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Fanzine: You write with great openness throughout the collection, including when writing about moments most people aren’t proud of in their own lives–abusive relationships, suicide attempts, drug abuse, womanizing, and so on–does knowing that one day your daughter will read these essays or knowing that family, friends, and strangers are currently reading them affect how you approach the subjects? Or do you mostly not think about audience when you write?
Jamie Iredell: It seems best to me that if you’re writing the personal essay or the memoir, the biggest villain of the story ought to be the author. Who wants to read something where someone’s talking about how great he is? I guess that’s okay if it’s Chuck Berry, or David Carradine. Both of those guys’ memoirs are amazing, in part for the ridiculous grandiosity of their narcissism–much of it unfounded–that they seem unaware of, so their books have this strange almost unreliable narrator thing going on. But there’s no question that writing about yourself, even when you’re talking about the lowest points of your life, is narcissistic, too. So mostly I’m concerned first with anyone reading it and thinking that I’m glorifying myself or the things I’ve gone through, as that couldn’t be farther from the truth. I’m terribly ashamed of most everything I’ve ever done in my life. I feel like I have very few high points. But I think I write about those lows, those terrible things–or at least I have in this book–as a way to confront how imperfect I am. I would never try to present myself to my daughter or any other family member as perfect, or even good. I’m just trying my best to be good, and usually failing. Then again, I’ve often looked at personal essay and memoir as a vehicle through which the artist becomes his art. The words aren’t really the art at all; the artist is his art. The artist has learned to manipulate the language in such a way that said art transmits to the audience. So, I think a lot about audience when I write; I’m just ashamed of who I am, but I’m not afraid of it.
Fanzine: How is writing nonfiction different for you than writing fiction and poetry is?
JI: I think a lot about essays before I write a first draft. I think about what I might want to talk about and how I’m going to talk about it. Sometimes I think of intricate ways to get ideas across, like with “Dear Kinsey,” a book review written in the form of a letter, that’s also a bit of contemporary cultural studies. I don’t really think about fiction or poetry beforehand. Whatever it is that gets me to the story or poem just comes to me. Sometimes it’s a dream or dreams, sometimes an image or character. With poetry it’s usually phrases or lines that come to me, and sometimes a whole story pops up fully formed in my mind, and I sit down and get it out. With longer things like novels, I obviously don’t get the first draft down in a single sitting, but I still don’t really think about the story. I like being surprised at where it might take me. It’s in revision that things start to take shape. What’s weird though, is that with that book-length lyric essay that I mentioned earlier, I didn’t even know that I was going to write it. I didn’t premeditate that book like I usually do with shorter essays.
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Jamie Iredell Last Mass
Civil Coping Mechanisms
'"I am a Catholic. I was baptized Catholic as a baby, and Mom raised me as such. The priests baptized Miquel Josep Serra a Catholic, born 1713 in Petra, Mallorca. Dad converted, and became Catholic. Twenty years before Serra’s birth, the Spanish Inquisition held autos de fé in Palma, Mallorca’s capital, and Jews were burned at the stake. My brother and sister are Catholics. Four more Jews were burned in 1720, when Miquel was seven. Grandma and Grandpa were Catholics. For his Holy Orders, Miquel Josep adopted the name of Father Fray Junípero Serra, and later still he came to what we know today as California, state where I was born and raised a Catholic."
'In Last Mass Jamie Iredell navigates the complex history of colonial California, his own personal history as a Catholic growing up in that state, and the process of writing itself, with all its pitfalls and revelations.'-- Civil Coping Mechanisms
Excerpt
In 1771, along the banks of the San Antonio River, Father Serra, along with Fathers Buenaventura Sitjar and Miguel Pieras, consecrated the ground and erected the foundation cross in founding Mission San Antonio de Padua, third of the missions of Nueva California. In celebration, before the High Mass, Father Serra had the main bell strung upon the branch of a live oak and, ringing it, he hollered to the empty flat of the valley studded with yet more live oaks: “Come! Come you pagans and receive the faith of Jesus Christ!” When his fellow friars asked their prelate why he exerted himself so, in a land devoid of other humans, he replied, “Just as Sor María de Jésus de Ágreda, that venerable mother, brought the Holy faith to the gentiles of Nuevo México, here also this bell cries, beckoning to the heathen of this sierra.” After the gospel, when Father Serra turned from the oaken altar to deliver his homily, he spied a solitary Salinan Indian in view of the rite. The Blessed Father exclaimed, “I foresee that this Mission San Antonio will reap a great harvest for the Lord, for the fruits of paganism are already at hand!” And he gave to the native gifts of beads to entice him to return to the mission and to bring his friends.
Speaking of fruit, Father Francisco Palou details the abundant foods available to the Salinan Indians of el Valle de los Robles, where the fathers situated Mission San Antonio de Padua. For the natives’ sustenance the Earth provided rabbits, squirrels, chipmunks, deer, geese, ducks, snakes, lizards, clams and mussels, trout, piñon pine, and acorns. Palou described the great oak-filled plains as if they resembled the landscaped parks of Europe, for the grass grew low beneath the trees. The natives systematically burned the grass to facilitate the acorn harvest, but the Europeans did not see this and assessed the tribes as cultureless heathen.
At Lake San Antonio, Dad said that the Indians ate acorns. So, I tried some, after gathering and shelling them. Dad laughed when I grimaced at the bitter taste, and the way the nut dried my mouth. I said, “How could they eat that.” Dad said, “When you’re an Indian you eat what you have to.” Only as an adult, after research, would I learn how Native Americans prepared acorns, so making them palatable—those “cultureless heathen.”
Not long after I wrote this, my dad suffered a stroke, and the food he chewed as he recovered in his hospital bed, shoved to his mouth’s left side—the side his damaged brain neglects—stayed there, his cheeks puffed like a chipmunk’s, until we instructed my dad to tongue it out.
Acorns are high in tannic acid, as are walnuts or pecans, and that’s what leaves the dry film rimming the inside of your mouth. Native Californians learned to leach their acorns of the tannic acid, after having harvested in the fall, when the seeds have ripened and fallen from the trees. Ripe acorns typically fall cap-intact. Capless acorns are usually wormy, the wiggles of a worm wrenching the acorn from its cap prematurely. Ripened acorns are golden and shiny, their shells uncracked and whole. After harvest, the acorns were dried, shelled, and ground. Salinan mizzen sites speckle arroyos in the Santa Lucia foothills. Large flat boulders pocked from these ancient Californians’ labors tell stories from before the coming of the Spanish Empire. The acorns were ground to a grit-like consistency, or a very fine powder for baking into loaves. The acorn meal was then taken to the sand at the nearby arroyo. Natives heaped the sand into mounds and dug out cavities, filling said cavities with acorn meal. The clear cold spring water washed out the tannins into the sand below, a natural sieve. To cook, Salinans used water-tight cooking baskets which they filled with the prepared acorn meal and water. They heated select clean round rocks in a fire to very high temperatures, which they stirred into the water and meal in their cooking baskets, removing cooled rocks and returning them to the fire for heating in rotation. Quickly, the water came to a boil. The natives cooked their meal in a variety of thin, soup-like, or oatmeal-like consistencies. They added salt and elderberries to the mixture for flavor.
