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'I’ve always admired Timothy Willis Sanders’s ability to walk the line between the commonplace and the fantastic, within the frame of the everyday. So many authors either overwrite or dumb down their characters’ speech until you might as well be watching reality television. Timothy Willis Sanders bucks that trend, as you might have noticed when we published “You Have A Crush On Kells,” a story that somehow parses the bizarre persona of R. Kelly with that of a young man obsessing over a girl he meets while working the ticket window of a movie theater into something somehow unlike any story I’ve read before. How did he make the words: “You remind me of my jeep / I want to ride it” carry actual emotional weight?
'Much of Sanders’s power comes from the way he wields unvarnished thought. His narration often meanders between non-sequitur observations that most writers would keep to themselves and clear, declarative impressions of people and places that don’t necessarily contribute to any concrete plot goal, but at the same time provide a unique ambient tone. By way of example, here’s a patently Sanders trio of sentences: ‘Matt parked the Isuzu Trooper. He thought, “My SUV,” and pictured George W. Bush saying, “Terrorism.” He stared at the Isuzu logo on the steering wheel and thought, “One term president. Or everything is over for humanity.”’ For once, I understand. There is something made apparent about existence simply through pairing cultural detritus with emotional tone, the redundancy of having to go on being a person every day surrounded by whatever you are surrounded by, looking for meaning.
'
Matt Meets Vik, coming out this month from Civil Coping Mechanisms, is Sanders’s first novel, and his fullest realization thus far of the modes of parsing such realities. Essentially the story of a blossoming relationship and the complications between humans inherent therein, again it works in a way no other realistic novel could, mashing up considerations of communication, food, existence, pornography, fast food, drugs, the internet, art, money, and countless other themes all in a voice by turns as even, honest, earnest, and hilarious as a reader could ask for. As always, it’s less about what happens as it is about how it’s told, and to me there’s no one else speaking quite like Tim Sanders.'
-- Blake Butler, ViceTimothy Willis Sanders
Matt Meets VikCivil Coping Mechanisms'As I was reading
Matt Meets Vik (and long after I’d finished), I couldn’t get the voice of ‘Matt’ out of my head, like it gave my inner monologue extra-charming-sounding subwoofers. Everything I did felt funnier and more important. There are only a few books that get in my head the way
Matt Meets Vik has. This is one of my favorite books. I didn’t want it to end. I can see myself reading this many times.'
-- Megan Boyle'Timothy Willis Sanders has replaced the need for food, water, and sleep with his literary genius.
Matt Meets Vik> True love, world peace.'
-- Mira GonzalezExcerpt![]()
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'Anna’s boyfriend got his head blown off over five dollars.
'We walk along the bridge where it happened, carrying a two-liter filled to the brim with various parts of our collective mother’s liquor cabinets. We swig and sway, we pass it along as if it were a secret, each pulling a cheek full, swishing it around, gulping loudly. We wipe our mouths on our arms. We do not say a word.
'We walk along the same bridge where that one girl’s tit fell out of her shirt, where the boys threw her trapper-keeper homework in the river. We remember the way the girl looked at us crookedly, as if to say she didn’t want to go with the boys that afternoon or that maybe she did and didn’t understand why we were interrupting their go-ahead, their green light.
'Across the bridge, down the street, is the church filled to the brim with blubbering people trying to forfeit their denial for a piece of understanding. We will all die here the brick building suggests, we will all end up this way. We hang back across the street, lingering, pulling weeds from the edge of the street the way we saw men on the side of the highway do, their green reflectors on the backs of their knees glowing in the headlights at dusk. They are always unshaven.
'Anna’s boyfriend’s head fell apart like the Zapruder film, one piece slid backwards, one piece look liked it splayed across his girlfriend’s dress. If we could play the thirty seconds over and over again, we would see he was smiling and the blood didn’t come for a breath. His girlfriend would look like she was in the moment between laughter and tears and if the moment was on mute, we wouldn’t know the difference. Here is a mouth wide open and filled with future—a tooth for each year of life, a tooth for each child birthed to term, birthed at all.'
