What inspired you to write The Ugly?

It was a combination of things I had read and thought about. The first spark came from Jorge Borges´ accolade to "Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote". Menard wrote his Don Quixote 300 hundred years after Cervantes. The relationship between these two renderings - I wouldn't want to give it away, because Borges story is so delightfully funny as it unfolds - is not  the same as the relationship between "The Dead" and "The Ugly", but it got me thinking. And then I read Douglas Hofstadter's "Le Ton beau de Marot" which is a wonderful book about translation in all it's aspects. Hofstadter gave me my wings. And then there is the whole thing of mixes and remixes in modern musicwhich I love. But most important to me - because of what he writes about "reproductions" and forgeries and the value of art - I would have to place William Gaddis' "The Recognitions". 

Then you consider yourself an "immaculate plagiarist" like Wyatt in "The Recognitions"?

 Ha ha. Why not? In any case I am a believer that invention is primarily a social act. That goes for Mr Joyce as well, as brilliant as he was. Plagiarism, as I see it, would be misrepresentation of oneself as the creator of something one had lifted from someone else. First you consciously take something and then you try to cover your tracks.  I am certainly not trying to hide where The Ugly comes from... I'm mean that is the whole point.

But you have said that you would prefer for people to read "The Ugly" without knowing before hand its relationship to "The Dead"?

Yes. Definitely. There is a version on the internet which does not point out the relationship. For me the ideal read would be to encounter that version and discover while reading it that there is something familar here.  As the reader progresses through the story more and more details would point to The Dead and eventually it would dawn on her that she was reading a parallel of The Dead. 

Then you are saying that "The Ugly" doesn't really stand on its own?

Yes, er - no... I suppose it works just fine as a story as it is - who am I to say. [laughs] But I think the real value lies in the relationship. The pull between them. The shift in context. That said, I know of several people who, though they were familiar with The Dead, read The Ugly and never saw the light - never got the hints.  That is a disappointment, but I can't imagine being more explicitly obvious than I have been...

What sort of rules did you make up for yourself in writing The Ugly? To what extent do you see it as a translation?

I would call it a transposition. Each character of "The Dead" is transposed into one or more characters in "The Ugly" and the various topics covered in "The Dead" all have corresponding counterparts in my story. I set up the two texts in parallel blocks and matched them paragraph for paragraph and if someone said something in The Dead then someone would say something in The Ugly.  I was aiming towards using the same number of words, but that became a minor issue as i progressed. At first I was careful to always use my own language - not just because English has changed somewhat in a hundred years, but because I felt it should be part of the game. When revising my first drafts I found it just as challenging to use Joyce's wording either unaltered, or mashed up in some manner. Since my characters, who are far from carbon coppies of Joyce's to start with, are actually holding completely different conversations, it was fun to let them do it with Joyce's words.

Like when Joyce writes that Browne was a tall wizen-faced man, with a stiff grizzled moustache and swarthy skin and your Jack Diamond is a short stiff-faced man with grizzly skin and a swarthy mustache...

Yeah - it's good fun.

You do a lot of gender switches?

You know I could have saved myself a lot of trouble and just done that - just changed Gabriel into Gabriella and Gretta into Garett - everything comes out different. You can switch gender with characters in almost anything ever written and get an entirely new story out of it with gobs of twists and turns to think about.  And sometimes the story gets weird and you think well, a man would never do that and a woman would never say that and so on ... and that tells us something as well. 

 In your story someone says  "The Dead" is the finest short story in the English language. Is that what you think?

God no! There is no such thing. It is a great story, of course, but as the man says context, context, context ... and there is some weird stuff in it. I could never reconcile myself with Gabriel saying it was time to go westward - what was that about? How would the hotel room scene change his attitude that completely? And the disdain he shows for his aunts in calling them "two ignorant old women" - I don't think that matches up well with his character. But just as my Eliot  says - The Dead has great diddling and a great climax. And I never tire of it - there are not many people on this planet who have poured over that text like I have. 

This was a learning experience?

You're not kidding. Every time I put "The Dead" aside and just tried to develop my own story, I bloated. It is so much easier to bloat than to distill and exclude. Without Joyce reining me back in, my story would have been twice as long.  Constraints are wonderful. And necessary to all art.

What about your theme - the dichotomy between ugliness and beauty?

The dichotomy? Whoa. That sounds pretty heavy. Do I have to? Well, to start with I wanted a theme that was "lesser" than Joyce's - ugliness weighs lighter than death - or so I assumed. As my story unfolded I betrayed that ambition. In "The Ugly" a great deal is on a grander scale than in "The Dead". The Karmons have a lot more wealth then the Morkans, Jan Mayer is a sort of celebrity which is more than we can say for Mary Jane, and Gabriella trumps Gabriel in all her splendor. I'm sorry about that. And you know, I'm sorry about the snow, cause what I really wanted was for it to rain. I wanted it to rain in "The Ugly" every time it snowed in "The Dead", because in seemed to me that rain was "less" than snow, but when I had those black basketball players on the poster - well I just couldn't get them out of the snow.  So it snows in "The Ugly".

Gabriel is agonized by the dead, or at least one dead person as recollected by his wife - Gabriella is agonized by someone who was, in her husband's rendering of his encounter with her, let's say, not very attractive. Both Gabriel and Gabriella are challenged by these apparitions.  The build up in both stories make reference to the realms where they exist - the realm of the ugly and the realm of the dead. Both protagonists feel their own insufficiency in relation to these apparitions and are jealous of them. Both question their own worth, their self-esteem takes a hit. But while in Gabriel's case the comparison with Michael Furey is made from within a value system of romantic attributes, in Gabriella's case the threat is not that she is not the most beautiful, or the most successful - because she is - but that the value system within which she might rightfully appraise herself as a winner is put into question by her husband as superficial and meaningless. 

That's when she slams it to him in the balls...

Yeah, and that's when I slam JJ in the balls as well. I had to break loose. Of course I can't blame him for me deciding to rewrite his story a hundred years on, but we are not always fair about our aggravations. 

Lastly, would Joyce have appreciated what you have done?

Oh God, what a question! He liked puzzles and word games and he travestied a great deal himself, but he never suffered fools gladly [laughs} - that's for sure. But he was a pretty superstitious fellow and if he found out that we both shared the same birthday - well, I think that might have influenced him in my favor.