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'Dear Francis Bean Cobain,
'I like your grotesque, skateboard-influenced art. And I like your tweets. Like when you said you were going to a suicide party in your dad’s pajamas. Often you link to 90s music videos that I don’t remember. Like one with the group Placebo. I don’t like the song but the video is evocative of a certain grotesque sensibility – legs in a bathtub, mouths like bullet holes, the all-around insect-like take on anatomy. It makes me think about how the grotesque is almost always about gender. And it makes me think about how much the gurlesque aesthetics owe to not just 90s alternative music videos but also to David Lynch and his saturated rooms and bodies.
'Have you ever read the poems of South Korean poet Kim Yideum? She has this amazing poem that rewrites the fairytale of Blue Beard as a collapsing woman. At one point this female Blue Beard says:
'“Well, stop sending me depilators and mouse traps. And I wouldn’t know what to do with a wig crawling with lice, either. Fruits cut and arranged, all this trash, I’ve had enough of it. Don’t light candles or burn incense at my bedside. It will kill me. And don’t come bringing things like bundles of flowers. Dead roses said it: “‘You are beautiful.’”
'As someone who wore your dad’s pajamas to a suicide party, you may recognize the beautiful interpenetration of artifice and anatomy. The depilators (I don’t know what that is, but based on my Internet research it must have something to do with hair-removal) and the mousetrap are strangely equated: to remove hair with a machine is like catching mice. She has no need for them, either because she wants to grow her hair out or because there are no mice in her body… Or because the mouse is running rampant… She wouldn’t know what to do with an infested wig either, the artificial hair is crawling with the too-real lice of real hair. It’s all about sex of course…
'She is beautiful because of dead roses, which reminds me of that great song by the Rolling Stones: “Send me dead flowers on my wedding.” The addressee of that song – the “queen of the underground” with her fashion and her men and her grave, dead from artifice – is gurlesque.
'The last time I met Kim Hyesoon – in Seoul, drinking sweet, milky wine – she told me to befriend Yideum because, she said (translated by her daughter the brilliant artist Fi Jae Lee) “she is the same as you.” But I had already met Yideum. On my first night in Seoul she had gotten me drunk and helped me back to my room. When I vomited that night I thought about make-up and the live sea-worms I had been served for dinner. In a dream that night, I dreamt that Yideum was Death. It was one of those brilliantly old-fashioned allegorical dreams. Like “Come on over and do the twist.” The walls were smeared with make-up.
'Have you ever read Kim Hyesoon’s poetry? It’s my favorite poetry. For example, “Lady Phantom,” where the speaker kills someone in a hotel room and then hits the town telling jokes about it. It ends: “I’m anxious/I can’t stand myself/I who am getting boisterous/I need to grow my fire hair again/I need to go out and kill myself again.” (Translated by Don Mee Choi.) The ending reminds me of the ending of that Chelsea Minnis’s poem “Primrose,” which ends with the speaker shooting “gentlemen rapists” so that the blood forms corsages and corsage of blood. And I guess that reminds me of Sylvia Plath’s infamous “I rise with my red hair and eat men like air.”
'I’d like to see your “lime-green hair.” Even if it looks like you went into “a chlorinated pool.” I love pools because they always make me nauseous. The chlorine but also the hair and skin floating around. The pool eats itself. Once I had a vision of a swimming pool made of cattle bones. It was like the hotel in The Shining or Twin Peaks: built on the bones of native americans. Genocidal hotels.
'The Sylvia Plath quote you tweeted on Feb 25 – “Everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end. “ – where is that from?
'It sounds like it’s from The Bell Jar. That novel always makes me think about my friend Tom who was institutionalized because he was constantly trying to kill himself because he kept thinking he was gay (he was bad at suicide, once he tried to smash his head against a bathroom wall, not very artful). Once he got out I went to see him in Montana, where he was going to college. I went into his room and he was jumping up and down on his bed screaming “Fuck you I’m not going to do what you tell me” along with Rage Against the Machine. Then he got down from the bed because he wanted me to shave his head. Then he turned on PJ Harvey’s “You’ll Never Rid of Me.” It was the 90s.'
-- Johannes GöranssonKim Yideum
Cheer Up, Femme FataleAction Books'This book struck me in a very physical way. As if so many of these actions were happening inside my gut, bowels, heart twisting and stretching in the shadows of contradiction, loss, resentment, conjuration, desire.
