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SK: I had a fantasy, when I was thinking about how to conduct this interview—perhaps I shouldn't play my hand, though I guess it's too late—of trying to come up with an Oulipian structure based on, say, wine appellations in the Loire Valley.

HM: I have a performance piece about a nonexistent Loire wine that I'm going to do again in June. It starts with a description of a period in the 100 Years War, when the British are being driven out of Normandy. There's something that's always been unexplained, which is that there were an enormous number of skirmishes near a village of no strategic value whatsoever. I start the performance by saying that I have the answer to this quandary: next to the village was a hill, in an area known for its red wines, where an extraordinary white wine was grown.

SK: In Normandy?

HM: In the southern part of Normandy, getting close to the Loire. So I start explaining how this wine was made, what grapes went into it, how there was a grape used that was never used elsewhere in the Loire, mixed with Sauvignon Blanc. And then I say, "To better explain what I'm describing, I've brought along a bottle of this wine." And I put it on the table and open it.

SK: What is it?

HM: The last time I did it, it was a very good Bourgogne Aligoté. As I started to drink it I described my sensations, saying, "This way you will be able to participate in the quality of this wine," and I made the usual ornate comments on its nose. Then I went on describing the story of the 100 Years War, and then a little bit more of what the wine was like, and little by little, the written lecture, which alas I've lost, began to be corrupted by Oulipian methods as I got drunk.

SK: In other words, despite yourself?

HM: Yes. And it was terribly difficult to read, because I had to read these extremely exact deformations of language while I was in fact drinking an awful lot of wine. It had people falling out of their chairs laughing. The more I had to drink, the more careful I had to be, because I wasn't making just any kind of changes to the words, I was making very specific ones, so I had to be able to articulate them. I'm performing it again it at a colloquium for translators on drunkenness. Aside from that, and the story "Country Cooking from Central France," I don't know that food figures so conspicuously in my writing.

AH: Well, there is a place where both food and drink figure prominently. In The New Tourism, the poem "Crème Brûlée."

SK: In fact they're found all throughout The New Tourism. The "Haikus Before Sleep" are full of drinking.

AH: And in "Crème Brûlée," food is keeping you at the table and drink is keeping you away, or food is keeping you here and drink is keeping you elsewhere. You want to be in both places at once.

HM: That's true. And with regards to the haiku, they were a nocturnal diary, so naturally dinner was more prominent in my memory than breakfast. And then there are the recipe poems that make up "Butter and Eggs: a didactic poem," which are based on very simple recipes: how to make a poached egg, or how to make a boiled egg.

AH: But I want to return to the poem "Crème Brûlée," in which you're sitting down at a restaurant and you're having a crème brûlée and some wine—I can't remember what kind of wine it is.

HM: I say that it's "of a denomination you don't have to puzzle your head over." I'd also like to say, to turn the thing around, there's a relationship between eating and reading. That is to say, I have nothing against electronic readers, but I love books, because it seems to me it's like opening something up, you don't know what's there, but you plunge your nose into it. It's a very physical experience. Even if the book doesn't suck your cock, you can eat its pussy. Isn't that your line, "I licked her pussy, she sucked my cock."

SK: No, it's from Shawn Vandor's story "Life Within a Life."

HM: It's a great line! But reading really is like entering into the physical unknown. That's why the book will always be preserved. I can imagine that digital readers are great for traveling salesmen, if they read. It occurs to me that there's another major food-related project of mine that you probably don't know about. After the tenth year anniversary of

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