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Joey: The villains are the heroes of your books, glamorous, funny, and often, like in The Show that Smells, the good guys are either idiots or sad sacks that get what they've got coming. Jimmie Rogers is constantly coughing up sputum and moaning, while Schiaparelli has page after page of glorious dead baby joke monologuing and these great insane dresses. What do you think is so compelling about evil? You first introduced me to Night of the Hunter, and Robert Mitchum owns that movie with his weird beautiful singing as he stalks those children. He's like Heath Ledger's Joker in The Dark Knight. He's bigger than the movie. Do you think that evil could be as compelling in real life? Do you think it'd be as fun, in real life? As much of a performance?
Derek McCormack: I dream of being evil. I have dreamt this dream since I was a child -- I wanted so badly to be the wicked witch from The Wizard of Oz. I carried a wooden wand around until I was, um, ten? A neighbour carved a wooden rifle for me so that I could play soldier or shoot-'em-up or whatever. I didn't mind playing with guns but I would always wind up waving the rifle around as if it were a wand. I wanted to cast spells. With The Show That Smells, I had a very clear vision: I wanted to write a book that was a spell that would destroy all the books in the world. Well, maybe not all the books, but CanLit at least. I love when the gays start making magic: I'm thinking of Kenneth Anger and others, but mainly of Jack Spicer and the incantatory tone of some of his stuff. I'm thinking of Jack Spicer because he was my patron saint! Gay, ugly, alone. Glamour's what guys like us dream of -- an evil glamour that doesn't make us beautiful but that changes what beauty is. I guess this is not what most people imagine when they imagine evil -- they think of serial killers and people who put poison in parks for dogs to discover. I think of The Joker, another childhood hero. Evil is art that can make evil real. Tell me, Joey, when you were younger, did you like superheroes or villains? I don't see much evil in your books -- there are monsters, but they're often there to test family ties, or the limits of fidelity, or so it seems to me. That said, the things you've been writing lately have certainly been more brutal and bananas -- are you digging into your dark side in a different way?
Joey: You don't seem particularly flaky to me, so when you say "a magic spell" I read that as a sort of trick. An illusion or sleight of hand. A glamourousness that makes it hard for the reader/viewer to recognize evil as evil, even when it's clear that this is the villain. The poor sap characters in the movie know that Freddy is the bad guy, but half the audience is getting bored whenever he's not on screen. Part of his evil is making evil seductive and fun. Evil is art that can make Evil sexy?
DM: As for whether I liked heroes or villains, I'm not sure. When I was a kid I liked Spider-Man. The hero aspect of him didn't really interest me. I didn't care about great power coming with great responsibility. I liked his jokes and one liners. But that doesn't answer your question. I was never interested in comic book villains, I wasn't particularly interested in the heroes either. The first comic I remember LOVING was Sam & Max. They're villains pretending to be heroes, I think. Maybe vice-versa. Good and evil don't matter in that world. Those concepts are just helpful setups to jokes. The characters are complete unbridled impulse. ("What should I do with this bomb, Max?" - "Throw it out the window, Sam, there's nobody but strangers out there.") They're irreverent in the best way. Those are the kind of villains I love.
The book you mentioned that I'm writing, Bible Camp Bloodbath, has a villain like that. He's making jokes while murdering children. He's got no back story, no deep psychological motivation, he's just having a really good time. It was so much fun to write something like that. So giddy.
Joey: You've been working a lot with visual artists, and on visual art lately. Do you think it's possible for visual art to have evil in it? Or to express evil in a fun way without losing its impact? I guess I mean, is there a place for villains in art? Or architecture? That doctor's house in Chicago around the time of the Chicago fair was the site of dozens of murders. But with its trap doors and fake walls, it has the surreal fun of a grisly puzzle. I could hear the glee in your voice when you told me about that place. But that's a different kind of horrific. There's not really any glamour to that house, is there? Why is it so fascinating?
DM: Oh, but there was glamour to the murder castle – there was a jewelry shop on the first floor! The murder castle is evil because of the murders that took place there, sure, but that’s not so interesting to me. The machinery of the castle – trap doors, sliding walls, dead-end corridors, etc – that’s what kills me. I’ve written about it before – it seems to me to have influenced the development of carnival dark rides and amusement park haunted houses. It’s not the murders I love, it’s the murder castle as tourist attraction. It’s the carnival haunted house that can’t possibly be as scary as it pretends to be.
It's like: when I was a kid, I would consult the Ouija board, which I knew was a dumb board game -- still, I would play it late at night with friends and we'd scare ourselves. And in that late-night fright I would always feel the hope that it could be real, even though it couldn't be real, but what if it could? The evil I care about is Disney evil, it’s Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty– what if that type of evil, which is so operatic and elegant, could come out of the cartoon and into the world? That would be crackerjack and catastrophic. That’s the black magic I care about, that I try to conjure in my books. It’s a laughable dream I have, laughable and probably impossible, but it’s still better than dreaming of winning the ReLit Award or getting a Canada Council grant, don’t you think?
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Derek McCormack The Well-Dressed Wound
Semiotext(e)
'The Well-Dressed Wound is Derek McCormack’s play script “séance”: a fashion show by the dead for the living. In the depths of the Civil War, in a theater in P. T. Barnum’s American Museum on Broadway, Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln participate in a staged spiritualistic rite. But the medium conducting them has invited along another being: the Devil, disguised as twentieth-century French fashionista Martin Margiela (aka “King Faggot”). What follows is the most fiendish runway show ever mounted, complete with war dead, deconstructed couture, and gay ghosts infected with all manner of infectious agents, including oozy AIDS.
'While his previous fictions have explored the darker corners of country music, high fashion, and camp, The Well-Dressed Wound is McCormack’s most radical work yet, occultishly evoking the evil-twin muses of transgressive literature, Kathy Acker and Pierre Guyotat. The creation thus conjured is a gleeful grotesquerie, a savage satire not so much of fashion as of death, a work that, as Bruce Hainley observes in Artforum, puts “the ‘pus’ back in opus.” Here death and life spin on a viral double helix of contamination and couture, blistering and bandages, history and hysteria, semen and seams. “Being dead is so very now,” Hainley opines. “This tiny tome (a time bomb, a tomb) is to die for and radically alive.”'-- Semiotext(e)
Excerpt/Intro
Welcome to The Well-Dressed Wound
The play is presented by P.T. Barnum. It's being staged in the theater at Barnum's American Museum on Broadway.
The play depicts a seance that takes place in a parlor in the presidential palace, the White House in Washington, D.C.
The characters:
The Medium, a woman wearing a black shawl.
Mary Todd Lincoln, the First Lady. She's in a black dress. She's in mourning for her son, Willie, who died when he was eleven.
Abraham Lincoln, the President of the United States. He's in a sack suit. The suit's black for Willie's sake and for the country's sake -- the Civil War's made the shade de rigueur.