'The poetry in this book is so much about seeking out those grotesque and creepy spaces where, despite the filth and shame, we still must reside. I think of the woman in Lee Chang Dong’s film Poetry, crying in the shower as she seeks to write a single poem as she struggles to hold on to her memory and with an unspeakable act committed by her grandson. The trauma, though not entirely hers, affects her, wraps her forcefully and though she can’t articulate why, the possibility within poetry seems like the only ghost that may save her.
'Here too, I want to ask along with the writing, why poetry? And of course this question is impossible and necessary. Why sadness? Why regret? Why forgotten? Why pain?'
-- Janice Lee, Entropy'In Kim Yideum‘s elegant and grotesque poetry, objective cool, violence and despairing megalomania all rage with the crystal-clear bitterness of vulnerability. When you read her beautiful, terrifying poems, you will go to pieces.'
-- Aase BergExcerptsThe Guitarist on the Street —"Don't come back," Mother
A woman on the street holds a guitar tightly. It's as if she would push her breast into it. She needs to sound the guitar and beg for dimes by any means necessary. She gets even more anxious when it starts raining. Since a guitar's genitals are its sound, she starts kicking her daughter.
Raindrops, clumsy in their landing, break their ankles as they touch the sidewalk. Rain crawls through the underpass. Is dragged on the ground. The guitar dangles on the violent woman's arm. There is a reason it cannot walk.
Pausing before putting a cigarette in her mouth, the woman plays with its sound. The guitar despises the woman and thus allows her. The guitar's genitals neither grow nor tremble; they have knots and strings.
There are twenty pages of newspaper and twenty-one pieces of rebar lying around in the basement. Eight hundred nautical miles of sadness, eight hundred nautical miles of hunger, and even a million miles of cockroaches are aware that growing is a sin.
The guitarist holds her daughter. As I look again, they are in the form of a guitar holding the woman. The guitar tightens its grip on the guitarist's neck. Its wrist is the wrist of an underdeveloped daughter who feels indecisive about whether to drop dead or not.
Jane Avril's mother forced her daughter to prostitute herself, and just like with guitars, there are many types of maternal instinct. The woman had the guitar by accident. The woman, together with the guitar, rolls down the staircase, falls over the guardrail, and plunges with the world. Surprisingly, some maternal instincts are just a cruel form of megalomania.
The guitar pushes the guitarist into the guitar case.
A Sealed WomanThe panties, soaked in menses, which started—earlier than the usual time of the month—while I was walking on the street. Wearing the panties that I took off from a Venus mannequin, I met up with him. Patterns of red tomatoes, the squishy seeds trickled down the crotch. The seaside motel, soaked in the smell of mudflats. The rooms' salty moaning, curses rolling on the creaking beds, curses. Vomiting the spermbugs that I struggled to swallow, I need to be plugged, even during my period, like a mannequin that finally stops feeling depressed only when sealed with a cock.
A waterbed, the billowing sea. A black whale, panting, swallows a mannequin, no, in the black stomach the mannequin is mincing the whale's heart with her plastic teeth.
In the casket of a white bathtub: through the red hole with a broken mesh strainer, jelly-like eyeballs, four of them, drain out before the bubbles. They go to the ocean, infiltrating a mammal's body, now sleek from a thousand years of erosion. The Mother that clings like tangled hair in a drainpipe is the source of the wailing that appears whenever I want to live. I want to go to the Urticate coast to follow the whales. You can go after killing me. Inside the Mother, who is already sprayed into the sea, there are hundreds, thousands of mothers in the midst of their water burial; if she lets me go, the dinner table under the sea will become amicable. So as not to surface again, I must be sealed deep in the sea bottom, like a casket.
Past the Garden of Ghost Poets#1
One day, a woman neither old nor young appears in this very place.
#2
The woman doesn’t have anything to say. If she opens her mouth, a mole-like drivel pops out and digs holes all over the lawn. She isn’t hungry, just tired. The official events take place at midnight. Nobody care about anybody.
#3
There is a bathtub in the backyard. A curtain with a drawing of a small bird drapes the tub.
#4
A woman starts lathering up the washcloth with soap. A dried-up piece of soap. The sequence is off. Stretching her arms backward, she slowly undoes her blouse buttons. I shouldn’t have bought this just for its lovely color. It’s hard to pull off the wet jeans that cling to her legs. Trying to shake off the panties wrapped around her ankles, she ends up kicking a rock. She grabs her toe, flops down and takes a deep breath. The ground is cold and the edge of the tub is also cold. To find a rubber plug for the tub, she grabs a fat giant spider’s leg and walks around beneath the flowering trees. There are no grapes or gooseberries. Then she struggles to lift the manhole-cover-sized plug and plug the drain. She lies down with her legs spread. She’s lonesome. She slowly turns on the faucet.
