Interview With Chris Sylvester

Walter Benjamin: What creative work is currently occupying you?

Chris Sylvester: I have this poem where there is a verbal organization or formal scheme and then I fill its places or its slots with different names for boys and girls from a fund of names for boys and girls

Fantasy is involved

WB: In the universe of your Splalaces, are all places / palaces hung from the solidity of some ceiling, or do they percolate up through the perforations of the floors?

CS: These things are a kind of writing and certainly not universes and don’t have floors

WB: I maintain that ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars. How is this true with respect to your own practice?

CS: 1) not a practice, 2) I don’t know anything about ideas, 3) stars are a kind of object that other than the stupidity of seeing are only accessible via certain forms of inscription, i.e. formulas, algorithms, other means or modes of operational writings—maybe poems can be a writing like that

WB: How would you care to respond to either of the critical glosses that now accompany your contribution to this publication?

CS: Sure

WB: What substance, in fact, precedes [nothing]?

CS: JYA

WB: What would you ask (of) me?

CS: A lot

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Chris Sylvester sisteract.tumblr.com / trollthread.tumblr.com

Walter Benjamin is a German literary critic and translator. He holds a doctoral degree in philosophy from the University of Bern. While his current whereabouts are unknown, his essays and reviews, as well as the collected fragments of his magnum opus on Parisian life in the 19th century, await posthumous publication and approbation.