The cast: The Medium's played by Nettie Coburn Maynard, a clairvoyant who conducted a seance for President and Mrs. Lincoln at the White House in 1862. Mary Todd Lincoln's played by Mary Todd Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln's Abraham Lincoln.
I'm Willie.
Derek McCormack and Anwar Mukhayesh (from HGTV's "The Designer Guys") interview each other
Derek McCormack on his novel The Show That Smells
Tony Burgess & Derek McCormack -- Die Scream Die
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'Elaine Equi's new book, just out from Coffee House Press, is Sentences and Rain, a smart title for a poet who translates her love of things and states of being into sentences -- albeit sentences broken in signature line-breaks. Language itself is a subject that impels her to write. From "Yo y Tu," a poem wondering about the presence of the second-person pronoun in Spanish but not in English: "Intimacy, friendship, / easy access -- // in English / the formal you / is 'Yo'."
'Equi is attracted to short forms, the short utterance, the sudden revelation. This predilection reflects a certain modesty but more importantly a tremendous value placed on economy.
'As one who is by nature attracted to wordplay and the idea that the composition of a poem may resemble a game of metaphysical chess or checkers, I always find much to delight me in an Equi collection. In Sentences and Rain, she has a poem consisting entirely of favorite lines from Charles Reznikoff on the subject of time and clocks and a second cento entitled "Varieties of Fire in Hilda Morley." There are two examples of the Equi epithalamium -- all the words in the poem "are derived from recombinations of only the letters" in the names of the new spouses. It is, of course, not only the idea preceding the poem that one admires but the intelligence and wit that the idea triggers
'Among my favorites is "Lucky Lipstick," perhaps because the poet's generative conceit lies very precisely in the title and its relation to the text -- consisting, in this case, of lines associated with such masters as Gertrude Stein "A Rose is a Rose"), Wallace Stevens ("Red Weather"), William Carlos Williams. ("I Have Eaten the Plums") and Samuel Taylor Coleridge ("Frost at Midnight").
'Here is the entire text of a one-line poem entitled "Caught in a Downpour": "If I open my mouth, I might drown." And this is from Equi's take on the will as an organizing motif: "For Edward Hopper: A perfect piece of lemon meringue pie in a diner at midnight, where the only other customer is Greta Garbo reading a book."
'But if there is a secret joy informing Equi's poetry, it is in the way she accepts the world as it is, without quarrel and without illusions except those that are sanctioned by art. Like a still-life specialist she gets you to see not only the red flesh of the watermelon but the beauty of the black seeds on it. She has a feel for the comic side of things, she refuses to take herself too seriously, she is true to her own mind rather than vainly endeavoring to sound like someone else. It is this sensibility that links her to the New York School poets, James Schuyler in particular, and Williams, Niedecker, and Reznikoff among the Objectivists.
'There is a lot of fake poetry out there. Equi is real. She changes the way you look at things. You cannot fake the authenticity that informs even the most casual of her observations.'-- David Lehman
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Elaine Equi Sentences and Rain
Coffee House Press
'Whether celebrating clones or revising Led Zeppelin, Equi melds verse with aphorism, wisdom with wicked playfulness."—Entertainment Weekly
'Equi's poems are under the breath asides from your cleverest friend—witty, thoughtful, and wry.
'Widely published and anthologized, Elaine Equi's work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Nation, and numerous volumes of The Best American Poetry.'-- Coffee House Press
Excerpts
SLIGHT
A slight implies
if not an insult
(real or imagined)
at least something
unpleasant --
a slight cold,
a slight headache.
No one ever says:
"You make me slightly happy."
Although this, in fact,
is often the case.
YO Y TU
In Spanish
yo means I
and tu
is a you
I know
or at least
am comfortable
addressing casually.
In English
we have no
informal form
to indicate
the you
still in pajamas —
hair wild,
drinking coffee.
Intimacy, friendship,
easy access –
in English
the informal you
is “Yo”
IMBIBING
A show globe
of red intensity,
a glass beacon
of medicinal yellow.
Both are only
colored water
meant to be drunk
with the eyes, and yet.
The ancients knew
that color heals,
makes a fine meal
for a ruined mind.
Things (maladies) thought
to go on forever
eventually do,
like summer, end.
Poet Elaine Equi reads from Ripple Effect
Fantasy Poetry Reading: Elaine Equi
Poets Elaine Equi & David Lehman @ Big Apple BAP
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'“I’ve written a number of essays the past few years,” Dodie Bellamy writes in her new book, When the Sick Rule the World, “and I keep vowing to quit.” We know her essay-quitting hasn’t been going well, not only because we’re reading about it in a Dodie Bellamy essay, but also because these words, which originally appeared in the 2008 chapbook Barf Manifesto, are now nestled in a new collection alongside thirteen other essays, most of which have been written in the years since.
'To be frank and detailed about sex in one’s writing, to use one’s own name and biography, to blend high and low cultural references in an intermittently casual tone, as Bellamy does, and to do these things while being a woman, as Bellamy is—all this might lead literal-minded readers to privilege what’s said over the way one says it, to fail to see the form for the subject matter. But for Bellamy, who came out of the New Narrative movement of the late 1970s and early ’80s, it’s form itself that’s juicy. She has published a post–Bram Stoker epistolary novel in which Mina Harker cuts a swath through AIDS-era San Francisco, possessing the body of Dodie Bellamy along the way; a blog-turned-book about her affair with a cultish Buddhist; a careful splicing of an erotic text into part of the 1975 Norton Anthology of Poetry. Not to mention a personal essay that begins with a set of seventy-eight “TV sutras” (“Stops more leaks than the next leading brand. End of tampon commercial. COMMENTARY . . . Distraction and lack of focus are also forms of leaking: losing track of what is valuable and meaningful”). No wonder she says she is “addicted” to the essay, yet at the same time has always found it “oppressive, a form so conservative it begs to be dismantled.” And she doesn’t merely want to deconstruct it, or to question it in the manner of a “feminist poetic essay” of the early ’80s. That kind of experiment “felt too watery for me. I wasn’t into watery, I was into libidinal”: Bellamy wants to fuck the essay (up).
'Like any subversion of a form, this is an act of aggression, but also one of love, because it shows the form how much more it could be capable of—especially apt in the case of the essay, which by definition is always an experiment, an attempt to do or discover something new. “Barf Manifesto” takes as its starting point another essay, “Everyday Barf,” by the poet Eileen Myles, a ten-page feat that also begins with a fuck-you to strict formal convention. Myles describes being asked to write a political sestina, then having the editor who commissioned the poem critique its technical flaws. She is not interested in acing her homework assignment: “It simply strikes me that form has a real honest engagement with content and therefore might even need to get a little sleazy with it suggesting it stop early or go too far.”