#5
No water comes out.
She lies in the dry tub and writes a poem.
...
#11
The abandoned daughter seeks out her mother for the same reason that a star rises in the sky.
Then what would be the reason for writing a poem?
#12
She stores away many questions about the world, setting aside her ambition to be a writer. Her life isn’t something that needs to be solved; her life just exists, somewhere beyond….Actually, she doesn’t really know.
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'DEAR RA is like 89 hyper-prose pages, stuffed with white space, though here the white space is as loaded as the floor of the Tangier hotel covered in black muck where Burroughs was discovered in a daze with the pages of NAKED LUNCH strewn all around him. These are letters to the sun god, though some might say now this god's replacement is a florescent lamp, a tanning bulb, a whoops. Göransson's text is the kind that slips past spam filters and makes you consider the dick surgery. Göransson's mind is the kind you feel breathing behind you while you're watching that slightly more filthy than usual porn download that you will delete from your web browser's history when you are finished even though no one ever looks at your web browsing history because one day motherfucker you will die.
'The most important books, I think now, are the ones that you either can't read because of where they touch, or that you can read in 30 minutes because they are so cleanly chiseled and short, to the windpipe.
'This book is still stuck in my windpipe.
'This book made Breton cry because Breton knew he never had such glimmer, and Breton is very dead.
'This book is much bigger than it feels with its slick cover and its quickburst easy-on-the eyes, and though I want it on my nightstand, the fucking thing keeps crumpling under the weight.
'I am going to open the book to a random page and quote the first line I see, because the pages of this book were cut from a rotting tree and made white enough for you to lose your eye-tint regarding, and still they have the wound layered in them enough that no matter where you are inside it, you will be infected:
'No, the interviewer asked me something about you, and 'moths' is how I replied.
'As I typed that, I accidentally typed 'mothers' at first where 'moths' is, and I felt the paint in the room around me on my face and a new McDonald's opened right down the street and everything was okay.
'DEAR RA knows more than it knows it knows, and the channels can't quite control their color.'
-- Blake ButlerJohannes Göransson
Dear RaCivil Coping Mechanisms'Back in print in a newly revised and expanded edition,
Dear Ra is an exhibition of an inimitable literary talent. The text therein is an assemblage of letters reminiscent of that daunting and delicate space where prose and poetry collide. Göransson’s cult-hit may in fact be a the sort of literary spell conjured from the ether to be as much your demise as your greatest dream. There are few genocides as important as the ones that reside in the human imagination.'
-- CCM'In
Dear Ra, we are told, among many other things, that ‘narrative equals death.’ If that is so, then Johannes Göransson’s 21st-century epistolary novel is very much alive, as it bobs and weaves through the mundane details and arcane allusions of our culture, filled with feints and jabs in all directions, warding off the threat of premature closure.
Dear Ra is sharp, funny, morbid, and deliriously (re)readable.'
-- Steven ShaviroExcerptsDear Ra,
The only man who truly can read the writing on the wall left town yesterday to pursue a career as a gold rush. The bereaved child wants to paint snatches all over your photograph, but I only have one photograph of you left and I want to keep it clean for my official history of stares. You probably wish I said "stairs" because you like that song by Modest Mouse that goes: "My heart belongs to stairs." My heart belongs to a drive-by shooting. Your heart belongs to something less melodramatic, such as a cockfight in an alleyway or a hotel where beautiful women get ready to attend a concert where the main instrument will be a cockfight. Your sleep belongs to a ship being salvaged out of the icy Baltic Sea.
My sleep has crumbs in it and sometimes it makes me dream about fascist insects, and sometimes it makes me dream about you. Just last night I woke up from a clumsy dream and wrote a poem for you. Unfortunately I wrote it in gibbered Swedish and it's hard to translate. I address you as "snapphane," a kind of guerrilla soldier in my home province in southern Sweden who continued fighting the Swedish army after it had stolen the province from Denmark. I wrote that my brain felt "hafsig." According to the dictionary this means something done in a hurry, a sloppy job, but to me it sounds more like a book with pages falling out or a shirt with the stitches coming undone.
