I first met Joe Natoli in Dublin. Despite the fact that I was there to study Irish Literature there were some rules to follow:

• Rule number one: do not mention Joyce or Yeats unless you want to get punched in the nose.
• Rule number two: nod and smile when someone tells you the pub you’re standing in sells the best Guinness in town.
• Rule number three: U2 had not been to the pub where you were having a pint, and they would not be "dropping by" to practice later.

Joe catapulted into Dublin central unawares March 16^th, 1994. Several of his students had followed Joe despite his best warnings that a place to sleep on St. Patrick’s Day weekend would be harder to find than a stable in Bethlehem December 25th 0 A.D. I walked into the American Express Office on O’Connell Street to cash some traveler’s checks after class that afternoon. When I walked in, I saw some of Joe’s students milling about like circus vagrants. They had large multi-colored hiking packs and windbreakers, nose rings, eyebrow rings; the types of kids that took Postmodern Cultural theory classes in East Lansing Michigan. I spotted their motley leader from the door. An olive-skinned, rough looking, gray haired man with a bristly beard. His eyes darted around the room, checking everything and everyone out while he kidded around with his students. I walked over and said, "You’re Joe Natoli."

"You’re Keith aren’t you?" Instant recognition through reputation had its benefit for once. I was the unpopular kid on my Dublin Program. Joe was the unconventional Professor who was teaching Postmodernism.

I helped Joe out by giving a couple of his students a place to stay over the weekend. On Saint Patrick’s Day I stopped by the Drury Inn on Upper Saint George Street to have a pint with him. We immediately hit it off after discovering that the other guy had the missing catalogue of films we wanted to see. Mine of course was a mixture between the trash from 80’s pop culture: Chevy Chase films like Spies Like Us, Fletch (give each other 30 Dollars and put it on Underhill), the Three Amigos, and Sci-fi: Alien, Bladerunner, Star Trek I-VI, Star Wars, Highlander. Joe’s catalogue had the good mix between Citizen Kane, All Along the Waterfront, and newer tuff-guy films like Reservoir Dogs. Each of these films spoke to a certain aspect of his history, or ideas that he wanted to express. His book Hauntings had just been published. This book characterized his mode of thought in drawing from the headlines and finding the cultural fears underneath in popular film.

Joe bought me a few pints that night, which I later learned was part of a greater generosity of spirit. We agreed to meet the following day for lunch. I chose the Marx Brothers Café . They made the best sandwiches in Dublin, good bread and good coffee (rare in Dublin). We talked for a few hours about cooking. Joe had a traditional Italian background that followed strict, almost fascist rules for cooking. " What about Oregano in a tomato sauce?" I’d ask. He'd spit on the ground and flatly state that it was out of the question. It was fresh basil, or nothing.

I returned to the States four months later. I signed up for Joe’s class that fall. During this period he was writing Speeding to the Millennium and in class we would be "treated" to chapters of his book. Essays like Running with Gump, or Reality as Pulp Fiction were delights in class. After this we would meet for dinner, to shoot pool, bowling. The man knows how to bowl.

I have since left East Lansing, but I returned to do the inaugural interview for turtleneck.net. I drove out to meet Joe at his house in East Lansing. He lives on a secluded street away from any potential burning police cruisers or flashing sorority girls. I pulled up into the driveway and knocked on the door. Jennie the family dog greeted me with a howl. Joe opened the door and brought me inside. I spotted a Muscle and Fitness magazine on the sofa in the dining room. This dichotomy between the physical and the intellectual is one of the things that makes him so likeable. He is an exercise nut who has read everything. His students respect him because he can bench press more than they can. He explains that he has to stop by the office to get his running shoes. He wants to run for an hour and he knows he’ll pull a muscle if he uses any other pair of shoes. I find it amusing that we own the same pair of Adidas running shoes. On the way to the Library where his basement office is located I started asking questions about his background.