-- Katie Jean ShinkleKatie Jean Shinkle
Our Prayers After the FireBlue Square Press'When I finished reading
Our Prayers After the Fire I saw that my fists were clenched tight. I'd been trying to grab a fistful, punch my way in. I wanted to get inside this book, figure out how it did what it did. I felt grateful and jealous, two of my favorite emotions when reading. Now my fists are open, my palms out. Katie Jean Shinkle is a writer who makes you beg for more, more, more.'
-- Lindsay Hunter'
Our Prayers After the Fire's exquisite discontinuation lays waste to the tired turns of conventional fiction. Every sentence is a wonder here, every gesture is fresh, and Katie Jean Shinkle has given us a book that's as wacky, consecrated, and as unsettling as a fever.'
-- Paul Lisicky'Katie Jean Shinkle performs extraordinary feats of emotional and narrative funambulism in
Our Prayers After the Fire. Her linguistic high-wire dexterity is gorgeous and devastating in equal measure. It is, in fact, the painful deadpan beauty of the prose that will knock you to your knees and allow you to feel things you may never have felt. Prepare to be happily shattered.'
-- Kellie WellsExcerptsMonsterThe Loch Ness Monster Had A Baby! the front cover of the supermarket rag says and we scream and scream and scream THE LOCHNESS MONSTER HAD A BABY and we are so happy and we say WE CAN’T BELIEVE IT, THE LOCHNESS MONSTER HAD A BABY and Mother says, girls. Mother says you are shrieking like girls. Mother says stop it, both of you. BUT WE CAN’T BELIEVE IT, THE LOCHNESS MONSTER IS HAVING A BABY.
We cannot shake the excitement of the cover of the supermarket rag, we are constantly thinking about it, we obsess over it.
In school, we pretend that the bare wall on the south side of the room is bare because the teacher is waiting for the corpse of the Loch Ness monster to be brought back and hung. We would be able to touch it, examine the beast for every subject. Spell M-O-N-S-T-E-R. See the trachea? The dorsal fin? Where is Scotland? 10 million sightings plus 5 times 20 million trillion is? Every single subject reigned supreme by the corpse of the Loch Ness monster hanging where “A Good Attitude is A+” currently hung, a caterpillar with a smile hanging out of an apple at the end.
The smoke is rising, is sinking and its making it harder to breathe outside. We will all have evacuate soon. We imagine the smoke coming from smokestack where the Loch Ness monster and it’s baby, like veal, are being smoked to feed us all.
We imagine the parade through downtown when the men bring back the corpses for processing to the smokehouses, our father and brother and mother at the beginning, dragging the giant faces down the street, blank eyes and slime skin.
Days Like TheseWe walk to the beach as a family, to the water as a family. We link arms and we hold breaths together, here we walk as a family, this is a family, look at us.
We are careful when we reach the shore to not let go of each other, as if letting go would result in us crashing like smashed porcelain, a million different ways to ourselves. As if not letting go would protect us from the ways in which we could hurt each other, letting us fall as we may.
“I cannot believe how beautiful the sky is today.” Mother says, as if she has never seen the sky before turned fall. “I cannot believe this is even real.”
We wade out into the lake to the sand bar and turn and wave and wave until our Mother waves and waves back to us. She is petting a nearby dog and talking to an old woman while Father lays on his back with his towel over his eyes on the blanket.
We take down the tops of our bathing suits and float on top of the water when no one is looking. We wade out until we cannot touch the bottom, and then some more.
The water looks as though it will never let us leave, as if it will hold us captive into the evening and we will feel fish and seaweed and things around our ankles and we will have nothing to hold on to but each other. We watch the horizon sink in and tuck itself and tumble itself, over and over again, a cosmetic uroborus of cloud-cover and color-cover. In the distance, there is pink only for a moment.
We wish for everyday to be as this one. We wish to the water, to the air, to the sky, to the sand. We wish for Father to hold Mother’s hand and laugh so easily. We wish for Mother to wave and wave and wave, to not forget about us.