This place is full of stitches. Somebody told the landlord I haven't been picking up my dogs' crap in the backyard. Somebody told her I watch TV all night. So far no complaints about my loud thoughts concerning “the true self” and other grotesque dance-moves invented in suburbia. Right now my brain is a dog chasing its own mouth. Right now we're toys in a game played by children who don't wash their hands. I worked as a whisper in the Santiago Stadium. I worked like a Saint in a conundrum with spokes. The tick inside my ear should be pulled out with tweezers! I blame it all on that little fellow. I tried to camp out in Death Valley but the Indians are bad this year. I blame it all on the Indians! The Indians and the ticks and the tramps and the lambs! I've forgotten how to pull the trigger!
I don't know why I'm telling you these secrets. If this is an opera the pearled ladies and shaven men will never get the smell out of their clothes. This opera has a moral about hygiene: You're it.
Little of this has anything to do with you. It's even starting to have little to do with me, and more to do with "dressed in divine hunger" and other phrases I've misheard in Bruce Springsteen songs while driving across country in a noisy truck:
I'm heading back
to the winter palace,
where we learned
to dance
a garbled dance.
You said
it reminded you
of gravel.
I said something
about your fingers.
Maybe I
compared them to mice.
Dear Ra,
You sound like a secretary at an abortion clinic. Very pleasant and understanding. I sound like a protest raging outside. Who's scared that this snappy rodeo won't last through the night? Not me, Miss Typewriter. I use an organic deodorant. I don't smoke anymore. I don't even drink. Odds are I won't wake up on a lawn without my glasses again. Odds are I won't wake up in your bed. Still I can't sleep. Must be the coffee. Could be the carp. The world is such a quick place.
Why did you ask me to star in your musical about overpopulation? Why did you cram the whole orchestra into my pit when all you wanted them to do was swallow their violins? Nobody wants to hear songs about panicking fingers or infected mouths. People just want to be told that they're good and that everything else is a conspiracy theory. I want to be good, but I may be a conspiracy. Once upon a time I had a smile, now I have a grin.
I'm waiting for my gun to tell me where I should move. Should I travel to the city of obscure film festivals? The crammed city? Sold City? Should I start calling myself Jesse? Should I collect shoe boxes? Should I give up on the Minnesota Vikings? Unfortunately I don't have a gun. Unfortunately my gun doesn't think I'm joking. Unfortunately my gun is lost in a tantrum. Unfortunately, this bed used to be an arrest. This criminal used to receive letters from girls. This foot used to break when I kicked it into couches.
Was it the eels that scared you? Or because my eyes look like fists? Did you think the cops would suspect you were a terrorist? Are you a terrorist? How would I know? I'm just a lurid lawyer stuck in a library shelf, but I am going to become the President of the United States of America. I'm going to walk to the corner store and buy some ginger ale!
I did and now I'm back! Now I have a big plastic bottle to suck on! Now I speak with the renewed enthusiasm of a child star whose career has been revived in a hilarious new comedy about child stars! Outside my corner store journalists are trying to invent a childhood that sounds strangely like a paralyzed man trying to get up in the morning.
My throat feels like a worn whip. There are spots on my skin that didn't used to be there. Poor me. What if the house burns down? What if Seattle blows up? What if I'm accused of being a cowardly madman who never killed anybody glamorous? What will I do tomorrow? The future is a woman wearing a tight skirt, and it's sliding up her thighs. Too bad my binoculars are fuzzy. I was invented by a nomad couple. My car is loaded. My neighbor is laughing.
If Petrarch is all about the longing for transcendence, then this poem is about shellshock. If Sir Philip Sydney's Astrophil and Stella is about masturbation, then this poem is about imperialism. If your name is an alternative spelling for raw, then mine is an alternative to rabies.
Dear Ra by Johannes Goransson read by Candice WuehleJohannes Göransson (Myopic Books, Chicago)10th Annual SLC Poetry Festival [Johannes Göransson]________________
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'
The Sleep Garden is a difficult book to summarize. Krusoe has never had much use for conventional storytelling, and his new novel is more concerned with themes and ideas than plot. But it's never dense or pretentious, and its lack of a conventional plot isn't a drawback in the slightest — the novel is atmospheric and weirdly suspenseful, punctuated with dark humor that still manages to be compassionate.
'Krusoe's meditations on life, death, and the importance of stories are as startling as they are fascinating. At one point, Jeffery speculates on why we invent fictions about ourselves, and concludes that it's closer to dependence than self-preservation: "It's stories, Jeffery thinks, that are the heroin ... the addiction that keeps the poor old nag of the human race running around the track again and again — the promise that no matter how confusing things are, no matter how completely messed up and hopeless, even doomed, someday, somehow, everything will eventually make sense."