Despite the abundance of said nature’s fruits, the Spanish missions of Nuevo California, because of the Europeans’ insistence on “civilized” agriculture, were in the midst of a severe famine within the first year of existence.
In this famine, when mission food stores at San Diego dwindled to their cows’ milk, starving soldiers scoured the hills, their horses gaunt, the hills emaciated.
JAMIE IREDELL & WILT CHAMBERLAIN
The Book of Freaks - Trailer
The Bear in the Neighbor's Kitchen
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'Maybe I am afraid that the dead won’t let me in, that there won’t be room for me.'-- Heather Christie
'Throughout these poems, the surreal is as real as the actual. Anything can be invented and seem as if it has always been. I like to think of the collection's narrator as some fixed character buried in a video game fantasy, waiting for the player to arrive so it can deliver the epiphany it has been coded to transmit. The consequence is a refreshing, if simultaneously revelation-bearing, state of address, where what is transgressed is world-weariness and stasis—each line insists itself alive, a kind of organism.
'Heliopause, Christle's most recent book, is her most effective yet in that regard. It brushes that feverish imagination against a more historical anatomy, that of technology, communication, exploration, and death. The book is centered around a subset of three longer poems, in which the author's grip attends more meticulously than ever on its outline in space and time. There is, for instance, "Disintegration Loop 1.1," a 13-page work divided into segments that visually mimic the William Basinski recordings of the same name, a fragment-based ambient project the composer is said to have completed on the morning of September 11, 2001.
'Pronounced effects produced from minor detail are a key component of Christle's writing, and help to make it so immersive, while at the same time unassuming of clear shape. The anatomy of her images are often simple ones—flowers, the sky, language, blood, birds, quiet, clothing, people—yet in the same breath made mysterious, contemplative, a drug-without-a-drug.
'Nowhere could this effect be truer than in Heliopause's second long poem, "Elegy for Neil Armstrong." Here is an erasure poem taking as its body the transcript of communications between Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and mission control during the first moon landing. Seven stark black pages form a bed for blips of language culled from the edges of what we know, and yet as everyday as anything in their foundation. "Neil, / You're / a picture / on the TV / Oh." What is provided is so little, and yet in its breadth creates a hole around which the reader and the language come together, touch, like walking in the darkness with only words to guide you. The effect is obscuring, open, and at the same time, kind of funny, in an abstract sense; what we come to at the edges of our experience of the universe is the fragmentary communications of men in sealed suits, toddling without sure purpose but to be there, to have seen it, and continue.'-- Blake Butler, VICE
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Heather Christie Heliopause
Wesleyan
'Heather Christle’s stunning fourth collection blends disarming honesty with keen leaps of the imagination. Like the boundary between our sun’s sphere of influence and interstellar space, from which the book takes its name, the poems in Heliopause locate themselves along the border of the known and unknown, moving with breathtaking assurance from the page to the beyond. Christle finds striking parallels between subjects as varied as the fate of Voyager 1, the uncertain conception of new life, the nature of elegy, and the decaying transmission of information across time. Nimbly engaging with current events and lyric past, Heliopause marks a bold shift and growing vision in Christle’s work.'-- Wesleyan
Excerpts
HATCH
In every place
you seem to end
I have loved you
There was that small
and dead and pink
bird we saw
near the sidewalk
with its smashed
open mouth
a place to let
the world in
a way of not ending
I loved you so
I had to crawl inside
NOT MUCH MORE ROOM IN THE CEMETERY
I will lie down on top of the graves
People beneath and people behind me
with their faces and their little horns
and the places from which they are shining
I know there is something else
that they have tried to teach me
and I am sorry for all of the times
I have listened and not learned it
No I am not crying
I'm maybe um a demon
For certain I am waving this fruit fly away
AND THIS TOO COMES APART
People agree with sleep
They nod into it
but death they sometimes fight off
until they can’t
and then
from their graves
they stick out their tongues
Good for them
Good for the people
In the world I can see
there is one tree still raining
The sun blares around
lights it up
in lines alongside the spiders’
They have an arrangement
a private design
When I’m arranged
into a mother
I will name my child
Incredulity and like it so much
I’ll do it again
three or four
or eight times
Stand up!
Good and straight like a tree
good and stiff like
the rain darkened gravestone
perpendicular
to the quiet
Or sit down
and make a nice lap
nod Incredulity off into sleep
Enumerate to her the lines
of the song you haven’t meant yet
DRAPES
There were erecting a conversational
in the middle of the inconsequential
afternoon
like one of those unnatural flowers
you drop into water and watch
immediately blossom
And then then what
Has anything changed?
They were emigrating from one wall
to the other
like swans of
ungodly proportions
They were not so much
humans as blood drenched with hair
Heather Christle reading for Real Pants
Heather Christle's "WHY I AM A TREE"
Heather Christle reads her poems
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'Joseph Fasano’s Vincent overflows with the kind of beautiful imagery and dazzlingly complex similes that makes it a book difficult to put down, which is all the more remarkable considering it is a book-length, one-sentence poem. It also happens to be told through the voice of a tortured, infamous murderer.
'Vincent is a fictionalized look into the mind of Vince Li, the man who without provocation killed and decapitated a fellow bus passenger in Canada in July 2008. We get this information from the book’s epigraph and it never quite disappears from our attention, making it all the more difficult to reconcile the horror of the act and the delicate and strange and haunting way Vincent sees the world.
'Fasano’s ability to capture the fragmented perspective of this killer is unsettling particularly because so much of what he writes gets us deeper and deeper inside Vincent’s head. We start to become hypnotized by the images and the rabbit-hole similes, which pile one on top of the other and push us further into his world. ...
'His ability to control the book/poem/sentence’s pacing is exemplary too. Because of the long, winding nature of the book, we have to read slowly and carefully to maintain a sense of proper syntax, which makes it easy to be swept away by the writing’s terrible beauty. Whether we want to or not, we end up feeling sympathy, if not empathy, for Vincent as we experience how troubled he is.'-- AMERICAN MICROVIEWS
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Joseph Fasano Vincent
Cider Press
'Authorities say a man was stabbed to death, decapitated and partly cannibalized in what appears to be a random act of violence on board a bus that was en route to Winnipeg late Wednesday." With these starkly haunting words from a 2008 Canadian news report, Joseph Fasano begins VINCENT, a book-length poem based on Vince Li's killing of Tim McLean on a Greyhound bus near Portage la Prairie, Manitoba. Using a fictionalized first-person narrative from the perspective of the killer, Fasano explores the inner workings of a disturbed mind trying to come to terms with a horrific act that even its perpetrator cannot fully comprehend. "Have you smelled the rose oil / in the shoes of the dead... have you woken / and woken / and woken," the speaker asks us. And the poem will not let us say no.'-- Cider Press
Excerpt
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Trailer: VINCENT
Joseph Fasano reads 'Fragments'
Writer's Block - Joseph Fasano
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Rob Hart: The book opens with this incredible and startling image—a marching band making their way onto the Golden Gate Bridge and leaping off. I'm curious to know what the nexus point was. Did you start with the image, or did it come to you as you were sorting out the story?