'As well as reading Myles’s work for us, Bellamy presents us with a portrait of the poet herself, and of their often tricky friendship (we see Myles, the more famous writer, maniacally destroying a piñata; we see her humiliate Bellamy after she clogs her toilet—“keep pumping,” Myles barks). Here Bellamy offers, both explicitly and implicitly, a way of thinking about the charged, rivalrous relations between writers and their influences, writers and their subjects, writers and readers. That’s one effect of the New Narrative practice of blurring those divides: Writers known and unknown show up in their own and their friends’ work; and they often present themselves as creative readers as well as writers, appropriating other texts in a particularly pointed fashion, not hiding or overprocessing the various foreign bodies they incorporate. In both cases the effects can be very complicated, because the texts are dramatizing several different kinds of power struggle: the obvious one in which the writer’s presentation of her subjects does battle with their own self-conceptions, but also others, in which, say, the writer grabs a brilliant passage from someone else’s work and tries to top it, or throws two incongruous, contradictory texts together and lets them fight it out.'-- Lidija Haas, Bookforum
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Dodie Bellamy When the Sick Rule the World
Semiotext(e)
'A moving meld of essay, memoir, and story, When the Sick Rule the World collects Dodie Bellamy’s new and recent lyric prose. Taking on topics as eclectic as vomit, Kathy Acker’s wardrobe, and Occupy Oakland, Bellamy here examines illness, health, and the body—both the social body and the individual body—in essays that glitter with wit even at their darkest moments.
'In a safe house in Marin County, strangers allergic to the poisons of the world gather for an evening’s solace. In Oakland, protesters dance an ecstatic bacchanal over the cancerous body of the city-state they love and hate. In the elegiac memoir, “Phone Home,” Bellamy meditates on her dying mother’s last days via the improbable cipher of Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Finally, Bellamy offers a piercing critique of the displacement and blight that have accompanied Twitter’s move into her warehouse-district neighborhood, and the pitiless imperialism of tech consciousness.
'A participant in the New Narrative movement and a powerful influence on younger writers, Bellamy views heteronormativity and capitalism as plagues, and celebrates the micro-revolts of those on the outskirts. In its deft blending of forms, When the Sick Rule the World resiliently and defiantly proclaims the “undeath of the author.” In the realm of sickness, Bellamy asserts, subjectivity is not stable. “When the sick rule the world, mortality will be sexy,” Bellamy prophesies. Those defined by society as sick may, in fact, be its saviors.'-- Semiotext(e)
Excerpt
from Fanzine
BAD PLACES
I park my car in the cul de sac on Natoma. As I approach Lafayette Street, a thin woman maybe in her early 20s passes me. She’d be attractive if it weren’t for the sores on her face and the way she confronts me with too much eye contact and a sort of glazed smile. She’s wearing a short white dress and one brown lace-up boot. Her other foot is bare.
Her presence doesn’t surprise me. Since 2012, when Twitter established its headquarters two blocks away, there’s been an ongoing battle to transform “Mid-Market” from sketchy skid row to up-and-coming “New Market,” as boosters and realtors have named it, or even the hip truncation, NEMA. Many of the displaced have moved East, to my micro-neighborhood. One guy regularly sits on the corner of my alley, shouting in different voices. His range is remarkable. Kevin and I lean over the outdoor landing of our rent-controlled Victorian and snoop. Rocking and wailing with his arms wrapped around his knees, the guy looks tiny. He doesn’t seem to be saying words so much as painfully expelling them. At times he sounds just like Regan in The Exorcist and I’m convinced he’s possessed, even though I don’t really believe in possession. Stupidly I call the cops and say, “There’s a guy on my corner who needs help.” The same migration happened when the City cleaned up Civic Center; it has been happening over and over ever since I moved to South of Market in 1990. In San Francisco when neighborhood associations or other vectors of power complain loud enough, police herd undesirables to the next neighborhood over, until that neighborhood generates enough political clout, and then they’re herded elsewhere. I learned this during the crack years. The crack years were scary, but fascinating to watch from my bedroom window and as I walked down 11th Street between Market and Mission. Vans distributed to bicycles that distributed to individuals. Person to person sales reminded me of gay cruising, the way transactions happen in plain sight. Two people approach one another, and without making eye contact, one stuffs something into the hand of another. The one receiving the good then heads to the closest alley, my alley, to smoke it. I used to joke I knew so much about crack sale and distribution I could go into business myself.
The one-booted woman loses interest in me and walks down Natoma towards 11th, weaving in the middle of the street with an indifference that could be described either as saunter or stagger. She seems weightless. Her otherworldliness and that one boot—it’s as if Bess—the title character of Daphne Gottlieb’s 2013 Spolia chapbook—has materialized before my eyes. Bess too wears only one shoe: “What I haven’t done a good enough job of telling you yet: How gone Bess is. She is the a-Bess. She is covered in menstrual blood, a Carrie in pink long johns wearing one shoe.”
The story of a drug-addicted young woman lost to psychosis, Bess is a Gothic horror novel distilled to 3100 words. The drug/prostitution maze of the single resident occupancy hotel (SRO) has entrapped Bess and endangers all who enter, including her case workers. Of it the female case worker ponders, “Can a place itself be bad? Is the ground under Auschwitz—the land itself—the brown earth that smells just like dirt—is the land itself evil? Is the land under Ted Bundy’s house cursed? Was there blood spilled under the labyrinth that made it hungry for more? Is there a reason people get swallowed up or snuffed out or trapped in a labyrinth?” Stephen King would answer, yes, the SRO has become a Bad Place. From Danse Macabre: “When we go home and shoot the bolt on the door, we like to think we’re locking trouble out. The good horror story about the Bad Place whispers that we are not locking the world out; we are locking ourselves in . . . with them.” In Bess it’s difficult to locate where corruption lies. We have the behemoth of social services, designed to assist, but which threatens to dehumanize all involved. We have the two case workers trying their damnedest to be the good guys in a system that invites failure. “This is what I do: I take lost people and I give them beds in places with big rooms with many beds.” And then we have Bess, who remains remote, manipulative, un-exorcize-able. “[O]ne Frye-boot on, still makes with the vacant, absent look. Nothing much matters to her, I think. Nothing is getting through. She’s gone away someplace.” In her schizophrenic haze, Bess is unable to take care of herself, and thus legally absorbable by the social services system. “She is the graybrown of the walls. Her pinpick eyes glare right through the curtain of hair. Her mouth is an asterisk. She nods that she will come with us because she has no choice.”
(cont.)