'Even at his darkest, Krusoe is still generous; while
The Sleep Garden isn't necessarily a hopeful book, it's one of the most acutely observed novels in recent years. Don't expect a big reveal at the end, an explanation that ties everything together — Krusoe is content to let some of the mysteries the book introduces stay unresolved.
'And of course, that's exactly how life works. The five residents of the Burrow are, possibly, more like us than we realize, and maybe we're all "twilight souls," who, as the Captain explains, "reside in a moment that is inseparable from memory, who live in hope that is a kind of hopelessness, a dream identical to their lives, whose lives pass but never change ... caught in a place between a name and no name and without a future."'
-- Michael Schlub, NPRJim Krusoe
The Sleep GardenTin House'In an underground apartment building called “the Burrow”--essentially purgatory―“twilight souls” inhabit the space between life and death. Interwoven with their stories are those of inhabitants of the living world: a retired sea captain, a psychotic former child actor (possibly the sea captain’s illegitimate son?), and the technicians who monitor the Burrow, making sure its occupants have a constant supply of oxygen and food. Through all of their stories, and the ways in which their lives, past and present, intertwine, Krusoe creates a poignant story about what constitutes a life, what remains when we die, and what we possibly carry with us into the next world.'
-- Tin HouseExcerptTo begin: the Burrow is a low mound that rises out of the ground. It rests on what would be, if not for the Burrow itself, a vacant lot on the edge of town, though not the farthest edge. On one end of the lot, on the west side of the Burrow, and far enough away so there are no drainage problems, is a small pond. What kind of pond? Picture a body of water about the size of a supermarket parking lot, with stands of cattails, frogs, tadpoles, and such, plus various insects, both on the water and flying above it. This pond grows larger in spring and in summer shrinks to the size of, say, a convenience store parking lot. In the fall and winter it stays somewhere roughly between the two extremes. On its eastern shore is a tree, possibly a cypress, but possibly something else entirely. A sad fact about the people who live in this town is that nobody knows much of anything about the names of trees.
Still, like so many other things in the world, this particular burrow is more than its name implies. This burrow has people living in it. It has five or six tenants, depending on how many of its apartments are rented at any given time, because, as you probably guessed, the Burrow is really an apartment building, and although it isn't called "the Burrow" in any formal sense — it's never had any formal name at all — it was the Burrow's neighbors, the very same ones who can't seem to tell one tree from another, who called it that back when it was first constructed. So to this day, whether out of affection or derision, "the Burrow" is how people, including those who live inside it, refer to the place. And while it's true that some of the children in the neighborhood say the Burrow is scary, no one offers any specifics. It's the kind of place that children like to pretend is scary on principle. It's part of being a child, and certainly that doesn't stop those same children from playing in the pond next to it when school isn't in session, albeit giving the Burrow a glance from time to time to make sure there's nothing frightening rushing toward them from it as they play.
So picture a mound of dirt with things growing out of the top, plants, new shoots, weeds, but having a front door, and you are picturing the Burrow.
* * *
Meanwhile, inside the Burrow, Jeffery is thinking this: Suppose a person spent his whole life being way ahead of the curve, was Überbrilliant, far in front of every other person in the world who was also working on whatever problem this first person was working on, so incredibly advanced, et cetera, et cetera, that those in his dust were totally blind to the fact there was even anyone out in front of them? They would look, of course, but all they would see was a big dust cloud, without having the slightest idea what was causing it. And correspondingly, when the genius, or whatever you want to call him, looked behind, and squinted through the dust of his own making, those others weren't visible.
But then, Jeffery thinks, one day, maybe thirty or forty years after this genius first embarked on his journey and the dust from the cloud settled, he happened to look back once again, and this time, because there wasn't any more dust at all, he could see for sure there was nobody following him.
There was only an empty plain, or road, or stage, or whatever you want to call it. In other words, whoever had been back there trailing after him must have taken a whole different path, or several different paths. So there he was — wherever "there" was — completely alone. But here's the thing: out of all those people who, a long time ago, were working on the same idea as he was, nobody cared. Every one of them had moved on to other projects, much better and more timely ones, and as a result, the genius was not ahead of anyone anymore. He'd been totally forgotten and whatever he might have done, whatever he did, meant nothing. Zero.
