__________________
![]()
You grew up in and around Detroit. Has place played a role in your language/ attitude/ overall badassness?
Sean Kilpatrick: Grew up in a moderate Detroit ghetto by Seven Mile. I do scant direct autobiography. I hope to write an absurdist memoir, go after the old personal voice people fetishize. Plays an itsy roll in the language maybe. Can be fun to discuss, getting one’s ass in a continual rock-stoned and beat through babyhood. Helped humble and I recommend. I know people would benefit. A fun brag at the littlest. Maybe my blood-focus, misanthropy, and nihilism originate here. I am grateful. As a white person, I take without consequence. Luckily poetry has no consequence. It has a lot of white people trying to siphon who or who doesn’t have privilege and what that means and what what means. Who the fuck cares what any white person has to say about politics or class-systems or crossing the street? Who the fuck tittles their verse. Serious serious serious serious.
I grew up around the same area and even before the crash of ’08, it always felt like a dying thing, robust in its decay. But living in Chicago now, I find myself sticking up for the area when some yuppie fed with a golden spoon starts the dis. So for me, I feel some allegiance with the city in terms of its existence in a marginalized sense. Brunch isn’t as big there. So, besides the hopeful job getting after you graduate, any major plans?
SK: We’re in the decay club. Hard not to recognize yuppie-ness as the worst crime where we been, or anything anyone does who breathes. I hate stuff not previously exploded. Applying to community colleges now. Edited a devotional slash psychology manuscript. What do you plan after Columbia? Which future isn’t suicide? I’m writing a book with my boo Elizabeth Mikesch and another (very slowly, my fault) with Sam Pink, a poetry manuscript implicating my anus as its own race, maybe gender, and a short novel five years in.
After I finish up with Columbia teach I guess…community college instead. But I want to live in Alaska for a year, too, and get a backyard somewhere to bbq some meat and poems in this fashion and have people love me. I admire the risks you take in your writing. When you sit down to compose a piece, what is at stake?
SK: First I inflate my cushion. Pop the wine. Ponder some fashionable crit. Random book reviews loving yet stern. Insert monocle with KY. Crack each knuckle, a forty minute process. Then I endeavor to change the world by humming a thought loose. Yes, the world goes purr and I blink. Usually lost is a square centimeter of my prepuce. Really the starving find themselves full by the closer. My consecutive hugs assist. Ah, but my alphabet is the loss of everyone who’s touched me. So the groins.
Any good movies/tv/music/artists etc. that inspire you? Oooooo sorry for jumping around but I just remembered I wanted to ask you about Anatomy Courses, a collaboration with Blake Butler. How did this go down, i.e. who decided to initially start the project? What was the process?
SK: Movies get my butter. Here’s who’ve kept me alive: Gaspar Noé, Andrzej Żulawski, David Lynch, Seijun Suzuki, Luis Buñuel, the movie Little Murders. Blake Butler as well. We started talking when I submitted to Lamination Colony around 2007. He suggested we write and sent the first page. He writes fast and best. To keep pace, I bathed in meth. Lots of rewriting for the slightest approach of me to his genius. We found Satan. Cameron Pierce, Lazy Fascist Press, beautified it, amazing cover by Matthew Revert. -- Columbia Poetry Reviews
![]()
Sean Kilpatrick Sucker June
Lazy Fascist Press
'Kilpatrick’s prose is the aural equivalent of anthrax cut with ecstasy. All other writing makes me sick. Here at last is one so nasty it’s almost like there’s hope.'-- Blake Butler
'The violent, sexual zone of television and entertainment is made to saturate that safe-haven, the American Family. The result is a zone of violent ambience, a ‘fuckscape’: where every object or word can be made to do horrific acts. As when torturers use banal objects on its victims, it is the most banal objects that become the most horrific (and hilarious) in Sean Kilpatrick’s brilliant first book.' -- Johannes Goransson (on Fuckscapes)
Excerpts
from Spork Press
09/07/2009
Similarly Rented Womb Stank
Touching outside involves less god. The river where I drown for thirty miles every night, huddled zigzag between fists in an ugly tickle, crowds of men seen pummeling slant from the bank, where my sockets ruckus pure money with the ancestors of whatever sex destroys me, chewing sediment toward China, hunkering through methods that heighten the land, disappeared splash by splash, an epilepsy of hue so tight I skip myself sore around spunk buoyancies. My absenteeism is symptomatic of my being there. In the stasis my blood refrains; combing the skin above until fire. Every nanosecond fluctuates overlapping hatreds so immense—and then little glances happen and I want to get married, someone pets me and I reconsider procreation, someone stands up and I want to slit their ballsac, shivers when I brush their hair, I want to bunch off all their skin and roll around in it, gives me some laconic refusal and I want to prove the world is flat, but not really. I call my period back from limbo, back from starvation, whisper the egg out of hiding and it sits up purring without nuisance of gravity, thighs spider webbing, black months reverse. The gush heats my esophagus, revolving downward, traceable on the glow of my birth marks, stains that mean put me back in, my ribs box the revolving cramp and I flap my arms to help inch belly upside down, dilated red, lips parting reflexively, sprinkling a baby no one might be cruel enough to raise. Better in town square, or on the floors of schools disassembled by movement. I am a parasite and I miss my host. I miss not having been born yet. Their unzipped pants taste of gas. They roll me in the balled hide of a screaming animal. The drool I hover with reflects me. Horsefly stung cataracts slapped down, scooting terror, sees the grass mashed fuck to soup and me humping on it: ass and folds. Folds chasing folds shiver off, muscular system exposed, shiny fat, wrapped in our own flay and squirting dermis, whining louder with each mouthful, blood dizzy and wedged maggots feed each shivering hunk, rowed through the plaster with torn placement, our doggy blanket drying slowly. All tomorrow I sneeze Flintstones Vitamins wrapped in fur. My wrecked circulation, so many veins the light, now blue, chaws inside a mother sound fainting forward.
Baby Bitch
“Your baby bitch weakness is never as cute an unreasonable defense as you think, especially when you’re off speed. If your tricks rather called you ugly, instead of letting you, in false modesty, say it first, they would then adorn you beyond your tiny comprehension, and you’d have to fill your own cunt with substance.” He placed my wounds like a petty savior, closing one eye, staring down the still unfolding prim and slick haltered tucks of where I land. He’s sucked my clit in a thought bubble all day. Now sweat lamps our torsos, public slime, conducted chafing. He slaps an extension cord through my come. “At some point we’ll miss each other, lick the wall socket.” I leak ounces of water I’ve eaten for the last week. He stirs, punches his tongue up my ass, cooing me close to an almost throb, floating inside gooey suction, his fingers v-shaped, compressing my clit, stuck out, elastic. Wound around thick calibration, I contract and lock tight enough for him to slam pathways. Our hips ache rhythm, my legs thrown, an afterthought. We bake through so much friction the house leans. I plug my hand into my mouth and shrink, organs choking into a suffocated spasm around his cock. We let go, pulse, vision loss, screaming in our skins, his tip audibly whacking my cervix like a rewound car accident. Our hearts tamper fabulous congruities. Body language is the one form of communication I keep finding myself trapped in and liking, so saying hi is hard. I quietly become a man under the sheets. I slip into cumy boxers and do hot dog rotations, make the sheets rise like something’s there, extend my good confidence to the world, focus on the limitations of my length and how to hide. Because he stretches out my undersized panties, folded into them like an after sex magic show, I assume his genitalia, no longer accomplishing that grotesque male bounce and flap, are inch by inch retracting into egg sac. I’ll have his musk by the time he’s awake. He’ll cream himself flowery and miss my big holy penetration. My fucking him leaves an imprint, an echo of cock he reverberates in girly sing-song. He contains my puddle, flutters around, dripping me. The physical memory lasts longer than he cares to think. He is sore and angry for being sore and mocks my enormous protuberance under red sore sheets, pretending to be me before on to the next breeching, which occurs in possibly five minutes. I finish ogling transvestite me, with my Rocky Horror hands, though I disagree with leather, unless it is in my mouth. I show Canada my tits. I live in a Japanese closet. I sneeze Algerian sperm. I log online and talk about dead dogs. I make phone calls and text messages and type in the instant message hatebox. I tap a telegraph on the small of my back, spread my legs around a smoke signal, take cell phone pictures, send them to a girl who tongues my ass, a boy with gout, a child with clap, a transvestite who takes notes, people in Hong Kong circle jerking in the middle of a crowded street, posted on the blog with pubic hair font. A guy from Sacramento is crying on my voicemail. I film my feet for someone in Kansas, toes wrinkling hello. I attend a webcam orgy, choking myself with my bra. I laugh asking if father catches feast in my diaphragm. He died in childbirth. Literally, he’s negative seven years old. His prick looks like a coat hanger. Boything from Colorado wants to watch me piss on cam. Girlcreature from school asks what drugs her boyfriend stuffed me with. LSD suppositories and I got pyrotechnic groin trauma. So he shampooed your cunt for CNN? Acronyms are hot. I’ll punch your clit later. LOL. I type upside down in the hatebox, legs over the chair top like white feathers that hate themselves. I invented wingspan. I’m typing I fucked your mom over and over to my own screen name. I answer my cell and continue an online conversation mid-sentence. The television is loud enough to upset my stomach. I hold music to my ear and type with one finger and yell “What!” into the phone while performing on cam, taking another picture, switching the lights on and off with my toe.
Graveyard
I hump the graveyard so bodies fizz. Their stains grow inside me. Exhaling into the corpse dirt above each grave, a lick of something molded dry inside my thought. I kill the hot end of a cigarette on my nipple, leaving white scars dividing the pink like a second nipple failing to begin. In a minute the world can turn your crucifixion runny. My scraped tits bobbling clay, retarded putty sucked by all. I want to get my gang rape on. Fill up a small closet with my blood. Comb it out of me, enough to paint a house. I’m too far up my own rashes to hear. My genitalia need constant sensory information. It’s how I can tell where I’m going half the time. I miss the ex who smoked my vulva like a bong. He spent a lot of time down there with a flashlight, being religious. That kind of spatial misconception is common amongst the devoted. For instance, when I’m five years old, I fall down trying to grab the moon. I want to use it to shave my legs. I miss a version of the future invented for my sorry inclusion. The particular slapped-tall ostrich pounce these fuckers ritualize. I am too far splayed again by hands.
