I thought the water tower was just a tower until you told me it was a machine to kill yourself with. I wished the woods I chased you through were infinite but the clearing they opened on was the meadow where your contrivance stood. It was dark, the thing and the ground beneath it, the clearing and the whole night. My tights were damp to knee height from the grass that ran likewise. You jumped at this ladder until you had a grasp on it. My screams were begs. I wrenched my ankle on the spotty soil. I slammed my head when I fell. Sparks like stars shot my gaze. There was no line then that could separate anything from anything else. There was no way then that I could see you throw yourself from the ladder because there was no way I could see you on it.
Lucy fell asleep on the bus. She just felt bummed out when she woke. It took her so long to walk home from the stop. She just got sadder. Her fingers rang numb in the cold. She had this headache. The girl was fucking crying by the time she turned down her street. She gathered herself on the porch as she played with her keys and the knob. Her parents were watching TV. The stairs made this sound when she paused on them. Hey. It was dark in her room and she turned on every light. Her eyes felt like skin drawn on bone. She sat on her bed. This rash on her foot made her breakdown, all dismal and wanting and aching. She hated herself, she thought sheíd give anything to stop feeling so bummed out. She just wanted to be able to feel good and get happy by getting drunk and doing drugs like a normal person. Her breathing sounded like hiccups until she held her breath. She got undressed and got into bed. Her clitoris felt sore when she touched it so she stopped. It was cold and she curled beneath the comforter. Her phone was in her jacket pocket, slung over the side of her dresser. When she got up in the morning she looked at it and saw she had all these missed calls and texts and when she read them it was just bullshit because nothing as horrible as what they said could be anything but
Into a black sky: an interview with Mark Gluth on the publication of his third book, The Goners (Kiddiepunk; 2015)
Diarmuid Hester: So we've waited four years for a new book by you and then two come out in the space of a year! Mark, you're really spoiling us...
Mark Gluth: Well, I'm really lucky that the two books are coming out so close to each other. No Other took a really long time to write, over five years but with breaks working on other stuff, and The Goners came together really quickly, maybe six or eight months total from conception to completion. So their proximity comes from the speed at which I was able to write them, or rather the speed at which I was able to be happy with what I had written when I wrote them. And then I was lucky enough to have Sator and Kiddiepunk believe in the books.
That's interesting you talk about the speed of putting The Goners together and the book feels very quick yknow? Like it's in flux or something: the characters seem really restless and hard to pin down and scenes are blurry and impressionistic. It's a very different vibe to No Other in that way.
Yeah, I wanted the book to feel in flux. I wanted each story to feel like a little three minute pop song. I got into how good pop songs offer this kind of distilled/concentrated version of themselves, and how a really perfect pop song achieves effects that are kinda hard to describe outside of just experiencing the thing. So in the novels I've written, I built them with the intention of the individual components having some staying power, and the books doing things that can only happen from the cumulative effects of the components. With this book I kind of imagined each sentence disappearing once you've read it. So there's a fleetingness to it all. I played around with how catchy and surface-y I could make the language. In early drafts of the book, I'd written each section as if a character was watching the story play out on a stage and like they were watching a play. I got rid of that, but it kept the kind of fleeting effect, I think.
Tied into that, I also began to think about what if the four main stories were just different versions of the same perfect or prototypical story. Like they mirrored some sort of Platonic ideal story or something. I was also really influenced by this book of stories by Marie Redonnet, which in English is called Understudies. All the stories in it have the same narrative shape, and they just mirror each other. I've always wanted to do something influenced by that.
Wow, yeah... So the characters, the text itself, they're both "goners," as soon as they're read, right? But that fleeting effect and the feeling that everything you know can quickly fall apart and the people you love are a whisker away from disappearing or dying and is really haunting and stays with you long after you've finished the book I think.
Yeah, totally. Like the book is a goner, full of goners. Or at least that's what I aimed for. It's cool that it stays with you. Ideally there'd be a kind of fading trail left in the wake of the book. Like the scent of a perfume fading or something, as opposed to No Other, which I hoped would kind of have a building rhythm and ends at a sort of climax. Anyway, it's my third book, and my third book where characters deal with the death of loved ones in some form, and I realized that for the time being this is the last way I want to write about this sort of thing, that I see my next book being very different. So I saw the book being a goner in the sense that this type of writing for me will be gone. I designed the coda as a way for the narrative to just disappear into a black sky or some sort of transcendent universality.