Joshua Mohr: I am a huge fan of Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin, which starts off with the tightrope walker between the Twin Towers, back in the 1970s. It's such a startling and mesmerizing image, it's so iconic New York, and I wanted to try and do something similar for San Francisco, my home for 20 years. I wanted the book to be both a love letter and an indictment of my town. So kicking the book off with a mass suicide seemed like the perfect way to do that, both honoring and creating a sense of anxious mystery.
RH: That's one of the things that stuck out for me—I'm a native New Yorker, and there's a lot of the same thing happening here—the city's being stripped of character, and you get this feeling pretty soon you're going to have to prove you make six figures just to be allowed inside. Like a club you're not cool enough for anymore. Why do we love the places that do this to us?
JM: I guess the answer has to be more complex than we're just fucking stupid, right? There is this Urban Masochism, where you dig your heels in, even if you don't dig the direction of the place. For example, I've lived in the Mission since the 90s, running around like a coked-up caveman, tons of literary events, tons of trouble, etc. The neighborhood teemed with artists. It's not like that anymore, which bums me out. All This Life is a pretty angry book, and I guess it's a way for me to grieve that: This great city that I loved/love is no longer alive. Now it's all tech-turds.
RH: Huh. I would not call it angry. Sharp and biting, yes. But I left feeling uplifted. Which brings me to the next point: It's clearly an indictment of technology and social media culture. Is that because of the tech-turds taking over your town? Or does that come from someplace else?
JM: If I've done my job right on the page, the narrative doesn't just demonize technology, it also shows some of its value. For example, there is a missing teenager in the book, who only communicates to his dad and his followers via Twitter. But it is that online communique that leads to him being located. I wanted to try and show both sides. Certainly there is a lot to bemoan about our swelling virtual lives, but there is goodness there, too. Granted, we mostly just use it for porn and cat memes, but eventually maybe probably possibly we'll figure it out. I know LitReactor's readers are mostly all aspiring writers themselves and it's something to ponder: How it's best to show both sides of the argument and leave space for the reader to make her own determinations. That way, things don't feel didactic.
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Joshua Mohr All This Life
Soft Skull Press
'Morning rush hour on the Golden Gate Bridge. Amidst the river of metal and glass a shocking event occurs, leaving those who witnessed it desperately looking for answers, most notably one man and his son Jake, who captured the event and uploaded it to the internet for all the world to experience. As the media swarms over the story, Jake will face the ramifications of his actions as he learns the perils of our modern disconnect between the real world and the world we create on line.
'In land-locked Arizona, as the entire country learns of the event, Sara views Jake’s video just before witnessing a horrible event of her own: her boyfriend’s posting of their intimate sex tape. As word of the tape leaks out, making her an instant pariah, Sara needs to escape the small town’s persecution of her careless action. Along with Rodney, an old boyfriend injured long ago in a freak accident that destroyed his parents’ marriage, she must run faster than the internet trolls seeking to punish her for her indiscretions. Sara and Rodney will reunite with his estranged mother, Kat, now in danger from a new man in her life who may not be who he – or his online profiles – claim to be, a dangerous avatar in human form.
'With a wide cast of characters and an exciting pace that mimics the speed of our modern, all-too-connected lives, All This Life examines the dangerous intersection of reality and the imaginary, where coding and technology seek to highlight and augment our already flawed human connections. Using his trademark talent for creating memorable characters, with a deep insight into language and how it can be twisted to alter reality, Joshua Mohr returns with his most contemporary and insightful novel yet.'-- Soft Skull Press
Excerpt
Sara’s adding more hot water to her bath. She does this with her big toe, moving the dial so the scalding reinforcements pour into the tub. First, her lower legs feel the temperature crank and the sensation slowly moves up her small body, the water working toward her head.
It’s been four days since the sex tape went viral, Sara’s day zero. Her rebirth with a digital, conjoined twin. New Sara is four days old, and this newborn can’t muster the will to get out of the bath.
She and Rodney drove out of Traurig and made it into California, cruised down the mountain into the foothills, finally entering Sacramento. After five hours on the road, they needed a motel room. The room had two double beds. Pillows so scrawny that they were probably stuffed with creamed spinach. The carpet smelled like a campfire. Under a black light, the bedspread could make a porn star blush.
Right when they got into the room, Sara said, “I need a bath.”
Sara lost track of time in the tub, or she knew that time passed and didn’t care. She never expected to spend four days bathing, but honestly, the tub was the safest haven she’d found since her fiasco posted online. It was warm and nobody was talking and why leave such quiet comfort?
She only exited for quick trips. To eat takeout that Rodney had ordered, Chinese, Thai, pizza. To sleep in spurts, toss and turn, think too much, retreat back to another bath, slipping into solace.
And four days later, they’re still in this god-awful motel room. This is a capricious way to dole out her emergency money, but she can’t find the verve to try. She feels bad for Rodney, trapped out there. She wouldn’t be surprised if he took off on her—she certainly wouldn’t blame him. But every time she briefly emerges from the bathroom, there he is, watching TV, using his own phone to scroll around the globe. He always greets her with a serving of food, something to drink.
“Eat,” he says.
“Okay.” But she barely does.
He hoists a plate of pad thai or whatever at her.
What would really make her feel good is if Sara can pick up the phone and talk to her dead mother. Not for any guidance, just empathy. Empathy that spans all across the sky like storm clouds.
Cumulonimbus empathy.
Instead, she’ll have to settle for another bath.
This is the time. Sara points herself at a certain URL. She opens the page and watches it load. There is a still image, Sara on her hands and knees, Nat behind her, a banner above them that says Skank of the Week.
And a link that says Click here for all the action!
It might sound like masochism, this impulse to watch what’s ruined her, but Sara remembers some of her mom’s advice. This was when Sara was seven or eight years old and she couldn’t stop singing the song “Frère Jacques.” It had been in her head for weeks and every time there was a lapse in conversation, that’s when Sara started singing. It was in her head when she fell asleep and when she woke up, in her head while she ate and played.
“Here,” her mom said, “let’s listen to the whole song together. That might help get it out of your head.”
She sat on her mom’s lap, and they fired up a CD, hearing the entire track, and it worked. “Frère Jacques” was no more, though it was replaced by another song. Sara’s life had music back then.
