Trip Report: Meeting Chuck Palahniuk

Cliff's Notes: Went to a reading by the author of Fight Club Chuck Palahniuk last night. Lasted six hours and was a blast. Really recommend his new book as a result.

Yesterday morning, my alarm woke me up with Chuck Palahniuk's (pronounced "Paula Nick") voice responding to questions from one of our inane local radio DJs.

Yes, the Chuck Palahniuk, on the phone with my local radio retards. Author of standout books Survivor and Choke as well as a little ditty by the name of Fight Club which was apparently turned in to some sort of motion picture which I guess a few people enjoyed

Turns out Mr. Palahniuk was in town tonight, reading from his new book. My plans for the evening were set.

Cujofan getting a copy of "Fight Club" signed :

Fellow Palahniuk fan Cujofan and I arrived an hour early. Mr. Palahniuk was already conversing with fans and signing books. The first thing that struck us both was how personable Mr. Palahniuk appeared - he was generally interested in speaking with his fans. He wasn't just signing a book and shaking hands, he was generally engaging in conversation with each person. He was posing for photos with props that he'd brought along. He was engaging, outgoing, and truly entertaining. For the minute or two that you were in front of Mr. Palahniuk, you were the most important person in the room. He truly appeared interested in how you were doing, in some random instantaneous connection with his fans. A brief tidbit or story or question would spawn, and a formerly awestruck fanboy would be actively engaged in an actual conversation instead of just an awkward stare and handshake. Completely unlike most author events I've attended.

Mr. Palahniuk already had a reputation as an unorthadox reader: his readings of his short story "Guts" on his book tour in 2004 reportedly saw fifty-some people passing out during readings. You can get an MP3 of Palahniuk reading Guts here (more mirrors later, or appreciated if anyone can mirror to help with bandwidth) or a transcript here. Note that both are pretty strongly NSFW.

Chuck Palahniuk spoke for a little over an hour - he opened with a handful of anecdotes from his life and his travels and his world. He started by asking how many people present had never attended an author reading event before - and it was close to half of the thousand-some people in attendance (1500 person capacity theater, nearly full). He mentioned that this was one of the most rewarding parts of going on tour, and how he really encouraged people to read more, that there were just so many things that authors could do in print that couldn't be done on the screen.

He led with an anecdote early in the evening about how he's constantly approached by fans who want to share something utterly disturbing with him, and how that's often how he gets a lot of his material. So a young man who came up to him at a signing in Oregon with a trash bag full of something, and as it came to be his turn to get his book signed he starts pulling what turn out to be Polaroid pictures out of this bag and flipping them on the table, one after the other like a card dealer in Vegas. They're pictures of people in strange poses, apparently all asleep, in a small wooden box. Mr. Palahniuk asks him "what are all of these?" and the kid responds "they're my art project". "Yeah, but what are they?" Palahniuk continues to ask. The young man responds "well I work at a porno theater at [location], and as part of my job I have to check all the booths between shifts to see who has died during the show, customers and strippers both. And see I have this camera, that we use for taking pictures of people when we kick them out. So what I do is when I find someone who has died, I grab that camera and then what I do is I take a picture of the person who died. Sometimes I pose them." Palahniuk went on to exclaim that "this is death, real true death - either you're the customer sitting in a makeshift wooden booth with your pants around your ankles being posed by a pasty white guy with a Polaroid camera - or you're the stripper caught dead with the needle still stuck in your tied-off arm".

He then proceeded to read us an unpublished short story entitled Mr. Elegant. The basic premise was a male exotic dancer with a neurological disorder, who, as his youth is fleeting and his career is ending, tragically becomes a internet phenomenon - and not in a good way, think the Star Wars Kid - and then proceeds to leave the exotic dancing life behind with a female psychiatrist - who is also a former exotic dancer - to form the management team of an exotic dance troupe... staffed entirely with kids with severe physical deformities. Totally twisted, and completely hilarious. The entire auditorium echoed with laughter throughout the reading, with a couple key "groan" moments as well. Highly entertaining.

One of my favorite quotes from the reading was a line he delivered beautifully: "By the time you're thirty your life is about trying to escape the person you've become....to escape the person you've become... to escape the person you've become... to escape the person you've become... to escape the person you started."

As the story ended to thunderous applause from the ~ thousand-person crowd, Mr. Palahniuk then proceeded to drag out two large cardboard boxes. As way of introduction to their contents, he told a story about his previous book tour in late 2004. Mr. Palahniuk apparently has always had a proclivity for doing two things - offending people with his edgy writing, and handing out random novelty prizes at his signings. On his previous tour, he had found a really great deal on these fake bloody severed hands in bulk, so he shipped a box of them to each of his signing locations a few days in advance, so that he could throw them out during his signings. When he hit the portion of the tour West of the Mississippi, it turned out he was touring directly behind hiker Aron Ralston who was touring for his recently published story Between a Rock and a Hard Place - Aron was the hiker who got his arm pinned underneath a boulder and had to amputate it himself, remember. So Mr. Palahniuk ships a crate of bloody severed hands to each of these locations, but Aron Ralston arrives first to each location. And so at each location the bookstore staff generally disregard the "do not open" on the packages, and would open them up, find the severed hands, and assume that the hands were a very tasteless promotional piece for Aron Ralston's tour. So repeated every night, the bookstore staff would come up to Aron and tell him "Mr. Ralston, your severed hands are here". And Ralston would tell them with a smile "No, those actually belong to Chuck Palahniuk". Mr. Palahniuk eventually found out what was going on and caught up with Ralston's publicist to apologize - but was informed that "Aaron would like to know where to get them for the release of his paperback."