Kept CuriositiesThe waves, our Mother says, will kill us. She wraps bricks with duct tape around our thighs and tells us to say hello to the moon as we walk the dirt road to the shore, the apple trees dropping and curtseying, and they are shaking and we are shaking with our bricks drooping, ripping hair, ripping skin.
The waves, our Mother says, are too high tonight. We each hold her hand on either side, we are stumbling and we are crying and we are moving too fast for our feet but she is strong and picks us up by our arms and it strains our sockets and we cry out but the water is all she hears in her ears.
O Mother, we say. No Mother, we say.
The waves, our Mother says, are much too much. We are running down the dirt road, we are running and running, we are going fast and everything is in black and white and everything is drowning. Things take on a spectrum, take on a different shape and everything threatens us. We are tripping and grabbing at trees and bushes and letting them tear at our arms and at our chests and letting them grab us, grab us.
The waves, our Mother says, are deafening. She covers her ears as she leads us to the shore, where the rocks are as tall as she is and jagged, dangerously slippery. The waves are crashing around us and the lights from the lighthouse are blinking rapidly, whispering. We are dragging our feet now. We are dragging our ankles. Mother is dragging us along the lawn, along the sand, to the rocks. She is going to throw us face first into the water.
The waves, our Mother says, are our new home. We scramble against the current, we grab a hold of the edges of rocks that are infested with zebra mussels that cut our hands. Swim, Mother says. When we thrash our legs, our knees hit the bricks just right. The duct tape is unfettered, waterproof. We thrash and thrash but nothing, nothing.
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You’re also a performance & video artist. How does all of your work intersect? Do you consider one medium (writing, performance, video) more “important” than another, or is the work you produce in each medium an extension of the other, creating a network of thematically & conceptually similar work? I’d say it’s really easy to link it all together, being familiar with it, but I’m curious as to your approach to it.Cassandra Troyan: I made a feature length film for my graduate thesis, called THE SACRIFICIAL TEMPTATION OF THE VOID: (AS NIGHT SLOWLY FALLS, WE MAKE LOVE), which could some day ideally be seen in a larger context or suite of works with THRONE OF BLOOD. These varied elements are all part of my practice at large, and the propulsive force to attempt to have a vision without trying to wrangle everything so hard that the pleasure of the confusion gets destroyed. It is also a good way to feel inadequate, or insatiable. You do all the right moves in one medium, yet they do not necessarily transfers to the knowledge or form of another. I mean this superficially and otherwise. Besides rare crossover, some people know that I make films/videos, but not about my writing or performance, or vice versa.
I often engage the negation of something like a practice of stuckness, by finding ways to let that complacency become a positive notion. Recently I was very struck by this talk of Sara Ahmed’s called “Things that get Stuck: On will, walls and willfullness”. In re-attenuating one’s self to objects and materials this practice provides the basis for a queer narrative of attachment and world-making, and as Hannah Arendt says, “the will is the organ of the future”. I see everything in my praxis as a very interwoven and complicated process of attraction and rejection. Severing and attaching the necessary pull/pulse I do several things at the same time, and it usually doesn’t feel right unless it is maddening. Before I can go to sleep at night I need to work myself into a frenzy of exhaustion if I even hope to still my compulsions. As Janey says in Kathy Acker’s
Blood and Guts in High School, “Dreams cause the vision world to break loose our consciousness. Dreams by themselves aren’t enough to destroy the blanket of dullness. The dreams we allow to destroy us cause us to be visions/see the vision world. Every day a sharp tool, a powerful destroyer, is necessary to cut away dullness, lobotomy, buzzing, belief in human beings, stagnancy, images, and accumulation.”
