FANZINE: Recently, you did readings in France in front of various still images: abducted children, television news, etc. I've seen a few of the CD-ROMs from where these images were pulled. Are they specifically companions to Comfort & Critique?

PS: The films you saw were actually companions to the book that had just been released in France–Au Fait, which is a translation of Tick. I have quite a few of those badly edited collections, I tend to call it a system, and they apply to any work I've done. They inform the books but they shouldn't be seen as anything complete. I struggled a great deal with explaining their personal context in France.

FANZINE: Why is the textual portion of the book named after Katrina Kassel?

PS: If there is a reissue of the book––without the photos––then I wouldn't include that title. This is something I'd like to see in the future. But this edition is a necessarily small amount without any legal haggling or concern. That's why the photos are included and why the print number is so small. Katrina and Sarah were names that I thought the original information could come wrapped in. The text functions in much the same way as the photos do. And I think Katrina Kassel is an extremely important subject in Sarah Payne's short life and Sara and Michael's longer one.

FANZINE: In the book, you posit a working definition of pornography: "It's that severe but specific reduction that creates the definition of pornography.... It is purely what I do to an image. Or a fucking act that I only run through my head. It is the limitations you accept..."

PS: It's impossible to apply grand definitions to pornography because the intense precision of individual taste is central. This is why laws and the necessary text on pornography are so loud and popular. It allows different sides to establish self-serving moral grounds but never a concrete or unified answer. One defines pornography for oneself only. The act of masturbation wouldn't, obviously, qualify everything as pornography but rather what one is looking for in pornography. Just that these objects are capable of being used as pornography. I've seen far too much of this so-called "transgressive" pornography that is completely defined by the ridiculous arguments of those who seek to vilify printed words and pictures. The ones that bask in their naked freedom and flaunted spirituality are just as ugly, just as obscene, as the ones who constantly beg you to watch out for their children's future.

FANZINE: Toward the end of Comfort & Critique there's the hysteria at Paulsgrove and the idea that perhaps Roy Whiting didn't fuck Sarah. I don't feel like you need to humanize the predators because they already feel human to me. Was that your intention when you introduced this information into the book?

PS: No. Not at all. I think it's important to understand that he probably didn't fuck her not because it makes him a more human or conflicted soul but because it defines what little he may have wanted.

FANZINE: In the book you also write: "see if you can title it without making a headline about the havoc of loss and the strength that rises from despair." Is Comfort & Critique an attempt at that headline?

PS: Yes, in a much larger sense, I think it is.