comes out, and Zak Smith’s new book comes out. Entitled We Did Porn: Memoir and Drawings, this art book traces the Yale art grad’s other life as porn star Zak Sabbath. As he explains, his porn career owes somewhat to Thomas Pynchon and a certain chance encounter with a real life Benny Profane. Although I myself don’t watch anything approaching porn (lame, I know, but I’m squeamish unless involved), I’m a big fan of Zak Smith for not only being a bold and talented artist but also for the insane dedication of illustrating every page of Gravity’s Rainbow, a project which comprised his last book. (Also on display in the Whitney Museum’s Bicentennial Exhibit).

Zak visited USC a couple of years ago for a Yemassee/USC Arts Institute event. It was one helluva show. In fact, that was a turning point for me as a writer. Why? Someone happened to ask Zak about his work ethic after his slide presentation. I remember he said something along the lines of “Well, professional artists have to produce a lot in order to make some good work. If you make pizza fourteen hours a day, for example, that’s a lot of pizza.” He admitted to freely devoting 12 and 14 hours straight to whatever activity engaged him at the time – drawing, reading, or perhaps ahem, ahem… Previously I’d thought 12 hours of anything straight on a regular basis was a recipe for insanity, or internal bleeding, or an aneurysm, despite my own tendencies toward writing marathons. So some obsession doesn’t make you weird; if you can afford 10 hours to write, paint, sculpt, rehearse, or draw -then by god, do it if you want to. That’s why I’ve spent the last seven hours writing and am about to hit it again after this post goes up.

And finally, when I was revising my novel for the 50th time or so, I turned to Zak for advice on how to write from the POV of an artist. It was in June ‘08, and Mike Curtis had told me we could do more to make Sarah West, the protagonist, sound like a genuine artist. I’m always afraid of losing someone in jargon and didn’t quite know where to go despite having read and watched a fair deal about art and watching people sketch imitations of famous works in places like The Art Institute of Chicago. I was sure that trying too hard to plug in jargon would kill the voice and story. Zak’s advice (over email) was pretty level-headed: on the one hand I could use plenty of jargon if the end goal was to “reveal something about the character who is doing the looking”; on the other, if the goal is to make the reader see a particular piece of art, like Giacometti’s Woman with her Throat Cut, then I would need to go “way over the top, metaphorically or rhetorically.”

Maybe he knew this from an earlier conversation, but by chance he happened to reference by example two of my favorite books – Underworld and Lolita. Just goes to show that great minds think alike. This is humor. It remains to be seen whether my mind is all that great or just really, really twisted.