Interview 1: Noah Cicero

Noah Cicero's novels are shorter than most I know of, but it takes me longer to finish them. This is because every few lines he will say something that causes me to get up and pace the floor. In his debut novel, The Human War, he has his narrator say "I need books. I need those dead man's lines. I need their truth. I like writers who write out of necessity. Writers who write because they have to. Who are compelled to express. They are driven by one thing only, and that is the written word." These lines could easily be ascribed to Noah himself, who spent his late teens and early twenties digesting literature with an autodidactic fervor and producing novels that were like claustrophobic rooms filled with kinetic energy. Noah Cicero is a deep thinker whose feelings perhaps run even deeper, a rarity in the generally sterile world of contemporary fiction. He has traveled the world from rural Ohio to Las Vegas, from South Korea to the Grand Canyon; along the way picking up new friends, stories, and a mystical outlook on life. He writes about Buddhism in his new book, "Blood-soaked Buddha, Hard Earth Pascal" which can be purchased here. Noah's work can be intense, raw, and angry but outside the page he is generous and kind, as demonstrated by the fact that he agreed to an interview by a complete nobody for a blog that didn't exist at the time. When I had the idea for this blog, periodically interviewing only my favorite writers, it was a no-brainer who I wanted to get first. Some of my favorite times of 2016 were the long nights I spent reading hundreds of different blog posts by him analyzing life from an existential perspective. Thank you, Noah. Buy his books, they have something for everyone.

-OMFW Staff


You once tweeted “I think I am going to be a poet. Roggenbuck and Ana seem happier than Tao and Sam and me. Feel like my novels are just giant poems anyway." To me this move away from primarily publishing novels to someone who publishes books of poetry and philosophy is exciting. What made you want to do that and has it made you any happier like you suggested it might?

I tweeted that in 2012 when I was living in South Korea. Leaving America gave me a lot of clarity. I was really caught up in the NYC through Chicago Matrix. I was really convinced I had to be poor, I had to be fucked, I had to live up to these weird ideals of Beatnik literature. It was all morbid and not the answer. At that moment some writers from our crews were getting on big presses, but I could never produce a legit 250 page book that was coherent and made NYC editors happy. I felt really obsessed before I was going to Korea, like “Why can’t I do this thing, that other people are doing?” You can really start to hate yourself. I found scapegoats like my class, where I was from, my own genetic code. But, it wasn’t any of those things. After Korea I worked at the Grand Canyon, an older Navajo woman that I worked with told me something like, she was looking right at me pointing “The Nobel Prize is yours, the Oscars are yours. We don’t make those types of things because we weren’t born for you, we aren’t here to impress you. We are here for different reasons.”

This really fucked me up. I have been trained my whole life that everyone should want to win specific elite prizes, to achieve specific goals, it had never occurred to me that there were a group born of a woman’s vagina that had no desire to want to live up to specific standards.

It really hit me, “I wasn’t born for you.” Like I wasn’t born to achieve specific goals a lot of random people agreed upon were good goals to achieve. I don’t even know who made up these goals, I have never met them. No one has ever asked me “Noah, what are the goals everyone single human should try to achieve?” I was completely kept out of this conversation.

But then I realized this is the dream of Jesus and Buddha, a dream where you realize and try to come to terms with being born into a world where everyone commonly agrees on social habits that aren’t really good for anyone. We get born into a world, that ended up being the minute before we were born, the world we have to live. We arise from our mother’s womb, you open your eyes and everyone immediately starts notifying you of their social agreements, and before the age of twelve what is obvious is no longer obvious, everything is colored with culture and mental projections.

Jesus and Buddha are really about to me, the study of false desire, and what is desire? It is when the public agrees “Should be wanted.” But it isn’t about wanting the right things, for me now, it is about enthusiasm, about excitement, about sadness, even panic. How do I feel something, with my whole heart? How do I interact with reality without putting my projections onto it, I want to hear music, I mean, really hear the music. I want to look off at the rocky mountains of the Mojave Desert, and just see them, without forcing them to be beautiful or a way of feeling better about myself. I want to enjoy food, not force it to supply me with an identity.

It seems like lately a fair amount of your new writing that you post links to is in Spanish. Can you talk about that? Are you writing them in Spanish or having them translated?

In the last few years most of my books have been published in Spanish speaking countries, I have books out in Spain, Chile, Argentina and Mexico now. In the next year or so more books will come out in Spain, Argentina and Peru.  I don’t write in Spanish, the books all have translators.

In the last couple of years I made trips to Santiago, Chile, Cusco, Peru, and Chihuahua City, Mexico for speaking engagements.