Much of your work seems to be about bringing a sense of gravitas to something absurd, whether it’s the horrible fucked-up reality of existence, or something as banal and pervasive as pop culture. As I am someone generally opposed to contemporary cultural referents in art (as I often find they immediately date a work or sit as shallow gimmickry), I find your use of pop culture refreshing. Your allusions & direct references aren’t the subject of any of the work, rather they pervade the word in the same way they creep into the world at large, and they speak in your work as pure fucked-up absurdity. How do you approach pop culture?CT: Pop culture is the endless circling cesspool that desecrates as it revives. As much as I feel Capitalism has destroyed the possibility of contemporary life, and how that pains me, I cannot ignore it. There is no “away”. It is the sensorial theater of the absurd. During the whole twerk-apocalypse, if you looked at google statistics for searches in the US, Miley Cyrus was trumping Syria hard, which is insane but sadly not surprising. Yet even for me there are some days where I read Al Jazeera and Huffington Post or OMG! in equal parts. This quality of seepage, or the transfer between high and low, I think Janice Lee touched on it a few days ago when she discussed Glenum’s and Klaver’s work in relation to Lauren Berlant’s ideas about the juxtapolitical. Too much seepage is toxic, and still maintains the prominence of hegemonic culture, unless it gets queered enough to complicate and disintegrate the work of commodification or the reproduction of the status quo.
Since I know you are constantly working on things, can you tell me what you’re working on right now?CT: Right now I am editing a manuscript called
Kept In Lacerated Light (KILL MANUAL) which is a combination of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, clinical trial results, operational procedures, and biblical verses. I’ve realized my project will always involve violence to some degree, but the dynamics are constantly fluctuating in terms of intensities and affective registers. I’m also writing on a longer novel-ish piece that is a sort of “cunt-up” (in reference to Dodie Bellamy, of course) of
Fifty Shades of Grey, and re-writes the work as a schizo-remapping of submission to late-Capitalism and consumption as the 21st century romantic model. In terms of film/video work, I’m working on a new series called A CURE FIT FOR A KING, which I describe as “A hysterico-environmental dreamworld set at the edges of capitalism, A CURE FIT FOR A KING, cycles through endless rabbit holes of Midwest despair and absurdity only to find further economic collapse, failure of masculinity, and the ever-present bee plight.” And I have a show next month in Malmö, Sweden with my collaborator and friend, Ola Ståhl at KRETS where we will have a multi-channel video installation and several hand-bound books as a part of interdisciplinary project that we have been working on for the past four years. The project is based in translation, immigration, opticality while exploring narratives around migration and itinerant labour from the unpublished memoirs of a Swedish immigrant in the US during the first decades of the 20th Century.
Cassandra Troyan
Kill ManualArtifice BooksWhile a young woman is receiving a bouquet of unfavorable psychiatric assessments, the voices that comprise her KILL MANUAL are dismantling the terrible machine being leveled at her. Her suicide notes and surgical records of poetry; her accounts of brutal, exhilarating experiences; her self-searing retorts to the biblically tinted advances of the rich and bored to depravity: She uses all forms at her disposal, growing in strength and violence as she struggles “just to be free / and know what that / really means.”
The sometime-narrator of KILL MANUAL anastasiasteele3577 haunts chat rooms and BDSM dating sites in search of oblivion. But oblivion hardly needs to be searched for: It’s already there. This disturbing and radical book reveals, among other things, the half-life left in the wake of ubiquitous, data-mined, robotically fabricated internet content. The world ends in exhaustion. Troyan’s piercingly felt, sampled text probes the immateriality of language. Her work is brilliant and brave.'
-- Chris Kraus''LET US PUT ON THE ARMOR OF LIGHT ;)' an unimaginable request from a poet from a nation of militarized cynicism, where the choking in the bedroom is our most authentic application to sell us back to ourselves, unmarked, very much alive. Cassandra Troyan’s amazing new book KILL MANUAL mows us down to the nub where we register just how thoroughly we have been plunged into an illusory, yet sensate world. She doesn’t flinch because she’s the poet we’ve been hurting for.'