turtleneck.net: Some people may not know anything about your background so I thought I would start there. You went to a Jesuit High School right?
Joe Natoli: I went to a Catholic High School run by the Jesuit brothers of Saint Francis Xavier in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.
tn: Was that a good high school in those days? Did you have to pay tuition?
JN: I originally went to public school and got yanked. You had to pay tuition, but I was on some kind of scholarship.
tn: Why did they "yank" you?"
JN: Not for the reasons you think. I took some exam and they thought I was smart, in those days Saint Francis Xavier was a school where kids who were going to be ushered into college went.
tn: Didn’t you tell me that you were actually more focused on math and science in High school than you were on literature?
JN: I was honors science and honors math at St. Francis Xavier.
tn: You went from Xavier to CUNY in Brooklyn? What did you major in there?
JN: I had fulfilled all of CUNY’s requirements for math and science at St. Francis Xavier. So there wasn’t a big push for me to take more of that. Back in those days (1961) there wasn’t the big push for young people to go into technologies, or business. You see when I was doing my undergrad if you wanted to get into business you went to a business school, unless it was economic theory, you could take that, but nothing like business administration they have now.
tn: So that’s when you got into literature, liberal arts? Blake?
JN: In my undergrad I was into literature. Nothing specific, Dickens, Rimbaud, that kind of thing. It was actually the [Professor], I don’t remember his name, but we were talking about what to do my master’s thesis on and he suggested Blake he thought it would suit my temperament.
tn: What do you mean by temperament?
JN: Well as far as trying to bring in all the things that I think literature has deposited in it, Anthropology, History, Psychology. I was already trying to do some cross-disciplinary writing, writing that wasn’t for the stuffed shirts in the English Department. Blake’s Poetry already had some of these elements in it, in that it wasn’t separate from the culture, Blake’s culture that created it. My first Dissertation was called Blake and the Twentieth Century. When I began reading I saw that he was drawing from psychology and history and these sorts of things so I put this into my dissertation. My dissertation was probably the first true cross, trans-disciplinary writing that was done there.

tn: Wasn’t literature and psychology back then kind of par for the course, Jung and literature kind of went hand in hand in those days?
JN: Yeah they found the literature and psychology more palatable than some of the stuff that I was doing. As far as a psychological analysis of the characters in literature that had been done for years. That wasn’t what I was interested in. I wanted to draw in Blake’s influence on the twentieth century and bring in the culture of the twentieth century to show where we were at as a culture. Northwood Frye’s Fearful Symmetry and later The Anatomy of Criticism was doing some of this and I liked a lot of what I read of that.
tn: When was that written?
JN: 1957. I was also heavily influenced by E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy. That was 1958 I think, I was influenced a lot by him while writing for my dissertation at the State University of New York, in Albany.
tn: Off the subject but was that the first time you moved out of New York City, Brooklyn?
JN: Yeah
tn: Had you been outside of Brooklyn much before that?
JN: (looking indignantly at me) No. It isn’t East Lansing you know, there are probably some people who’ve lived there for twenty-five years and never left, it’s not the same thing.
tn: Well I was thinking of whether or not there was in any culture shock for you like in that Tom Wolfe story "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn". The guys on the subway who were totally flabbergasted that Wolf’s Narrator had a map of the subway?
JN: (Still scowling at the inference that he was some kind of Bensonhurst bumpkin) I’d been to Manhattan on weekends or at night and we’d go as far as the subway would take us.
tn: You almost quoted the story.
JN: (Laughs his otherworldly high pitched nasal cackle)

