“Everybody’s Bluffing” by Miles Klee is featured this week in Electric Literature’s Recommended Read
“Everybody’s Bluffing” by Miles Klee is featured this week in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, with an introduction by Matt Bell. Klee’s new collection, True False, is now available from OR Books.Halimah Marcus: Reading “Everybody’s Bluffing,” which begins with a bank robbery, recalled for me a rich range of references in “bank robbery” genre, if we can call it that, from Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain” to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Did you intend to make an specific allusions or have particular influences within this genre?Miles Klee: The influences were more cinematic than literary. My favorite bank robbery movie is Dog Day Afternoon—on paper, the ’70s New York setting and story are fairly distant from what’s happening here, in the Depression-era Midwest—though the offbeat tone and purgatorial suspense apply. What could have been a kinetic thrill ride instead boxes you into a single sweaty room and then just cranks up the heat from there. It’s also a excellent character model in terms of the uneasy collaboration between two criminals who find themselves completely overmatched by the (un)reality of their situation. OK, I ripped off this film entirely! Thank you, Sidney Lumet.HM: Lionel tells a story of a dog “eating so intensely from a can of beans that it kept choking and puking a brown mouthful that it unfailingly bent to lick up once more.” Later, he says, “Life informs me, incessantly, of my needs. It’s repulsive. Being compelled to eat and see—to spend.” My interpretation is that he sees himself in the dog, caught in a futile struggle for control. It’s even a bit paradoxical because his body, the part of him that is alive, is the very thing he rages against. To be alive is to need. Is Lionel’s philosophical disposition connected to his being an outlaw? Do you sympathize with his point of view?MK: I do sympathize, unfortunately. Friends and family have always noted that I’m not much for food; I can enjoy a good meal, but it never sends me into the raptures that others seem to enjoy. I eat because I have to, not because I want to. That sounds crazy to a lot of people, and it’s certainly disturbing for me. In the dog I think Lionel may have once seen Slip—an uncomplicated creature whose desires are basically automatic and beyond harnessing. But in the wake of their shootout, Lionel begins to realize that he, too, has motives he never bothered to question. His passivity was itself a choice, a surrender to Slip’s baser instincts. So suddenly the horror of life, in all its banal demands and obligations, comes flooding back into him. For years, being a stick-up man kept his thoughts grounded in the moment-to-moment, the immediacy of the score. As soon as he’s untethered from such concerns, he’s free to remember who he is—and revisit the nightmare of his mind.A Twilight-Zone Airtightness: An Interview with Miles Klee -- source link