And as for this supposed genius, what word would Jeffery use to describe him?
* * *
Jeffery is in his midthirties and has hair the color of untoasted whole-wheat sandwich bread. He's still in fairly good shape because he exercises every day — squats, sit-ups, push-ups — right next to his bed first thing every morning. Though he's starting to develop a little pot on his stomach, it's not unusual for his age. He tells himself he needs to lay off the starch, but hasn't gotten around to it. It's not that big a deal.
* * *
Also: in addition to the problem with identifying their trees, none of the town's inhabitants seem to be able to pronounce the name of their own town, St. Nils.
That is, they can and do pronounce it in one of two ways: Saint Niles, like the river, or Nils, which rhymes with pills, but it appears they have no idea which one is correct.
* * *
The fact is, it was Raymond who inspired this idea of the alleged genius-person-so-far-ahead-of-everyone-else to pop into Jeffery's head, and Jeffery's first Raymond-as-a-genius thought came when he was smack in the middle of Raymond's living room in the Burrow, sitting on Raymond's couch surrounded by a humongous number of decoys: on wall shelves, on tables, even lined up along the baseboards. Raymond had carved each one, and now, apparently, he waited for some mysterious future event to move them out of there. In addition to the finished decoys there were also several piles of lumber for future decoys. There were also open cans of paint leaking fumes and smelling up the place — not a bad smell, but, well ... paint, and of course Raymond was living in the middle of all this. Then Raymond sat down on the recliner opposite the couch and made it recline by means of a lever on one side. Next, he took off his right shoe, propped his right foot up on the part of the recliner that had turned into a little platform, and allowed his left foot, its shoe still on, to rest quietly on the rug.
So while it was clear that Raymond had a vision, Jeffery still had a hard time working out precisely what vision that might be.
Is he a genius or a complete idiot?
And, for that matter, what would you call Jeffery for thinking all of this?
* * *
And yet there is something troubling about the Burrow, something hard to name, maybe something about the low shadow it casts on the vacant lot around sunset, or maybe the smell of its walls after a November rain, so maybe the children — bless them — are right to keep their distance.
* * *
Because Raymond is a big guy, and gentle, and his head is big and gentle, too, with dark brown hair like burnt whole-wheat toast, and frizzy, the kind of hair a person might want to lean their own head against if he or she were tired, but if they did they would be disappointed because what they would be leaning on would be Raymond's skull, which is very hard. As hard as a wooden decoy, a person who leaned his or her head against it might be thinking.
Plummeting Appliances, Dying Verbs, Enslaved Automatons: Jim KrusoeThree Writers: Moderated by Jim KrusoeJanuary 2016 Book Haul________________
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'Yeah, I’m crazy. What else am I doing? I’m watching this movie and it’s like playing games with old men: every move seems to matter. But with whom am I allied, at this nondescript age, this age of bastards hiding food in their socks? The thing is just to dig and get nowhere. To go on digging like there’s a place underground, to never get dragged to the surface by your hair. To not get got. To shit in a can and eat it with your fingers but never get found out, never beaten with sticks, or ordered about like some idiot animal, or seen disrobed and unarmed as only good for one thing. I hear the good times are over. It comes from a man threatening to fuck someone’s mutter. His pants are full up, in Berlin, to strains of Mozart. When I return from the kiosk the cinema is empty. But then piled up in a heap right at the back I see they’re still there. For the love of God give me a weapon. My heart is going nowhere and the sun is set to kill us all. My heart, I find, is where they cram in all the crowds; and if I’d known they’d all be drinking, I’d have placed it farther away, where the women like to sleep late—in case they’re early for being alive. The infants they carry are the size of fists and made of shrapnel. Milked or not, they save themselves for holidays and funerals. They say, You call that a face? They say, We’d rather eat you than make room for a cow. Fascists is a password they use: it means Hitler is crying in his sleep. We’ll all be asked one day whether we’re wounded or sick, and we’ll be expected to know. But I realize now I’m barely alive: I don’t hear the birds singing, my skin is box-calf leather, and what I took to be tertiary syphilis is just guinea pigs howling. I’m watching families die, families with only one arm, and no balls, and all its dongs ripped out like baby hair. The whole cinema’s sitting soaked in gasoline, when no one has a light. And still the wolf walks on like it’s snuggling in a woman’s tits, like a guy drunk on vodka he made out of soap. Our combined flatulence will flatten America, turn it Gestapo black, and a lot of people will be starving to death, in German. In order not to infect new generations, I have Europe stuck in my upper intestine. But what a picture! Even though the intelligentsia all got drowned, and it was left to the 15th Einsatzkommando to translate it. No matter, not every sequence of words needs a right to exist. When the lights come back on we’re all this film’s inhabitants, all its contagion, all burning to the ground in the shape of a pelican.'