Dodie Bellamy reads from Erotika Biblion
Dodie Bellamy Reading at Small Press Traffic
Whistle While You Dixie (excerpt) / Dodie Bellamy
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'Electronic globalization has turned us into relentless postdigital flaneurs; something quite different from the Baudelaires, the Prousts or the Benjamins of early modern times. For Leslie Scalapino, the flaneur, the detached stroller, no longer exists. Instead, individuals on all economic and class levels at once are both seeing and creating the ‘conceptual’ interaction that is them: whicch is then exterior, is ‘society’ (that is, the illusion of simultaneity). The classical flaneur was typically a big city dweller astonished by the perception of witnessing the birth of a new world and, at the same time, a romantic outsider digging into the nostalgia of a fictional inheritance through which modern subjectivity was initially constituted. The contemporary contra-flaneur, however, is a solitary individual wandering beyond the edge of the city in a quiet region completely isolated and around which lie ruins, as an exaltation of abandonment turning toward annihilation, abandoning all hope while jammed in Hell’s enter or exit lanes—Any narrator for the arts is already deleted, writes Sean Kilpatrick in the introduction to Grant Maierhofer’s Postures.
'Maierhofer plays the Big Brother game to find a kaleidoscopic fuckscreen of bad cameras angles that make mankind look like half a speck of civilization when you pick it apart for just a moment”, realizing that “the way the world is changing, and will change, is far more dire, far more obscene, far more anti-Human. The contra-flaneur is already deleted—already dead and having no clue to decide if the apparently one way road he’s stuck into is leading in or out of Hell. In his immediate previous work Marcel, a collection of wonderfully carved stories about ways of coping with loneliness and despair, Maierhofer introduces us to a handful of contra-flaneurs trapped in places where it’s almost impossible for them, no matter how fucked up their minds might be, to ignore the tragicomic aspects of the collapse of conventional human relationships (Friends came as unwelcome scars)—yet they’re burdened by the anxiety their awareness of the fact that whatever her/his activity accounts for, it means acknowledging the decomposition of the present. Imagine a lonesome, sick or depressed person, languishing under the dim light of the TV, suddenly discovering the reality that surrounds him when illuminated by the instantaneous lightening of language—and then lost again, faded again in the miserable electronic twilight.
'Foremost, fuck the strong—writes Kilpatrick. Because these are not so much stories about despair and loneliness, as of weakness. That weakness that makes us still human in a world that seems to be the most inhospitable and desolate place—until we learn that the real problem was our own, physical, biological weakness. The author might no be dead, but he’s positively sick.'-- GERMÁN SIERRA, Queen Mob's Teahouse
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Grant Maierhofer Marcel
[The] Heavy Contortionists
'Marcel, being stories collected: stories as dashed-off failures, rubbled; stories as rotten attempts, mounting; stories as odes to others, as burnt journals; stories as misspent youths, urgent; stories as fragments, ugly; a collected puddle of Midwestern or elsewheres ennui, ground up and arranged or scaled; slim fictive etchings toward an erasure of their author.'-- [The] Heavy Contortionists
'While I was reading Grant Maierhofer's collection of fragments, names kept floating up, some ecstatically invoked in the stories, others kindred ghosts-Daniil Kharm's Today I Wrote Nothing, Robert Walser, Shulamith Firestone's Airless Spaces, Renata Adler's Speedboat, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. I felt such connection to these portraits of Midwestern stuckness, where characters cling to art as a way out of and a way into bewilderment and despair. Reading these beautiful shards of stories might make you feel okay for a while with your own loneliness.'-- Kate Zambreno
Excerpt
from Fanzine
TABLOID PHOTOGRAPH OF DAVID DUCHOVNY WIELDING STARBUCKS (AN EKPHRAST)
Lately very few things pull me from the television, which I guess just means I’ve got too much time. I started going to the meetings again cos I thought it was best maybe or would help, I don’t know where I fit but it isn’t here or really anywhere. I’d fit on some weird tiny planet with a disgusting family who just wanted to laugh and fart and swing for centuries then die peacefully together, elsewhere I don’t fit. I’m not a good guy, I accept it because the notion of being either “good” or a “guy” or a “good guy” or any of the relatively small handful of variations therein I might be doesn’t strike me as all that interesting in today’s sense of what those words mean, or any day’s sense I should say, which is more accurate. Don’t get me wrong, though, as in I have a way imagined in which you should get me and that might be termed the right way from where I exist and I don’t want you to get me in a way that contradicts this glaringly enough to be termed wrong to the “right” that I’ve admittedly imagined, so don’t get me wrong, I’m not a revolutionary, I just have less than interest in most things. I watch a lot of television. Whatever you think is a lot of television, multiply this by at least four and that’s probably about as much as I watch and it isn’t all stimulating and most of the time I’m watching it on a laptop computer propped on my chest in bed with the lights off while feeding my facehole from a bag of rusted potato chips. This is all completely accurate at least in that there’s probably a degree of iron in the potato chips (I have no way of knowing this that would allow me to remain in the bed from which I write this note) and thus they could actually be termed “rusted” without the person writing elevating into the metaphorical and the invention of the term “facehole” really isn’t so glaring or ambitious when one considers the pretentiousness of the word “mouth” and the way we’ve comfortably used it for years to refer to this disgusting shitsucker in the center of out melting visages.
I do this stuff and maybe I feel bad about it, maybe not. I don’t think I feel bad about it but then I’m writing this thing and Burroughs said he wrote from a place of guilt after killing his wife so maybe my fat fat paunch is like a dead wife stuck to the front of me and every time I look away from the television long enough to look down at her I feel strong guilt that drives me to piddle thus. I don’t believe in masterpieces. I don’t think human beings have actually done anything that admirable in just about anything and if the structuralist mode is applied to music and the arts we’ve just been rearranging bare essentials and primary colors for centuries calling it ambitious when in the end we’re just imitating something that made us feel good when our privilege seemed to dissipate long enough for us to remove our heads from hinds. I’m like a dog grieving the death of its owner in perpetuity without knowing this means I’m free. I’m a lot like you as in I listen to Mott the Hoople some mornings and feel a bit better adjacent to heating apparatuses. I smell pretty awful. I think of sweaty geniuses and I’m not like them but I’m sweaty. There’s no place in this world for a boy like that. Sweaty without the genius no thank you at least we know why this cauldron of information sweats what’s your excuse. Physiological, alchemical, whatever. I could turn this place to something burning. That’s about the extent of where I exist. I say all these things and they all bear meaning and that’s the problem. We could just babble and swim forever. Babble and swim with alien dead maybe. I like to float out sometimes. I floated out in the lake one time in Wisconsin and it felt real good. I had all my clothes on but they were bunched up a bit so the water wouldn’t stick forever. It feels good sometimes. I watched a video that evening with my young brother and tried to inform him of something great that I perceived but that’s the problem with “great” “things” that you “perceive” it’s as relative as relative gets and by the time it’d finished he was onto the next one. Someone somewhere commented near that there was a “dead pixel” and people seemed to like it. I appreciate that. I appreciate people liking simple things when only things ultimate and spectacular grab attentions. I like simple dumb monotonous things most. I stare at ants if I can. I stare at bugs and let spiders live even while I’m shitting and close and helpless thus. The spiders treat me OK and I treat them back OK. They’re frightening creatures if you watch too much TV and doing this I think they’re frightening but thus I like to press myself toward some deeper humanity loving and even sharing space with those who do not pay rent and in turn frighten. Is this the most frightening thing about spiders. That they do not pay rent? I think it might be. We are so afraid of freeloaders and freeloaders with eight appendages are just too much to handle. I have feelings about this and more, none of which I care to share with the courts. That’s what someone somewhere said. Stay out of churches and courtrooms, something on that order. Then a mate one said “me flucky asshole” and it was too wild. I can’t handle that shit anymore. People are just too nutty. Burroughs man he shouldn’t have been published the way he was. Do you think so? I don’t know. He killed his wife. Accident or not, I just don’t want to read someone who killed their wife. I just don’t want to do it.