Joshua Mohr reads from All This Life
Joshua Mohr Discusses New Book, All This Life on Book Circle Online
Beast Crawl - Joshua Mohr
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p.s. Hey. ** James, Hi. Hm, maybe bringing text more into the foreground and giving more of a 'voice' to the internal workings makes it seem darker? Ha ha, well, I guess you and Zac are very different kinds of people then. Doesn't that thing where desirers of the underaged become so fraught in their desire that they fall for an illogical FBI bait/sting thing happen all the time? Seems like it. ** Thomas Moronic, Hey. That's pretty close, yeah. The title translation. So appreciative of your close reading of that gif work and of the others. It means a lot, thank you! I deliberately experimented in those flash fictions with bringing text into the very foreground of the work, which is something I resisted doing earlier as I'm interested in making literary gif fiction where language itself is backgrounded and disempowered because using gifs as a language allows one to do that and allows one to free oneself from the necessity of making fiction that is wedded to written language, but I wanted to see what happened if the stories were spelled out closer to the surface, and I'm very happy with what happened. I think I'm at the point where I'm sufficiently inside the practice that I can and know how to that without tipping the boat or whatever. Well, texts are always in my mind and in my behind-the-scenes thinking/strategizing when I make those pieces, operating as a resource and structuring device. I'm just mostly interesting in trying to represent them in a non-textual way. Thank you very, very much, man. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Oh, that's him? I thought he looked vaguely familiar. ** Sypha, Zac generally isn't into having the art he makes available online. The fact that our film does and will increasingly have an online presence is new for him. ** Kyler, Well, I hope he does too. Thank you! Galassi didn't seem like a bad guy to me, really. I mean my work is very particular, and lots of editors and people with excellent taste don't like it at all. I'm used to that. And he has published a lot of really good things at FSG. I mean, FSG is like the crown jewel of big publishers, and he is largely responsible for that. He might have published Sarah Kane. It wouldn't shock me. ** Bill, Hi, B. Thanks very much. Yeah, with those works, I was experimenting with making text more prominent. I'd like to do that more. The problem is that there's a far, far more limited supply of text-only gifs out there. I could make those myself, and I may, but, so far, the fact they're found-only gifs has been important to what I'm trying to do. We'll see. Seattle? For a gig or what? Cool! ** Chris Goode, Hi, Chris! Man, I'm sorry to be slow with the email. Zac's and my film is premiering soon, and I've been dragged into a bunch of grunt work that needs to be done to prepare for that and set that up, and my head got waylaid. But, long story short, pretty much yes to everything in your email, and, yeah, let's have a Skype as soon as you want. Today even. What about an actual conversation rather than a text exchange? I can do a text exchange, but talking sounds more fun and useful or something. Up to you. But, yeah, I'm mostly just home working all the time right now, so I'm generally totally free. I'm good, pal, how are beauteous you? Cool, obviously I'm very happy if the gif work is getting more gettable and pleasurable. Very, very, cool, thank you! Bringing actual text up in the mix did really create a different, more ... something effect. It was interesting to discover that. I think you mentioned before that you were writing a book? And it sounds kind of like the same one? Am I right? It sounds really exciting! I want to hear more about it and talk to you about it. Yum. So, yeah, let's talk. Call me, if you have my # -- I'll email it to you, if not -- or email me, and I'll be a diligent email checker for once, and let's get everything arranged. Very awesome. Love to you, maestro. ** Steevee, Everyone, Here's Steve's article on the new Agnes Varda box set. ** _Black_Acrylic, Thank you, Ben. Exporting does indeed sound very promising. I know from our film work what that means. Tentative, but even not all that tentative, hooray! I've been trying to read up on Jeremy Corbyn. It's hard because there are agendas about him flying all over the place, and I can't tell what's factual and what's bullshit. He sounds like a very mixed bag, so far. I have no stake or opinion in any of this, but ... a naive question: If Corbyn becomes Labour leader then doesn't Labour become a different party that isn't, at the very least, as responsible for the previously, differently led party's position on the Referendum? ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hi, Jeff. Thanks for the good words, man. Well, they're three flash fictions. The separated groupings of gifs are my notion of a sectioning device that works with the idea of literary gif work and which has essentially the same function as paragraphing or sectioning in written fiction. So the works are unified things, and the grouping/spaces within them are the method I've found thus far to be the most effective way to structure the fictions a la written fiction when I'm using animated visual imagery as the material. I think, because of their particular 'power' to mess-up or exhaust the viewers' eyesight, they require a careful kind of connective pausing and breathing spaces. If that makes sense. Last I heard, that film project, which was/is supposed to be co-scripted by Bret and Gus van Sant and directed by Gaspar, has been either pushed way into the future or might even be dead now, I'm not sure. Yes, huh, I do think I understand what you mean about thickening. Yeah, sure, of course I've done that. I mean it took forever, for instance, to devise the exact correct thickness for 'The Marbled Swarm'. Thickening/de-thickening was a lot of the work I had to do on that novel. Sounds exciting, Jeff! ** Misanthrope, Hey. I have no idea who these guys you recognized in the gif fictions are. Those gifs just served my purpose, basically. Thanks for getting it. Victoire! ** H, Hi. Thank you for meditating on it. I hope NYC and its environs are treating you very well. ** Chris Dankland, Hi, Chris. Thanks a lot, man. That's great. It means a lot! ** Jeffrey Coleman, Hi. I didn't get to The Last Hurrah!! yesterday due to real life interference, but that's cool 'cos now I'll make a beeline for 'The Beauty of Fake'. Thanks a lot. And for that link. You bet it's interesting to me. I can read writings about theme parks 24/7 given the chance. And I'll see what her book is too. Great! ** Schlix, Thanks, Uli. It's still boiling there? Here it's like we're in summer's death throes -- awful/hot one day and then cool as fall the next. I hope yours ends right ... now? Is that possible? Oh, you mean the Teenage Hallucination exhibition in Geneva? I'm not directly involved in it, but I think it's just all of Gisele's mannequins/ dolls and the 40 portraits of them. So just that part and not 'Last Spring, a Prequel' or the other things unfortunately. I really wish we could show 'LS,aP' again 'cos I love that piece, and I'm sure we will. The Geneva festival is doing a big celebration/ focus on Gisele's work, so there'll be the exhibition, 'The Ventriloquists Convention', 'This Is How You Will Disappear', music concert by Peter/Pita, and other stuff. It should be fun. I'm going over there for part of it, particularly because that will be the world premiere of the English language version of 'TVC'. Glad things are good with you other than things related to heat and tech. ** Douglas Payne, Hi, Douglas. Thanks, man. I'm very looking forward to 'The Imposter'. No, comix and graphic novels are a big weakness in my reading and in my history of reading for no good reason at all because I hugely respect the form. I'll try to rectify that problem to some degree by investigating those three you mentioned. Yeah, that is fascinating and surprising about their petitioning to lower the age of consent. Even in France today, that would so extremely not fly. The revolution these days or right now seems to be focused on gender identity, which is a different thing, of course, but it's very interesting to watch happen and seemingly succeed. Have a great day, man. ** Right. There, right up there, are 4 books I read recently and loved that I consequently recommend that you check out and consider as possible reading material. See you tomorrow.