-- Gary J. ShipleyGary Shipley
You With Your Memory Are DeadCivil Coping Mechanisms'Gary Shipley’s conception of reality is more like our actual present reality than our literary culture’s usual inbred narrative realism can afford; that is: grotesque, cornered, starving, horrific, on the verge of being ripped to shreds. Yet in the same breath, by way of his attentions: finally transcendent of that same ongoing mundane, excised of playground made-for-TV horseshit, thought-bendingly alive in a way most ways of storytelling couldn’t begin to wish to ape. Literature almost doesn’t deserve this maniac, and thank hell he’s here.'
-- Blake ButlerExcerptHis diet has not seen light or colour.
The proteins born inside a hospice suite.
And another failed attempt to settle back into the dimensions of rooms-in-general.
They take it from him.
They crap out toenails and eyelashes, make craven effigies of weather.
I chew on the landscapes in my ears.
The afterbirth of a cadaver.
Scar tissue in my incubator.
The walls are changing colour: the old green, the white before that…
His mouth is this cunt.
His teeth, shrapnel from exploded babies.
My hair inscribed with negative airflow.
His offspring, organs made of tar.
A waxwork human fruit.
I’ve acquired the posture of a slug.
The cloth stuffed in place of the air in there.
The tongue a rag in a petrol bomb.
I feel reasons suiciding in newly isolated swarms.
When the rock is a cloud I scoured off my lung.
I breathe solids in my sleep.
It’s not me made meaningless by this series of emptying-outs, just always the other way round.
And the eyes going shut, the mouth going kissing up blood.
A starved gorilla puking swallows.
And my body an impersonation of all the other bodies I see.
Like pre-chewed chicken wings squirming in gangs in lost areas of the moon.
Thought of other planets videodromes my sitting watching. The inside surfacing the only surface left.
The door to my side filling up with maggots inside flies in the spiders in the webs in there.
And yet hands are bodiless, mucking out the mouth.
And retched organs form into the shape of a reservoir, simulated in phases of being formed that way.
Fake partitions dismantled, then reassembled in my blindsight.
Six boils festering on the face of God.
The distant drone of numerical frictions, fretted inertias, subtractions multiplying all by themselves, lost frequencies uncoiling the whine of the world.
I baptise my smiles as baby farts.
The son is my son.
Even if I have to cut him down the middle to make two.
There’s a sky outside this room coloured with holes and water.
All of them together: a human swatch burnt down past the fats.
Sick animals drunk on the vertigo of their pending disappearance.
And it’s possible I’ll ingest the witness in one.
When the contusion is still this moving thing.
Bodies fluent in their lassitude, the organism slowing to become unfixed.
I haven’t had an erection in a month.
This is my idea for a life.
That that sky is my sky now.
And away from the screen there are stage sets of rooms, kept inside other rooms, and eyes painted over the top of eyes.
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The pack coming pissed and untoothed.
Civilisation was pleasant once, and a frenzy then of gums.
The tension will peak with falsified depictions of endless one-way migrations.
Lifted up, growing, gurgling the sun, this infant cattle boy.
When already it’s so: our ready acceptance of death just altitude sickness.
And the rate at which my material conditions remain the same has started to accelerate.
Life in here is all the many uncompleting circles in my ceiling.
The telescopic dead-ends of crudely opened light.
The screen removes the room, has it sit in its void both sides of the door.
And one more abused boy is dragged to the summit to watch the sun burn out his eyes.
He’s florescent in the feedback of his being extinguished this way.
Because I cough the thoughts out pre-numbed and half-digested.
When the fire is just one more heatless flicker of white repeated to suggest heat.
And the copying reveals what’s imperceptible, while the process fails its objects by allowing them to be seen.
In the same way I once suspected birds of substituting their organs for baby food.
Because they want me to believe that reasons are medieval innocuities.
That my reasons have moved on.
That they sit behind my seeing doing things.
Collaging some clot in dead hair and shed skin to prop my watching on.
The daily excavation made all puffy by my many electric self-resuscitations.
As if straining at the molecular level. Which is meaningless.
And so I decide they’re just five flightless birds that have found the sky inside a newborn boy imagining himself a newborn bird.
