Jimmy Chen is all over the internet. He is all over Thieves Jargon. One day he may be in your living room on your walls watching you. He is this week's Thieves Jargon Friday Conversation.

EDY: Hello Jimmy
Chen, let's do an interview. This could go horribly. I've had interviews
like that. I've also had interviews that went well. I don't know if
I am skilled at interviews and sometimes have bad luck or am not skilled at all
and sometimes have good luck. You did not need to know all of that.
I won't delete it though. Let's talk about you. How's your life as
Marilyn Manson going?
JIMMY CHEN: Hi Every Day Yeah. I don't think this interview will go
horribly, and if it does, it's half my fault. My life as Marilyn Manson is one
of cheap laughs. I realized all my posts somehow involve sodomy. Sometimes when
there's no real punchline, anal penetration is all that's left. Jared, the
editor at News Groper, contacted me having read a piece involving Manson on
Yankee Pot Roast, and asked me to be him. Most of New Groper leans towards commentary
on current event, and I think my pieces are too solipsist, and I've been told
just fucking weird. It's odd that I'm him. I'm actually a very clean cut guy,
with a bias towards the brower orifaces. See? There I go again...

Sorry, quick question,
did you mean "browner orifaces"?
Moving on, I feel like you have about 300 different characters you play.
A few of them being the Asian Kafka, the Male Virginia Wolfe, the Asian Woody
Allen, and the Straight Oscar Wilde, as well as running the Embassy of
Misguided Zen.

Sorry, yes I meant “browner orifices.” I don’t generally
misspell ‘browner’, but I often misspell orifices as ‘orifaces’ because I
imagine a face.

Yes, let’s move on please. No more orifaces I promise. Fuck.
Orifices.

I took liberty in calling myself the Asian Kafka, Male V.
Woolf, and Straight O. Wilde—but the Asian Woody Allen is an invention by my
buddies from college. One time we all went to Bass Lake, in Northern
California, for the afternoon. This led, invariably, to the stripping off of
clothes and jumping into lakes. I stayed fully clothed on shore, worrying about
worms potentially swimming up my urethra and catching pneumonia from the
imminent dusk’s chill. I followed the bank listening to them, hidden by the
trees, as they swam (the way that non-urethra-conscious people are prone to
do). Anyways, I over-heard them calling me the ‘Asian Woody Allen’. At first, I
was insulted, but then I thought, “Hey, they love him in France.”

As for K., Woolf and Wilde, I just really like them. I’m
obviously being facetious by making any comparisons. If I am anybody, I am the
Black Faulkner.

Originally I had
planned to leave the part out about when I asked you if you had meant to say
"Brower" (I still might). I hate being the type of person who calls out others for spelling mistakes because I make my share, but after you went and said, "Fuck.
Orifices." I might have to include the whole thing. Whoops, I just
broke the "no more orifices" rule. Maybe it should be a rule
that we antagonize by saying orifices in every response. Oh, this could
get out of hand...
Please more asian woody allen stories. It's funny, now I know two Woody
Allen doppelgangers. One of them likes to do open mic readings and lives
on my street. Most of the time he goes over his alloted time, but he
doesn't know any better and no one cares.
Also, I read you're story, eyeshot lee klein. I liked it. Is there any more
secret information not included in the story that you could share. How
did he accept it?

I promised not to say what I said I wasn’t going to say.
That sounded like ee cummings.

No more Woody Allen stories, sorry. I never chased a lobster
in my kitchen. The only crustacean-related thing about me is that my zodiac
sign is cancer, but I keep that shit out of the kitchen.

About Eyeshot Lee Klein, I sort of passive-aggressively sent
it to him after he rejected “May I Be Frank?” (which incidentally, and very
fortunately, was picked up by Thieves Jargon.) Lee Klein said the piece made
him laugh aloud, and his one rule for accepting a piece (I’m totally
paraphrasing now) is that it should evoke some involuntary visceral reaction in
him. I liked the meta-fictional aspect of the title, how both journal and
editor were implicated. Eyeshot sounded like I shot, so I went on from there.
The dream about the wax layers and ink cloud beard was real.

Speaking of messing with editors, I’m usually very polite
and ‘professional’, but one time I wrote a story to Madison Glass, fiction
editor at Alice Blue, after she rejected a piece. The story (not the rejected
one, but the response) was called “Alice’s Blue Period” (and no, it was NOT
about her menstrual cycle.) The story’s protagonist was ‘Madison Glass’, lost
member of Salinger’s ill-fated Glass family. Surprisingly, she wrote a story
back! I really liked her stories. We exchanged about 5 – 6 stories, and then
she stopped. I think I was secretly hoping she’d serialize and publish the
entire exchange, but I was obviously naively mistaken. I submitted another piece
some months later, and didn’t get a response. I may have went too far with
that.