Sucker June excerpts
Sucker June
WANT A HUG?
________________
![]()
I wrote a novel with daggers that jut from the page and poke people in the eyes at appropriate moments in the plot. It was kind of a pop-up book, except with daggers.
The novel was about a man who was aware that all he was was a character in a novel. He hated his readers because he couldn’t get away from them. He had no privacy. He was like someone on a reality television show without having signed a contract to be on a reality television show. Occasionally, he would look up and shake his fist and curse at the people reading his life. And sometimes he would poke them in the eyes with daggers.
The title of the novel was Don’t Read This or You Might Get Poked in the Eye With a Dagger.
I used to hand out free copies to people at independently funded literary festivals. Aspiring authors smiled and said things like “Oh, you wrote this?” and “I look forward to reading it.” I told them, Please don’t.
My mom found out about my novel and wanted a copy. Before shipping it, I signed the inside cover: Mom, for the love of God, please don’t read this. Love, Darby.
After my book tours ended, my agent called and told me Don’t Read This … was a breakout. It was selling like crazy. Bookstores couldn’t keep them on the shelves. I said, That’s great. “Are you working on anything else?” he asked. I told him I was recording an audio version called Don’t Listen to This or You Might Get Needles Jabbed in Your Eardrums.
My fame was overwhelming me. I had to get an unlisted number. I had to remove my e-mail address from my website. I had to buy a secluded house in the woods with a long crazy driveway and an electronic gate at the bottom.
The university invited me to give a lecture on writing. As I walked up the cement steps to the lecture hall, a man was sitting on the steps with sunglasses on. An upturned hat lay on the ground next to him. I stopped to talk to him. He said he was blind. I asked him how he became blind. He said he was born that way.
Inside the lecture hall, I stood at a podium and told professors and aspiring writers what I thought about the craft of writing. I told them that you have to hate the readers who read your stories. You have to punish your readers. Readers want to feel pain. Then everyone murmured amongst themselves, “That’s so true,” and, “You should really read his book,” and they nodded in agreement and they hugged each other and they felt the happiness that agreements always bring, and then they all looked up at me with perfect eyeballs. -- Darby Larson
![]()
Darby Larson Ohey!
Civil Coping Mechanisms
'My book Ohey! became a book yesterday! It is now available from places like amazon. The writings in this collection have been published online and in print over the last 12 years. It includes some of my very first published pieces as well as work published very recently.'-- Darby Larson
'Darby Larson is a lyricist. He might be the Eminem of prose fiction, but probably not. Perhaps he’s more like Sage Francis or one of the guys from Definitive Jux, but my guess is no. Hip-hop comparisons aside, Larson’s got some skills where putting words together is concerned. He’s definitely an artist who adeptly uses literary devices such as assonance, alliteration, and wordplay.'-- Joseph Michael Owens, PANK
Excerpts
Ohey!
This is a story about a girl I'm after named Ohey! that ends with me on The Worm Gang's couch watching Jeopardy! Ohey! is a witch I'm after with benefits. I'm heading to The Worm Gang's hideout on the flip side of my fictional city and stopping at stop signs in my VW Ghia.
I get there, am let in, and it's like how it is when I go there. Ohey! is there but I can't see her. I see the rest of the gang on couches and leaning. Clev's in the kitchen cleaving. Nina's wiping the cover of a book with a cloth. Annie and Angi, the twins, sit at the couch, conjoined at the calves, and there's Ohey! peeking from the hall. I wink and she disappears.
What's cooking? I say something like to Clev who won't be bothered.
How did I even walk in here? No one sees me?
Oh, Hi Nina, how's the new job? It's fine, I'm dusting these books. Like a jacket, I offer. Solid, she says like it's her new slang. Where's, I begin but stop because there's Ohey! from the hallway again, so I venture.
The trouble is, once Ohey! and I get our clothes floored, we're no longer ourselves. We become metal-headed heroin machines. It's rocky at first but the going's rock-rupturing and nearly nauseating, like how the last full moon lasted.
But there's screaming from the kitchen. Oh god. Ohey! says this and something else. We go to the kitchen wearing what we're wearing and it's Clev on the floor with her arm severed and in a large popcorn bowl full of ice Nina's preparing like a snack. Clev's wah-wahing on the floor. Ohey! jackets herself and follows Nina and the bowl out the door. The twins pick up Clev and help her out the door, and that's the last of The Worm Gang gone. A leaf floats in on a breeze through a window and follows them out the door. A dog behind me barks. I sit on the couch. What is... Jupiter.
from Preamble
In Order to form the United States and establish the People of the United States and Justice, We establish a more perfect Justice. The People of the Union and Justice, We, to form, in Order to form a more perfect People of Justice. The United States of a more perfect Union, in Order to establish the People of We, form a more perfect Justice in Order to establish it. So, We form a more perfect establishing of Justice just as the People of Justice formed the United States before us. We the People of a more perfect Union establish the United States for a more perfect People of it. But in Order to insure the People of a more established Justice feel okay about it, the Union, in Order to insure the People of the Union, forms a more perfect People of the United States. This insures the People of the Union feel insured and a more perfect Union forms. The United States and the form of the Union, to establish Justice, forms a more perfect Union. Meanwhile, the People of the United States establish a more perfect People.
Tickled Pink (for Darby Larson)
Reflexive by Darby Larson
WEIRD MK9 GAS STATION LAUGH?!
________________
![]()
Why The Green Ray as a title for your book?
Corina Copp: Long story! I started with the title as a constraint a few years ago, after opening a page in Mark Ford’s biography of Raymond Roussel to a description of a short story called “La peau de la raie” (the skin of the skate), where a play on the phrase le rayon vert ends up le crayon vert (the green pencil) — and I had just seen the Eric Rohmer film Le Rayon Vert (The Green Ray: Summer) at Film Forum a few days prior, or maybe it was the other way around. The synchronicity felt like something I should follow. But I fell into a trap of inscribing Meaning into every aesthetic chance encounter from there forward, and made a constellation from the coincidences that felt very mesmerizing — but what’s the line, “if it looks like a trap it’s a trap.” So the green ray or green flash is a rarely seen optical phenomenon occurring when the sun sets over water in the “purest of weather conditions.” In Jules Verne's 1882 novel The Green Ray (I have no idea who translated this, by the way — there's no name on the English-language edition), a young woman named Helena Campbell refuses to get married until she sees the green ray. She explains it as a conductor of “true feeling,” if seen with another person. Helena and her two uncles travel the Scottish Hebrides with her two suitors, looking for it. So Eric Rohmer adapts this story loosely, with his wanderer Delphine (a Capricorn with “crippling intimacy issues”) at a total loss when her boyfriend breaks up with her and she suddenly has nowhere to go for summer holiday — the film starts with a Rimbaud couplet from a poem about “idle youth / enslaved to everything / through sensitivity.” Later I found a story by Alain Robbe-Grillet called The Shore which was originally to be called La Vue, after a 60-page Roussel poem called La Vue about a shore and a lighthouse seen through the lens of a penholder, whatever that is; and I was reading about this on my way to a lighthouse at sunset, in Point Reyes, CA, “looking” for the green ray ... I ended up traveling all last summer trying to write the title poem. It was a task I had given myself even though the manuscript was already over 100 pages long. I went to Montreal, insisting I needed to do it there. I was talking with this seven-year-old — we had just visited the Center for Canadian Architecture and saw a prototype of a catastrophe machine. So later we're sitting outside on a balcony with her dad, my friend Michael Nardone, and I’m lamenting that I haven't written the title poem for the book, and while we’re talking, she starts drawing a “catastrophe machine” with a green colored pencil. And Michael says, “Uma, remember that Corina is writing a book called The Green Ray, and Uma writes THE GREEN RAY at the top of the drawing, made of green circles, and she signs it at the bottom. Later of course Michael tells me that Uma's middle name is Hebrides. I wrote an essay for the book, finally, The Green Ray, which attempts to illustrate the connections, and others, and how I felt living in these materials or by this hand, but it's too explicit, so we decided not to include it.
Can you talk about the epigraph at the beginning of the book?
CC: The book starts with a quote from the artist Tacita Dean, who made a 16-mm film of the sunset called The Green Ray, in which she says: “So looking for the green ray became about the act of looking itself, about faith and belief in what you see.” This line feels gentler than anything I’d write, and could be misconstrued as sentimental platitude, yet it was heartbreaking how much I needed to hear it when I did. It was a total relief to come to it at the end of this process. More interestingly, Dean says in a BOMB interview that she thinks she saw the green ray by accident on her flight home from making that project, after filming the sunset every day. It’s hard to know who to turn toward as I answer this. I mean, this also relates to Rohmer and art-making by intuitive logic in general. Also, if you think decisions are arbitrary and that so much is linguistically seductive, and that some kind of central image like the green ray is going to ground you (me), you know, waking life is pretty important.
Do you see your poetry as having a relationship with cinema?
CC: I do. I'm interested in the idea that a text can be read, played, or filmed. And that objects — bad objects like love objects, or anything else seen or wanted — can reappear in other mediums. I'm interested in reappearance, I guess, which is what eventually drives me to write. And I could answer this autobiographically: I've been trying to stage film, or watch poetry, or play parts in my writing, and as a kid, for a long time, I read only biographies of Hollywood actors — I know a lot about film but never studied it really. And both poetry and cinema are forms that can be paradoxically poisonous and healing, and they make us into a better kind of collective subject, but I don’t know. Their appeal to a solitude that lacks self-sufficiency is more compelling, actually.