You know I’ve never smiled while my throat was cut. Most of the aquiline politicians about can’t seem to understand this matter, but no matter, I hobnob with them nonetheless and sink my teeth into wheels of curdled bacterium to go inside my head a bit. Perhaps our teeth are something we don’t yet understand. To visit a dentist is to visit a grave. I once slept without my molars and marauding gangs fled my cough at every snore. This world just isn’t making sense and I can’t make sense of it. I’ve never smiled while someone metaphorically or literally cut my throat as one can readily assume that the reception of a hickey at one point or another likely drew blood i.e. “cut” my throat and I doubt in these moments if smiles came. Politicos smile whatever the cost. I don’t mind as I simply “eat emotionally” to ward off the hounds of hell. I’ve never trusted dentists, boy. To remove the teeth of wisdom is to gain entry into the human palace of decadence and American royalty circa the 1990s, babe. See you’re just like those dogs you ward off, methinks. Is this some tepid answer to some placid riddle that’ll only be unveiled on death’s bed and then we’ll be too withered to hear or care? I’d argue, yes.
CUTTYSPOT/grant maierhofer
first portion of 'had thoughts, blue thoughts'
bronchitis reading of 3 poems from 'ode to a vincent gallo nightingale'
*
p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, D. Me too. So great that you got to meet him, and those are wonderful stories. ** James, Hi. Thanks, man. Yeah, I hope I'll get to find out what Gaspar thought. That film still you like is from 'Zabriskie Point.' ** H, Hi. See my answer to James about that image's origin an inch back. Nice to see Roger Laporte's name and thoughts mentioned. He's such a very overlooked writer these days. Oh, did the post seem erotic because of the film stills I chose? Maybe I unconsciously looked for that type, I don't know, ha ha. ** Sypha, Hi. 'Ocarina' is pretty different. And I think they've just upgraded it to contemporary tech standards if you ever want to try it. I never played console games until the N64, so I missed all those formative games that weren't computer based. The La-Bas Day would be an amazing thing to have, if you find the time to finish it. Thanks so much for wanting to! ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. 'Blow Up' was huge for me when I first saw it. Still is, of course. Rather embarrassingly, the only reason I went to see it at the time was because I knew that the brief, classic Yardbirds line-up with both Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page were in it. Oh, okay, about the age of that film. I just saw this morning that a Ben Wheatley film played at L'Etrange Festival where 'LCTG' played, and I had a free pass to everything, and I totally missed out. ** Étienne, Hi, E. Wow, thank you so much for that. That's very, very interesting. I mean, I can believe that the film could do that, I think. I'm as happy with it as I am with anything I've made, even though Zac was at the wheel. Yeah, Zac and I have this almost supernatural connection, both personally and artistically, to a degree I wouldn't have imagined was possible. We're starting work on the early stuff re: our new film, and it's going to be even infinitely better than 'LCTG', I'm pretty sure. I got your email. I'll write back to you, but those dates you suggested should be good for me. Great! Enjoy the raining, if you can. ** Steevee, Hi. I totally agree about those films being underrated. For me, the only dreadful Antonioni film is 'Beyond the Clouds', and I think it's safe to entirely blame Wenders and his tropey, boring input for that. I have not seen the China documentary. I've always wanted to, of course. ** Styrofoamcastle, Hey! I did. Yesterday ended up being swamped with film-related stuff, and I was still in its midst when you called. I think maybe today, or tomorrow. My schedule is tricky. Maybe, if later today opens up, as I hope it will, I'll try calling you. ** Thomas Moronic, Thanks, Thomas. We're very happy. It really went as well as I think it could possibly have gone. Oh, I'll go look for those photos of Zac and me at the festival. I haven't seen them. At the moment, I don't know if we'll get chance to screen 'LCTG' in the UK. Attempts are being made, but I think the DVD will come out there early next year, so it's matter of whether we can score a screening before that or not. No, the images in the film posts are never organized. Apart from trying to space-out the gifs, I just stack them in same the order that they hold in the folder I make to house the stuff I need to build the posts. So all the exciting connections in them are excitingly coincidental. ** Misanthrope, Hi. I don't know. Why do you think that? Technically, he could remotely have still been alive, I guess. I need to find out when the WWE event is. I'll do that. If I go, you'll be the first to 'enjoy' the asides' fruit. Wood knocked forcefully on my end too. ** Bill, Hi. You'll probably need to rent them unless some film series there does a retrospective. He just had a big retrospective here plus exhibition of film-related materials at the Cinematheque. Maybe it'll travel? Psychic TV is hitting SF? Well, of course, duh. Curious to hear how their current incarnation is. ** Kyler, Hi, K. Oh, thanks about the VICE thing. Do people ever literally drool when they say they drooled? I know I haven't. I mean yuck. Dogs can pull it off, though. ** Okay. With that, I hope you'll give your attention over to the four books I read recently and loved up there. All of them are very worth your time, if you have time, I most sincerely assure you. See you tomorrow.
Joey: The villains are the heroes of your books, glamorous, funny, and often, like in The Show that Smells, the good guys are either idiots or sad sacks that get what they've got coming. Jimmie Rogers is constantly coughing up sputum and moaning, while Schiaparelli has page after page of glorious dead baby joke monologuing and these great insane dresses. What do you think is so compelling about evil? You first introduced me to Night of the Hunter, and Robert Mitchum owns that movie with his weird beautiful singing as he stalks those children. He's like Heath Ledger's Joker in The Dark Knight. He's bigger than the movie. Do you think that evil could be as compelling in real life? Do you think it'd be as fun, in real life? As much of a performance?