Fanzine: You write with great openness throughout the collection, including when writing about moments most people aren’t proud of in their own lives–abusive relationships, suicide attempts, drug abuse, womanizing, and so on–does knowing that one day your daughter will read these essays or knowing that family, friends, and strangers are currently reading them affect how you approach the subjects? Or do you mostly not think about audience when you write?
Jamie Iredell: It seems best to me that if you’re writing the personal essay or the memoir, the biggest villain of the story ought to be the author. Who wants to read something where someone’s talking about how great he is? I guess that’s okay if it’s Chuck Berry, or David Carradine. Both of those guys’ memoirs are amazing, in part for the ridiculous grandiosity of their narcissism–much of it unfounded–that they seem unaware of, so their books have this strange almost unreliable narrator thing going on. But there’s no question that writing about yourself, even when you’re talking about the lowest points of your life, is narcissistic, too. So mostly I’m concerned first with anyone reading it and thinking that I’m glorifying myself or the things I’ve gone through, as that couldn’t be farther from the truth. I’m terribly ashamed of most everything I’ve ever done in my life. I feel like I have very few high points. But I think I write about those lows, those terrible things–or at least I have in this book–as a way to confront how imperfect I am. I would never try to present myself to my daughter or any other family member as perfect, or even good. I’m just trying my best to be good, and usually failing. Then again, I’ve often looked at personal essay and memoir as a vehicle through which the artist becomes his art. The words aren’t really the art at all; the artist is his art. The artist has learned to manipulate the language in such a way that said art transmits to the audience. So, I think a lot about audience when I write; I’m just ashamed of who I am, but I’m not afraid of it.
Fanzine: How is writing nonfiction different for you than writing fiction and poetry is?
JI: I think a lot about essays before I write a first draft. I think about what I might want to talk about and how I’m going to talk about it. Sometimes I think of intricate ways to get ideas across, like with “Dear Kinsey,” a book review written in the form of a letter, that’s also a bit of contemporary cultural studies. I don’t really think about fiction or poetry beforehand. Whatever it is that gets me to the story or poem just comes to me. Sometimes it’s a dream or dreams, sometimes an image or character. With poetry it’s usually phrases or lines that come to me, and sometimes a whole story pops up fully formed in my mind, and I sit down and get it out. With longer things like novels, I obviously don’t get the first draft down in a single sitting, but I still don’t really think about the story. I like being surprised at where it might take me. It’s in revision that things start to take shape. What’s weird though, is that with that book-length lyric essay that I mentioned earlier, I didn’t even know that I was going to write it. I didn’t premeditate that book like I usually do with shorter essays.
Civil Coping Mechanisms
'"I am a Catholic. I was baptized Catholic as a baby, and Mom raised me as such. The priests baptized Miquel Josep Serra a Catholic, born 1713 in Petra, Mallorca. Dad converted, and became Catholic. Twenty years before Serra’s birth, the Spanish Inquisition held autos de fé in Palma, Mallorca’s capital, and Jews were burned at the stake. My brother and sister are Catholics. Four more Jews were burned in 1720, when Miquel was seven. Grandma and Grandpa were Catholics. For his Holy Orders, Miquel Josep adopted the name of Father Fray Junípero Serra, and later still he came to what we know today as California, state where I was born and raised a Catholic."
'In Last Mass Jamie Iredell navigates the complex history of colonial California, his own personal history as a Catholic growing up in that state, and the process of writing itself, with all its pitfalls and revelations.'-- Civil Coping Mechanisms
Excerpt
In 1771, along the banks of the San Antonio River, Father Serra, along with Fathers Buenaventura Sitjar and Miguel Pieras, consecrated the ground and erected the foundation cross in founding Mission San Antonio de Padua, third of the missions of Nueva California. In celebration, before the High Mass, Father Serra had the main bell strung upon the branch of a live oak and, ringing it, he hollered to the empty flat of the valley studded with yet more live oaks: “Come! Come you pagans and receive the faith of Jesus Christ!” When his fellow friars asked their prelate why he exerted himself so, in a land devoid of other humans, he replied, “Just as Sor María de Jésus de Ágreda, that venerable mother, brought the Holy faith to the gentiles of Nuevo México, here also this bell cries, beckoning to the heathen of this sierra.” After the gospel, when Father Serra turned from the oaken altar to deliver his homily, he spied a solitary Salinan Indian in view of the rite. The Blessed Father exclaimed, “I foresee that this Mission San Antonio will reap a great harvest for the Lord, for the fruits of paganism are already at hand!” And he gave to the native gifts of beads to entice him to return to the mission and to bring his friends.
Speaking of fruit, Father Francisco Palou details the abundant foods available to the Salinan Indians of el Valle de los Robles, where the fathers situated Mission San Antonio de Padua. For the natives’ sustenance the Earth provided rabbits, squirrels, chipmunks, deer, geese, ducks, snakes, lizards, clams and mussels, trout, piñon pine, and acorns. Palou described the great oak-filled plains as if they resembled the landscaped parks of Europe, for the grass grew low beneath the trees. The natives systematically burned the grass to facilitate the acorn harvest, but the Europeans did not see this and assessed the tribes as cultureless heathen.
At Lake San Antonio, Dad said that the Indians ate acorns. So, I tried some, after gathering and shelling them. Dad laughed when I grimaced at the bitter taste, and the way the nut dried my mouth. I said, “How could they eat that.” Dad said, “When you’re an Indian you eat what you have to.” Only as an adult, after research, would I learn how Native Americans prepared acorns, so making them palatable—those “cultureless heathen.”
Not long after I wrote this, my dad suffered a stroke, and the food he chewed as he recovered in his hospital bed, shoved to his mouth’s left side—the side his damaged brain neglects—stayed there, his cheeks puffed like a chipmunk’s, until we instructed my dad to tongue it out.
Acorns are high in tannic acid, as are walnuts or pecans, and that’s what leaves the dry film rimming the inside of your mouth. Native Californians learned to leach their acorns of the tannic acid, after having harvested in the fall, when the seeds have ripened and fallen from the trees. Ripe acorns typically fall cap-intact. Capless acorns are usually wormy, the wiggles of a worm wrenching the acorn from its cap prematurely. Ripened acorns are golden and shiny, their shells uncracked and whole. After harvest, the acorns were dried, shelled, and ground. Salinan mizzen sites speckle arroyos in the Santa Lucia foothills. Large flat boulders pocked from these ancient Californians’ labors tell stories from before the coming of the Spanish Empire. The acorns were ground to a grit-like consistency, or a very fine powder for baking into loaves. The acorn meal was then taken to the sand at the nearby arroyo. Natives heaped the sand into mounds and dug out cavities, filling said cavities with acorn meal. The clear cold spring water washed out the tannins into the sand below, a natural sieve. To cook, Salinans used water-tight cooking baskets which they filled with the prepared acorn meal and water. They heated select clean round rocks in a fire to very high temperatures, which they stirred into the water and meal in their cooking baskets, removing cooled rocks and returning them to the fire for heating in rotation. Quickly, the water came to a boil. The natives cooked their meal in a variety of thin, soup-like, or oatmeal-like consistencies. They added salt and elderberries to the mixture for flavor.