Returning to the Tacita Dean quote: I read your book as a response, but not acceptance, of her “belief in what you see.” For example, from “Bath Praise” (“if you don’t project a film, it’s simply not there”) or your reference of the letter from Max Ophuls’ Letter from an Unknown Woman in “Underpainting.” There is a constant questioning of what you see.
CC: Yes. How to answer this. The quote is wishful thinking, maybe. A balm for the fact that you’re right. Or an assurance that we’ll be OK, despite the fact that the world is on fire right now and should be, and that the poems following the epigraph want to shut it out or down or float near the unseen or are precarious and contradictory and heartbroken and desiring to. This might be me protecting my naiveté…
You mentioned “trying to stage film, or watch poetry, or play parts in my writing.” I know you also work in the theater, and are currently developing something inspired by Marguerite Duras, a writer who also made films. What would a film of The Green Ray look, or sound, or feel like?
CC: Lovely question. It might look something like the wrestling scene in front of the fireplace in Ken Russell’s Women in Love. And I’d change the palette on the men so it’s washed out. With an imposed soundscape of birds and outside and dishes and tennis and fake crying. Or is this Duras? I get our projections mixed up because I’ve been working on that piece for so long. The Green Ray is different; there’s more promise. I listened to Fairport Convention’s “Autopsy” on repeat for days while I put it together. So “Autopsy” as furniture music, it would sound like that, and there is a too-long walk to a shore, and probably a scene in a salon that looks like all the scenes in salons. I can go on and on here.
![]()
Corina Copp The Green Ray
Ugly Duckling Presse
'The Green Ray is relentless—in its syntactical and almost kaleidoscopic subversion of univocal emotion, its contrapuntal speed and delay, intimacy and pretense, security of sources and formal promiscuity. The poems both sense and want to, enacting a rigorous aesthetic engagement that never quite achieves synthesis, instead posing writing itself as dialogic longing. It is Corina Copp's first full-length collection of poems.'-- UDP
Excerpt
LA VOIX HUMAINE
It begins seductively, with the potential loss of her hands
parting in a bath O Fernet, able to close again, close enough
to his temples that his darker moments of depression
illuminate, taking on a slow neon flush of knee-
cap busting into freedom like we’d like it to
for the story. In reality, the butter did it, accompaniment
for a lens in constant threat of expansion; plus
it’s all over the microphones
but like a judge-salve more than
a ski-resort French-bread patter creaming
the handheld Mi in ornate fumes,
and took the view that a woman I had loved
for a long while was dead, BUT did you know she’d be finally
important to you after she died. OF COURSE you knew that,
that’s why she went to so much trouble to feel like she was always
ABOUT TO DIE when she was with you, because she knew she
belonged to you much more in death than in life, already.
What are we bedrooms’
throats drenched in bromide supposed to do then
We hire someone to …
such and such a degree of independence, but they do need
you. Knee becomes nothing, calm down, stick to your
thoughts if I were you. I’d detail here a feeling of degradation
but I lack an ability to practice, much less make you feel it because of my practice, to persuade in-
side suede pink gloves what a line like that can do
without a single desire to insist
other than form itself blotching anterior paprika while you’re
out drink
ing. I listen to La voix humaine, a woman moving from
not … a leaf to objective, as shrewd the many
forces assume to keep curt … she is thinking
I don’t want to be pissed on
all the time,
obsolete in the dark can. I leave right as Piaf
sings “Bâtarde! Bâtarde!” Overwhelm: “Le journal! Le
journal!” Her husband can’t stop reading (Algeria, PEUT
TROUT), newspaper in hands. Outshone, she
makes scenes on the telephone with scarabs
in the wrong
scone at the astron sppeed. Âllo? A virgin in Bourgogne
is still a subscriber to AMC. At some point, pause
I could not hinter Madam is not at home
divorce
at your improductivity, deluded interior.
bragging boys over, I mean, there was nothing to do
but be honest. Coming from nothing.
How could faster wealth possibly be so inevitable
and why resolve
dangerous impulses. I turn off the glass
fibrillator
break a, you distract the women’s
Door beneath sound of 3 accordions … nothing
I am lying, socially, I’ve only had three cigarettes today
and not one called. No one called the house.
All the day the house
persisted in its infinite artistic workings. Mine
teddy bears. THEY ARE FALLING ALSO
TO DISREPAIR.
Come lend your time to me
It’s all right, she likes it like that. She told her friend,
For heaven’s
sake, what do I expect me to do about it? Her friend
sucked on some hard candy she got at the waxer’s at 7:00 AM.
It was pink and paraclete, pain ward
labored tirelessly, sweet, yes, an indirect salivate
Obediently beyond pink, it took on a Rosicrucian beam
inspir’d by her agape
so she’s all standing there drooling
For a moment a Radical spiritism—
Smooth is
conservative.
From that surface on
Amplify went flat on ice rink
onto a book, «The confusion of persons is
always the evil of the city»
Just looking for some triplicity, you?
Put your hand up,
under my black cotton turtleneck
below a celluloid collar
Earnest living
Antibody Series - Corina Copp
Corina Copp: Spring Benefit -- Epic Now: Poetry for Epic Times
Corina Copp & Miguel Gutierrez
______________
![]()
First, do you consider yourself a writer? What does that term mean, exactly?
Brandi Wells: Sure. I’m a writer because I write things. I’m an eater because I eat things. I am not a runner, because I do not fucking run places. Seems easy enough.
You seem to have no fear in writing a story in an unconventional or experimental way. For you, what’s appealing about an unconventional form such as a chart or a list?
BW: I like constraints and obstructions. I like to see what I can do with different types of spaces. Though lately I’ve been thinking about traditional linear narrative and how it’s quit feeling fun for me. Whenever I enjoy someone’s linear narrative, it’s because it’s slightly fucked in some way. I really only like things that are slightly fucked.
What’s so distinct about your stories is that they’re so in-your-face and loud, but at the same time tender and small and simple, the kind the reader can’t help but relate to. Do you think that’s true? How would you describe your voice?
BW: Sometimes I’m in a workshop and someone calls my narrator crazy or gross or disgusting. And I know, this person is not for me. Because my narrator is me. Maybe I am crazy and gross and disgusting.
An interesting question about fiction, I think: How much personal experience do you draw from in order to produce your stories? In other words, does writing inform your life or does life inform your writing?
BW: I used to base things on myself and my relationships and that writing feels different than what I’m interested in now. I don’t want to write stories about some significant other or some failed relationship of mine. I feel done with that. Now I am thinking kittens with laser beam eyes, etc. Because that’s what I want to think about.
When did you first start writing? Do you remember your first time trying to put a story together?
BW: I wrote short stories for my dad when I was a kid. He asked me why I couldn’t write happy stories. I remember trying to write happy stories. Trying to write stories that were just a group of people having a picnic and hanging out. And these were practices in descriptive writing, but very, very dull.
When you write, what are you trying to do? Are you trying to say anything? What are you looking to find?
BW: Writing is just a way of entertaining myself. It’s not very different than reading book, but I have more control. I am picking what happens, when it happens and who it happens to. At last, I have control over something.
Do you usually map our your ideas or are you open to improvisation?
BW: I NEVER map anything out. I can’t imagine working with outlines or plans. Things happen and I don’t expect them. It’s exciting. If I knew what was going to happen, it wouldn’t be any fun. But my work would probably be more organized if I mapped things out. Organized and dull.
![]()
Brandi Wells This Boring Apocalypse
Civil Coping Mechanisms
'Keen, shocking, and shockingly funny, This Boring Apocalypse glitters like a mirrorball of razors above a dance floor packed with severed legs. Each page is a grisly prism. Each page flashes with a kind of light. In tiny, honed chapters, this book creates a world where love bleeds into horror, where there is neither life nor death but a life-death hybrid, where everything exists in a state of regenerative decay. Brace yourself for these sentences. Brandi Wells knows how to take you apart.'-- Joanna Ruocco
'A novella told in miniature nocturnes, This Boring Apocalypse is violent and dazzling, brutal and mesmerizing; its melody is fatal. Wells pulls the body apart and buries it in pieces, but in her necropolis, limbs can rejoin, resurrect, return—fragments are hot-glued or sewn or soldered or just magically reattached to assuage a loneliness more formidable than death.'-- Lily Hoang
'Like if Donald Barthelme had been hired to transcribe Jeffrey Dahmer’s wet dreams for Lars Von Trier, Brandi Wells holds zero whims back in her blitzkrieg surrealist take on the Theater of Cruelty. The result is a hilariously germane Frankenstein-like idea-sprawl of gore and impulsive feeling, set in a mutative landscape where bodies are playthings, domesticity is punishment, and death, as if to match life, reigns on in brutal, fertile wonder. Strap yourself in and don’t look up.'-- Blake Butler
Excerpts
I build a fort to protect myself from the person capable of judging lemons
I make a fort that doesn’t look like a fort. If my fort looks like a fort, the person capable of judging lemons will know what to attack and will do so quickly. I make a fort that looks like a lemon. It looks exactly like a lemon. In fact, when she comes to visit me, she eats the lemon and tells me it is delicious. I watch her for a while, wondering how safe the fort is inside her stomach. Could I climb into her stomach and still be safeguarded by the fort? But I remember digestion. Surely her digestive track is no safe place.
I make a fort that looks like nothing. The person capable of judging lemons will never recognize it. He will never be able to attack it because it is impossible to attack nothing. But I misplace the fort that looks like nothing. For me, nothing has always been a hard item to locate. Hard to carry with me, hard to remember, hard to feel attached to. I have lost nothings before and I hardly remember those nothings or the idea of having those nothings. I lament the loss of nothing, but is a short, unremarkable lamentation, so I lament short lamentations, because remembering feels significant. Self-expression should be valued. There should be more prolonged screaming and bleeding, being born and dying, dying again, dying differently, dying in a way that is long lasting. I have seen many unimpressive deaths. Death should be more than the lack of life. Death should be a terrible event, forever ongoing. Life is so momentous. Why shouldn’t death be lauded as well?