tn: Did you do your Doctoral work on the same thing you did your Master’s thesis on?
JN: I got interested in Norman O Brown’s Life Against Death. The thing with him was that you could be cross-disciplinary and that reeled me in.
tn: I’m getting the feeling that even back in the early sixties you were looking for a way to jump ship from the conventions of literary criticism.
JN: It always seemed to me that you couldn’t isolate these things: literature, history, politics, psychology, that they were interconnected. I was big believer in the "Garden of Forking Paths", like in Borges’ Ficciones. I never made a pledge or swore an oath that I would uphold writing about literature and only literature when I got my PhD although it certainly seems some did.
tn: They didn’t make you take something close to the Boy Scout’s oath?
JN: You mean the Hitler Youth? Norman O Brown’s book was the seminal text on the subject, he had it all broken down by stanza and ode, that kind of thing. He was very good, but then everyone said he went nuts and they attributed it to the sixties. That happened to a lot of people.
tn: So where did you go after your PhD work was done?
JN: We moved to Amherst Massachusetts.
tn: You say we now, who was we at that point?
JN: Elaine, we got married in 1970.
tn: Did you know Elaine from your old neighborhood?
JN: Yeah she was from Bensonhurst. We moved there after we got married, I was teaching there. There was a cash flow problem at the college, so they were cutting salaries, I started, or rather some of the other untenured professors and I started a union. We tried to organize and the college had the Bank of New England fire a bunch of workers, they started with the building and grounds maintenance people. They fired librarians, custodians, then they began to fire faculty. It was actually late in the game before the faculty realized that we were being weeded out. We weren’t looking for a battle, but they were picking us off one by one. So even though we won the NLB election, I got fired anyway. We had a lot of following after we won that election with students and other college, university employees. I was very popular in the classroom, with the students, but not with the administration.
tn: Not unlike now? You’re students all adore and admire your energy and your work, but you’re an untenured professor working out of the library?
JN: Well that was back in the seventies there were loads of hippies willing to get mobilized for us.
tn: You don’t think that would happen now?
JN: No. Students aren’t as courageous after seeing things like Tianeman Square, or Kent State.
tn: You were a "long hair" back then too.
JN: There were loads of students hanging out at my house back then.
tn: More so than now?
JN: Oh yeah. Are you kidding I was only 27 or 28. So they waited until the current academic year ended, because they knew the students identified with me and the other faculty. Then they pulled me in and fired me for unspecified reasons.
tn: What were you teaching then?
JN: Well I was a top rated professor then, they thought I was a star of the English department, I taught mostly contemporary material: Contemporary European Novel, European Drama. I taught British Romanticism, Theory and Criticism.
tn: And then they fired you?
JN: Yeah they had picked up this unspecified reason bullshit from Fortune Five Hundred companies. The union wanted to fight it out, but I was so disgusted. The University made me a deal to take a year's salary as a research grant. I thought I could teach anywhere. Little did I know that they had blacklisted me.
tn: Where did you try to teach?
JN: All over, but I found out in New Hampshire that I had been listed as a troublemaker and an incorrigible. So we moved around a lot after that. No kids yet. I was traveling through West Virginia and I got a message from home in Brooklyn that someone at Bluefield State College wanted to hire me. The college was about twenty minutes from where we were camping. They wanted a librarian. I put on a suit and went and interviewed for this job. I got the job so we lived outside of town and I had a little farm for a while. The university there was troubled mainly because it had been one of the first integrated black/white universities in the United States. The Dean liked me for some reason and made me Director of the Library after a year or so. When I started hiring blacks into positions of power there, they didn’t like that. I got a lot of leaflets from the white women who worked at the library who were concerned for my soul.
tn: They were leaving you leaflets? What did they say?
JN: Fire and brimstone messages mainly about me going to hell for abandoning white southern tradition.
tn: What did you tell them?
JN: That I was concerned about social justice, and not to worry too much about my soul.
tn: How many African Americans did you hire?
JN: Four or five over about a year. So after I had hired too many blacks into the library, I was called into the Dean’s office and fired for unspecified reasons.
tn: Not again?
JN: (laughing) Yeah this time it was more of a get the hell out of dodge thing. The farm had gone kaputsky, so Elaine and I packed it up, went to the next town, which was Wakeforest. Drove a couple of hours there. The guy there was from the north and we got on pretty well, he said something like, "it’s going to be a delight having somebody around who I can talk to." I became the head of reference and bibliography there at Wakeforest College. We stayed there for a few years. But we moved on to Orange County California when I got wind of a job out there as a bibliographer and I taught a few courses as an adjunct associate professor of humanities at Irvine.