-- CA ConradExcerptI’M THE CONSUMMATE GENTLEMAN IN EVERY SITUATION, BUT KNOW WHEN AND HOW TO BE THE NAUGHTY BAD-BOY WHEN THE TIME CALLS FOR IT. I’M A SUCCESSFUL ENTREPRENEUR, STARTING SEVERAL COMPANIES AND FINANCING THE STARTUP OF SEVERAL OTHERS. I TAKE EXCELLENT CARE OF MY HEALTH, WORK OUT AT LEAST 4 TIMES PER WEEK, EAT WELL AND DRINK ONLY SOCIALLY. I HAVE A LOT TO OFFER AND I’M LOOKING FOR SOMEONE THAT HAS A LOT TO OFFER IN RETURN, WHICH INCLUDES FRIENDSHIP, HONESTY, RESPECT, A CLEAR DIRECTION IN LIFE AND AN INCOME THAT CAN MAKE LIFE INCREDIBLY FUN AND BUY US FREEDOM. I LOVE LEARNING, ENJOY DOING MANY DIFFERENT ACTIVITIES AND FINDING NEW ADVENTUROUS EXPERIENCES – AT MINIMUM THEY INCLUDE CONCERTS, MOVIES AND MUSIC OF ALL TYPES, TRAVELING TO FAR OFF LANDS, BEACHES, MOUNTAINS, GREAT CITIES FOR LET US NOT BE WEARY IN WELL DOING: FOR IN DUE SEASON WE SHALL REAP, IF WE FAINT NOT. THE WOMAN I’M LOOKING FOR WILL HAVE FOUND COMFORT IN THE BALANCE SHE HAS ACHIEVED IN HER PHYSICAL, MENTAL AND SPIRITUAL LIFE. HEIGHT/WEIGHT PROPORTIONATE (LARGE BOOBS GETS EXTRA POINTS! BOUNTY IS ALWAYS REWARDED) ENJOYS STAYING IN SHAPE, LIKES TO MAINTAIN HER FEMININITY TAKES THAT CHORE TO LIFTED HEART, AND HAS THE BASIC CORE CHARACTERISTICS OF HONESTY, TRUST AND RESPECT. WITH A GLASS HALF FULL PHILOSOPHY ABOUT LIFE AND MINIMAL SARCASM. PLEASE BE MID-THIRTIES OR OLDER, LIVE CLOSE TO DALLAS COUNTY, WITH TIME TO MEET A COUPLE OF TIMES A WEEK. PART OF THE MAGIC OF MEETING IN-PERSON IS DISCOVERING MORE ABOUT THE WHO’S IN FRONT OF YOU. IF YOU HAVE A SENSE THAT YOU’D LIKE TO MEET, LET’S TAKE THE STEP RIGHT AWAY AND PLACE YOUR BOUNDS TEST YOUR CORE TO ME. EMAILS, TEXTS AND PHONE CONVERSATIONS CAN NEVER REPLACE THE CHEMISTRY TWO PEOPLE HAVE WHEN THEY MEET. UPDATE: I WANT SOMEONE TO SHARE MY SUCCESS WITH, BUT DON’T WANT TO BE CONSIDERED JUST A WALLET. IF YOU’RE EXCLUSIVELY AFTER THE $ THEN PLEASE DON’T CONTACT ME.
We are in your white bed full of light drinking white wine and it is dark. I balance the base of the glass on the side of my naked hip and look at the marble spa tub in the bathroom. There is a flushed gleam bouncing off the mirror, fainting exhaling ebbing back into the room and I ghost the smoke a reprise a remorse of sighing and feeling nothing but beam.
A 12 minute Bob Dylan sound is playing that neither of us has ever heard before. You remember him in a way I do not know because you are twice my age yet younger than my father. We discuss Blonde on Blonde and I feel nostalgia for methamphetamines. I suck the last cull from my glass and extend to re-cloak. You remove the ropes forming a harness around my chest and the bites stretch past plumper times into the skinny of need. Only moments ago I saw the bed from an angle of above and the bloodrush had all fluids clammering to head heart lungs into bird bath of swollen precautions my mouth a home gutter for all impossible feelings and membrane flows the pussy knows the path to other fragrant holes. A squeal releases as you finally unclamp all openings and protrusions.