And the earth is not a nest.
I arrive here a thousand times a day.
I imagine that when lava cools it concludes. That there is peace in this concluding. That some one thing can truly end and then be done.
Date denoting transparencies![]()
The scab roots, forgets the wound.
Imagines further, that displacement is no burden to it there.
And the room has lost its fur, chewed space into concrete like weeds drinking deserts.
And the congealed bird grows too heavy for the air.
And I’m consuming days for this zero.
Eating whole currencies into not coming back.
Into the augmented physics I impute to dressing in this cautious mauling.
There are no places left.
I get stuck on the purposed men I saw in Angola.
I grab for the baby’s swallowed tongue.
Reaching rendering visible the infinite, eye-gouging nowhere into all my dirty shapes.
And if it was to say something, what would it say?
When the top of his head is now missing.
When the absence of light is just the layered recordings of various other absences of light. And all darknesses are made that way.
But then I’ve passed off too much of this with the occludent terminology of illness, an illness, in many forms, I’ve inherited as being somehow separable from life.
As with the lunging of an instrument made for making holes.
Each visible turn going side by side.
Into my irreversible spin.
White strings of light trailing from his upturned face.
Our human future depicted as an upside-down head: a mouth where the brain should be. Insides made gooey into outsides.
To be as I am, as it’s somehow proved I am – that is, caged in a skull – I’d have to stop thinking. While still thinking.
His outstretched hand a flail, a deflighted bird.
When horror becomes its own nostalgia, and there’s this death called irony to take its place.
And I think I’m confusing the future tense with disguising this convulsion.
When I sense bits of him coming off.
The stillborn man woken with a hail of bullets.
But I might get away in the grease of it, arranged into montage too slickly, all kinds of every kind of brain-death.
Its softnesses coming out.
And through. And through these extrusions and excretions materialize the impossibility of ever returning to nothing.
The walls ghosting, ghosted by other walls.
By his fireworked face.
And the forced stare of the actress, with a cock down her throat.
To look to an enclosure for proof of what surrounds it.
The Face Hole by Gary J. ShipleyThe Tongue-Tied Mystic: Aaaarrrgghhh! Fuck Them! Fuck You!Asemic Shining*
p.s. Hey. Four comments? Okay ... ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Yes, and yet only four people seem to have gotten wet. It's a miracle. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! Thanks! Sometimes I wonder why, but yes. You should try everything, if you want. My visual sense as an artist isn't very good and yet I figured out a way to make animated gif fiction and collaborate on a movie. I guess I think one of the great things about being a writer is that writing gets the chance to work in and with other mediums -- film, music, art, theater, etc. Being a music maker is like that too, I guess. No, I've seen clips and a lot of gifs from 'Suicide Room', some of which have ended up in my gif work, but I've never actually seen the film, strangely. I'm guessing you recommend it? My day was pretty good. What happened ... uh, I met with this curator guy who is proposing this idea of having Larry Clark and me have a conversation (moderated by the curator) and turn that conversation into a book. I said, yeah, maybe. I've never met Larry Clark, but I guess he's coming to Paris and the curator guy will introduce us and then we'll see if we both feel like doing that. I worked on stuff. I went to see a performance last night made by this dancer who's in one of Gisele's and my works ('Kindertotenlieder'), and it was kind of horrible but charmingly horrible. It was sort of like if some young kid who had just started taking dance classes and was a fan of David Lynch had smoked pot for the first time and then watched an old cheesy sci-fi film from the early 1970s and thought that was a profound experience and then tried to make the trippiest, most profound dance piece in the world. How was Wednesday on your end? ** _Black_Acrylic, Okay, gotcha on the car. That's interesting, no pedals. So ... driving that car is kind of remotely like playing a video game with a very big controller? Sort of? Eliasson made one of those waterfall things in Dundee? That guy is everywhere. I think at this point his work is really cool about 35% of the time. ** Misanthrope, Howdy. Well, George, the post was called 'Water', but hey, I'll give you some props. Well, thank you. It seems as if I might have inadvertently made that gallery show only for you. Which is plenty of good reason. Poor LPS. I hope he's having some cool hallucinations at least. I'm glad you're better. Very glad. Ah, I see, about the guy and why he hasn't been caught. Makes sense, yeah. As for that guy in Russia, his imagination sure is an easy lay. Oops. ** Okay. Maybe you'll be interested in these books that I loved and now recommend? See you tomorrow.