I never expected to be published in so many Spanish speaking countries, let alone, South America. When I was in high school, I had a completely different vision of what my writing life would be like, but those visions were based off dead writers. I am a living writer, I am a 21st Century writer, and to be honest, I love it. I have made so many cool friends in Latin America, my Whatsapp is always going off with someone from Argentina or Chile sending me a cool picture or suggesting me a book. I think I have approximately 800 friends on Facebook from Latin America, they have given me great suggestions for authors to read, music and movies.

I really like, this might sound weird, say someone from Colombia becomes my Facebook friend, I will investigate their whole life. I will look at their family Christmas pictures, look at them eating dinner with their friends. I will look at everything, the objects in the room, the clothes they are wearing, the shape of their faces and bodies.

Going to Latin America and having a lot of contact with people from South America, has taught me a lot. To understand those countries and the people publishing and reading me, I read histories of Chile, Peru, Argentina and Mexico. Learning about what South America went through with the 70s dictators and then going there and listening to people face to face tell me what happened, what their parents and grandparents went through, I learned a lot.

I am very grateful, to the people in those countries that publish and read my books.

Oh, something funny, they call me El Noa Noa, after a song by Juan Gabriel. It doesn’t matter, wherever I go in Latin America, and even in Las Vegas Hispanics start singing when they see me “Vamos al Noa Noa, Noa Noa, Noa Noa, Noa Noa, Noa Noa, Noa vamos a bailar.” I love to get drunk and dance, so I am cool with it. I got to dance with one of my translators in Cusco at Mama Africa’s, her hips still haunt my hands.

"let’s stand together and gaze upon beautiful things the way tourists look at The Grand Canyon."

In your last response, you mention the vision of your writing life being based on dead writers. This made me think of a few things. How in "Nature Documentary" (the advance reader's copy, anyway) you say that while some people replicate their parents' lives, you wanted to be like Hemingway, Kerouac, and Bukowski. And about how in "Blood-soaked Buddha" you talk about the benefit of having a core set of books that you re-read throughout life. 

I used to read your blog and the impression I got from it was that of someone very devoted to literature. It seemed like back then if you weren't working that chances are you were reading or thinking about books. I was interested to learn from Blood-soaked Buddha that you were still ruminating on some of the main writers that you used to analyze and talk about on the blog. Your two new books have references to Sartre, Nietzsche, Camus, Erskine Caldwell, Dostoyevsky, and Jean Rhys peppered throughout, which were staples for you in the blog days. 

Can you talk about how your relationship to literature has changed/developed or stayed the same since getting a more serious job and moving to poetry and philosophy? What do you get from these old favorite books now that your life has changed in some key ways? And do you see yourself as a more generous reader than you used to be? In your early twenties you wrote a scathing review for a book of stories by Dave Eggers at the ULA but I noticed that a couple of years ago you reviewed his memoir thing and you seemed to enjoy aspects of it and focused your review on what you liked about the book. Do you read differently now thanks to your Buddhism?

I think I have to explain my view on literature to answer this: I think there was a classical period, starting with Jane Austen (late 1700s) and ending with Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea in 1953. It was intensely Euro-American Centric, dominated by white men. But, the world generally agrees this era of literature is Great. The end of this era reveals itself in the fact that we all have read these great writers, I have sat at tables with award winning MFA grads, and we will discuss Joyce, Dostoevsky, Proust, Chopin, etc but the books we have in common for the most part end at 1953. If you grew up in the 20th Century this is what you were fed “as literature” this thing called The Canon. But in the late 1950s there are major schisms in literature, literature broke into different camps, Updike/Bellow representing the Status Quo, that literature should have well constructed plots, a writer voice, appeal to the sentiments of white collar people, books about suburban people mostly, and even when books are written by POC white people are always the fulcrum of everything. Kerouac/Ginsberg/ that literature should be about the conflict of man with technological society and liberal rights like LGBTQ rights, right to do drugs, and social norms are in general stultifying. James Baldwin and Simone De Beauvior in France came out saying that literature had neglected the voices of women and POC people. And there is even Ayn Rand who thought that capitalism was the apex of human dignity, so literature should be about that. Writers and well-read people can all trace their roots to this schism in the late 1950s.  This really reveals itself in the career of Norman Mailer, some of his novels are about nice white collar people, but often they contain these Beatnik elements of weird sex, and people engaging in abnormal behavior, and then he wrote articles and books about Marilyn Monroe and Mohamed Ali. In the Armies of the Night and in Miami and the Siege of Chicago the confusion of the country is happening all at once inside Mailer. If you ever ask yourself the question “When did America start dividing?” Those two Mailer books have some good insights.