In the kitchen you feed me strawberry red grapefruits and slip chocolate into my tongue slot. Melt meets vintage melt. Sop a plate of olive oil into new bread. Yes take and know that this is special and I know my attention to authenticity and green slips freshly pressed in Tuscany. No tart no now now and most people don’t know they are actually drinking corned canola. We talk of your children divorce and how you’ve never even held a gun. I feel embarrassed by my Midwest gun lust and the need for constant violence identity erected out of the low plains of nowhere peyote crunching bareback horse frolic grip a mane and pistol and try not to blow your brains stupid. Try not to swing wide stranger’s car doors on country highway single lane pavement nothing to acquire nothing to lose. Slide raw in the earth’s gut roots and damp clay let a truck defeat difference and we drink blank drink varicose into another day closer to death swells and plump ride incumbent.
We make plans to go to a hockey game this weekend and wonder if I will have to drink beer. Fantasize about bringing martinis in a thermas desert dry filthy cloudy. Perhaps instead some pills will or at least a good roofie I could never turn down an unconscious flow. Watch the ice glides snear and the pucks slants psychotic. A frozen glow emanates while the warms slides smoothes in corridors of sinew, muscle caves and cracks. I watch you get hard really hard during a blunt crosscheck and I know we are easy implements. That khaki crotch sweat spot bleeds a bred of indecent need as I stretch my leg out and plant a platform heel into the juice and pump it.
(cont.)Beware of a Holy WhoreINCANTATION HOUR TRAILERWHERE THE SUN NEVER SHINES____________________
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'Justin Taylor is back again and is at his most convincing, with new stories conveying the sex-charged and privileged disappointment of middle-class 20-somethings. If each American generation is marked by its young adulthood (beatniks, hippies, yuppies, slackers), Taylor mirrors a cynical chill in today’s postgraduates.
'In style and content, Taylor’s tightly crafted stories have been compared to a wide range of esteemed writers, including Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson and Miranda July. The quick transitions and grim breeziness of the book’s title story, “Flings” bring to mind two other classics in alienation literature: “The Way We Live Now” by Susan Sontag in 1986, and Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel, “Gen-X.”
'Though his characters may be aimless, Taylor retains a steely, self-serious control — there is irony, but not humor. And his writing is refreshingly free of the smirk and snark that has come to nearly define contemporary fiction.
'Taylor often successfully captures a whole demographic in a few words. After college graduation, a couple go “hard-core domestic” by subletting a house in the suburbs, and the man in this pairing is soon guilty of a “craven, mealy-hearted note.” This same man, in a separate story remembering his 16th summer, notes a friend turning into a “poseur delinquent.”
'Some of these stories move into other ages and financial situations. Two different tales in Florida follow Carol, an insomniac 72-year-old widow in a retirement apartment who will not be consoled, and Mike, a wealthy lawyer with a new girlfriend the age of his adult children. “Saint Wade” is a quietly harrowing tale of an unemployed Alabama divorcee redeemed by his connection to a single mother waitressing at P.F. Chang’s. They reside in what Wade calls the Hardluck Arms: “You couldn’t call them apartments, quite, but ‘rooms’ seemed sad, somehow, so I went with units.”
'Insomniac Carol, for being the oldest character in the book, may best sum up a younger generation’s ennui. As she watches TV into the night, “All the commercials are for tax attorneys and prescription drugs. Grinning AARP members in tracksuits chat about their pills for their bladders, memory, blood sugar, skin, pain, and sleep —everything managed and nothing solved.”'
-- St. Louis Post DispatchJustin Taylor
FlingsHarper Perennial'The acclaimed author of
Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever and
The Gospel of Anarchy makes his hardcover debut with a piercing collection of short fiction that illuminates our struggle to find love, comfort, and identity.
'In a new suite of powerful and incisive stories, Justin Taylor captures the lives of men and women unmoored from their pasts and uncertain of their futures.
'A man writes his girlfriend a Dear John letter, gets in his car, and just drives. A widowed insomniac is roused from malaise when an alligator appears in her backyard. A group of college friends try to stay close after graduation, but are drawn away from—and back toward—each other by the choices they make. A boy’s friendship with a pair of identical twins undergoes a strange and tragic evolution over the course of adolescence. A promising academic and her fiancée attempt to finish their dissertations, but struggle with writer’s block, a nasty secret, and their own expert knowledge of Freud.