M. Glass, if you are reading this, it’s a perfect day for
banana split.

I respect your
decision to keep the promise not to say what you said you weren't going to
say.
The Alice Blue pieces sound interesting. I think one day they will turn
up. They should be on some kind of old 45 or something where you read on
one side and she reads on the other side and at the end of each tale a narrator
voice comes on as gentle ambiguous new age melodies play in the
background and says, "please flip this recording over."
Oh, someone mentioned there's a rumor that you and Tao Lin are the same
person. If so, is Jimmy Chen the pseudonym for Tao Lin or vice versa?
Also, I liked your piece on David Foster Wallace in Lamination Colony. I
picked up Infinite Jest a few weeks ago with the intent on finally reading
it. I got it from the library a few years back, but only got a 100 or so
pages in before I had to return it. How long did it take you to read
Infinite Jest?

i am not tao lin, i think. tao lin’s goal in life is to
decrease pain and suffering. my goal in life is fellatio from strangers, or
something.

Seriously though, I’m surprised that there’s a rumor. My
‘voice’ is very erratic, and caters to the rhetoric of whatever piece I’m
writing. Tao’s voice is more consistent, like his personality itself is the
rhetoric. I’m a huge fan of his, and I can’t decide what I like more; his
stories in ‘Bed’ or his more absurd funny pieces online. No one can write
‘fuck’ the way he can. Sometimes I think he’s just bored and really likes dicking
with people. I like it when he says ‘I’m being serious now’ on his blog,
because his blog is so laced with sarcasm and contradiction he has to write
such disclaimers. He’s very anti-corporate America, yet wants to make as much
money he can, which is the corporate model—yet there’s sarcasm even in that;
all his paypal/ebay stunts. When you can say you’re being ‘sarcastic’ you can
pretty much win any philosophical argument you get into. He makes fun of
‘networking nepotism’, like Rick Moody, John Updike, and all the comfy literary
hot-shots, and yet he rewards writers (Brandon Scott Gorrell, Zachary German)
with a 3AM publication for writing pretty much exactly like him. If Tao links
this on his blog, this interview will get like 453 comments in 2 hours and I
will be publicly hung. His friends are really productive. Were are both Chinese
though. Ha Jin, watch the fuck out.

As for Infinite Jest, I can’t finish it. DFW is my favorite
living writer, but he’s asking too much from the reader with that one. Blake
Butler, the editor at Lamination Colony, urged me to read it while going
through some edits of ‘Finite Just’, and I started again, but gave up. D.F.W.
does not rhyme with A.D.D. What I love about DFW is that he goes into a ‘story’
like it’s not a story. It’s hard for me to explain. It’s like he chooses an
arbitrary medium which expresses information, like the back of a cereal box or
an electric bill, and forces two things: narrative and excess. The result, I
think, is greater than what Nabokov or Joyce tried to do. It’s so cliché to
say, but it really is ‘mind-blowing’.

From fellatio to mind ‘blowing’, you see how I made a circle
of motif?

Ha Jin, watch the fuck out.

I see you changed
your website again. How frequent do you make changes?
About the Tao Lin rumor, it may or may not have been started before Mr. Matt
DiGangi and I watched a screening of Narnia: Prince Caspian. I like how
it may have spawned some beef with Ha Jin.
Do you sometimes worry you were never born.
You do magnificent things with circles. What you did with that last
response was great. In a way you most certainly gave me knowledge by
pointing it out. I wouldn't have notice.

I fidget with my website until I think it looks okay, then
it stays that way for some time. I recently finally figured out frames in
dreamweaver, so I've been messing with the site almost daily.
By the way, I really like the Every Day Yeah photos. It seems like a hefty
commitment going out and writing those words somewhere every day. Do you take
all the photos? There's something very intuitive about them. Some should publish
a book of all those photos.
I Was Never Born grew out of 'I Was Never Young', an Of Montreal song. I was
singing it in my head one day and sang 'I was never born'. Then I said to
myself, "I'm going to write a story in which the narrator's voice is
precluded by the events in therein." I added Malcolm X because, as I
already mentioned, I'm the black Faulkner.

Thank you for the
nice comments. The Every Day Yeah photos are all mine. The ones you
see on the site are from a year ago. I've got a year stockpiled.
Maybe one day I'll lay the pictures out and try and get it published.
I'm curious if you've got any plans yourself for a short story
collection. You must have novel manuscripts you're working on. For
some reason I picture you have four or five under your bed or in the
closet. Or maybe you just do the short story style to balance out your
painting?