Derek McCormack: I dream of being evil. I have dreamt this dream since I was a child -- I wanted so badly to be the wicked witch from The Wizard of Oz. I carried a wooden wand around until I was, um, ten? A neighbour carved a wooden rifle for me so that I could play soldier or shoot-'em-up or whatever. I didn't mind playing with guns but I would always wind up waving the rifle around as if it were a wand. I wanted to cast spells. With The Show That Smells, I had a very clear vision: I wanted to write a book that was a spell that would destroy all the books in the world. Well, maybe not all the books, but CanLit at least. I love when the gays start making magic: I'm thinking of Kenneth Anger and others, but mainly of Jack Spicer and the incantatory tone of some of his stuff. I'm thinking of Jack Spicer because he was my patron saint! Gay, ugly, alone. Glamour's what guys like us dream of -- an evil glamour that doesn't make us beautiful but that changes what beauty is. I guess this is not what most people imagine when they imagine evil -- they think of serial killers and people who put poison in parks for dogs to discover. I think of The Joker, another childhood hero. Evil is art that can make evil real. Tell me, Joey, when you were younger, did you like superheroes or villains? I don't see much evil in your books -- there are monsters, but they're often there to test family ties, or the limits of fidelity, or so it seems to me. That said, the things you've been writing lately have certainly been more brutal and bananas -- are you digging into your dark side in a different way?
Joey: You don't seem particularly flaky to me, so when you say "a magic spell" I read that as a sort of trick. An illusion or sleight of hand. A glamourousness that makes it hard for the reader/viewer to recognize evil as evil, even when it's clear that this is the villain. The poor sap characters in the movie know that Freddy is the bad guy, but half the audience is getting bored whenever he's not on screen. Part of his evil is making evil seductive and fun. Evil is art that can make Evil sexy?
DM: As for whether I liked heroes or villains, I'm not sure. When I was a kid I liked Spider-Man. The hero aspect of him didn't really interest me. I didn't care about great power coming with great responsibility. I liked his jokes and one liners. But that doesn't answer your question. I was never interested in comic book villains, I wasn't particularly interested in the heroes either. The first comic I remember LOVING was Sam & Max. They're villains pretending to be heroes, I think. Maybe vice-versa. Good and evil don't matter in that world. Those concepts are just helpful setups to jokes. The characters are complete unbridled impulse. ("What should I do with this bomb, Max?" - "Throw it out the window, Sam, there's nobody but strangers out there.") They're irreverent in the best way. Those are the kind of villains I love.
The book you mentioned that I'm writing, Bible Camp Bloodbath, has a villain like that. He's making jokes while murdering children. He's got no back story, no deep psychological motivation, he's just having a really good time. It was so much fun to write something like that. So giddy.
Joey: You've been working a lot with visual artists, and on visual art lately. Do you think it's possible for visual art to have evil in it? Or to express evil in a fun way without losing its impact? I guess I mean, is there a place for villains in art? Or architecture? That doctor's house in Chicago around the time of the Chicago fair was the site of dozens of murders. But with its trap doors and fake walls, it has the surreal fun of a grisly puzzle. I could hear the glee in your voice when you told me about that place. But that's a different kind of horrific. There's not really any glamour to that house, is there? Why is it so fascinating?
DM: Oh, but there was glamour to the murder castle – there was a jewelry shop on the first floor! The murder castle is evil because of the murders that took place there, sure, but that’s not so interesting to me. The machinery of the castle – trap doors, sliding walls, dead-end corridors, etc – that’s what kills me. I’ve written about it before – it seems to me to have influenced the development of carnival dark rides and amusement park haunted houses. It’s not the murders I love, it’s the murder castle as tourist attraction. It’s the carnival haunted house that can’t possibly be as scary as it pretends to be.
It's like: when I was a kid, I would consult the Ouija board, which I knew was a dumb board game -- still, I would play it late at night with friends and we'd scare ourselves. And in that late-night fright I would always feel the hope that it could be real, even though it couldn't be real, but what if it could? The evil I care about is Disney evil, it’s Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty– what if that type of evil, which is so operatic and elegant, could come out of the cartoon and into the world? That would be crackerjack and catastrophic. That’s the black magic I care about, that I try to conjure in my books. It’s a laughable dream I have, laughable and probably impossible, but it’s still better than dreaming of winning the ReLit Award or getting a Canada Council grant, don’t you think?
Semiotext(e)
'The Well-Dressed Wound is Derek McCormack’s play script “séance”: a fashion show by the dead for the living. In the depths of the Civil War, in a theater in P. T. Barnum’s American Museum on Broadway, Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln participate in a staged spiritualistic rite. But the medium conducting them has invited along another being: the Devil, disguised as twentieth-century French fashionista Martin Margiela (aka “King Faggot”). What follows is the most fiendish runway show ever mounted, complete with war dead, deconstructed couture, and gay ghosts infected with all manner of infectious agents, including oozy AIDS.
'While his previous fictions have explored the darker corners of country music, high fashion, and camp, The Well-Dressed Wound is McCormack’s most radical work yet, occultishly evoking the evil-twin muses of transgressive literature, Kathy Acker and Pierre Guyotat. The creation thus conjured is a gleeful grotesquerie, a savage satire not so much of fashion as of death, a work that, as Bruce Hainley observes in Artforum, puts “the ‘pus’ back in opus.” Here death and life spin on a viral double helix of contamination and couture, blistering and bandages, history and hysteria, semen and seams. “Being dead is so very now,” Hainley opines. “This tiny tome (a time bomb, a tomb) is to die for and radically alive.”'-- Semiotext(e)
Excerpt/Intro
Welcome to The Well-Dressed Wound
The play is presented by P.T. Barnum. It's being staged in the theater at Barnum's American Museum on Broadway.
The play depicts a seance that takes place in a parlor in the presidential palace, the White House in Washington, D.C.
The characters:
The Medium, a woman wearing a black shawl.
Mary Todd Lincoln, the First Lady. She's in a black dress. She's in mourning for her son, Willie, who died when he was eleven.
Abraham Lincoln, the President of the United States. He's in a sack suit. The suit's black for Willie's sake and for the country's sake -- the Civil War's made the shade de rigueur.
The cast: The Medium's played by Nettie Coburn Maynard, a clairvoyant who conducted a seance for President and Mrs. Lincoln at the White House in 1862. Mary Todd Lincoln's played by Mary Todd Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln's Abraham Lincoln.
I'm Willie.
Derek McCormack and Anwar Mukhayesh (from HGTV's "The Designer Guys") interview each other
Derek McCormack on his novel The Show That Smells
Tony Burgess & Derek McCormack -- Die Scream Die
________________
'Elaine Equi's new book, just out from Coffee House Press, is Sentences and Rain, a smart title for a poet who translates her love of things and states of being into sentences -- albeit sentences broken in signature line-breaks. Language itself is a subject that impels her to write. From "Yo y Tu," a poem wondering about the presence of the second-person pronoun in Spanish but not in English: "Intimacy, friendship, / easy access -- // in English / the formal you / is 'Yo'."
'Equi is attracted to short forms, the short utterance, the sudden revelation. This predilection reflects a certain modesty but more importantly a tremendous value placed on economy.