I make a fort that looks like tortured people. I have always been good with tortured people. It is my talent. They appreciate working with someone who appreciates them. It is the secret of the tortured. They do not want to be saved. They only want to be admired as beauties and labeled aesthetically pleasing, because of course they are pleasing. Who hasn’t tortured someone and felt that twinge of pleasure? That beauty? That something? That something-something? I am good at torture. It is a talent many possess but few are proud of. If a person has a skill, they should be praised for their skill. Their skill should be appreciated and utilized. When I go into the houses of strangers and torture them, I expect a Thank you, and a mint, and a sweater, because it has been cold lately and torture is tiring work and I do not like to be cold. I do not deserve to feel uncomfortable, because I have a skill and this skill should earn me something. It should matter.
I abandon forts. They have not worked for me. But I dread the man capable of judging lemons, so I destroy all the lemons. I build a fire and burn them. It is a citrus burning. Nothing anywhere on Earth can smell bad. Nothing can smell unfresh. Young people fall in love. They hold hands and sniff each other, admire one another. There is mating and the production of untortured offspring who may acquire torturing later, either as a skill or as a fate.
The world is turning beautiful and I move into the abandoned house I have longed for.
I tire of arms
They seem far too small, insubstantial. Their accruement matters so little. I can have arms or not have arms. I can collect more or not. I develop an affinity for torsos but I always find them attached to worthless appendages. I try to convince people to bring me torsos already detached from their appendages. Detaching arms and legs and heads is hard work. Grueling and rewarding, but it would be best if everyone else would gruel while I am rewarded.
No one brings me torsos. Not a single torso. I dream of lovely torsos against a red or purple background. Intimate table settings, candlelight flickering.
I go out in search of torsos. No one is hiding the torsos, hoarding them like I expected. Do they not realize the torsos are delicious? Have they never tasted a torso? Licked a skin covered rib or grazed teeth against the muscle of back? But I realize everyone else is one step ahead of me. They are hiding their torsos and well. They are leaving the appendages attached to their torsos. They are leaving their torsos alive and allowing these torsos to have jobs and friends and hobbies like working on their cars or building paper mache statues. These people are smart. They have planned well. But I am on to them.
Sometimes it is hard for me to tell which torsos are for eating. It is hard to distinguish between a person who you love and a person you intend to consume, a person you intend to de-arm and de-leg and behead. You should label those close to you. But even then, it would be a tricky business. How am I to tell a well-intentioned label from a label someone is securing to mislead me so they might hoard the torsos for themselves? So I label the people, not in a confusing way, but in a well-intentioned manner. I carry a self-inking stamp with me everywhere I go. It is double-sided. One side says Delicious. The other side says OH this one does not look so good. It does not look so good at all. The stamp is self-inking and I have added a sort of acid for semi-permanence. I would hate for the stamps to wear off, but also I do not want them to be permanent. A person might grow less delicious after a few years or a formerly unattractive person might become more delicious. Things can change. So the stamps only last a year or so, at least this is what I think. I can’t be certain because I have just begun the stamping process.
![]()
![]()
![]()
*
p.s. Hey. ** H, Hi! Nice to see you! Thanks, everything with the submitting and the moving is smooth with a tolerable rockiness. Oh, well, yeah, that would be great about the post if you have time and if it would interest you. Thank you muchly! I hope you're doing very well. ** David Ehrenstein, I think I would need a de-sketching class to do that. Really superb piece on 'Out 1'. Wealth galore. I have no leather daddy dreams, which won't surprise you, and I think I like Mr. Sacks in his scrubs best. Nonetheless, I anxiously await to the moment of reading your piece on him. Everyone, Mr. E follows up his great piece on Rivette's 'Out 1' with this no doubt also great piece on Oliver Sacks. ** James, Hi. Oh, I see. Hm, no, I don't think I've ever experienced that. I basically lose interest and stop reading based on whether the writing in what I'm reading interests me or not. What a piece of writing about is usually drowned if visible in the prose for me. It's certainly true that sex is very, very rarely written about interestingly. That's for sure. I'm trying to remember whether, back when I was younger and bought escorts a lot, any of their asses seemed to be an especially short shortcut to God. There was this one guy. Named Jimmy maybe? In NYC. I used to see him at the hustler bars all the time, but he was always with this really old man and seemed to 'belong' to him. Then I saw him on alone once, and he made himself available. I asked him why he wasn't with his friend. He said his friend had died of a heart attack while they were smoking crack two days before. Maybe it's possible that that made his ass seem like a shorter shortcut? ** Cobaltfram, Hey, John! Good to see you, buddy! You're re-ensconced in Texas again then. That's good, right? Glad you liked the PdT. If memory serves, they were having some kind of performance festival when you were there? That's a good way to experience the joint. I'm good. Film is moments away from being totally finished. Really good about your reengagement with the novel! Sweet! ** Steevee, I can only agree. Wow, a double Steevee feature! Everyone, you have the golden opportunity to read Steevee's thoughts on two new films if you like this weekend. Here's his thinking on the 'lame' French thriller 'The Connection', and here are his thoughts on André Téchiné’s 'disappointing' new film 'In the Name of My Daughter'. ** _Black_Acrylic, Good to hear, Ben. It's nothing but their loss. ** Bill, Hi. Thanks a lot about the stills. Yeah, it was pretty good month for escort texts, I thought so too. JaketheBlake just might. He seems like a real candidate. Mm, I don't have my dates for Halle yet. I might just nip your time there at the beginning of mine and at the end of yours. I'll let you know when Gisele gives me my marching orders. ** Keaton, Nice tribute to BB. To anyone else reading this, that means BB as in ... King. Not as in 'unsafe practices'. Everyone, BB King gets a tributary post over on Keaton's. Go pay your respects, please. I think that when I played as a kid with other kids, it was mostly 'cowboys and Indians.' And croquet. Discursive-ness is a sign of good health. So it is cherry? That's interesting because I hate real cherries and everything made from them. But I don't think there's an atom of real cherry in red jello. ** Etc etc etc, Hi, Casey. The 'LCTG' page signifies that festivals are considering it and that having some kind of online presence for it is a good idea, basically. Genesis P-orridge and Aaron Dilloway? Wow, that's a strange combo. Makes sense in a way but is also seems quite wack. Really nice about seeing Merzbow. I still haven't. Aching legs aside, that setting is probably more conducive. But I haven't seen him live, of course. Awesome that you're reviewing Mark's book. I think that is crazily amazing, great novel. He does still check in here once in a while, and I think he's still a regular reader to some degree. I'm in the 4th arr. Down at the very bottom, about two and a half blocks from Bastille, a block from Place des Vosges. I like the place. It's old and a little creaky, but it's sweet. Most people would say this new neighborhood is an improvement, but I actually miss the 10th. Living there is like living in the real Paris. Living here is too, but about 70% of the people on the street here are tourists, it seems like. Very happy weekend to you too! ** Kier, Kier! Yay! I liked and noticed that line too. Cool. I'm so sorry about the shitty aspects of your last days. I hope they're fading away. When I feel shitty, sometimes playing video games helps a lot, I don't know why. Maybe that? While I'm sure that it has at least a very slightly irksome side, the idea of a spoiled sheep made me happy. I hope you don't get sick. Although, another weird thing, sometimes when I get sick when I'm feeling shitty, the sickness replaces the shittiness, and then, when I get better, the shittiiness is dead. Silver lining? But I hope you don't get sick. My days ... well, I had no electricity in my apartment for almost three days. That sucked. It just went off suddenly because I guess the transition from previous tenants to me wasn't properly arranged. And everything here is electric, so there was nothing. And it was a French holiday, so it didn't get turned back on until yesterday. I bought a little clothes washing machine. I haven't had a washing machine in the place where I lived since I lived at my parents' place a billion years ago, so that's cool. I worked hard on the script for Zac's and my next film, and it's going really, really well. I met with Zac about it, and he likes it a lot and suggested changes and additions and stuff, so I'm revising it now. That's exciting. Gisele and I auditioned this dancer to fill the other newly vacant role ('the singer') in 'Kindertotenlieder', and she was great and got the role really fast, and we spent the day rehearsing the role with her. I was supposed to be photographed for Purple Magazine, but I need a haircut, so I delayed that. I think those things plus suffering to some degree inside my lightless, powerless, hot water-less, etc., apartment was the gist of my days of late. I hope you have really good weekend, pal. And I will do my best to do the same. ** Kyler, Hi. The beyond is always a good idea. ** Marilyn Roxie, Hi, Marilyn! Great to see you! Happy to have instigated your chuckling. Oh, no, that tribute CD has been o.o.p. for a long time. Maybe you can get a used copy cheap somewhere, I don't know? Yeah, I contested-off my extra copy, or I would send you one. I'll go have a look and see if anyone's selling theirs. Take care! ** Misanthrope, I would imagine your lawyer knows infinitely better than I do. Ugh, I hope it's not as complicated as it sounds. Oh, yeah, same deal here with the 'what's that word mean' thing. Funny how you know what something means but putting words to that knowledge is so difficult. But then I guess I've 'built' a whole 'career' as a writer around that. ** Cal Graves, No heyDEN was good, actually. I've been basically quite good. And you? Are you writing up a storm, hurricane, a super volcano? 'LCTG' is being promoted to film festival people in the market at the Cannes Film Festival right now. I don't know how that's going yet. New place is cool except for an electricity problem that is now thankfully solved. Is the Bastille a big tourist trap? That's sort of strange. It's a cool area, but there's nothing there really for tourists. It's just a huge roundabout with a very tall column in the middle. Huh. Where'd you go? What happened there? Drastically (in the good way), Dennis. ** Torn porter, Torn! It's been ages! Really, really great to get this chance! I moved, yep. Film's all but finished, yep. Do reintegrate here if you feel like it. Would be awesome for me and mine. Love, me (and mine). ** Okay. This weekend you get to look over and consider four books that I highly recommend. This is a particularly great foursome, so do be attentive, if you have the time and attention to spare. I will see you on Monday.