Can you tell me about the photos that accompany the stories? Seems to me that they're an important part of the mood of The Goners.
You know, the inclusion of the photos, which I'm totally happy with, came late in the game. With this book, and all my books, I ceded all visual decisions to someone who is vastly more capable than I am. Michael Salerno, who designed the book, suggested using some photos I'd taken because -- and I'm paraphrasing and he felt the captured the mood of my writing. So then we played around with selection, and one day the light was just perfect and I took four of the pictures that ended up in the book within about three minutes of each other. I do feel they document a mood and landscape that correspond with the text, and in a really low level way, they are kind of inspired by the way W.G. Sebald used images in his novels.
Your Instagram's wonderful and full of these beautiful, arrestingly ethereal photos. Do you see yourself working with other media like photography in the future?
Oh man I just take pictures incessantly. It's really instinctual and something I often do out of boredom. I guess my goal is just to take pictures of stuff I see, the way I see it, and Instagram is wonderfully set up to enable me to do that, ya know?
As far as other media, well Michael Salerno and I are collaborating on a screenplay. It's tough to sum it up, but I think it's going to be a really interesting hybridization of our two styles and styles that have a significant amount of overlap to begin with. It's really exciting and, to some extent super challenging. Writing novels is something I can do without really interacting with anyone during the creative process, so it's cool to have a back and forth with Michael as we go through this. It forces me out of my comfort zone. Of course it will be super neat to see what comes of it, I've written some stuff for it where, while I'm super happy with it, I feel a tad guilty because Michael will have to try to translate it to the screen.
I really can't wait to see what you come up with together! Before you disappear into the Washington woods, can I ask you a final question? It's one that Orwell and your beloved Joan Didion took a shot at... Why do you write?
Oh man, I think Didion's essay is perfect, and I felt such a kinship with her after first reading it that I'm not sure I can answer this without being in her shadow in some way. Having said that... I don't fully understand my desire to write or be creative or whatever, and I don't really want to understand it for fear of that understanding affecting it. But what I can say is, when I'm writing it's kind of like an organized day-dream state, or one where I bypass the normal filters at play in day to day life. When I'm writing well (meaning it's going well), I feel that I can be both intuitive and analytic at the same time, which is not something I can normally handle. I dunno. Whatever it is, I know I need to do it, because I crave it when I don't.
The world pulsed and wrenched. Dick ran like he was running for help. Andy knelt beside Luc looking like, were there good light, he would be studying him. Dick stopped. Andy closed his eyes. Cars sounded on a street somewhere behind the building in front of them. Lights flicked against shadows in the distance. Andy screamed Help, somebody. Dick said come on. He stood next to Andy and Luc then. His point was they could flag down a car or something. Andy didn't open his eyes. He heard Dick running away then come back. The kid grabbed his arm. He stood there then. Luc was this shape in the dark, darker than the shadow he was surrounded by. The boys ran through these puddles and their socks were soaked in their sopping shoes. Tears ran down Andy's face. He didn't see lights or cars on the street they tried towards. It didn't look like anything really.
Buy The Goners @ Kiddiepunk Press here.