Despite the abundance of said nature’s fruits, the Spanish missions of Nuevo California, because of the Europeans’ insistence on “civilized” agriculture, were in the midst of a severe famine within the first year of existence.
In this famine, when mission food stores at San Diego dwindled to their cows’ milk, starving soldiers scoured the hills, their horses gaunt, the hills emaciated.
JAMIE IREDELL & WILT CHAMBERLAIN
The Book of Freaks - Trailer
The Bear in the Neighbor's Kitchen
_________________
'Maybe I am afraid that the dead won’t let me in, that there won’t be room for me.'-- Heather Christie
'Throughout these poems, the surreal is as real as the actual. Anything can be invented and seem as if it has always been. I like to think of the collection's narrator as some fixed character buried in a video game fantasy, waiting for the player to arrive so it can deliver the epiphany it has been coded to transmit. The consequence is a refreshing, if simultaneously revelation-bearing, state of address, where what is transgressed is world-weariness and stasis—each line insists itself alive, a kind of organism.
'Heliopause, Christle's most recent book, is her most effective yet in that regard. It brushes that feverish imagination against a more historical anatomy, that of technology, communication, exploration, and death. The book is centered around a subset of three longer poems, in which the author's grip attends more meticulously than ever on its outline in space and time. There is, for instance, "Disintegration Loop 1.1," a 13-page work divided into segments that visually mimic the William Basinski recordings of the same name, a fragment-based ambient project the composer is said to have completed on the morning of September 11, 2001.
'Pronounced effects produced from minor detail are a key component of Christle's writing, and help to make it so immersive, while at the same time unassuming of clear shape. The anatomy of her images are often simple ones—flowers, the sky, language, blood, birds, quiet, clothing, people—yet in the same breath made mysterious, contemplative, a drug-without-a-drug.
'Nowhere could this effect be truer than in Heliopause's second long poem, "Elegy for Neil Armstrong." Here is an erasure poem taking as its body the transcript of communications between Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and mission control during the first moon landing. Seven stark black pages form a bed for blips of language culled from the edges of what we know, and yet as everyday as anything in their foundation. "Neil, / You're / a picture / on the TV / Oh." What is provided is so little, and yet in its breadth creates a hole around which the reader and the language come together, touch, like walking in the darkness with only words to guide you. The effect is obscuring, open, and at the same time, kind of funny, in an abstract sense; what we come to at the edges of our experience of the universe is the fragmentary communications of men in sealed suits, toddling without sure purpose but to be there, to have seen it, and continue.'-- Blake Butler, VICE
Wesleyan
'Heather Christle’s stunning fourth collection blends disarming honesty with keen leaps of the imagination. Like the boundary between our sun’s sphere of influence and interstellar space, from which the book takes its name, the poems in Heliopause locate themselves along the border of the known and unknown, moving with breathtaking assurance from the page to the beyond. Christle finds striking parallels between subjects as varied as the fate of Voyager 1, the uncertain conception of new life, the nature of elegy, and the decaying transmission of information across time. Nimbly engaging with current events and lyric past, Heliopause marks a bold shift and growing vision in Christle’s work.'-- Wesleyan
Excerpts
HATCH
In every place
you seem to end
I have loved you
There was that small
and dead and pink
bird we saw
near the sidewalk
with its smashed
open mouth
a place to let
the world in
a way of not ending
I loved you so
I had to crawl inside
NOT MUCH MORE ROOM IN THE CEMETERY
I will lie down on top of the graves
People beneath and people behind me
with their faces and their little horns
and the places from which they are shining
I know there is something else
that they have tried to teach me
and I am sorry for all of the times
I have listened and not learned it
No I am not crying
I'm maybe um a demon
For certain I am waving this fruit fly away
AND THIS TOO COMES APART
People agree with sleep
They nod into it
but death they sometimes fight off
until they can’t
and then
from their graves
they stick out their tongues
Good for them
Good for the people
In the world I can see
there is one tree still raining
The sun blares around
lights it up
in lines alongside the spiders’
They have an arrangement
a private design
When I’m arranged
into a mother
I will name my child
Incredulity and like it so much
I’ll do it again
three or four
or eight times
Stand up!
Good and straight like a tree
good and stiff like
the rain darkened gravestone
perpendicular
to the quiet
Or sit down
and make a nice lap
nod Incredulity off into sleep
Enumerate to her the lines
of the song you haven’t meant yet
DRAPES
There were erecting a conversational
in the middle of the inconsequential
afternoon
like one of those unnatural flowers
you drop into water and watch
immediately blossom
And then then what
Has anything changed?
They were emigrating from one wall
to the other
like swans of
ungodly proportions
They were not so much
humans as blood drenched with hair
Heather Christle reading for Real Pants
Heather Christle's "WHY I AM A TREE"
Heather Christle reads her poems
__________________
'Joseph Fasano’s Vincent overflows with the kind of beautiful imagery and dazzlingly complex similes that makes it a book difficult to put down, which is all the more remarkable considering it is a book-length, one-sentence poem. It also happens to be told through the voice of a tortured, infamous murderer.
'Vincent is a fictionalized look into the mind of Vince Li, the man who without provocation killed and decapitated a fellow bus passenger in Canada in July 2008. We get this information from the book’s epigraph and it never quite disappears from our attention, making it all the more difficult to reconcile the horror of the act and the delicate and strange and haunting way Vincent sees the world.
'Fasano’s ability to capture the fragmented perspective of this killer is unsettling particularly because so much of what he writes gets us deeper and deeper inside Vincent’s head. We start to become hypnotized by the images and the rabbit-hole similes, which pile one on top of the other and push us further into his world. ...
'His ability to control the book/poem/sentence’s pacing is exemplary too. Because of the long, winding nature of the book, we have to read slowly and carefully to maintain a sense of proper syntax, which makes it easy to be swept away by the writing’s terrible beauty. Whether we want to or not, we end up feeling sympathy, if not empathy, for Vincent as we experience how troubled he is.'-- AMERICAN MICROVIEWS
Cider Press
'Authorities say a man was stabbed to death, decapitated and partly cannibalized in what appears to be a random act of violence on board a bus that was en route to Winnipeg late Wednesday." With these starkly haunting words from a 2008 Canadian news report, Joseph Fasano begins VINCENT, a book-length poem based on Vince Li's killing of Tim McLean on a Greyhound bus near Portage la Prairie, Manitoba. Using a fictionalized first-person narrative from the perspective of the killer, Fasano explores the inner workings of a disturbed mind trying to come to terms with a horrific act that even its perpetrator cannot fully comprehend. "Have you smelled the rose oil / in the shoes of the dead... have you woken / and woken / and woken," the speaker asks us. And the poem will not let us say no.'-- Cider Press
Excerpt
Trailer: VINCENT
Joseph Fasano reads 'Fragments'
Writer's Block - Joseph Fasano
__________________
Rob Hart: The book opens with this incredible and startling image—a marching band making their way onto the Golden Gate Bridge and leaping off. I'm curious to know what the nexus point was. Did you start with the image, or did it come to you as you were sorting out the story?