You grew up in and around Detroit. Has place played a role in your language/ attitude/ overall badassness?
Sean Kilpatrick: Grew up in a moderate Detroit ghetto by Seven Mile. I do scant direct autobiography. I hope to write an absurdist memoir, go after the old personal voice people fetishize. Plays an itsy roll in the language maybe. Can be fun to discuss, getting one’s ass in a continual rock-stoned and beat through babyhood. Helped humble and I recommend. I know people would benefit. A fun brag at the littlest. Maybe my blood-focus, misanthropy, and nihilism originate here. I am grateful. As a white person, I take without consequence. Luckily poetry has no consequence. It has a lot of white people trying to siphon who or who doesn’t have privilege and what that means and what what means. Who the fuck cares what any white person has to say about politics or class-systems or crossing the street? Who the fuck tittles their verse. Serious serious serious serious.
I grew up around the same area and even before the crash of ’08, it always felt like a dying thing, robust in its decay. But living in Chicago now, I find myself sticking up for the area when some yuppie fed with a golden spoon starts the dis. So for me, I feel some allegiance with the city in terms of its existence in a marginalized sense. Brunch isn’t as big there. So, besides the hopeful job getting after you graduate, any major plans?
SK: We’re in the decay club. Hard not to recognize yuppie-ness as the worst crime where we been, or anything anyone does who breathes. I hate stuff not previously exploded. Applying to community colleges now. Edited a devotional slash psychology manuscript. What do you plan after Columbia? Which future isn’t suicide? I’m writing a book with my boo Elizabeth Mikesch and another (very slowly, my fault) with Sam Pink, a poetry manuscript implicating my anus as its own race, maybe gender, and a short novel five years in.
After I finish up with Columbia teach I guess…community college instead. But I want to live in Alaska for a year, too, and get a backyard somewhere to bbq some meat and poems in this fashion and have people love me. I admire the risks you take in your writing. When you sit down to compose a piece, what is at stake?
SK: First I inflate my cushion. Pop the wine. Ponder some fashionable crit. Random book reviews loving yet stern. Insert monocle with KY. Crack each knuckle, a forty minute process. Then I endeavor to change the world by humming a thought loose. Yes, the world goes purr and I blink. Usually lost is a square centimeter of my prepuce. Really the starving find themselves full by the closer. My consecutive hugs assist. Ah, but my alphabet is the loss of everyone who’s touched me. So the groins.
Any good movies/tv/music/artists etc. that inspire you? Oooooo sorry for jumping around but I just remembered I wanted to ask you about Anatomy Courses, a collaboration with Blake Butler. How did this go down, i.e. who decided to initially start the project? What was the process?
SK: Movies get my butter. Here’s who’ve kept me alive: Gaspar Noé, Andrzej Żulawski, David Lynch, Seijun Suzuki, Luis Buñuel, the movie Little Murders. Blake Butler as well. We started talking when I submitted to Lamination Colony around 2007. He suggested we write and sent the first page. He writes fast and best. To keep pace, I bathed in meth. Lots of rewriting for the slightest approach of me to his genius. We found Satan. Cameron Pierce, Lazy Fascist Press, beautified it, amazing cover by Matthew Revert. -- Columbia Poetry Reviews
Lazy Fascist Press
'Kilpatrick’s prose is the aural equivalent of anthrax cut with ecstasy. All other writing makes me sick. Here at last is one so nasty it’s almost like there’s hope.'-- Blake Butler
'The violent, sexual zone of television and entertainment is made to saturate that safe-haven, the American Family. The result is a zone of violent ambience, a ‘fuckscape’: where every object or word can be made to do horrific acts. As when torturers use banal objects on its victims, it is the most banal objects that become the most horrific (and hilarious) in Sean Kilpatrick’s brilliant first book.' -- Johannes Goransson (on Fuckscapes)
Excerpts
from Spork Press
09/07/2009
Similarly Rented Womb Stank
Touching outside involves less god. The river where I drown for thirty miles every night, huddled zigzag between fists in an ugly tickle, crowds of men seen pummeling slant from the bank, where my sockets ruckus pure money with the ancestors of whatever sex destroys me, chewing sediment toward China, hunkering through methods that heighten the land, disappeared splash by splash, an epilepsy of hue so tight I skip myself sore around spunk buoyancies. My absenteeism is symptomatic of my being there. In the stasis my blood refrains; combing the skin above until fire. Every nanosecond fluctuates overlapping hatreds so immense—and then little glances happen and I want to get married, someone pets me and I reconsider procreation, someone stands up and I want to slit their ballsac, shivers when I brush their hair, I want to bunch off all their skin and roll around in it, gives me some laconic refusal and I want to prove the world is flat, but not really. I call my period back from limbo, back from starvation, whisper the egg out of hiding and it sits up purring without nuisance of gravity, thighs spider webbing, black months reverse. The gush heats my esophagus, revolving downward, traceable on the glow of my birth marks, stains that mean put me back in, my ribs box the revolving cramp and I flap my arms to help inch belly upside down, dilated red, lips parting reflexively, sprinkling a baby no one might be cruel enough to raise. Better in town square, or on the floors of schools disassembled by movement. I am a parasite and I miss my host. I miss not having been born yet. Their unzipped pants taste of gas. They roll me in the balled hide of a screaming animal. The drool I hover with reflects me. Horsefly stung cataracts slapped down, scooting terror, sees the grass mashed fuck to soup and me humping on it: ass and folds. Folds chasing folds shiver off, muscular system exposed, shiny fat, wrapped in our own flay and squirting dermis, whining louder with each mouthful, blood dizzy and wedged maggots feed each shivering hunk, rowed through the plaster with torn placement, our doggy blanket drying slowly. All tomorrow I sneeze Flintstones Vitamins wrapped in fur. My wrecked circulation, so many veins the light, now blue, chaws inside a mother sound fainting forward.
Baby Bitch
“Your baby bitch weakness is never as cute an unreasonable defense as you think, especially when you’re off speed. If your tricks rather called you ugly, instead of letting you, in false modesty, say it first, they would then adorn you beyond your tiny comprehension, and you’d have to fill your own cunt with substance.” He placed my wounds like a petty savior, closing one eye, staring down the still unfolding prim and slick haltered tucks of where I land. He’s sucked my clit in a thought bubble all day. Now sweat lamps our torsos, public slime, conducted chafing. He slaps an extension cord through my come. “At some point we’ll miss each other, lick the wall socket.” I leak ounces of water I’ve eaten for the last week. He stirs, punches his tongue up my ass, cooing me close to an almost throb, floating inside gooey suction, his fingers v-shaped, compressing my clit, stuck out, elastic. Wound around thick calibration, I contract and lock tight enough for him to slam pathways. Our hips ache rhythm, my legs thrown, an afterthought. We bake through so much friction the house leans. I plug my hand into my mouth and shrink, organs choking into a suffocated spasm around his cock. We let go, pulse, vision loss, screaming in our skins, his tip audibly whacking my cervix like a rewound car accident. Our hearts tamper fabulous congruities. Body language is the one form of communication I keep finding myself trapped in and liking, so saying hi is hard. I quietly become a man under the sheets. I slip into cumy boxers and do hot dog rotations, make the sheets rise like something’s there, extend my good confidence to the world, focus on the limitations of my length and how to hide. Because he stretches out my undersized panties, folded into them like an after sex magic show, I assume his genitalia, no longer accomplishing that grotesque male bounce and flap, are inch by inch retracting into egg sac. I’ll have his musk by the time he’s awake. He’ll cream himself flowery and miss my big holy penetration. My fucking him leaves an imprint, an echo of cock he reverberates in girly sing-song. He contains my puddle, flutters around, dripping me. The physical memory lasts longer than he cares to think. He is sore and angry for being sore and mocks my enormous protuberance under red sore sheets, pretending to be me before on to the next breeching, which occurs in possibly five minutes. I finish ogling transvestite me, with my Rocky Horror hands, though I disagree with leather, unless it is in my mouth. I show Canada my tits. I live in a Japanese closet. I sneeze Algerian sperm. I log online and talk about dead dogs. I make phone calls and text messages and type in the instant message hatebox. I tap a telegraph on the small of my back, spread my legs around a smoke signal, take cell phone pictures, send them to a girl who tongues my ass, a boy with gout, a child with clap, a transvestite who takes notes, people in Hong Kong circle jerking in the middle of a crowded street, posted on the blog with pubic hair font. A guy from Sacramento is crying on my voicemail. I film my feet for someone in Kansas, toes wrinkling hello. I attend a webcam orgy, choking myself with my bra. I laugh asking if father catches feast in my diaphragm. He died in childbirth. Literally, he’s negative seven years old. His prick looks like a coat hanger. Boything from Colorado wants to watch me piss on cam. Girlcreature from school asks what drugs her boyfriend stuffed me with. LSD suppositories and I got pyrotechnic groin trauma. So he shampooed your cunt for CNN? Acronyms are hot. I’ll punch your clit later. LOL. I type upside down in the hatebox, legs over the chair top like white feathers that hate themselves. I invented wingspan. I’m typing I fucked your mom over and over to my own screen name. I answer my cell and continue an online conversation mid-sentence. The television is loud enough to upset my stomach. I hold music to my ear and type with one finger and yell “What!” into the phone while performing on cam, taking another picture, switching the lights on and off with my toe.
Graveyard
I hump the graveyard so bodies fizz. Their stains grow inside me. Exhaling into the corpse dirt above each grave, a lick of something molded dry inside my thought. I kill the hot end of a cigarette on my nipple, leaving white scars dividing the pink like a second nipple failing to begin. In a minute the world can turn your crucifixion runny. My scraped tits bobbling clay, retarded putty sucked by all. I want to get my gang rape on. Fill up a small closet with my blood. Comb it out of me, enough to paint a house. I’m too far up my own rashes to hear. My genitalia need constant sensory information. It’s how I can tell where I’m going half the time. I miss the ex who smoked my vulva like a bong. He spent a lot of time down there with a flashlight, being religious. That kind of spatial misconception is common amongst the devoted. For instance, when I’m five years old, I fall down trying to grab the moon. I want to use it to shave my legs. I miss a version of the future invented for my sorry inclusion. The particular slapped-tall ostrich pounce these fuckers ritualize. I am too far splayed again by hands.