*
p.s. Hey. It's a great day here. We get to help usher the new book by super-author and longterm d.l. Mark Gluth in a people-ward direction on the very day it is born. If you don't know, and you surely must, Mark is previously the author of the novel 'The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis', which I was very lucky to get to publish with my Little House on the Bowery imprint, and the novel 'No Other', recently pubbed by Ken Baumann's awesome Sator Press. I have my copy of 'The Goners' already, and it's an amazing little book that also looks fantastic thanks in no small part to the genius of Michael Salerno, master of Kiddiepunk Press. Anyway, you should so totally buy a copy. Seriously. And thank you, Mark, for letting this happen today! Otherwise, I'm here, and yet I'm not here. Let me explain. I'm actually writing this p.s. by necessity on Sunday night, Berlin time, so, for instance, I'm probably going to miss responding to some comments that come in afterwards, but I'll get to them on my next return. Here's the deal: At the moment, Zac's and my post-production schedule has us starting work early every weekday morning beginning today. And, for as long as that's the case, I will not be able to do the p.s. regularly while I'm here as I had hoped. We're trying to arrange for a later start in the day and a corresponding later work stoppage time at night, and, if that happens, I could be back doing the p.s. any day now. If not, the p.s. won't return live again until Saturday. My apologies. Second to lastly, since there aren't so many comments, I won't group them into days/dates but rather talk to them and to you in a big bunch. And lastly, only if you're interested, the big French newspaper Liberation did an article/interview with me re: 'Zac's Haunted House', in French, of course, and you can read it here if you like. ** Keaton, Hi, buddy. Did you see that some guy bought The Residents' one-of-a-kind box set for the asking price of $100,000.00? That seems like lunacy. Remind you ... okay, reminder: don't take drugs. My mom claimed she saw UFOS all time time. And giant floating talking pumpkins. And all kinds of stuff. Didion is pretty highly recommended by me. Based on this visit, so far, I have to say that I'm not very into Berlin, but time will tell. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh! The Final Cut Pro 10 thing has been a huge headache mostly do to some ridiculous fucking snobbishness among Final Cut Pro 7 aficionados, of which there are many in our way, who technically can but don't want to work in FCP 10 because ... well, because they suck, basically. The problem has not yet abated and it may well cause us serious problems with the post-production, and I guess we'll find out starting today. Ridiculous. ** David Ehrenstein, Hello, Mr. E. Some of them good, ha ha, good one. ** Schlix, Hi, Uli! Yeah, I read that. About the reunion. That's crazy. So curious to see the youtube footage from that. ** Kier, Hi, Kier! I've missed you! Thank you for telling me about your days! It's been a daily joy for me! It's really exciting to hear about you planning for the application, man. Have you gotten everything or most things figured out now? When is the deadline? If you told me already, I apologize for forgetting. I guess I'm going to give you a quick report on all the days since I last saw you in one continuous plop. Let's see ... So, we made it to Halle by plane. No problems. The powers-that-be put us (Zac and me, that is) up in a nice, roomy apartment on the river, which was cool even if we were hardly ever there. So, the afternoon we arrived, we walked over to the theater, which was easy 'cos Halle is tiny, and Gisele was doing rehearsals, but in German, so we just kind of watched and tried to figure out what was what. Then Gisele filled us in one the progress, problems, ups and downs. A big problem at that time was that the piece was way, way over 3 hours long, which is way, way too long. So we talked, and we decided right then to cut this one long scene where the ventriloquists were supposed to talk about the history of puppetry and defend their art against people thinking puppetry is just an old fashioned and really low art form. It was a very good scene, but it had to go, and that immediately removed an hour from the piece. We spent long hours for the next three days rehearsing and editing and changing and cutting from morning 'til night. It went really well. The ventriloquists are fucking amazing to work with, and they're geniuses at what they do. The piece got better and better. We cut another half-hour-long section, and we nipped and tightened other stuff and added new things as well. There's a ton of work left to do, and I need to revise the entire script now, but it'll be good. Also, as I think I mentioned here before, Gisele wants to do a television series, a puppet/ventriloquy show, for one of the big French TV channels, and she wants Zac and me to write the series, or, rather, write the pilot first and then series should the TV channel pick up the series. So we were watching everything also as research and inspiration for the TV pilot. On Saturday morning, we took a train to Berlin, and then we rushed to this movie