'As one who is by nature attracted to wordplay and the idea that the composition of a poem may resemble a game of metaphysical chess or checkers, I always find much to delight me in an Equi collection. In Sentences and Rain, she has a poem consisting entirely of favorite lines from Charles Reznikoff on the subject of time and clocks and a second cento entitled "Varieties of Fire in Hilda Morley." There are two examples of the Equi epithalamium -- all the words in the poem "are derived from recombinations of only the letters" in the names of the new spouses. It is, of course, not only the idea preceding the poem that one admires but the intelligence and wit that the idea triggers
'Among my favorites is "Lucky Lipstick," perhaps because the poet's generative conceit lies very precisely in the title and its relation to the text -- consisting, in this case, of lines associated with such masters as Gertrude Stein "A Rose is a Rose"), Wallace Stevens ("Red Weather"), William Carlos Williams. ("I Have Eaten the Plums") and Samuel Taylor Coleridge ("Frost at Midnight").
'Here is the entire text of a one-line poem entitled "Caught in a Downpour": "If I open my mouth, I might drown." And this is from Equi's take on the will as an organizing motif: "For Edward Hopper: A perfect piece of lemon meringue pie in a diner at midnight, where the only other customer is Greta Garbo reading a book."
'But if there is a secret joy informing Equi's poetry, it is in the way she accepts the world as it is, without quarrel and without illusions except those that are sanctioned by art. Like a still-life specialist she gets you to see not only the red flesh of the watermelon but the beauty of the black seeds on it. She has a feel for the comic side of things, she refuses to take herself too seriously, she is true to her own mind rather than vainly endeavoring to sound like someone else. It is this sensibility that links her to the New York School poets, James Schuyler in particular, and Williams, Niedecker, and Reznikoff among the Objectivists.
'There is a lot of fake poetry out there. Equi is real. She changes the way you look at things. You cannot fake the authenticity that informs even the most casual of her observations.'-- David Lehman
Coffee House Press
'Whether celebrating clones or revising Led Zeppelin, Equi melds verse with aphorism, wisdom with wicked playfulness."—Entertainment Weekly
'Equi's poems are under the breath asides from your cleverest friend—witty, thoughtful, and wry.
'Widely published and anthologized, Elaine Equi's work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Nation, and numerous volumes of The Best American Poetry.'-- Coffee House Press
Excerpts
SLIGHT
A slight implies
if not an insult
(real or imagined)
at least something
unpleasant --
a slight cold,
a slight headache.
No one ever says:
"You make me slightly happy."
Although this, in fact,
is often the case.
YO Y TU
In Spanish
yo means I
and tu
is a you
I know
or at least
am comfortable
addressing casually.
In English
we have no
informal form
to indicate
the you
still in pajamas —
hair wild,
drinking coffee.
Intimacy, friendship,
easy access –
in English
the informal you
is “Yo”
IMBIBING
A show globe
of red intensity,
a glass beacon
of medicinal yellow.
Both are only
colored water
meant to be drunk
with the eyes, and yet.
The ancients knew
that color heals,
makes a fine meal
for a ruined mind.
Things (maladies) thought
to go on forever
eventually do,
like summer, end.
Poet Elaine Equi reads from Ripple Effect
Fantasy Poetry Reading: Elaine Equi
Poets Elaine Equi & David Lehman @ Big Apple BAP
________________
'“I’ve written a number of essays the past few years,” Dodie Bellamy writes in her new book, When the Sick Rule the World, “and I keep vowing to quit.” We know her essay-quitting hasn’t been going well, not only because we’re reading about it in a Dodie Bellamy essay, but also because these words, which originally appeared in the 2008 chapbook Barf Manifesto, are now nestled in a new collection alongside thirteen other essays, most of which have been written in the years since.
'To be frank and detailed about sex in one’s writing, to use one’s own name and biography, to blend high and low cultural references in an intermittently casual tone, as Bellamy does, and to do these things while being a woman, as Bellamy is—all this might lead literal-minded readers to privilege what’s said over the way one says it, to fail to see the form for the subject matter. But for Bellamy, who came out of the New Narrative movement of the late 1970s and early ’80s, it’s form itself that’s juicy. She has published a post–Bram Stoker epistolary novel in which Mina Harker cuts a swath through AIDS-era San Francisco, possessing the body of Dodie Bellamy along the way; a blog-turned-book about her affair with a cultish Buddhist; a careful splicing of an erotic text into part of the 1975 Norton Anthology of Poetry. Not to mention a personal essay that begins with a set of seventy-eight “TV sutras” (“Stops more leaks than the next leading brand. End of tampon commercial. COMMENTARY . . . Distraction and lack of focus are also forms of leaking: losing track of what is valuable and meaningful”). No wonder she says she is “addicted” to the essay, yet at the same time has always found it “oppressive, a form so conservative it begs to be dismantled.” And she doesn’t merely want to deconstruct it, or to question it in the manner of a “feminist poetic essay” of the early ’80s. That kind of experiment “felt too watery for me. I wasn’t into watery, I was into libidinal”: Bellamy wants to fuck the essay (up).
'Like any subversion of a form, this is an act of aggression, but also one of love, because it shows the form how much more it could be capable of—especially apt in the case of the essay, which by definition is always an experiment, an attempt to do or discover something new. “Barf Manifesto” takes as its starting point another essay, “Everyday Barf,” by the poet Eileen Myles, a ten-page feat that also begins with a fuck-you to strict formal convention. Myles describes being asked to write a political sestina, then having the editor who commissioned the poem critique its technical flaws. She is not interested in acing her homework assignment: “It simply strikes me that form has a real honest engagement with content and therefore might even need to get a little sleazy with it suggesting it stop early or go too far.”
'As well as reading Myles’s work for us, Bellamy presents us with a portrait of the poet herself, and of their often tricky friendship (we see Myles, the more famous writer, maniacally destroying a piñata; we see her humiliate Bellamy after she clogs her toilet—“keep pumping,” Myles barks). Here Bellamy offers, both explicitly and implicitly, a way of thinking about the charged, rivalrous relations between writers and their influences, writers and their subjects, writers and readers. That’s one effect of the New Narrative practice of blurring those divides: Writers known and unknown show up in their own and their friends’ work; and they often present themselves as creative readers as well as writers, appropriating other texts in a particularly pointed fashion, not hiding or overprocessing the various foreign bodies they incorporate. In both cases the effects can be very complicated, because the texts are dramatizing several different kinds of power struggle: the obvious one in which the writer’s presentation of her subjects does battle with their own self-conceptions, but also others, in which, say, the writer grabs a brilliant passage from someone else’s work and tries to top it, or throws two incongruous, contradictory texts together and lets them fight it out.'-- Lidija Haas, Bookforum
Semiotext(e)
'A moving meld of essay, memoir, and story, When the Sick Rule the World collects Dodie Bellamy’s new and recent lyric prose. Taking on topics as eclectic as vomit, Kathy Acker’s wardrobe, and Occupy Oakland, Bellamy here examines illness, health, and the body—both the social body and the individual body—in essays that glitter with wit even at their darkest moments.