Sucker June excerpts
Sucker June
WANT A HUG?
________________
I wrote a novel with daggers that jut from the page and poke people in the eyes at appropriate moments in the plot. It was kind of a pop-up book, except with daggers.
The novel was about a man who was aware that all he was was a character in a novel. He hated his readers because he couldn’t get away from them. He had no privacy. He was like someone on a reality television show without having signed a contract to be on a reality television show. Occasionally, he would look up and shake his fist and curse at the people reading his life. And sometimes he would poke them in the eyes with daggers.
The title of the novel was Don’t Read This or You Might Get Poked in the Eye With a Dagger.
I used to hand out free copies to people at independently funded literary festivals. Aspiring authors smiled and said things like “Oh, you wrote this?” and “I look forward to reading it.” I told them, Please don’t.
My mom found out about my novel and wanted a copy. Before shipping it, I signed the inside cover: Mom, for the love of God, please don’t read this. Love, Darby.
After my book tours ended, my agent called and told me Don’t Read This … was a breakout. It was selling like crazy. Bookstores couldn’t keep them on the shelves. I said, That’s great. “Are you working on anything else?” he asked. I told him I was recording an audio version called Don’t Listen to This or You Might Get Needles Jabbed in Your Eardrums.
My fame was overwhelming me. I had to get an unlisted number. I had to remove my e-mail address from my website. I had to buy a secluded house in the woods with a long crazy driveway and an electronic gate at the bottom.
The university invited me to give a lecture on writing. As I walked up the cement steps to the lecture hall, a man was sitting on the steps with sunglasses on. An upturned hat lay on the ground next to him. I stopped to talk to him. He said he was blind. I asked him how he became blind. He said he was born that way.
Inside the lecture hall, I stood at a podium and told professors and aspiring writers what I thought about the craft of writing. I told them that you have to hate the readers who read your stories. You have to punish your readers. Readers want to feel pain. Then everyone murmured amongst themselves, “That’s so true,” and, “You should really read his book,” and they nodded in agreement and they hugged each other and they felt the happiness that agreements always bring, and then they all looked up at me with perfect eyeballs. -- Darby Larson
Civil Coping Mechanisms
'My book Ohey! became a book yesterday! It is now available from places like amazon. The writings in this collection have been published online and in print over the last 12 years. It includes some of my very first published pieces as well as work published very recently.'-- Darby Larson
'Darby Larson is a lyricist. He might be the Eminem of prose fiction, but probably not. Perhaps he’s more like Sage Francis or one of the guys from Definitive Jux, but my guess is no. Hip-hop comparisons aside, Larson’s got some skills where putting words together is concerned. He’s definitely an artist who adeptly uses literary devices such as assonance, alliteration, and wordplay.'-- Joseph Michael Owens, PANK
Excerpts
Ohey!
This is a story about a girl I'm after named Ohey! that ends with me on The Worm Gang's couch watching Jeopardy! Ohey! is a witch I'm after with benefits. I'm heading to The Worm Gang's hideout on the flip side of my fictional city and stopping at stop signs in my VW Ghia.
I get there, am let in, and it's like how it is when I go there. Ohey! is there but I can't see her. I see the rest of the gang on couches and leaning. Clev's in the kitchen cleaving. Nina's wiping the cover of a book with a cloth. Annie and Angi, the twins, sit at the couch, conjoined at the calves, and there's Ohey! peeking from the hall. I wink and she disappears.
What's cooking? I say something like to Clev who won't be bothered.
How did I even walk in here? No one sees me?
Oh, Hi Nina, how's the new job? It's fine, I'm dusting these books. Like a jacket, I offer. Solid, she says like it's her new slang. Where's, I begin but stop because there's Ohey! from the hallway again, so I venture.
The trouble is, once Ohey! and I get our clothes floored, we're no longer ourselves. We become metal-headed heroin machines. It's rocky at first but the going's rock-rupturing and nearly nauseating, like how the last full moon lasted.
But there's screaming from the kitchen. Oh god. Ohey! says this and something else. We go to the kitchen wearing what we're wearing and it's Clev on the floor with her arm severed and in a large popcorn bowl full of ice Nina's preparing like a snack. Clev's wah-wahing on the floor. Ohey! jackets herself and follows Nina and the bowl out the door. The twins pick up Clev and help her out the door, and that's the last of The Worm Gang gone. A leaf floats in on a breeze through a window and follows them out the door. A dog behind me barks. I sit on the couch. What is... Jupiter.
from Preamble
In Order to form the United States and establish the People of the United States and Justice, We establish a more perfect Justice. The People of the Union and Justice, We, to form, in Order to form a more perfect People of Justice. The United States of a more perfect Union, in Order to establish the People of We, form a more perfect Justice in Order to establish it. So, We form a more perfect establishing of Justice just as the People of Justice formed the United States before us. We the People of a more perfect Union establish the United States for a more perfect People of it. But in Order to insure the People of a more established Justice feel okay about it, the Union, in Order to insure the People of the Union, forms a more perfect People of the United States. This insures the People of the Union feel insured and a more perfect Union forms. The United States and the form of the Union, to establish Justice, forms a more perfect Union. Meanwhile, the People of the United States establish a more perfect People.
Tickled Pink (for Darby Larson)
Reflexive by Darby Larson
WEIRD MK9 GAS STATION LAUGH?!
________________
Why The Green Ray as a title for your book?
Corina Copp: Long story! I started with the title as a constraint a few years ago, after opening a page in Mark Ford’s biography of Raymond Roussel to a description of a short story called “La peau de la raie” (the skin of the skate), where a play on the phrase le rayon vert ends up le crayon vert (the green pencil) — and I had just seen the Eric Rohmer film Le Rayon Vert (The Green Ray: Summer) at Film Forum a few days prior, or maybe it was the other way around. The synchronicity felt like something I should follow. But I fell into a trap of inscribing Meaning into every aesthetic chance encounter from there forward, and made a constellation from the coincidences that felt very mesmerizing — but what’s the line, “if it looks like a trap it’s a trap.” So the green ray or green flash is a rarely seen optical phenomenon occurring when the sun sets over water in the “purest of weather conditions.” In Jules Verne's 1882 novel The Green Ray (I have no idea who translated this, by the way — there's no name on the English-language edition), a young woman named Helena Campbell refuses to get married until she sees the green ray. She explains it as a conductor of “true feeling,” if seen with another person. Helena and her two uncles travel the Scottish Hebrides with her two suitors, looking for it. So Eric Rohmer adapts this story loosely, with his wanderer Delphine (a Capricorn with “crippling intimacy issues”) at a total loss when her boyfriend breaks up with her and she suddenly has nowhere to go for summer holiday — the film starts with a Rimbaud couplet from a poem about “idle youth / enslaved to everything / through sensitivity.” Later I found a story by Alain Robbe-Grillet called The Shore which was originally to be called La Vue, after a 60-page Roussel poem called La Vue about a shore and a lighthouse seen through the lens of a penholder, whatever that is; and I was reading about this on my way to a lighthouse at sunset, in Point Reyes, CA, “looking” for the green ray ... I ended up traveling all last summer trying to write the title poem. It was a task I had given myself even though the manuscript was already over 100 pages long. I went to Montreal, insisting I needed to do it there. I was talking with this seven-year-old — we had just visited the Center for Canadian Architecture and saw a prototype of a catastrophe machine. So later we're sitting outside on a balcony with her dad, my friend Michael Nardone, and I’m lamenting that I haven't written the title poem for the book, and while we’re talking, she starts drawing a “catastrophe machine” with a green colored pencil. And Michael says, “Uma, remember that Corina is writing a book called The Green Ray, and Uma writes THE GREEN RAY at the top of the drawing, made of green circles, and she signs it at the bottom. Later of course Michael tells me that Uma's middle name is Hebrides. I wrote an essay for the book, finally, The Green Ray, which attempts to illustrate the connections, and others, and how I felt living in these materials or by this hand, but it's too explicit, so we decided not to include it.
Can you talk about the epigraph at the beginning of the book?
CC: The book starts with a quote from the artist Tacita Dean, who made a 16-mm film of the sunset called The Green Ray, in which she says: “So looking for the green ray became about the act of looking itself, about faith and belief in what you see.” This line feels gentler than anything I’d write, and could be misconstrued as sentimental platitude, yet it was heartbreaking how much I needed to hear it when I did. It was a total relief to come to it at the end of this process. More interestingly, Dean says in a BOMB interview that she thinks she saw the green ray by accident on her flight home from making that project, after filming the sunset every day. It’s hard to know who to turn toward as I answer this. I mean, this also relates to Rohmer and art-making by intuitive logic in general. Also, if you think decisions are arbitrary and that so much is linguistically seductive, and that some kind of central image like the green ray is going to ground you (me), you know, waking life is pretty important.
Do you see your poetry as having a relationship with cinema?
CC: I do. I'm interested in the idea that a text can be read, played, or filmed. And that objects — bad objects like love objects, or anything else seen or wanted — can reappear in other mediums. I'm interested in reappearance, I guess, which is what eventually drives me to write. And I could answer this autobiographically: I've been trying to stage film, or watch poetry, or play parts in my writing, and as a kid, for a long time, I read only biographies of Hollywood actors — I know a lot about film but never studied it really. And both poetry and cinema are forms that can be paradoxically poisonous and healing, and they make us into a better kind of collective subject, but I don’t know. Their appeal to a solitude that lacks self-sufficiency is more compelling, actually.
