My Feral Research

“When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil.”
-- Max Lerner
-- Actions and Passions, 1949

“Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.”
-- Mae West
-- in Klondike Annie, 1936


I tried to group Nancy’s “so-called” interviews thematically. According to my abstract, which I now have in front of me, the headings were, territory, possessions, health and finances. I thought, ok, I’ll sift through the interviews and group them accordingly. One look at the first entry and it became immediately apparent there would be no way to collate these interviews, because they made no sense. I literally had to make sense of her questions and then make them make sense (sound confusing, in the trade we call this ‘style by enactment’).

Once I framed the question to fit the criteria of a given category, for instance, finances, then I would literally invent a context and create a fictional dialogue between fictional characters that would sound believable to the kinds of dull people who are condemned to a life of reading these things. I’m trying to think which ring of Dante’s inferno they’re bound for. Whenever she disobeyed my command to peruse journal research in her corner (in all of our meeting places, like feral cats in a cramped and tawdry kennel, we carefully marked our territory, after all we were experts on privacy boundary management) and commenced her insane (I know I use that word a lot, but it applies) over the shoulder badgering, I had to ask myself, is the fact that the meter’s running worth the risk of losing my sanity?

“This is the way people talk, Nancy, they actually make sense.”

“But why are they talking about checking account authorizations?” (Of course, she would never ask a question this succinctly; the sheer incomprehensibility of her spoken ideas would render a direct quotation here unintelligible to the reader)”

“Because that would be a privacy boundary management issue,” I would patiently explain. And on and on it went. Let me tell you, this was work.

I invented settings and scenarios: here, a demented parent in Romulus being accompanied on a doctor's visit by a slightly less deranged son, there, a Betty Davis sister stifling her Joan Crawford sibling’s phone privileges in an Ann Arbor trailer park. It was Hellish! Satan lives! And with all of these phony (I like that better than bogus) interviews, I tried to sprinkle in the kind of verisimilitude that would sell the emperor’s new clothes to a committee of dullards, and unleash a professorial moron on an unsuspecting pack of incoming freshman students. Praise God!