o some, pubbing with Irvine Welsh would qualify as a religious experience, not unlike sharing a confessional with the Pope. Unless, that is, you're Irvine Welsh. "People in Scotland, they really fuckin' drink," the 41-year-old author mutters from a table at Manhattan's Macalary's Pub. "I can't hack it there anymore."
    Times change; so does a man's poison. For the past decade, Welsh's drink-and-drugs-fueled books like The Acid House, Trainspotting and Ecstasy injected the traditional bildungsroman with smack, speed and truth serum. Trainspotting was his most culturally significant; the 1996 film introduced the world to Ewan McGregor's penis and provided a scapegoat for countless raccoon-eyed fashion spreads that followed.
    Six years later, porn has replaced heroin as the media style referent of choice, so it's somehow fitting that Welsh has come out with Porno. It's a sequel to Trainspotting that finds the familiar crew (Sick Boy, Renton, Spud and Begbie) reuniting to make an amateur porn flick, abetted by Sick Boy's girlfriend, a film-student slash prostitute named Nikki Fuller-Smith. The product, titled Seven Rides for Seven Brothers, gives you a sense of the tone of the book, with its frequent laugh-out-loud indictments of capitalism, feminism, gender roles and the amateur-X industry. — Michael Martin

Why revisit the Trainspotting characters? Why not leave well enough alone? Eh, I dunno. I didn't really have a choice. The characters kept coming back and coming back, telling me to do something more with them. Writing a book is like having sex for the first time. You should have taken your time and enjoyed it more. With Trainspotting, I just got it over with.

Why did you want to write about porn? Everyone seems to be involved in sex clubs now in Edinburgh. People go to a pub, then they all go back to each others' houses, shag each other senseless and get it on the DV. It's become like a social thing, like a dinner party. It's a bunch of people who would normally not be involved in that kind of thing.

I think that now, porn's a bit like drugs were in Trainspotting — it's underground, about to go mainstream. Of course, it can't really, because of the legislation. But everybody's into it. Thanks to the internet, it's easy for people to consume pornography, and forty percent of those who do are women. It changes the whole narrative.

Isn't porn played out as a theme? In some ways, it's quite exciting and interesting. It's an innovative industry. As it says in the book, if pornography sneezes, popular culture catches cold. If you look at what happened in the porn world five years ago, you can predict humiliation TV. It has the pornographic sensibility: even if you can't actually show people fucking each other on telly, you can have that metaphorically. The pornographic sensibility has infiltrated every other part of mainstream society. Sex has always been used to sell things. But mainstream Hollywood violence, when they're shooting the guns, is just like pornography.

Nikki is your first major female character. Did you write her to prove that you could? People assume that the male characters are parts of me or parts of people I've known, and that I can do male characters and not female characters. Historically, my interest has been in working with young working-class male friendships and gangs and groups. I've always been interested in how people become a gang. But now I feel like I've done that, and I'm less interested in it. It's a very natural thing for more female characters to come in.

You also can't write a book about pornography and not have a female perspective. And um, Nikki's sort of the ideal character to do that because between her and Dianne and Lauren, her flatmates, you've got a real debate. Dianne has a real traditional feminist, anti-porn perspective, like Andrea Dworkin and Catherine Mackinnon. Nikki's the opposite. She sees it as a sort of liberation. And Dianne has a very academic view.

What kind of research did you do? Did you watch a lot of porn, go to swingers clubs, visit amateur video companies? Yeah, just about everything. When you're writing something like this, you want to look at your own reactions to it as well as other people's reactions.

Nikki's heroine is Nina Hartley. Are you a fan? I don't really know much about Nina Hartley. I'm not a great consumer of porn. I know some people in the sex industry in London, and they were very helpful when I was researching. I know who Nina Hartley is, and I think she's an empowering figure to a certain kind of woman.

What movies did you see? I watched a lot of Ben Dover's stuff, which is kind of interesting, because it's amateurs that are having sex with professional male shaggers: just these horny women who want to give it a go. A friend gave me a lot of German stuff, which is hilarious. I just loved the acting. The German guys are like [listlessly] "Ja, is good, ja is gooood."

I haven't seen any German or Scottish amateur porn...Scottish amateur porn! That would be great!

What would Scottish amateur porn look like? It would be filled with love handles and beer guts and false teeth. [pause] And that's just the women.

What's the sickest thing you encountered? Well, I didn't want to get into all the farmyard things, with sheepdogs and whatever. But that Annabelle Chong [gangbang] video — it's like one hundred men in a minute, it's like Record Breakers, and it's more about the performance of sex rather than real sex. There's an element to the whole thing like, "I'm a nasty bitch, and I can suck as many cocks as I want." There's something fucking ugly about that.