Returning to the Tacita Dean quote: I read your book as a response, but not acceptance, of her “belief in what you see.” For example, from “Bath Praise” (“if you don’t project a film, it’s simply not there”) or your reference of the letter from Max Ophuls’ Letter from an Unknown Woman in “Underpainting.” There is a constant questioning of what you see.
CC: Yes. How to answer this. The quote is wishful thinking, maybe. A balm for the fact that you’re right. Or an assurance that we’ll be OK, despite the fact that the world is on fire right now and should be, and that the poems following the epigraph want to shut it out or down or float near the unseen or are precarious and contradictory and heartbroken and desiring to. This might be me protecting my naiveté…
You mentioned “trying to stage film, or watch poetry, or play parts in my writing.” I know you also work in the theater, and are currently developing something inspired by Marguerite Duras, a writer who also made films. What would a film of The Green Ray look, or sound, or feel like?
CC: Lovely question. It might look something like the wrestling scene in front of the fireplace in Ken Russell’s Women in Love. And I’d change the palette on the men so it’s washed out. With an imposed soundscape of birds and outside and dishes and tennis and fake crying. Or is this Duras? I get our projections mixed up because I’ve been working on that piece for so long. The Green Ray is different; there’s more promise. I listened to Fairport Convention’s “Autopsy” on repeat for days while I put it together. So “Autopsy” as furniture music, it would sound like that, and there is a too-long walk to a shore, and probably a scene in a salon that looks like all the scenes in salons. I can go on and on here.
Ugly Duckling Presse
'The Green Ray is relentless—in its syntactical and almost kaleidoscopic subversion of univocal emotion, its contrapuntal speed and delay, intimacy and pretense, security of sources and formal promiscuity. The poems both sense and want to, enacting a rigorous aesthetic engagement that never quite achieves synthesis, instead posing writing itself as dialogic longing. It is Corina Copp's first full-length collection of poems.'-- UDP
Excerpt
LA VOIX HUMAINE
It begins seductively, with the potential loss of her hands
parting in a bath O Fernet, able to close again, close enough
to his temples that his darker moments of depression
illuminate, taking on a slow neon flush of knee-
cap busting into freedom like we’d like it to
for the story. In reality, the butter did it, accompaniment
for a lens in constant threat of expansion; plus
it’s all over the microphones
but like a judge-salve more than
a ski-resort French-bread patter creaming
the handheld Mi in ornate fumes,
and took the view that a woman I had loved
for a long while was dead, BUT did you know she’d be finally
important to you after she died. OF COURSE you knew that,
that’s why she went to so much trouble to feel like she was always
ABOUT TO DIE when she was with you, because she knew she
belonged to you much more in death than in life, already.
What are we bedrooms’
throats drenched in bromide supposed to do then
We hire someone to …
such and such a degree of independence, but they do need
you. Knee becomes nothing, calm down, stick to your
thoughts if I were you. I’d detail here a feeling of degradation
but I lack an ability to practice, much less make you feel it because of my practice, to persuade in-
side suede pink gloves what a line like that can do
without a single desire to insist
other than form itself blotching anterior paprika while you’re
out drink
ing. I listen to La voix humaine, a woman moving from
not … a leaf to objective, as shrewd the many
forces assume to keep curt … she is thinking
I don’t want to be pissed on
all the time,
obsolete in the dark can. I leave right as Piaf
sings “Bâtarde! Bâtarde!” Overwhelm: “Le journal! Le
journal!” Her husband can’t stop reading (Algeria, PEUT
TROUT), newspaper in hands. Outshone, she
makes scenes on the telephone with scarabs
in the wrong
scone at the astron sppeed. Âllo? A virgin in Bourgogne
is still a subscriber to AMC. At some point, pause
I could not hinter Madam is not at home
divorce
at your improductivity, deluded interior.
bragging boys over, I mean, there was nothing to do
but be honest. Coming from nothing.
How could faster wealth possibly be so inevitable
and why resolve
dangerous impulses. I turn off the glass
fibrillator
break a, you distract the women’s
Door beneath sound of 3 accordions … nothing
I am lying, socially, I’ve only had three cigarettes today
and not one called. No one called the house.
All the day the house
persisted in its infinite artistic workings. Mine
teddy bears. THEY ARE FALLING ALSO
TO DISREPAIR.
Come lend your time to me
It’s all right, she likes it like that. She told her friend,
For heaven’s
sake, what do I expect me to do about it? Her friend
sucked on some hard candy she got at the waxer’s at 7:00 AM.
It was pink and paraclete, pain ward
labored tirelessly, sweet, yes, an indirect salivate
Obediently beyond pink, it took on a Rosicrucian beam
inspir’d by her agape
so she’s all standing there drooling
For a moment a Radical spiritism—
Smooth is
conservative.
From that surface on
Amplify went flat on ice rink
onto a book, «The confusion of persons is
always the evil of the city»
Just looking for some triplicity, you?
Put your hand up,
under my black cotton turtleneck
below a celluloid collar
Earnest living
Antibody Series - Corina Copp
Corina Copp: Spring Benefit -- Epic Now: Poetry for Epic Times
Corina Copp & Miguel Gutierrez
______________
First, do you consider yourself a writer? What does that term mean, exactly?
Brandi Wells: Sure. I’m a writer because I write things. I’m an eater because I eat things. I am not a runner, because I do not fucking run places. Seems easy enough.
You seem to have no fear in writing a story in an unconventional or experimental way. For you, what’s appealing about an unconventional form such as a chart or a list?
BW: I like constraints and obstructions. I like to see what I can do with different types of spaces. Though lately I’ve been thinking about traditional linear narrative and how it’s quit feeling fun for me. Whenever I enjoy someone’s linear narrative, it’s because it’s slightly fucked in some way. I really only like things that are slightly fucked.
What’s so distinct about your stories is that they’re so in-your-face and loud, but at the same time tender and small and simple, the kind the reader can’t help but relate to. Do you think that’s true? How would you describe your voice?
BW: Sometimes I’m in a workshop and someone calls my narrator crazy or gross or disgusting. And I know, this person is not for me. Because my narrator is me. Maybe I am crazy and gross and disgusting.
An interesting question about fiction, I think: How much personal experience do you draw from in order to produce your stories? In other words, does writing inform your life or does life inform your writing?
BW: I used to base things on myself and my relationships and that writing feels different than what I’m interested in now. I don’t want to write stories about some significant other or some failed relationship of mine. I feel done with that. Now I am thinking kittens with laser beam eyes, etc. Because that’s what I want to think about.
When did you first start writing? Do you remember your first time trying to put a story together?
BW: I wrote short stories for my dad when I was a kid. He asked me why I couldn’t write happy stories. I remember trying to write happy stories. Trying to write stories that were just a group of people having a picnic and hanging out. And these were practices in descriptive writing, but very, very dull.
When you write, what are you trying to do? Are you trying to say anything? What are you looking to find?
BW: Writing is just a way of entertaining myself. It’s not very different than reading book, but I have more control. I am picking what happens, when it happens and who it happens to. At last, I have control over something.
Do you usually map our your ideas or are you open to improvisation?
BW: I NEVER map anything out. I can’t imagine working with outlines or plans. Things happen and I don’t expect them. It’s exciting. If I knew what was going to happen, it wouldn’t be any fun. But my work would probably be more organized if I mapped things out. Organized and dull.
Civil Coping Mechanisms
'Keen, shocking, and shockingly funny, This Boring Apocalypse glitters like a mirrorball of razors above a dance floor packed with severed legs. Each page is a grisly prism. Each page flashes with a kind of light. In tiny, honed chapters, this book creates a world where love bleeds into horror, where there is neither life nor death but a life-death hybrid, where everything exists in a state of regenerative decay. Brace yourself for these sentences. Brandi Wells knows how to take you apart.'-- Joanna Ruocco
'A novella told in miniature nocturnes, This Boring Apocalypse is violent and dazzling, brutal and mesmerizing; its melody is fatal. Wells pulls the body apart and buries it in pieces, but in her necropolis, limbs can rejoin, resurrect, return—fragments are hot-glued or sewn or soldered or just magically reattached to assuage a loneliness more formidable than death.'-- Lily Hoang
'Like if Donald Barthelme had been hired to transcribe Jeffrey Dahmer’s wet dreams for Lars Von Trier, Brandi Wells holds zero whims back in her blitzkrieg surrealist take on the Theater of Cruelty. The result is a hilariously germane Frankenstein-like idea-sprawl of gore and impulsive feeling, set in a mutative landscape where bodies are playthings, domesticity is punishment, and death, as if to match life, reigns on in brutal, fertile wonder. Strap yourself in and don’t look up.'-- Blake Butler
Excerpts
I build a fort to protect myself from the person capable of judging lemons
I make a fort that doesn’t look like a fort. If my fort looks like a fort, the person capable of judging lemons will know what to attack and will do so quickly. I make a fort that looks like a lemon. It looks exactly like a lemon. In fact, when she comes to visit me, she eats the lemon and tells me it is delicious. I watch her for a while, wondering how safe the fort is inside her stomach. Could I climb into her stomach and still be safeguarded by the fort? But I remember digestion. Surely her digestive track is no safe place.
I make a fort that looks like nothing. The person capable of judging lemons will never recognize it. He will never be able to attack it because it is impossible to attack nothing. But I misplace the fort that looks like nothing. For me, nothing has always been a hard item to locate. Hard to carry with me, hard to remember, hard to feel attached to. I have lost nothings before and I hardly remember those nothings or the idea of having those nothings. I lament the loss of nothing, but is a short, unremarkable lamentation, so I lament short lamentations, because remembering feels significant. Self-expression should be valued. There should be more prolonged screaming and bleeding, being born and dying, dying again, dying differently, dying in a way that is long lasting. I have seen many unimpressive deaths. Death should be more than the lack of life. Death should be a terrible event, forever ongoing. Life is so momentous. Why shouldn’t death be lauded as well?