tn: Did you like California? What was that area like then?
JN: It was the eighties and Reagan had just become president. Everything there was very materialist. I’m a radical leftist person and I didn’t fit in. I didn’t want my girls Brenda and Emelia to grow up there. It was pretty awful for me. So I left and came to East Lansing. That’s when I became the Bibliographer here and an adjunct professor of humanities here too. Then I got this deal to do the study abroad program.
tn: One of the things that I wanted to ask you about was the movement that you made after you came to East Lansing from Literature and Poetry, or writing about them, to writing entirely about film. Most of your writing up until the late eighties was about one poet, William Blake.
JN: I was actually never that enthused about his poetry, I just liked his mode of thought, he was visionary, like in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he was taking on the moral categories of good and evil. Evil is all human, hatched through sex, and that humans couldn’t deal with it. That’s why D.H. Lawrence picks up on Blake, and the way he connects the body and the spirit and after all that time with Jesuits I think it was something that made sense for me. Sin was almost entirely equated with sex. Blake was a free thinker, he always walked around the house naked and he was trying to get his wife to do the same. Then he tried to get another woman in the house.
tn: But she wouldn’t have it?
JN: She was in the 18^th century. (he laughs). He wasn’t. Blake was always looking for ways to connect the corporeal and the spiritual. I think that was what appealed to me.
tn: Your last book before moving onto film entirely is one that I think I most identify with, and also one that isn’t as easy to nail down as the others, Mots D’Ordre, where you bring to play the literary worlds of order and disorder. In short that there are stories that contribute to the cultural order of the here and now, and stories that do not. Stories within the text you wrote to mean literature. What does this play between order and disorder mean to you now, some time after you’ve written the book, and now that you don’t really write about "literature."?

JN: If you think about things like I was when I was writing that book that everything is relative to time and place, there are always going to be stories that we leave out, stories we ignore about ourselves, nature, past, other people. We ignore them because they’re just not hip right now. We are disinclined to engage these stories. They’re not palatable or attractive or reasonable to us. Like right now the free player in the global market is a big story. Now say if you wanted to resurrect Walt Whitman’s Story [I cannot help but think about the Simpson’s Episode where Homer discovers his mother is not dead. Homer pounds on Walt Whitman's grave, which he thought was his mother's, and shouts-"I hate you Walt friggin Whitman!" -Ed.] "we are all leaves of grass," that doesn’t play to where we’re at, the Thoreau story, "simplify, only simplify," which right now means "that means I can only get one SUV right?" So where do you find these stories now that are now only not privileged, they’re unheard of. And when someone does express them, you can’t comprehend them, they’ve fallen outside the order of things. My argument in that book was then where do you find the play of order and disorder? Stories that have been left out I think would be found in literature.
tn: Would you say that literature has some special dispensation towards these stories of disorder, untold or unpalatable narratives? Or in other words does literature have a unique way of telling these unprivileged stories?
JN: Well not soon after I discovered that film could do it better in the present, because literature is now entrapped within the school of high literary criticism, of serious art. So now by the time you wait for the "serious novel" to engage the unsaid narratives, it has to do it in a…(searching for a word)
tn: I think you refer to that as the incommensurable in Mots D’Ordre.
JN: Yes, the serious novel has to handle the incommensurable in a way that transcends it into some perennial truth, it has to resolve say that battle between order and disorder. And if we are constructing reality day by day, by the time the novel has done that, it’s done it for a mindset, or a time that no longer exists. Where as popular film makes no attempts at perennial truth and therefore has better leverage at the here and now.
tn: One of the things that I wanted to ask you when I was putting together the outline was kind of a two part question, and mainly why I wanted you to talk about some of the jobs you’ve had, or been fired from for unspecified reasons… I know that most people think of literature as mostly a highbrow thing and do not look to pop film for the greater meaning of our societies ills and fears. Do you think that your struggle with academia or the administration played any part in your move towards film and away from literature, where I’m sure if you had stayed as a strict literary critic you would have had a different set of circumstances?