'From an East Village rooftop to a cabin in Tennessee, from the Florida suburbs to Hong Kong, Taylor covers a vast emotional and geographic landscape while ushering us into an abiding intimacy with his characters,
Flings is a commanding work of fiction that captures the contemporary search for identity, connection, and a place to call home.'
-- Harper CollinsExcerptGregory's YearMarch and there’s dirty snow humped on the windowsills, still; sidewalk’s mucked, sky’s been the color of dust for days. He’s shaving his head over the bathroom sink, weekly ritual some years now, ever since that first spot blossomed high in the back. He remembers how the pads of his fingers felt when they first found the smooth patch, warm and soft, and how he thought, Shit no not gonna be that guy. So instead he’s this guy, whoever this guy is, clean-scalped, boasting a thick beard, well-groomed, hazelnut, he likes to think but would never say. A well-groomed beard is paramount, believes Gregory who when he meets new people says “Please, call me Greg” but doesn’t mean it. The full name is what he likes, its fine whiff of archaism, bouquet of saints and England, popes and Greece; the two “g” sounds granting clangorous passage toward the open and humming “ory” with its quick high finish like young wine or the inflatable slide you ride to escape from the burning plane. But nobody calls him Gregory except his mother, and he rarely calls her at all. So Greg, then: a higher-up in the lower echelon of a medical copy-writing firm in far West Chelsea. Sometimes it seems like science fiction that one blue train line should connect that neighborhood to the part of Bed-Stuy where he’s been living for—what is it, two years now? Two years. Merciful Mary. Fucking hell.
In April he stops at his corner coffee shop for an afternoon latte, asks the barista out on a date. Not only does she say yes, but over riojas it turns out she doesn’t just work at The Grind Shack, she owns it. Used to have one just like it, successful, in Charlottesville, Virginia, unless she said State College, PA. Anyway, she sold that place and with proceeds bought this one because she wanted to have the experience: city life. Audrey says business is booming but she never imagined she’d hate New York the way she does. She expected an adjustment, sure, but up all night crying? Never. Says she’s wolf-whistled at by corner drunks, wants to see a field sometime, may be suffering PTSD from a train grope.
“What can you do?” he says.
“I’m looking for a buyer,” she says. He’d meant the question rhetorically—hadn’t, in fact, thought it could be taken any other way.
He has these great big bear hands and loves them, favorite thing about himself, easily, the way a double cheeseburger looks a little lost when held in them, or the neck of his old Fender Strat. Proud, too, of the arms they’re mounted on, whose size is half gift and half result of honest effort (he’d looked into a gym near his office; joined the Y near his apartment instead). He’s in the bathroom lathering his head. It’s May and already most days the mercury’s hitting eighty-five by noon. The stripper—one of four strangers he shares this narrow two-story house with—is banging on the door for the second time. She wants to get in here to do her own shaving, plus mascara, body glitter, diaphragm. She’s running late, she says; the car from the club is going to be here any minute. His eyes are red, cheeks round, puffy, hairy, and high.
Everything about his job disgusts him. He engineers the jargon that lies the company out of whatever the studies they’ve done have proven more or less unequivocally. The raw data is enough to keep you up half the night mulching your fingernails, choking back bile and fright. Ergo face puff, ergo eyes. He buys Žižek books by the pound and wine by the gallon. Žižek and Audrey, he feels, are the only people who understand him. Zombies his way through the workweek with a bottomless coffee mug—I’m always on drugs, he thinks at the mirror, Always trying to go faster or else slow down, sharper or more dulled, my fingers a beige blur over the beige keyboard, up and down my beige girlfriend; if I were someone else looking at myself at my desk I’d see a slack face bathed in monitorlight, dull. He heats the razor by running it under the faucet. He touches the thin hot steel to his head, pulls.
