The Guest List is a regular book column that surveys the reading habits of our favorite musicians. In this edition, Jimmy Cajoleas talks with Michael Berdan, frontman and multi-instrumentalist for the ferocious New York noise rock band Uniform. Uniform’s latest album, American Standard, is out now on Sacred Bones.
Jimmy Cajoleas: What are you reading right now?
Michael Berdan: Right now I’m reading The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks. It’s been on my shelf for the better part of twenty-five years, and I’ve had a lot of false starts with it, which sounds kind of ridiculous because it’s less than two hundred pages long. I’m aware of the book’s reputation, and I’ve gotten like halfway through it a bunch of times and then just got distracted. There’s nothing wrong with the book; I just never finished it. So I started that [again] last night. Before that I just wrapped up all four books of Derek Raymond’s Factory series.
JC: How were those?
MB: I mean, kind of hit-or-miss in a lot of spots, but where they hit, they hit very well. I kind of dug the overall ethos of the books, how it’s about crimes against marginalized people in London in the ’80s and the early ’90s, how they were underreported or underinvestigated. The detective who is put on these cases intentionally stays lower in rank so that he can get assigned to these people because he gives a shit. The books speak to that ire really well, and to the humanity of people who exist within underground economies and at the fringes of society. I really like them.
But the other day, I was sitting at work and a friend of mine came by and asked me what I was reading and what it was about. I told him, he was like, “Oh, so you mean he investigates crimes against Black people,” and it hit me at that second: I actually don’t think I’ve read a single Black character in this book. You know, for the time period and for the people that the author hung around, it’s not surprising. But as great as the books are, there’s definitely room for improvement. I feel that way about, like, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett too, who I think can go toe-to-toe with Sartre and Camus. They were good at class issues, but they weren’t so good at race. A lot of the Black crime writers, like Chester Himes and Walter Mosley, could do both.
JC: Are there any books that inspired your latest record, American Standard?
MB: You know, not so much this time. There have been books that have directly inspired other records we’ve done. But with American Standard, it was less about being inspired by specific books as it was being inspired by certain writers and styles. I had a theme that I wanted to touch on, and there were people I knew in the contemporary horror sphere who addressed issues very similar to what I was going for, and in a way I was always afraid to do in my own work. Like, “I’ll skirt around the topic. I won’t go all the way, I’ll pull my punch at the last second.” However, knowing people like B. R. Yeager or Maggie Siebert or Thomas Moore, they never flinch. The way they work through their core emotions relating to a singular subject and let things branch out from there—I just became enamored with it, so I straight up asked those people for help. The press releases were written by both Geoff Rickly and Thomas Moore. I wanted the record to be a celebration of the current guard, all these boundary-pushing fiction writers. These are people I admire a ton who I think stand up just as well if not better than the people they might have initially emulated. I think we live in an interesting time for writing, and in particular, writing genre fiction. So that’s kind of what American Standard is, a celebration of all these people in this community without being directly related to any singular book.
JC: When did you start getting into more like extreme and experimental fiction? Is that a newer development or is that something that’s always been a part of what you read?
MB: It’s kind of always been there. I started reading Stephen King’s Dark Tower series at the same time I started reading The Hobbit. In high school—I’m in my midforties—it was the height of the Dell/Abyss publishing line. I was exposed to books like Clive Barker’s The Books of Blood and Kathe Koja’s The Cipher. In the mid-2000s I moved from Clive Barker and Kathe Koja and Poppy Z. Brite to Camus and Kurt Vonnegut. It kind of scrambled my brain for a second, and that’s what led me to William S. Burroughs and Hubert Selby Jr., which are thematically horrific a lot of the times, and often very nonlinear, but also speak to the soul. Like wanting the best in us and expecting the worst.
One of my favorites is Jack Ketchum. He started out as a writer for Creem and various men’s magazines, and he was briefly Henry Miller’s literary agent or something ridiculous like that. But when I read Off Season, which is basically The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in fucking book form but set off the coast of the Canadian border, I was like, “Oh, I’ve never really read anything quite like that.” But if you go a little further and get to books like The Girl Next Door, Ketchum writes in this mode of extreme violence. It’s not lurid; it’s not prurient at all. It’s written with the point of showing you how much hate the victims are up against, and making you feel the proper degree of terror at the situation. Not just what’s being described on the page, but what this poor person is going through. I don’t think I’ve encountered a writer who abhors violence more than Jack Ketchum, and it’s clear because of the way that he uses it. I think he’s singular, a once-in-a-generation voice.