JN: Somebody said to me that you fit into the crowd of the disaffected, I was probably disaffected from the egg. Oh I left out the part where the government fired me for unspecified reasons.
tn: What? Did you ever get a reason?
JN: Well the with the Fed’s, it’s in their files, I was fired from the department of Health, Education and Welfare. Years later when I took the Foreign Service exam-
tn: You mean the foreign service exam like the one Chevy Chase and Dan Akroyd took in Spies Like Us? The scene where Chevy Chase walks in and hands Frank Oz his wallet, and says, "Would you hold my wallet, there’s a thousand dollars in there, or maybe there isn’t?"
JN: (hysterical cackling) That’s supposed to be one of the toughest exams, I already had a PhD in lit, and it was tough. The exam is graded from 1 to 5, 1 being the best, I got a one. So they claimed 15 years later when I tried to get another job with the federal government in West Virginia, that it was something to do with my test scores, but it wasn’t true.
tn: With a one you could easily be a GLG20.
JN: (Cackling.)
tn: When did you work for the federal government?
JN: In 1966, I was part of the group that launched Medicare.
tn: So whenever Al Gore talks about Medicare there’s a little Joe Natoli in there?
JN: I didn’t stay around that long, they launched me. You were asking about the film thing though. I’ve always been attracted to film. And the Postmodernism really gave me an avenue to write about film and to draw on the cultural theory. To use the film and write about the headlines and politics. We are constructing reality and I was looking for a barometer that would help me tap into the zeitgeist of the culture and I think film does that, where it seems the novel is always catching up.
tn: What about some of the supposedly big postmodern writers like Calvino and Borges that comment on, or make light of some of these postmodern ways of writing and constructing reality?
JN: A lot of those guys were caught in either becoming totally commercial, or high serious art, they were undertaking a priestly art, a serious pursuit, those postmodern guys, or meta-fictionists like [John] Barth, were not so much about constructing reality now as meta-commentary about consciousness, or represented reality. Fiction, it seems to me has always been about its form, rather than radical politics in the headlines.
tn: Would you say then that a way to gather up all these disordered narratives or unpalatable stories you mentioned are brought to light in your writing about film?
JN: Film has to make big bucks so it is forced into tapping into the stuff that haunts us. What troubles us and what bothers us, makes us tick. That’s what I was trying to get at in Hauntings, it was all these stories that we pay big bucks to see that terrify us. The films may not resolve these issues, but they’re thrown up there for us to see. It isn’t experimental avante guard stuff, it’s box office smashes that tap into the headlines. The stories that work the best are the ones like The Crying Game where they’re showing you something, titillating you and then covering it up with a constant chicanery. The stories that work the best do this constant covering up. They were playing with the-I know who I am, I know who you are- in point of fact you’ve been exposed to something that you can’t forget. People now are even less inclined to engage these types of stories, these disorder narratives, while 20 percent are doing really well. The other eighty percent aren’t doing so well. The other twenty percent are blinded to the misfortune of the eighty.
tn: So it’s like going to a cocktail party in winter, you invite a bunch of people, they show up. They arrive and move inside this big house very quickly, the house has lots of windows, and everybody is drinking great vodka and gin martinis. So the problem with the party, i.e. wealth, is at the party everybody’s thinking we’re doing great in here, everybody must be, but with all those people drinking and carrying on it fogs up the windows so fast they can’t see outside.
JN: (Laughs) Good image you’ve got to use that somewhere.
tn: The struggle that we find, that writers, authors and poets is that we are always struggling to make literature viable, vital. Most people, your average Joe six-pack isn’t reading books, he’s watching movies. I think most people are more inclined to engage film as an enlightening medium.
JN: There’s always going to be a call for good stories. All film needs stories. Filmmaking is totally dependent upon stories. You may have guys like Coppola who shot from the hip, like in Apocalypse Now. He let Brando walk all over him. And the film showed it.
tn: I think I swallowed a bug.
JN: What?
tn: It’s a scene from Hearts of Darkness the documentary about Apocalypse Now, where Coppola is shooting Brando improvising and Brando calls for a cut because he swallowed a bug. In the middle of the Philippines in a tropical rain forest, which was a big surprise for everyone on the set, Brando swallowed 3 dozen doughnuts, pizzas, pasta, potato chips, the key grip’s hat, but wait he swallowed a bug, cut, cut!