(cont.)Justin Taylor reads at In The Flesh Reading SeriesJustin Taylor reads at the June 2011 NYC Sunday Salon*
p.s. Hey. ** gucciCODYprada, Codester! Hey, man! You still loving the hell (or heaven) out of where you are? Run into any pirates? We're just tying up a last post-shoot knot in the next day or two, and then I'll be free to read, write, and god knows what, and your thang is number 1. So, imminently. Tons of love from the so-called city of love! ** David Ehrenstein, Thank you for not suggesting that I replace Geoffrey Rush in the next 'Pirates' movie. Judy and Rivette would have been an interesting couple. ** Sypha, Hi. Oh, right, the technical matters thing, I heard about that. That's kind of cool. Not cool enough to get me to read Clancy, mind you, although DFW's tagging of a Clancy book among his faves is mightily mysterious and alluring. Probably not enough, though. Oh, me, I'm all of the mind that you should read whatever feeds you. Any type of source can do it. I love or at least 'love' blockbuster movies and junk food, etc. Mind over matter, as they say. Cool about the final stuff getting to RS. 2015 is mere months away, so, if that's the 'worst comes to worst', it's not so worst, you know? ** Thomas Moronic, If you find anything especially interesting about Mike18's current whatever, pass it on. I often wonder what happened to Klark. He was kind of the reigning Russian twink porn star for over a decade, and would pretty much take any porn job, no matter how odd or cameo-like, but he seems to have finally taken his leave. The Kevin Drumm post would be superb, if you end up having the time. No, no relationship between the novel and the Flags post, as far as I can tell, but I'm not sure if I would be able to tell. We'll see. What you wrote made a bunch of sense, yeah. And it's a thrill to have someone absorb the post with the intricacy with which I made and intended it, thank you! I've never eaten mooncake. Want to. Maybe I'll go try to score some before the holiday is completely over. ** Kier, Thanks, buddy! A great day for you! Awesome! That monster potato thing sounds incredibly cool. My mind just tried to puzzle together your conjoined triplets and had most lovely time during the attempt. An Iceage shirt! Let me see it once it's designed and transferred. My Monday wasn't bad. Uh, Zac and I had a Skype meeting thing with our German producers. It was fine, no problems at all. They want us to have a rough cut ready by December, but I'll be fairly amazed if we can manage it, but don't tell them that, ha ha. Then we further planned our Iceland trip, which we'll try to finalize today. We organized a little party for this coming Friday for/with the cast and crew of our film, and hopefully enough of them will be around and into the idea to make it happen. And we hung out, which was bliss as always. I did some writing, blog post-making, this and that. It was pretty okay. Now it's Tuesday again. How was yours? ** Steevee, I hope the switching health insurance plans is as easy as something like that can be. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Cameron and crew seem to be pulling out the big guns. Scare tactics so often work, disgustingly enough, so I guess I'll be amazed if the 'no's' don't win. I hope it stays a nail biter and posits a wild surprise. Oh, cool, about your interview. I'll watch it in a bit.
Everyone, _B_A aka Ben Robinson is interviewed in video form right here about his thoughts and knowledge re: Yuck 'n' Yum's upcoming zine fair. Check it the heck out. ** Mark Gluth, Hi, Mark. Oh, you know, my pleasure, of course. I have friends who are young enough to be my grandkids, yikes, and no small number of them, which is so great. Excited for the pieces of the birthday post, and I'll flex my fingers in anticipation. Hooray! Love, me. ** Hyemin K, Hi. Oh, thank you so much! I was kind of happy with that post, I must admit. I hope the writing you got back to went extremely well. ** Keaton, Hey, man! Nice quote. I thought I had found every quote ever about flags while I was doing my post research, but I missed that one. ** Misanthrope, You would assume that. And, heck, your assumptions could be correct. But what are the odds? Not so good, logically. I know, I do want to see 'GotG', and I think it's still playing here somewhere. I second what Sypha said about your family, ha ha. Not that I've ever seen a lick of 'Honey Boo Boo'. Remind me never to accept a kind offer by you to crash on your couch. Was that Biebs? See, I didn't even realize that. Shit. ** Bill. Hi. I know, flags, skulls, what else is there of intrigue in the world? A few things, I guess. Oh, your tasters for those new works were so fucking good! I watched each of them about 15 times. You are kind of a god, Mr. Hsu, admit it. ** I think that's it. Okay, up there are four books I not only managed to read during the little breaks in the film project work but also found the head space to love. I recommend each and every one of them to you highly. See you tomorrow.
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