Martin Riker, "Four Minutes and 33 Pairs of Sweatpants"
It’s December 4. Martin Riker, author of Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return, prefers the term “loungewear.”
How would you describe your story?
MARTIN RIKER: Well, at the time I wrote it (very long ago, now), I was interested in the idea that corniness could be aesthetically subversive. I was a kid who loved Weird Al et al., but had grown up to be a reader of very serious, generally rather dark experimental work, and I felt a personal need to reclaim some of the goofball side of me, knowing pretty clearly that this was not what the world of serious fiction was "looking for." I have always had a knee-jerk reaction against "being cool," whether it's "cool" in mainstream ways or "cool" in anti-social ways, and I was considering, at the time, that corniness, as the opposite of cool, might represent the last truly subversive stance. And so I was trying to figure out if I could make a kind of fiction that was corny but not just silly.
When did you write it, and how did the writing process compare to your other work?
MR: I think I wrote it around 1999. It was a chapter in a novel I was writing then. The novel I completed and promptly filed in a drawer, but the chapter, as a story, had a little more life to it.
What kind of research went into this story?
MR: There were geographical things I had to look up, since I hadn't lived in NYC for a few years by then. But I was at that point in my life a musician by trade, so the musical stuff was all at my fingertips.
What, to you, makes the short story a special form? What can it do that other kinds of writing can’t?
MR: I actually find I'm incapable of writing short stories. This is not an opinion about the form, just a fact about myself. The closest I can come is to write tales in the context of a longer work. These tales resemble stories but have, I think, a stronger oral basis, throwing that show-don't-tell idea out the window. I've always loved sitting around swapping tales with friends, and I suppose trying to get some of the special energy of that kind of storytelling into my fiction has always been a goal. John Cage—who hovers cornily in the background of this story—was really into anecdotes, as a form of story that doesn't force a lot of meaning onto the reader. I like the freedom of that, and the simplicity of it, even if my own tales usually end up (perhaps through my own weakness) edging toward more conventional literary turns.
Where should people go to learn more about you and your work?
MR: Well, I published one novel, written well over a decade after the one this story is from. But they aren't so different, actually. I think maybe I don't change that much.
What's the best gift you've ever been given?
MR: One year for my birthday my wife delivered a son. That was a pretty good gift. Though it did mean that I lost having my own birthday ever again.
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