A chat with Chuck Palahniuk

This is what bloggers look like after a Chuck Palahniuk interview. Image by Ryan McPherson from my Fight Club pinups photoset.

The column this week is called Prelude to a gangbang: Violet Blue asks Chuck Palahniuk about his new porn novel, ‘Snuff’. However, it looks like you won’t see the title on the front page of the Chronicle. And the excerpt from the book I wanted to include was also too much for prime time (it’s below). Aaaand they shortened my closing punchline because it was an obscenity. They always castrate my “fucks” because that is what they do, and it’s good because no one will know in all of newspaperlandia that f- is so absolutely not the potent poking of “fuck” if you shear off it’s “uck” foreskin. It is actually not my editor’s fault. However, I did get to interview CHUCK MOTHERFUCKING PALAHNIUK and as many have emailed giddily to tell me, I am mentioned in his new book *in regard to a method of sexual death, OMFGYAY* — so I highly suggest you read it. Plus, Palahniuk was really snarky with me, so you better bet I had a great time. First, a snip from the column:

We’re standing in a Mission bar, and Tristan Taormino has just finished poking my cleavage with her index finger and giggling, when she says, “So. The story goes like this. One night, Hunter S. Thompson calls up Susie Bright. It’s late, and he says, ‘It’s Hunter. Tell me everything you know about statistics on bestiality. Details.’

“Except Hunter had the wrong number. He hadn’t called Susie, but some other woman whose number was a digit off. But the minute the woman realized who was on the phone, she hopped on her computer and started researching for him. The next day she got a hold of Susie and said, ‘You wouldn’t believe this, but …'”

It’s exactly that kind of relationship I hope to foster with “Fight Club” author Chuck Palahniuk. Inappropriate late night calls. Referencing methods of death by sex act later immortalized in novels that would just as soon break your nose as be read by you. With characters overdosing on Viagra, death by appliance turned sex toy, a whole collection of unsavory misadventures set in the waiting room for a gangbang shoot that might well be a snuff film.

This waiting room is where the majority of Palahniuk’s complicated and gritty new novel, “Snuff” unfolds. I caught up with Palahniuk after his book tour, and when I asked him what people should know about “Snuff,” the first thing he said was, “‘Snuff’ is not about sex. Most times sex isn’t even about sex.”

And “Snuff” has a lot of sex in it, though it’s actually about the bloated, aging carcass of the mainstream porn industry and its ineffectual struggle for relevance in hard, dripping detail — so it’s not really about sex. In “Snuff,” Cassie Wright is a washed-up golden age porn star who’s making her final comeback by setting a gangbang record. I asked Palahniuk if Cassie Wright was based on an actual performer, or if there were many “Cassies.” He replied, “Cassie is a composite of a half dozen performers I’ve met while promoting books. God bless them, but folks feel free to tell me anything.” (…read more!)

Then, here is the excerpt I wanted to run that got cut — you’ll see why, and that I’m a truly cheeky nuisance for my editors at the Chronicle. But I think you really get a taste for Chuck Palahniuk’s book in these three grafs. I originally wrote, “Palahniuk does indeed bring a rather stinging perspective on the entire adult industry though the eyes of every character, commenting on its dated incoherence even when describing sex toys. In one passage Mr. 137 muses about the dildos cast from Mr. 600’s penis, thinking”:

A person could always ask: How does it feel, that the cock of Branch Bacardi and the vagina of Cassie Wright are reduced to kitsch? Camp objets like Duchamp’s urinal or Warhol’s soup can?

A person could ask: Thanks to the Branch Bacardi Butt Plug, how does it feel that people around the world go to work, to school, to church with your dick wedged up their anus?

How’s it feel seeing your dick and balls, or your clit and cunt flaps, cloned a zillion times and sitting on the shelf behind some gum-chewing porn store clerk? Or, worse, your most private bits heaped in some bargain bin, strangers lifting, squeezing, pinching, and rejecting them the way they would avocadoes at the supermarket? (…buy the book.)