JC: I’ve never read any Jack Ketchum. What should I start with?
MB: Start with The Girl Next Door and then go to Joyride. The Girl Next Door is the hardest one, but it’s also the most necessary. It’s very upsetting, but it’s incredible. Also, his short story collections are all great. Ketchum’s not really regarded as a short story guy, but I think he’s like Stephen King: most people know them for their big books, but they’re better at short stories. I would love to say, “Oh, you’re in for a treat,” but you’re not. You’re in for a really bad afternoon. Yeah, you’re going to have a terrible time with it.
JC: I know you’re a James Ellroy fan as well. He seems to connect both the classic noir and the extreme violence.
MB: Yeah, I think that Ellroy is kind of this weird meeting place between those two things. He’s almost the logical progression of somebody like Jim Thompson. His early stuff is fine, but he got way better as he developed. In the novels of the L.A. Quartet, the sentences get punchier, and the imagery gets more visceral and the language gets more hateful. I feel like Ellroy speaks to a part of me that I don’t often want to acknowledge. He has this blanket contempt for all of humanity at any given point, and for him it will manifest as a kind of resentment of history, but also a general resentment of the human race. None of his characters since The Black Dahlia have gotten off spiritually unscathed.
JC: You brought up Hubert Selby Jr., who I feel like has been unjustly forgotten.
MB: Selby is my favorite writer of all time. His identity as an addict, alcoholic, and as a poor New Yorker was the crux of his life, and he spoke with an authenticity that I’ve never encountered before or since. I remember reading Last Exit to Brooklyn for the first time when I was pretty deep in my cups. Selby wrote that book before he got sober, but he was talking about the interior alcoholic experience so intensely. I didn’t even identify that way at the time, but I just felt seen in my misery. Then, you know, he got clean and he wrote The Room, which is the interior monologue of a man locked away in a cell as his mind eats itself and as he plays out these fantasies. Selby wrote that during, like, his first two years of sobriety. I read that when I was still drinking and I felt fucking terrified. But then I read it again in sobriety, I could say, “Yeah, that’s what it’s like when you first get clean and you don’t have drugs and alcohol to medicate with and your thoughts come back full bore.” Like, your thoughts are harrowing and awful, and it can drive you to fucking madness. I identified with that book in the worst way.
But from that point on, you start to see more of the Christian stuff. Selby continues to talk about the experience of the marginalized, mostly through drugs but also through race, through gender, through everything, with a really clear lens. He puts his characters’ dignity as the main focus. It’s never their misery, it’s their dignity. The misery is clear, but you never lose sight of the fact that these are, like, human beings and they deserve love and compassion. They deserve a way out, and sometimes they find a way out. Most of the time they don’t, but there are clear avenues presented.
You know, I don’t know what God is, but I’m not an atheist. I am a Catholic who largely resents the church and kind of always has. I don’t believe in the rewards of heaven or the punitive nature of hell. I think that’s absurd. I think that it’s completely absurd to think that human beings could understand the will of God, let alone the voice of God. If God exists, it’s so outside of our goddamn scope, why even bother? The Catholic church as a governing institution existed without checks for almost two thousand years and inherently became corrupt, as all governments do. However, I think the basic teachings of every major world religion are essentially the same, which is do unto others, love your neighbor. Don’t do good because you’re going to be rewarded in heaven or punished in hell. Like, what are you, a fucking child?
This is what Selby does a great job at. He talks about doing good in his books and receiving a spiritual reward for it, but that spiritual reward is inner peace and calm within. The world is still awful, but for a moment, you’re okay. And I truly believe that’s how you create heaven. The more you make yourself available for those who need it, the more that you use your experience to lift others up, that’s where you find God. I think Selby understood that. I think he went through hell on earth to understand it. I’m sorry he did and I’m also glad he did because I needed him.
So yeah, that’s my Selby rant.
JC: Are there any other books you would like to mention or recommend?
MB: There are so many! I love this book Notice by Heather Lewis. It’s about a young sex worker who winds up getting too involved with a very dangerous client. It’s from her perspective and it’s one of the most miserable books I’ve ever read. But it moved me more than any other book I read this year so far.
Jimmy Cajoleas was born in Jackson, Mississippi. He lives in New York.