Joshua Mohr: I am a huge fan of Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin, which starts off with the tightrope walker between the Twin Towers, back in the 1970s. It's such a startling and mesmerizing image, it's so iconic New York, and I wanted to try and do something similar for San Francisco, my home for 20 years. I wanted the book to be both a love letter and an indictment of my town. So kicking the book off with a mass suicide seemed like the perfect way to do that, both honoring and creating a sense of anxious mystery.
RH: That's one of the things that stuck out for me—I'm a native New Yorker, and there's a lot of the same thing happening here—the city's being stripped of character, and you get this feeling pretty soon you're going to have to prove you make six figures just to be allowed inside. Like a club you're not cool enough for anymore. Why do we love the places that do this to us?
JM: I guess the answer has to be more complex than we're just fucking stupid, right? There is this Urban Masochism, where you dig your heels in, even if you don't dig the direction of the place. For example, I've lived in the Mission since the 90s, running around like a coked-up caveman, tons of literary events, tons of trouble, etc. The neighborhood teemed with artists. It's not like that anymore, which bums me out. All This Life is a pretty angry book, and I guess it's a way for me to grieve that: This great city that I loved/love is no longer alive. Now it's all tech-turds.
RH: Huh. I would not call it angry. Sharp and biting, yes. But I left feeling uplifted. Which brings me to the next point: It's clearly an indictment of technology and social media culture. Is that because of the tech-turds taking over your town? Or does that come from someplace else?
JM: If I've done my job right on the page, the narrative doesn't just demonize technology, it also shows some of its value. For example, there is a missing teenager in the book, who only communicates to his dad and his followers via Twitter. But it is that online communique that leads to him being located. I wanted to try and show both sides. Certainly there is a lot to bemoan about our swelling virtual lives, but there is goodness there, too. Granted, we mostly just use it for porn and cat memes, but eventually maybe probably possibly we'll figure it out. I know LitReactor's readers are mostly all aspiring writers themselves and it's something to ponder: How it's best to show both sides of the argument and leave space for the reader to make her own determinations. That way, things don't feel didactic.
Soft Skull Press
'Morning rush hour on the Golden Gate Bridge. Amidst the river of metal and glass a shocking event occurs, leaving those who witnessed it desperately looking for answers, most notably one man and his son Jake, who captured the event and uploaded it to the internet for all the world to experience. As the media swarms over the story, Jake will face the ramifications of his actions as he learns the perils of our modern disconnect between the real world and the world we create on line.
'In land-locked Arizona, as the entire country learns of the event, Sara views Jake’s video just before witnessing a horrible event of her own: her boyfriend’s posting of their intimate sex tape. As word of the tape leaks out, making her an instant pariah, Sara needs to escape the small town’s persecution of her careless action. Along with Rodney, an old boyfriend injured long ago in a freak accident that destroyed his parents’ marriage, she must run faster than the internet trolls seeking to punish her for her indiscretions. Sara and Rodney will reunite with his estranged mother, Kat, now in danger from a new man in her life who may not be who he – or his online profiles – claim to be, a dangerous avatar in human form.
'With a wide cast of characters and an exciting pace that mimics the speed of our modern, all-too-connected lives, All This Life examines the dangerous intersection of reality and the imaginary, where coding and technology seek to highlight and augment our already flawed human connections. Using his trademark talent for creating memorable characters, with a deep insight into language and how it can be twisted to alter reality, Joshua Mohr returns with his most contemporary and insightful novel yet.'-- Soft Skull Press
Excerpt
Sara’s adding more hot water to her bath. She does this with her big toe, moving the dial so the scalding reinforcements pour into the tub. First, her lower legs feel the temperature crank and the sensation slowly moves up her small body, the water working toward her head.
It’s been four days since the sex tape went viral, Sara’s day zero. Her rebirth with a digital, conjoined twin. New Sara is four days old, and this newborn can’t muster the will to get out of the bath.
She and Rodney drove out of Traurig and made it into California, cruised down the mountain into the foothills, finally entering Sacramento. After five hours on the road, they needed a motel room. The room had two double beds. Pillows so scrawny that they were probably stuffed with creamed spinach. The carpet smelled like a campfire. Under a black light, the bedspread could make a porn star blush.
Right when they got into the room, Sara said, “I need a bath.”
Sara lost track of time in the tub, or she knew that time passed and didn’t care. She never expected to spend four days bathing, but honestly, the tub was the safest haven she’d found since her fiasco posted online. It was warm and nobody was talking and why leave such quiet comfort?
She only exited for quick trips. To eat takeout that Rodney had ordered, Chinese, Thai, pizza. To sleep in spurts, toss and turn, think too much, retreat back to another bath, slipping into solace.
And four days later, they’re still in this god-awful motel room. This is a capricious way to dole out her emergency money, but she can’t find the verve to try. She feels bad for Rodney, trapped out there. She wouldn’t be surprised if he took off on her—she certainly wouldn’t blame him. But every time she briefly emerges from the bathroom, there he is, watching TV, using his own phone to scroll around the globe. He always greets her with a serving of food, something to drink.
“Eat,” he says.
“Okay.” But she barely does.
He hoists a plate of pad thai or whatever at her.
What would really make her feel good is if Sara can pick up the phone and talk to her dead mother. Not for any guidance, just empathy. Empathy that spans all across the sky like storm clouds.
Cumulonimbus empathy.
Instead, she’ll have to settle for another bath.
This is the time. Sara points herself at a certain URL. She opens the page and watches it load. There is a still image, Sara on her hands and knees, Nat behind her, a banner above them that says Skank of the Week.
And a link that says Click here for all the action!
It might sound like masochism, this impulse to watch what’s ruined her, but Sara remembers some of her mom’s advice. This was when Sara was seven or eight years old and she couldn’t stop singing the song “Frère Jacques.” It had been in her head for weeks and every time there was a lapse in conversation, that’s when Sara started singing. It was in her head when she fell asleep and when she woke up, in her head while she ate and played.
“Here,” her mom said, “let’s listen to the whole song together. That might help get it out of your head.”
She sat on her mom’s lap, and they fired up a CD, hearing the entire track, and it worked. “Frère Jacques” was no more, though it was replaced by another song. Sara’s life had music back then.