This interview is
going to be very long I think. Feel free to edit stuff out.

I went through most of the Every Day Yeah photos, and
imagine you having alot of fun writing that shit everywhere. I’m assuming the
public ‘tags’ are in a set radius from your home. Does anyone recognize them
around town? I gather you are near Somerville, MA, since you mentioned watching
Narnia w/ Matt. The EDY tags remind me of this, but subtler.
You should consider taking submissions from other people. It might just become
the rage.

I thought about sending my stories to a publisher for print,
but a) the tones are too erratic, and b) most of my pieces are flash—and it
seems that ‘real short-stories’, the stuff publishers like, are much longer,
and c) I’m too lazy to get a bunch of stamps.

Also, I may be one of the few writers who is not working on
a novel. (One of my Pboz bios reads: Jimmy Chen is currently working on reading
a novel). This whole ‘writer’ thing is odd for me, because I majored in art and
consider my ‘real’ artistic agenda painting. The ironic thing is: I have a
full-time administrative job at a University, and can only find time to paint
on the weekends, so I began writing as a ‘relief’ creative outlet…at work.
About 95% of my writing happens at work, frantically writing/editing pieces on
my break, or at lunch. This inadvertent urgency has turned out to be a good
thing, I think. I tried writing at a hip ‘socialist’ café in SF (only two
blocks from McSweeney’s!!!) on my MAC laptop and could not stop thinking to
myself, “I must look like a fucking asshole.”

I don't mind that
this interview is long. I hope that one day, thousands of years from now,
when all that remains of Jimmy Chen is his artwork that maybe this interview
will be kicking around and people will find it and look at it and rediscover
that you were a writer. "fuck the book" is a good idea.
Maybe you can be the first submission to edy. You can write it on your
forehead and submit the picture for the interview.
Do you ever ring the doorbell when you walk by the Mcsweeney's building.
I think you should ring it and then run home and write them a story about
ringing their doorbell.

I broke my digital camera by landing on it with my ribs
during a rather heated ‘team-building’ exercise at a Staff Retreat for work,
which entailed leaping out of a box and rolling on the ground. Long story
short, I rolled incorrectly and fell on the camera (I had brought it to
document the retreat) which was in my inside coat pocket. This was during hay
fever season, and I suffer from allergies. Let’s just say the near-broken
rib—and the pain that ravaged through my body every time I sneezed—had an
adverse effect on my willingness to be a team-builder. Long story short, I
would take a picture of EDY on my forehead, but my camera has a concavity the
contour of my rib.

So instead, here’s a picture of me on the street corner
waiting for the WALK man; a sort of Asian triad: spring-roll, chop-sticks, and
me. God, I’m playing the race card. Obama ’08.

Are you asking me to door bell ditch McSweeney’s? No way.
I’m pretty sure they all run faster than me (I know their velocity).

I remember we went to
one of those bonding things in middle school and it was fun. Then they
did one when I was in high school and the second day only half the kids showed
up. Sorry to hear about your camera. If your staff really were team
players they would have chipped in and got you a new camera. There was
probably 20 of you right? $10 bucks each and you got yourself a new
digital.
I feel our time is running out. I guess this is where I say, "Any
last thoughts?" and you either say, "Nah, not really" or
"Not that I can think of..." or you answer by giving your life story
in the form of a haiku or you respond by saying that my last suggestion about
the haiku was uncalled for and I don't need to add to the stereotype and I'll
mention something about the picture you attached and how I thought it was okay
because you seemed to already be headed in that direction and maybe then you'd
respond by saying something like, "yeah, but I'm Asian and your not,"
which will make me remember a conversation I had earlier in the week where my
roommate and I couldn't figure out if you guys liked being called 'asian' or
not (this was all after we concluded 'oriental' probably wasn't politically
correct even though my girlfriend's mother refers to any asian eatery as one
having oriental food) and you'll either be left to respond with either,
"You guys?" or nothing at all and I'll be embarrassed, etc...
Okay, ummm, not really sure where to go from here...I think I'll just go get
one of those free ice coffees across the street.

Thank you Mark for taking all this time to interview me, I
really enjoyed it. I’ve been looking at the Best Friends section at EDY and
like that as much as I do the EDY daily photos. You have nice ideas. I am glad
my first interview ever has been on EDY.

I think ‘oriental’ is not politically correct, but neither
is ‘bitch ass ho’, and I say that very often. You can call me anything, just
not on the phone. My cell phone is out of batteries.

Here is my life story, in chronological order, in haiku:

a womb with a view

teen chronic
masturbation

my hair is
thinning

Goodbye.