This just epitomizes the Chuck Palahniuk story - it was highly humorous, yet with a dark edgy twist, but ultimately everything would work itself out to some sort of - usually unexpected - resolution in the end.

So Mr. Palahniuk then begins dumping out the contents of the boxes, showing severed hands from his previous anecdote as well as rubber rats, bloody plastic gelatinous hearts - which he warned would explode if you didn't catch them directly, but then of course he proceeded to chuck them in to the crowd apparently as hard as he could - and in the grand finale some sort of sealed plastic eyeballs, which had generally ruptured and were leaking fluid - he'd fling these through the air, splattering everyone in the path of the eye.

He then proceeded in to a full hour of question-and-answer. He answered some pretty straightforward questions: about his next book, entitled "Rant" which was due out next may. He described "Rant" as "a fake biography of a really disturbed huckleberry Finn type character... and its also about cars". Several typical questions about writing and tips for emerging writers, etc.

One which particularly interested me regarded music. He was asked if he listened to music when he wrote or felt his writing was particularly inspired by music. He responded that he actually assigned each of his characters their own "theme song" - a single song which he'd play continuously on repeat whenever he was writing that character. He mentioned that this was almost a meditative mantra, that when listening to a single song on repeat for days and weeks on end, you would transcend the lyrics and no longer notice them, and become engrossed in the raw elements of the song. He also mentioned that it served as a great way to clear people out of your life so that you could write undisturbed. For Fight Club, he mentioned a lot of those theme songs were Nine Inch Nails. But his other examples ran the gamut of styles and genres, from Reznor to Glen Miller.

He was hit with a couple standard questions about Fight Club - most predominantly asked to settle the debate as to whether Marla was a hallucination inside Jack/Tyler's head from a tumor. He answered with "Marla is whatever you want her to be" and remarked that it was something he found wonderful and fascinating about Fight Club - that people could and would read in to it many different interpretations. Of course, being Chuck Palahniuk these are bound to be some twisted interpretations, and of course he apparently gets hit with them left and right. He recounted an extremely humorous story of being on a flight right after the movie was released, and being approached by a male stewardess, saying "Mr. Palahniuk I recognized your name from the manifest and wanted to tell you how much I loved the book and the movie but I just have to ask - and this can stay between you and me of course, I can keep a secret - the whole of fight club is really about gay people having sex in bathhouses, isn't it?" Palahniuk deadpans "What do you say to someone like that? So of course, I say the only thing I can to him: 'shhhh don't tell anyone'. No, of course its not, but I don't want to tear down someone's interpretation of my work. That's what's great about it".

He was asked if any of the rest of his books were going to be made in to a movie. He reported that all of his books are already optioned except his latest "Haunted", and only not yet on the latter because they're deciding to option it whole or in parts. He mentioned that he thought "Choke" would be the next movie released - and that Darren Aronofsky was the director and Arnofsky's production team from "Requiem for a Dream" was in place for "Choke". But he also mentioned that "Choke" might get beat by "Survivor" which was optioned by the people that did "Constantine"

One of the best Q+A responses came in response to a question from a female in the front row, asking that since he pushed the boundary so much with his writing, what truly disturbed him? I think this question truly surprised him, as he laughed in response. He warned us that this image is what he sees eight nights out of ten when he closes his eyes to go to sleep, and that it would haunt us forever, and that some of us should probably put our hands over our ears and hum. Those who chose not to read, just skip the next paragraph.

He returned to the story he'd opened with, about the young man with the trash bag full of polariods of dead people from Oregon. Remember that the man had mentioned that he had the camera on hand to photograph people that they'd kicked out, ostensibly so that they could hang their picture with some warning such as "do not admit". Palahniuk said that he'd asked the young man "So what do you have to do to get kicked out of this sort of place?" Palahniuk said that the man responded with "well, the most frequent offense was one we'd call "the taster". You just get tired of opening up the booth to clean up the jizz, to find the same guy licking the floor all the time. "

After completing the Q+A, Mr. Palahniuk stayed on hand for another three, maybe four full hours to meet with fans, continue his autograph session. I was among the last group to go through the line, and while visibly tired he was still as engaging and entertaining and genuinely interested in engaging with each of his fans as he was the two hours he spent before the reading. At the right you can see the salutation I received on my signed hardbound copy of Haunted. He filled out the dedication and the signature, then bam - bam - bam hit the book with a the stamps seen. it was quite a surprise - I think he reserved that for the few hardbound copies that people brought in, as 95% of the audience was there with the glossy paperbound copy instead. I walked away a little after midnight, having been in the presence of greatness for six solid hours, with a newfound respect for one of my favorite authors, and a strong desire to go home and get started on "Haunted" right away - not to mention to re-read every one of his books thereafter. If you're interested, there are still aparently a couple dates left in his tour. Check this page on his site - tonight (June 13th) he's in Dallas TX and tomorrow (June 14th) he's in Modesto, CA. I'd strongly reccomend attending the event if you can, even if you've never read any of his books.