Joshua Mohr reads from All This Life
Joshua Mohr Discusses New Book, All This Life on Book Circle Online
Beast Crawl - Joshua Mohr
*
p.s. Hey. ** James, Hi. Hm, maybe bringing text more into the foreground and giving more of a 'voice' to the internal workings makes it seem darker? Ha ha, well, I guess you and Zac are very different kinds of people then. Doesn't that thing where desirers of the underaged become so fraught in their desire that they fall for an illogical FBI bait/sting thing happen all the time? Seems like it. ** Thomas Moronic, Hey. That's pretty close, yeah. The title translation. So appreciative of your close reading of that gif work and of the others. It means a lot, thank you! I deliberately experimented in those flash fictions with bringing text into the very foreground of the work, which is something I resisted doing earlier as I'm interested in making literary gif fiction where language itself is backgrounded and disempowered because using gifs as a language allows one to do that and allows one to free oneself from the necessity of making fiction that is wedded to written language, but I wanted to see what happened if the stories were spelled out closer to the surface, and I'm very happy with what happened. I think I'm at the point where I'm sufficiently inside the practice that I can and know how to that without tipping the boat or whatever. Well, texts are always in my mind and in my behind-the-scenes thinking/strategizing when I make those pieces, operating as a resource and structuring device. I'm just mostly interesting in trying to represent them in a non-textual way. Thank you very, very much, man. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Oh, that's him? I thought he looked vaguely familiar. ** Sypha, Zac generally isn't into having the art he makes available online. The fact that our film does and will increasingly have an online presence is new for him. ** Kyler, Well, I hope he does too. Thank you! Galassi didn't seem like a bad guy to me, really. I mean my work is very particular, and lots of editors and people with excellent taste don't like it at all. I'm used to that. And he has published a lot of really good things at FSG. I mean, FSG is like the crown jewel of big publishers, and he is largely responsible for that. He might have published Sarah Kane. It wouldn't shock me. ** Bill, Hi, B. Thanks very much. Yeah, with those works, I was experimenting with making text more prominent. I'd like to do that more. The problem is that there's a far, far more limited supply of text-only gifs out there. I could make those myself, and I may, but, so far, the fact they're found-only gifs has been important to what I'm trying to do. We'll see. Seattle? For a gig or what? Cool! ** Chris Goode, Hi, Chris! Man, I'm sorry to be slow with the email. Zac's and my film is premiering soon, and I've been dragged into a bunch of grunt work that needs to be done to prepare for that and set that up, and my head got waylaid. But, long story short, pretty much yes to everything in your email, and, yeah, let's have a Skype as soon as you want. Today even. What about an actual conversation rather than a text exchange? I can do a text exchange, but talking sounds more fun and useful or something. Up to you. But, yeah, I'm mostly just home working all the time right now, so I'm generally totally free. I'm good, pal, how are beauteous you? Cool, obviously I'm very happy if the gif work is getting more gettable and pleasurable. Very, very, cool, thank you! Bringing actual text up in the mix did really create a different, more ... something effect. It was interesting to discover that. I think you mentioned before that you were writing a book? And it sounds kind of like the same one? Am I right? It sounds really exciting! I want to hear more about it and talk to you about it. Yum. So, yeah, let's talk. Call me, if you have my # -- I'll email it to you, if not -- or email me, and I'll be a diligent email checker for once, and let's get everything arranged. Very awesome. Love to you, maestro. ** Steevee, Everyone, Here's Steve's article on the new Agnes Varda box set. ** _Black_Acrylic, Thank you, Ben. Exporting does indeed sound very promising. I know from our film work what that means. Tentative, but even not all that tentative, hooray! I've been trying to read up on Jeremy Corbyn. It's hard because there are agendas about him flying all over the place, and I can't tell what's factual and what's bullshit. He sounds like a very mixed bag, so far. I have no stake or opinion in any of this, but ... a naive question: If Corbyn becomes Labour leader then doesn't Labour become a different party that isn't, at the very least, as responsible for the previously, differently led party's position on the Referendum? ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hi, Jeff. Thanks for the good words, man. Well, they're three flash fictions. The separated groupings of gifs are my notion of a sectioning device that works with the idea of literary gif work and which has essentially the same function as paragraphing or sectioning in written fiction. So the works are unified things, and the grouping/spaces within them are the method I've found thus far to be the most effective way to structure the fictions a la written fiction when I'm using animated visual imagery as the material. I think, because of their particular 'power' to mess-up or exhaust the viewers' eyesight, they require a careful kind of connective pausing and breathing spaces. If that makes sense. Last I heard, that film project, which was/is supposed to be co-scripted by Bret and Gus van Sant and directed by Gaspar, has been either pushed way into the future or might even be dead now, I'm not sure. Yes, huh, I do think I understand what you mean about thickening. Yeah, sure, of course I've done that. I mean it took forever, for instance, to devise the exact correct thickness for 'The Marbled Swarm'. Thickening/de-thickening was a lot of the work I had to do on that novel. Sounds exciting, Jeff! ** Misanthrope, Hey. I have no idea who these guys you recognized in the gif fictions are. Those gifs just served my purpose, basically. Thanks for getting it. Victoire! ** H, Hi. Thank you for meditating on it. I hope NYC and its environs are treating you very well. ** Chris Dankland, Hi, Chris. Thanks a lot, man. That's great. It means a lot! ** Jeffrey Coleman, Hi. I didn't get to The Last Hurrah!! yesterday due to real life interference, but that's cool 'cos now I'll make a beeline for 'The Beauty of Fake'. Thanks a lot. And for that link. You bet it's interesting to me. I can read writings about theme parks 24/7 given the chance. And I'll see what her book is too. Great! ** Schlix, Thanks, Uli. It's still boiling there? Here it's like we're in summer's death throes -- awful/hot one day and then cool as fall the next. I hope yours ends right ... now? Is that possible? Oh, you mean the Teenage Hallucination exhibition in Geneva? I'm not directly involved in it, but I think it's just all of Gisele's mannequins/ dolls and the 40 portraits of them. So just that part and not 'Last Spring, a Prequel' or the other things unfortunately. I really wish we could show 'LS,aP' again 'cos I love that piece, and I'm sure we will. The Geneva festival is doing a big celebration/ focus on Gisele's work, so there'll be the exhibition, 'The Ventriloquists Convention', 'This Is How You Will Disappear', music concert by Peter/Pita, and other stuff. It should be fun. I'm going over there for part of it, particularly because that will be the world premiere of the English language version of 'TVC'. Glad things are good with you other than things related to heat and tech. ** Douglas Payne, Hi, Douglas. Thanks, man. I'm very looking forward to 'The Imposter'. No, comix and graphic novels are a big weakness in my reading and in my history of reading for no good reason at all because I hugely respect the form. I'll try to rectify that problem to some degree by investigating those three you mentioned. Yeah, that is fascinating and surprising about their petitioning to lower the age of consent. Even in France today, that would so extremely not fly. The revolution these days or right now seems to be focused on gender identity, which is a different thing, of course, but it's very interesting to watch happen and seemingly succeed. Have a great day, man. ** Right. There, right up there, are 4 books I read recently and loved that I consequently recommend that you check out and consider as possible reading material. See you tomorrow.