I make a fort that looks like tortured people. I have always been good with tortured people. It is my talent. They appreciate working with someone who appreciates them. It is the secret of the tortured. They do not want to be saved. They only want to be admired as beauties and labeled aesthetically pleasing, because of course they are pleasing. Who hasn’t tortured someone and felt that twinge of pleasure? That beauty? That something? That something-something? I am good at torture. It is a talent many possess but few are proud of. If a person has a skill, they should be praised for their skill. Their skill should be appreciated and utilized. When I go into the houses of strangers and torture them, I expect a Thank you, and a mint, and a sweater, because it has been cold lately and torture is tiring work and I do not like to be cold. I do not deserve to feel uncomfortable, because I have a skill and this skill should earn me something. It should matter.
I abandon forts. They have not worked for me. But I dread the man capable of judging lemons, so I destroy all the lemons. I build a fire and burn them. It is a citrus burning. Nothing anywhere on Earth can smell bad. Nothing can smell unfresh. Young people fall in love. They hold hands and sniff each other, admire one another. There is mating and the production of untortured offspring who may acquire torturing later, either as a skill or as a fate.
The world is turning beautiful and I move into the abandoned house I have longed for.
I tire of arms
They seem far too small, insubstantial. Their accruement matters so little. I can have arms or not have arms. I can collect more or not. I develop an affinity for torsos but I always find them attached to worthless appendages. I try to convince people to bring me torsos already detached from their appendages. Detaching arms and legs and heads is hard work. Grueling and rewarding, but it would be best if everyone else would gruel while I am rewarded.
No one brings me torsos. Not a single torso. I dream of lovely torsos against a red or purple background. Intimate table settings, candlelight flickering.
I go out in search of torsos. No one is hiding the torsos, hoarding them like I expected. Do they not realize the torsos are delicious? Have they never tasted a torso? Licked a skin covered rib or grazed teeth against the muscle of back? But I realize everyone else is one step ahead of me. They are hiding their torsos and well. They are leaving the appendages attached to their torsos. They are leaving their torsos alive and allowing these torsos to have jobs and friends and hobbies like working on their cars or building paper mache statues. These people are smart. They have planned well. But I am on to them.
Sometimes it is hard for me to tell which torsos are for eating. It is hard to distinguish between a person who you love and a person you intend to consume, a person you intend to de-arm and de-leg and behead. You should label those close to you. But even then, it would be a tricky business. How am I to tell a well-intentioned label from a label someone is securing to mislead me so they might hoard the torsos for themselves? So I label the people, not in a confusing way, but in a well-intentioned manner. I carry a self-inking stamp with me everywhere I go. It is double-sided. One side says Delicious. The other side says OH this one does not look so good. It does not look so good at all. The stamp is self-inking and I have added a sort of acid for semi-permanence. I would hate for the stamps to wear off, but also I do not want them to be permanent. A person might grow less delicious after a few years or a formerly unattractive person might become more delicious. Things can change. So the stamps only last a year or so, at least this is what I think. I can’t be certain because I have just begun the stamping process.
*
p.s. Hey. ** H, Hi! Nice to see you! Thanks, everything with the submitting and the moving is smooth with a tolerable rockiness. Oh, well, yeah, that would be great about the post if you have time and if it would interest you. Thank you muchly! I hope you're doing very well. ** David Ehrenstein, I think I would need a de-sketching class to do that. Really superb piece on 'Out 1'. Wealth galore. I have no leather daddy dreams, which won't surprise you, and I think I like Mr. Sacks in his scrubs best. Nonetheless, I anxiously await to the moment of reading your piece on him. Everyone, Mr. E follows up his great piece on Rivette's 'Out 1' with this no doubt also great piece on Oliver Sacks. ** James, Hi. Oh, I see. Hm, no, I don't think I've ever experienced that. I basically lose interest and stop reading based on whether the writing in what I'm reading interests me or not. What a piece of writing about is usually drowned if visible in the prose for me. It's certainly true that sex is very, very rarely written about interestingly. That's for sure. I'm trying to remember whether, back when I was younger and bought escorts a lot, any of their asses seemed to be an especially short shortcut to God. There was this one guy. Named Jimmy maybe? In NYC. I used to see him at the hustler bars all the time, but he was always with this really old man and seemed to 'belong' to him. Then I saw him on alone once, and he made himself available. I asked him why he wasn't with his friend. He said his friend had died of a heart attack while they were smoking crack two days before. Maybe it's possible that that made his ass seem like a shorter shortcut? ** Cobaltfram, Hey, John! Good to see you, buddy! You're re-ensconced in Texas again then. That's good, right? Glad you liked the PdT. If memory serves, they were having some kind of performance festival when you were there? That's a good way to experience the joint. I'm good. Film is moments away from being totally finished. Really good about your reengagement with the novel! Sweet! ** Steevee, I can only agree. Wow, a double Steevee feature! Everyone, you have the golden opportunity to read Steevee's thoughts on two new films if you like this weekend. Here's his thinking on the 'lame' French thriller 'The Connection', and here are his thoughts on André Téchiné’s 'disappointing' new film 'In the Name of My Daughter'. ** _Black_Acrylic, Good to hear, Ben. It's nothing but their loss. ** Bill, Hi. Thanks a lot about the stills. Yeah, it was pretty good month for escort texts, I thought so too. JaketheBlake just might. He seems like a real candidate. Mm, I don't have my dates for Halle yet. I might just nip your time there at the beginning of mine and at the end of yours. I'll let you know when Gisele gives me my marching orders. ** Keaton, Nice tribute to BB. To anyone else reading this, that means BB as in ... King. Not as in 'unsafe practices'. Everyone, BB King gets a tributary post over on Keaton's. Go pay your respects, please. I think that when I played as a kid with other kids, it was mostly 'cowboys and Indians.' And croquet. Discursive-ness is a sign of good health. So it is cherry? That's interesting because I hate real cherries and everything made from them. But I don't think there's an atom of real cherry in red jello. ** Etc etc etc, Hi, Casey. The 'LCTG' page signifies that festivals are considering it and that having some kind of online presence for it is a good idea, basically. Genesis P-orridge and Aaron Dilloway? Wow, that's a strange combo. Makes sense in a way but is also seems quite wack. Really nice about seeing Merzbow. I still haven't. Aching legs aside, that setting is probably more conducive. But I haven't seen him live, of course. Awesome that you're reviewing Mark's book. I think that is crazily amazing, great novel. He does still check in here once in a while, and I think he's still a regular reader to some degree. I'm in the 4th arr. Down at the very bottom, about two and a half blocks from Bastille, a block from Place des Vosges. I like the place. It's old and a little creaky, but it's sweet. Most people would say this new neighborhood is an improvement, but I actually miss the 10th. Living there is like living in the real Paris. Living here is too, but about 70% of the people on the street here are tourists, it seems like. Very happy weekend to you too! ** Kier, Kier! Yay! I liked and noticed that line too. Cool. I'm so sorry about the shitty aspects of your last days. I hope they're fading away. When I feel shitty, sometimes playing video games helps a lot, I don't know why. Maybe that? While I'm sure that it has at least a very slightly irksome side, the idea of a spoiled sheep made me happy. I hope you don't get sick. Although, another weird thing, sometimes when I get sick when I'm feeling shitty, the sickness replaces the shittiness, and then, when I get better, the shittiiness is dead. Silver lining? But I hope you don't get sick. My days ... well, I had no electricity in my apartment for almost three days. That sucked. It just went off suddenly because I guess the transition from previous tenants to me wasn't properly arranged. And everything here is electric, so there was nothing. And it was a French holiday, so it didn't get turned back on until yesterday. I bought a little clothes washing machine. I haven't had a washing machine in the place where I lived since I lived at my parents' place a billion years ago, so that's cool. I worked hard on the script for Zac's and my next film, and it's going really, really well. I met with Zac about it, and he likes it a lot and suggested changes and additions and stuff, so I'm revising it now. That's exciting. Gisele and I auditioned this dancer to fill the other newly vacant role ('the singer') in 'Kindertotenlieder', and she was great and got the role really fast, and we spent the day rehearsing the role with her. I was supposed to be photographed for Purple Magazine, but I need a haircut, so I delayed that. I think those things plus suffering to some degree inside my lightless, powerless, hot water-less, etc., apartment was the gist of my days of late. I hope you have really good weekend, pal. And I will do my best to do the same. ** Kyler, Hi. The beyond is always a good idea. ** Marilyn Roxie, Hi, Marilyn! Great to see you! Happy to have instigated your chuckling. Oh, no, that tribute CD has been o.o.p. for a long time. Maybe you can get a used copy cheap somewhere, I don't know? Yeah, I contested-off my extra copy, or I would send you one. I'll go have a look and see if anyone's selling theirs. Take care! ** Misanthrope, I would imagine your lawyer knows infinitely better than I do. Ugh, I hope it's not as complicated as it sounds. Oh, yeah, same deal here with the 'what's that word mean' thing. Funny how you know what something means but putting words to that knowledge is so difficult. But then I guess I've 'built' a whole 'career' as a writer around that. ** Cal Graves, No heyDEN was good, actually. I've been basically quite good. And you? Are you writing up a storm, hurricane, a super volcano? 'LCTG' is being promoted to film festival people in the market at the Cannes Film Festival right now. I don't know how that's going yet. New place is cool except for an electricity problem that is now thankfully solved. Is the Bastille a big tourist trap? That's sort of strange. It's a cool area, but there's nothing there really for tourists. It's just a huge roundabout with a very tall column in the middle. Huh. Where'd you go? What happened there? Drastically (in the good way), Dennis. ** Torn porter, Torn! It's been ages! Really, really great to get this chance! I moved, yep. Film's all but finished, yep. Do reintegrate here if you feel like it. Would be awesome for me and mine. Love, me (and mine). ** Okay. This weekend you get to look over and consider four books that I highly recommend. This is a particularly great foursome, so do be attentive, if you have the time and attention to spare. I will see you on Monday.