theater where we were going to see our film on a big movie screen for the first time with the producers and with the two guys who are going to work on the post-production. It looked great on the big screen, and we were very happy and excited by that. Then we had a meeting. Okay, the good thing is that the producers seem to have given up trying to get us to change our film into what they want it to be. It's obvious that they don't like it much, but they said, with a deep sigh, 'We can live with it.' But, and it's too boring and complicated to go into, there are major problems with the post-production for the reasons I mentioned before about the version of Final Cut Pro that we edited the film in and the supposed incompatibility problem. So we've ended up stuck with an editor who doesn't seem to know what he's doing, which is very bad because he needs to a do lot of very intricate, complicated work on the sound and color correction, and we have a very limited amount of time to do the work, and it's just a big fucking fiasco because it shouldn't be difficult like this at all. We'll see how it goes today, but it really is a joke and nightmare how poorly prepared the producers and editors are to do the work we need to do. Ugh. We're just hoping that the guy is better than he seems to be, ha ha. Anyway, we did that. Then we ate Mexican food and crashed. Today was an off day, so nothing really happened other than walking around and trying to figure out how to deal with the problems tomorrow. That's my multi-day report for the time being. And how was your Monday and, likely, rest of your week, my dear Kier? ** Misanthrope, I don't envy the shoveling. Okay, we're even. Oh, shit, what's the latest on the pipe break and the temporary work quarters? Jesus. You didn't know or at least know of The 13th Floor Elevators? Huh. ** Jimmy Johns, Wow, spam. We haven't spam here in a long time. Wow. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben! I haven't gotten the new Wire yet. It tends take three frustrating weeks to reach the Paris newsstands, or my favorite newsstand anyway. Are you back at work now? Oh, wait, having scrolled down now, awesome news! And your interview is on Vimeo, so I can see it sans nationalistic tech problems, as can everyone! Everyone, _B_A aka the great man of many letters, all of them capitalized and in bold type, Ben Robinson has been interviewed about his terrific, ongoing project Art 101 by Art In Scotland TV, and you can watch it no matter what country or kind of computer or tablet or phone or whatever else you have. That's right! It's so easy! Just click this to watch. Hooray! And, in addition, how's about this: an article written by Ben for the zine Sindigo on the subject of Heaven and Hell in the digital age. Fascinated? Surely! So, click this to read it. Thank you. ** Damien Ark, Hi, Damien! Really good to see you! Cool, yeah, the videos were kind awesome, right? And there's, like, hundreds more of them if you get addicted, and almost all of them are great. What's up, man? How's everything? You writing? ** Bill, Hi, Bill! Since it's now next week, I'm hoping your rough week has passed its expiration date. Ha ha, I'm keeping my eyes open. Yeah, Berlin, I don't know. I'm waiting for its famous seductive charm to show itself. It sure hasn't done that yet. ** Steevee, Hi, Steve! It's 9 degrees here too. Well, 9 degrees Centigrade. Or rather it was during the day, Now it's night, and it's ... let me check... 0 degrees Centigrade. I'm glad things turned out to be okay with that editor. I came across your little review of 'Fifty Shades' on Facebook, and I liked it a lot. Mushrooms are a nice drug. However, at least in my case, the wonderfulness tends to be proceeded by about 45 minutes of intense paranoia, so, yeah. Ah, a new review! Everyone, here's the great Steve Erickson aka Steevee's Gay City News piece on the Film Society of Lincoln Center's "Film Comment Selects" series. ** Etc etc etc, Hi there, Casey! Well and intact: those two things are true. Yeah, the relentless cold in NYC and on the East Coast in general is nuts. It's so weird because over here we're having this totally mild non-stop non-winter. Thanks about the reruns. Fence is cool. There must be a batch of possible places for that piece, no? Where else are you sending it? ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, T!!!! Work stuff is ... well, I'll know how it is after today. Can't tell yet. But the theater work went great. And we think our film looks amazing on the big screen for whatever that's worth. Yeah, Kp said he met up with you guys. Awesome! I haven't taken mushrooms or really any drug stronger than coffee for, like, fuck, so long. I did have a Margarita last night, which is pretty rare. So weird. Don't miss drugging though. Mushrooms are a sweet thing, though. ** Okay. No doubt I missed at least a few comments that arrived while I was asleep in the Berlin time zone. I'll get to them next time. Like I said, I don't know when next time, p.s.-wise, will be, but, worst comes to worst, it won't be any later that this coming Saturday. Hopefully sooner, but ... Take care! Enjoy the post on Mark Gluth's book and get yourselves copies, why don't you? See you ... soon.