When I was growing up in Ohio I was taught The Canon, the school and local libraries were full of The Canon. I was told “There was a standard, it is The Canon, the apex of literary achievement is The Canon.” But I was born after The Canon was finished, I could never get into The Canon. Since we cannot get into The Canon, we have to pick a camp, I picked the Beatnik flag. It seemed natural for me, I wasn’t the best student, I was not on my way to a great college, my parents had working class jobs, the world of Updike/Bellow was not my world. But Kerouac was from a nobody town with normal working parents, Gregory Corso was in prison, Bukowski was a working guy, Hunter S. Thompson was from Kentucky, Acker was a stripper, none of those people went to college, of course some them did, Burroughs Harvard, Ginsberg Columbia, Kesey Stanford, etc. But there was a mixture and I liked that. It appealed to my sentiments, to my life. And like most people I took a dogmatic approach to literature, I claimed ownership over The Canon “This is actually what The Canon believed, your view is blasphemy.”

At some point in my late 20s I became less dogmatic, it wasn’t helping me. My dogmaticism wasn’t helping anyone. I went back to college and started talking to younger people again, I was only 29 and they were 22, but that was a huge difference at that time in history, a lot had changed changed in that time. They talked to me a lot about feminism and POC rights, about other countries not having their voices heard. Then at the same time HTML Giant started having amazing voices like Roxane Gay basically call out all of humanity, but in a way, that helped us understand why we were being called out. Roxane Gay has a way of getting you to understand without annoying you into immediate defensiveness, she simply says, “You know, what you are thinking right now isn’t accurate. Let’s take a walk together.” Roxane Gay takes a movie scene and unwraps it for you, at first you see how the movie scene does follow her logic, but then, you are like, “Wait, I do that.” Then I went to South Korea for a year, I was in a neighborhood where I was the only white man, like, weeks would pass without me seeing another foreigner except for my girlfriend. I was The Other, they stared at me, they touched my hair, they made me stop to take pictures of me, they would stop me on the street and make me stand there while they stared at my blue eyes, there were places I was openly not wanted or just told to leave. I was The Other. For the first time in my life, I would look in the mirror and see “my whiteness.” The person I was dating was having it too, she yelled something like “Everyone can see us, everyone can see us, we can’t hide.” Then I moved to Las Vegas and worked in a grocery store, a super racially diverse place to work.

I don’t think the 21st Century requires these divisions anymore, it is true that if you follow the Updike/Bellow rules you have a greater chance of winning awards and getting tenure.

But we don’t sell enough books anymore to care about these divisions concerning The Canon. The Canon is like the Bible, the books of the Ancient Greeks, the paintings of Renaissance, Tang Dynasty poetry, let’s all enjoy it, let’s stand together and gaze upon beautiful things the way tourists look at The Grand Canyon. Everyday people from all over the earth look upon the Grand Canyon and they don’t fight, they are amazed, let’s just read, and hand these books to our kids, maybe 2600 years from now there will be a class of students reading To the Lighthouse. We should all agree that these books need to be protected. You know in that Indiana Jones movie, there is that old man protecting the holy grail, that’s how we need to be about those books. But there is no necessity to use those books to create divisions between ourselves.

I don’t care about the mainstream literary world though: the top five publishers mean nothing to me, the awards are not for people like me. Major presses and award communities are these arbitrary abstract institutions that resemble marketing niche cults. We are all victims of marketing niches, let’s not judge too harshly.

Sidenote: Dave Eggers, Miranda July and Carrie Brownstein came to Las Vegas for an all weekend event. I went and had a great time, I bought one of Dave’s books and had him sign it. And later at a concert for the event, Dave Eggers sat cross legged about ten feet from me, he was a very handsome man.

"A person that is secure in their sense of self just lets people have fun."

Speaking of your relationship to the Canon, you wrote a book that was a reworking of a Chekhov novella. It's hard to find now. Any plans to re-release that ever? Maybe a "Collected Works of Noah Cicero volume 3"? Is your current writing affected at all by studying and emulating Chekhov? Do you think the book "My Life" is Buddhist?

I doubt the reboot of My Life will ever come out again, if it does, it will be a total surprise to me. There won’t be anymore books from Lazy Fascist Press, so I doubt it a Collected Works 3 will ever come out.

My Life is very Buddhist, in terms of the book Lankavatara Sutra. The Lankavatara Sutra is considered the first book of Zen, it is a very strange book, even in terms of Buddhism. No one really knows where it came, no one knows who wrote it, the book just appears one day in human history. The Lankavatara Sutra basically explains how reality is objective, reality is there, but project reality onto reality, losing reality itself. And if we can “see reality” and lose our instinct to discriminate then we will have a mode of Being that will not suffer. We are at peace, when we lose the discriminating mind. This is what Ken Kesey talks about when he says “acid could get you to see reality without 30 years of living in a monastery.”