It's no different from schadenfreude TV — the "my boyfriend's having an affair" shows — where you bring on the people who are having an affair, have them shout at each other and strip them down to nothing. It's the same process.

How did you want to deal with the traditional feminist criticisms of porn? Forty percent of porn consumers are women, and porn is very different now. There are more varied dialogues and narratives. It's very difficult, for example, for traditional feminists like Catherine Mackinnon and Andrea Dworkin to look at, say, girl-on-girl porn for a lesbian market. How does that fit into the argument? How does gay porn fit into men's exploitation of women?

I have some respect for that traditional feminist position, but porn is too diverse and wide-embracing to be fit into that narrow paradigm, although that is important, and it comes out in the book as well. If you're Nikki, you can be as radical a porn star as you like, but if you've got Sick Boy holding the purse strings and the camera, you end up another capitalist product in the marketplace.

Coke replaces heroin as the drug of choice in the book. Cultural reflection or personal preference? I didn't have any real thing for heroin. As far as the characters go, I think they've been through the heroin thing, the HIV epidemic and the number of people who've OD'd, and they've gotten over that. But part of the reason is economics. Coke has come crashing down in price. There's a massive drinking culture in Scotland, and coke gives you superhuman drinking powers. You can stay up way past your bedtime. During the punk era, speed was the original drug of choice. You get bad comedowns from doing speed, but with coke, you can binge and have less of a problem.

In what ways is porn the heroin of this decade? It's this capitalist product. Demand always exceeds supply, demand seems to be limitless. I think it's similar in that way. I think ultimately everything's an advert for coke. You're selling a drug buzz you don't actually get from that product. So you'll find another product where you do get that buzz. Everyone has become a commodity.

In the book there's that line: In Britain, we like to see people getting fucked. As opposed to actually fucking? Yeah. I think that's true in America as well, but certainly in Britain — everything in the culture is founded on class war, basically, this class antagonism, this new kind of jealousy and hatred. And people really do like to see other people get their comeuppance. It's like a national sport in a way, you know? You see it in these Pop Idol programs. You feel sorry for the ones who get ritually humiliated, and then you actually feel sorry for the ones who win. They can do no wrong for a while, but you can just hear people behind them, sharpening their knives.

The title of thefilm — Seven Rides for Seven Brothers — is fairly inspired. What's your favorite porn title? Um . . . there's a great one I can't remember. German titles have like fifteen fucking letters. It's one big word, and you can see "tits" and "fuck" in there, but the Germanic versions. The Germans were fucking made for porn. They're just so devoid of expression, when they try to go for it — ah is good — there's something so fucking unsexy about them. The technicians come in, they try to inject a bit of warmth and humanity into it, and it ends up looking like Benny Hill.

Ever had any run-ins with inanimate objects? Nah, I think they're horrible things, these blow-up dolls. It's really weird to think how anybody could actually be that desperate to want to use one of those things. Even a fucking chair is sexier. I'd rather rub myself up against the bar.

So is reading the Scottish vernacular any easier for Scots? No. It's purely because you're not used to seeing words on the page like that. I actually don't know why, um, I seem to be doing a lot better than I was in the States. My last one sold better than the previous one. I was in Boston and 450 people showed up to hear me read. I don't understand why people can, um, persist. Why is it suddenly, America is interested in this? I think that culture's so easy to consume these days; people want to make an effort sometimes. They want someone to challenge them. That's the best theory I've been able to come up with.

Are you more of a realist or a satirist? I think I'm much more of a satirist than a realist, because fiction, by nature, is false. It's not a realistic process. I think what people mistake for realism is people writing about cultures that aren't represented in fiction. Somebody living in a council flat isn't any more or less real than someone living in a big place in Notting Hill. Basically, fiction is written by the rich for the rich. Especially in Britain. Every character is the same in British fiction, they're all essentially James Bond. Money's never an issue. You can't say that about ninety-nine percent of the people in the world.

Is there a moral here? I always try to write about characters who behave really badly to other people and are self-destructive. I try to make out consequences of that behavior on themselves and the people around them. I'm not interested in writing about a serial killer who just pops into people's lives and destroys them and moves on. You don't know anything about the character. It's based on that notion that evil can never come in a human form. To me, evil always comes in a human form. I'm not interested in writing about bogeymen.

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© 2002 Michael Martin and hooksexup.com.