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AD: Besides Bukowski, who are some other writers you would call influences on your work?

JS: I think it would be a bit presumptuous, to say the least, for me to attempt to make any sort of objective comparison between my own work and that of other writers… That being said, I guess some of my early influences were writers like Ray Bradbury, H.P. Lovecraft, Kerouac, Celíne, Henry Miller, Bukowski, of course….  lemme think, well, Jorge Amado, Garcia Marquez, Jerzy Kozinski and so on. I read a lot of different shit, so many different books, it’s really hard to remember, but I guess it all ends up going into the computer (taps the side of his head)...

As to some of my contemporaries, I really love Lydia Lunch’s writing (The legendary punk rock Spoken Word author and performer who wrote the introduction to the first edition of NARCISA. CLICK HERE TO READ). I wish she’d get off her ass and write some more books. She’s brilliant and I’m always jonesing for more from her… I love Jerry’s writing too. (Jerry Stahl, the author of PERMANENT MIDNIGHT. Read his blurb on Narcisa here) Wish he’d write more books too. He is a true master of black humor, rivaled by only the likes of Celíne. I wish I could write as funny and ironic as him…

As far as influences though, I dunno, it’s kinda a mixed bag… I used to read a lot of biographies coming up, things like that big, thick Lenny Bruce book and so on. There was this old Charlie Parker bio I read when I was a kid, it was called Bird and it was like a bunch of interviews with people who knew him and told all sorts of wild, legendary stories about the Bird. I always really liked reading stuff like that, biographies, reading about actual people in a sort of mythological context… I guess there’s a little of that in Narcisa, even though she’s a fictional character, I really feel as though I totally know her. And maybe I do, since she really represents a big part of me… my own struggles with alcoholism and drug addiction, violence, rage, disillusion and self-destructive tendencies, family abuse, all that shit…

In the last decade or so before actually starting writing this book, I was mostly writing alot of random stuff, stream of consciousness poetry and short stories and journaling and sorta reading and studying a lot of real heavy non-fiction material. Alot of recovery oriented literature, the kinda stuff some narrow-minded idiots like to dub “Self-Help books”… and the like, studying books of a more metaphysical or spiritual nature for my own personal edification… quantum physics, the works of David Icke, especially… What else? Well, Daniel Pinchbeck (realitysandwich.com) , A Course in Miracles, and all this kinda deep, practical philosophical stuff mixed in with bits and pieces of psychology, science, history, anthropology… But at the end of the day, it’s really hard to speculate rationally exactly where and how all those vague, random influences eventually decided to invade my own work as I went along through the wierd process of midwifing this book in particular.

For me, I think it’s a completely unconscious process. I guess it always is for a writer. It’s not like you sit there and go, “ok, now I’m gonna try and write like Bukowski, now I’ll throw in a little bit of Lovecraft here or take a pinch of Miller and throw it in there” or whatever… it just kinda comes about organically as you go through the process…

I know I’m kinda drifting a bit from your original question, but I think the literature that makes that sort of a subliminal impression on a writer is bound to eventually come out in his own work one way or another as it all unfolds. But it’s still a real mysterious process, at least to me it is… I find that it’s usually other people, readers and critics and editors and friends like you who end up making those sort of observations and comparisons… Maybe because they’re so much better qualified to do so — since they’re looking at the work from a strictly objective point of perspective, something that’s probably pretty much impossible for a writer to to…

As a writer I was so completely caught up just writing this thing, living in that strange gonzo-journalistic limbo reality that just sort of takes over your soul, there’s really no conscious thoughts whatsoever about such considerations anyway… It’s kinda like a spirit medium when they’re channeling other spirits or something like that, like an out of body experience, I guess… While they’re in that sort of altered state, they really have no conscious awareness of most of the things that are going on around them while all these weird entities are coming and going, chanelling through them. Usually they don’t even have any recollection of what they said or did while they were possessed by these other beings. It’s a very strange process…