In My Life Misail sees that being wealthy won’t lead to anything desirable, being a laborer doesn’t lead to anything desirable, he just ends up taking care of his sister. Because that is all we really do anyway, is take care of family members. He is surrounded by people who have no self-awareness, and have no interest in having any. It doesn’t matter how rich or poor they are, without self-awareness you live in a prison, the consequence is the same. Misail doesn’t discriminate between people, he might analyze them, or remove toxic people from his life. But he doesn’t condemn them viciously, he sighs, and finds something else to do that day.

I really like Chekhov as a person, I can relate to him. Chekhov went to everyday, he didn’t have a cute literary life, he wasn’t surrounded by artsy friends. If you asked his co-workers and patients if they knew Dr. Chekhov had all these crazy ideas in his head they probably would have never guessed it. I imagine Chekhov riding on a wagon to the next patient, looking off having wild thoughts about people and culture, contemplating deeply the life of his last patient. But not going around talking about it, just thinking to himself quietly.

Hemingway said Chekhov was an amateur, because Hemingway didn’t understand Chekhov. Hemingway wrote famous stories about topical things people would immediately be interested in, wars, Spain, bullfighting, giant fish, and killing animals in Africa. Hemingway was a great writer, he understood voice, pacing and character development, but he was not a courageous writer. A courageous writer dares to take the most mundane of topics and attempts to make a story out of them. Chekhov could take a Jewish guy, a violin, and make a story out of it. Hemingway needed an entire war, a bridge, and an old man to make a story. Anytime a status quo person who knows they are doing what they are doing for money and fame calls someone an amateur, it is because they are insecure. A person that is secure in their sense of self just lets people have fun.

I wrote a novel about summer at The Grand Canyon, I think the book will be out in 2019. I think it is Chekhov like, just short, with lots of little moments, eventually all the little moments add up and a book is made. The characters in the book are real, they aren’t societal hollywood projections, the characters are clunky and wobbly just like real people, just like Chekhov characters.

I've seen you say that before the Human War was published you wrote several novels that you shelved (and like a thousand pages of stories and poetry). I've seen you say as many as five novels before your first was published. That always interested me because it seems like most writers try to publish the first novel they write. Can you talk a little about that period of your life or what some of those scrapped novels were like?

I’ve shelved a lot of novels, before and after The Human War. I started writing when I was about 15, previous to that period in my life I played sports age 5 until 14. I played baseball, soccer and football. Sports was all I knew about how to achieve things, I applied the same methods of sports to my writing. In sports you have to practice as much as possible, that means doing drills over and over and over again. To me at that time of my life, I needed to read and write as much as possible. I read constantly, and when I wasn’t reading I was writing. I made layouts like one makes football plays, I would get a novel and figure out how many words on average a writer used in a sentence, how many commas, how many sentences they devoted to body description, to description of scenery. If they wrote the dialogue in the paragraphs, or made it play like. I read plays to learn how to write dialogue. Every time I encountered a word I did not know I would write the word and its definition in this notebook I had, I eventually filled the notebook. The first novel was written on a shitty word processor my mother had, I think it was about teenagers in a trailer park. Then I wrote another novel about something I can’t remember on wordpad on my computer. I also had a typewriter from the late 70s I would write on. I would bring the typewriter to the garage and type staring at the yard. I wasn’t happy during those years at all, I am trying to remember them, and it feels like hell to even think that I had to exist during those years, I guess the writing was the only hope I had then.


What do you hope people will get out of Blood-Soaked Buddha/Heard Earth Pascal?


I hope when people read it, it makes them think about their encounters with people, objects, and themselves. The parts of the book that are the most sluggish, when I describe in detail the behaviors of certain people are the most important. Because we never look that closely. We are so busy in our minds, we never look close. We never really think deeply about the people around us, how many parents do you know who can’t even accurately describe the behaviors of their own children? How many coworkers do you have and you don’t even know where they are from? Can you even name the birds in your neighborhood? Let alone, describe the different noises they make. Those birds are your world, those birds live where you live, they live alongside you, and you live alongside them. Do you truly chew your food, or just grind it up and smash it down your throat? I just want people, just for a minute, to stop thinking about their future and how they want other people to see them for just a little bit of time. And when they turn off their minds for a little bit, it will hit them, that all this cool stuff is happening around them, and be amazed about how serendipitous everything is.

Noah Cicero has a newly released book of philosophy called "Blood-soaked Buddha, Hard Hearth Pascal". It is out now from Trident Press. It is short, accessible, uplifting, erudite, and excellent. You can buy it here and I suggest that you do. You can pre-order his upcoming book of poetry, "Nature Documentary" here. It made me cry.