JN: I don’t think Brando had a lot of respect for Coppola. That style of filmmaking isn’t done anymore. That auteur, avant guard stuff. But it was cultural politics that got that film made back in the seventies when we needed someone to comment on Vietnam, the same thing happened with Bill Faulkner back before World War II, he had a series of unreadable novels that no one was reading and then after the second world war where there’s some American hegemony people started asking overseas for the quintessential American writer. Any derivatives, they asked? Well we got a guy who’s a third rate Thomas Mann, and a fourth rate whatever. We got that guy down south here that writes like nobody you got over there. Sure enough no European writes like him. Of course this is an opinion based relative to time and place. He’s already a classic, been canonized, but those early reviews of his book tell something about what cultural politics does for writers.
tn: Why not Hemingway then, the south is a troubled area with all kinds of sticky issues about race and politics. If you were going to put someone forward as the quintessential American why not say Hemingway. He’s from the Midwest. The Midwest is safe. He’s big, macho, he fishes, likes guns?
JN: I suppose it’s because the southern drunk is more verbose, less taciturn, than a Michigander? (laughs).
tn: The first book that was entirely about film was Hauntings. And it seemed particularly suited to explaining how postmodernism could be used to deconstruct pop culture.
JN: There are a few chapters there about theory that I don’t repeat again.
tn: A guide for the reader?
JN: Exactly.
tn: If I ever try and explain to someone who doesn’t know anything about your books, or postmodernism and cultural theory, I usually try to explain the chapter on Basic Instinct, or the Running with Gump chapter from Speeding to the Millennium.
JN: My book Postmodern Journeys that’s coming out has some more essays like that. There’s one on Good Will Hunting.
tn: You usually have all the major cultural events laid out from the years where you wrote the book and the films that you thought reflected those events. In your latest book, not yet released, Postmodern Journeys, or an as yet unpublished book is a piece that is going to stand out?
JN: The book I’m writing now that’s coming out after Postmodern Journeys called Times and Places. When I was learning how to box with Sonny Boy in Brooklyn. He was a black janitor working in one of the apartment buildings in my neighborhood. He put up a ring. The thing I remembered about going there was that Sonny said I had a good left. I had a straight fast left, if only it was half a foot longer I’d be doing something else with my life. I use that as a metaphor throughout the book to tie things together, like when someone calls me into their office to fire me.
tn: For unspecified reasons?
JN: Or when I am confronted by a confederacy of dunces.
tn: Sounds like Times and Places will be more autobiographical and less about cultural theory?
JN: Yeah so when I get called in to these offices all of it would be over quicker if I just led with a left jab.
tn: Is there a cultural event that you’d like to comment on but haven’t?
JN: (thinks) Well the cultural norm it seems is to have the most toys, the guy with the most toys wins. The adult norm that is, but the kids that are brought into it now are already dissatisfied with that. The kids have all the goodies and gadgets, the videogames, and everything and they’re still dissatisfied, disenchanted. So the kids think what else is there? If this is a fraud, and kids are amazingly perceptive, what else is there, nothing according to the adult cultural norm, so they get in a tear it down mode. So the kids at Columbine see that it is a fraud and decide to go burn down the twentieth century. I can understand violence coming from the underclass because they have a reason to be disenchanted, because we’ve failed them.
tn: So is there a film that’s tapped it into that?
JN: I’m still looking for one.
tn: How about Fight Club?
JN: Exactly, good example. When they burn down the credit card companies and the monologue about ordering furniture from the catalogue that gets blown up. The stories in there of the guy with a good white collar job, and he can’t even consciously betray that and wanna burn it all down, but inevitably does anyway.
tn: Oh no! my yin-yang table.
JN: (cackles)

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