'In a safe house in Marin County, strangers allergic to the poisons of the world gather for an evening’s solace. In Oakland, protesters dance an ecstatic bacchanal over the cancerous body of the city-state they love and hate. In the elegiac memoir, “Phone Home,” Bellamy meditates on her dying mother’s last days via the improbable cipher of Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Finally, Bellamy offers a piercing critique of the displacement and blight that have accompanied Twitter’s move into her warehouse-district neighborhood, and the pitiless imperialism of tech consciousness.
'A participant in the New Narrative movement and a powerful influence on younger writers, Bellamy views heteronormativity and capitalism as plagues, and celebrates the micro-revolts of those on the outskirts. In its deft blending of forms, When the Sick Rule the World resiliently and defiantly proclaims the “undeath of the author.” In the realm of sickness, Bellamy asserts, subjectivity is not stable. “When the sick rule the world, mortality will be sexy,” Bellamy prophesies. Those defined by society as sick may, in fact, be its saviors.'-- Semiotext(e)
Excerpt
from Fanzine
BAD PLACES
I park my car in the cul de sac on Natoma. As I approach Lafayette Street, a thin woman maybe in her early 20s passes me. She’d be attractive if it weren’t for the sores on her face and the way she confronts me with too much eye contact and a sort of glazed smile. She’s wearing a short white dress and one brown lace-up boot. Her other foot is bare.
Her presence doesn’t surprise me. Since 2012, when Twitter established its headquarters two blocks away, there’s been an ongoing battle to transform “Mid-Market” from sketchy skid row to up-and-coming “New Market,” as boosters and realtors have named it, or even the hip truncation, NEMA. Many of the displaced have moved East, to my micro-neighborhood. One guy regularly sits on the corner of my alley, shouting in different voices. His range is remarkable. Kevin and I lean over the outdoor landing of our rent-controlled Victorian and snoop. Rocking and wailing with his arms wrapped around his knees, the guy looks tiny. He doesn’t seem to be saying words so much as painfully expelling them. At times he sounds just like Regan in The Exorcist and I’m convinced he’s possessed, even though I don’t really believe in possession. Stupidly I call the cops and say, “There’s a guy on my corner who needs help.” The same migration happened when the City cleaned up Civic Center; it has been happening over and over ever since I moved to South of Market in 1990. In San Francisco when neighborhood associations or other vectors of power complain loud enough, police herd undesirables to the next neighborhood over, until that neighborhood generates enough political clout, and then they’re herded elsewhere. I learned this during the crack years. The crack years were scary, but fascinating to watch from my bedroom window and as I walked down 11th Street between Market and Mission. Vans distributed to bicycles that distributed to individuals. Person to person sales reminded me of gay cruising, the way transactions happen in plain sight. Two people approach one another, and without making eye contact, one stuffs something into the hand of another. The one receiving the good then heads to the closest alley, my alley, to smoke it. I used to joke I knew so much about crack sale and distribution I could go into business myself.
The one-booted woman loses interest in me and walks down Natoma towards 11th, weaving in the middle of the street with an indifference that could be described either as saunter or stagger. She seems weightless. Her otherworldliness and that one boot—it’s as if Bess—the title character of Daphne Gottlieb’s 2013 Spolia chapbook—has materialized before my eyes. Bess too wears only one shoe: “What I haven’t done a good enough job of telling you yet: How gone Bess is. She is the a-Bess. She is covered in menstrual blood, a Carrie in pink long johns wearing one shoe.”
The story of a drug-addicted young woman lost to psychosis, Bess is a Gothic horror novel distilled to 3100 words. The drug/prostitution maze of the single resident occupancy hotel (SRO) has entrapped Bess and endangers all who enter, including her case workers. Of it the female case worker ponders, “Can a place itself be bad? Is the ground under Auschwitz—the land itself—the brown earth that smells just like dirt—is the land itself evil? Is the land under Ted Bundy’s house cursed? Was there blood spilled under the labyrinth that made it hungry for more? Is there a reason people get swallowed up or snuffed out or trapped in a labyrinth?” Stephen King would answer, yes, the SRO has become a Bad Place. From Danse Macabre: “When we go home and shoot the bolt on the door, we like to think we’re locking trouble out. The good horror story about the Bad Place whispers that we are not locking the world out; we are locking ourselves in . . . with them.” In Bess it’s difficult to locate where corruption lies. We have the behemoth of social services, designed to assist, but which threatens to dehumanize all involved. We have the two case workers trying their damnedest to be the good guys in a system that invites failure. “This is what I do: I take lost people and I give them beds in places with big rooms with many beds.” And then we have Bess, who remains remote, manipulative, un-exorcize-able. “[O]ne Frye-boot on, still makes with the vacant, absent look. Nothing much matters to her, I think. Nothing is getting through. She’s gone away someplace.” In her schizophrenic haze, Bess is unable to take care of herself, and thus legally absorbable by the social services system. “She is the graybrown of the walls. Her pinpick eyes glare right through the curtain of hair. Her mouth is an asterisk. She nods that she will come with us because she has no choice.”
(cont.)
Dodie Bellamy reads from Erotika Biblion
Dodie Bellamy Reading at Small Press Traffic
Whistle While You Dixie (excerpt) / Dodie Bellamy
________________
'Electronic globalization has turned us into relentless postdigital flaneurs; something quite different from the Baudelaires, the Prousts or the Benjamins of early modern times. For Leslie Scalapino, the flaneur, the detached stroller, no longer exists. Instead, individuals on all economic and class levels at once are both seeing and creating the ‘conceptual’ interaction that is them: whicch is then exterior, is ‘society’ (that is, the illusion of simultaneity). The classical flaneur was typically a big city dweller astonished by the perception of witnessing the birth of a new world and, at the same time, a romantic outsider digging into the nostalgia of a fictional inheritance through which modern subjectivity was initially constituted. The contemporary contra-flaneur, however, is a solitary individual wandering beyond the edge of the city in a quiet region completely isolated and around which lie ruins, as an exaltation of abandonment turning toward annihilation, abandoning all hope while jammed in Hell’s enter or exit lanes—Any narrator for the arts is already deleted, writes Sean Kilpatrick in the introduction to Grant Maierhofer’s Postures.
'Maierhofer plays the Big Brother game to find a kaleidoscopic fuckscreen of bad cameras angles that make mankind look like half a speck of civilization when you pick it apart for just a moment”, realizing that “the way the world is changing, and will change, is far more dire, far more obscene, far more anti-Human. The contra-flaneur is already deleted—already dead and having no clue to decide if the apparently one way road he’s stuck into is leading in or out of Hell. In his immediate previous work Marcel, a collection of wonderfully carved stories about ways of coping with loneliness and despair, Maierhofer introduces us to a handful of contra-flaneurs trapped in places where it’s almost impossible for them, no matter how fucked up their minds might be, to ignore the tragicomic aspects of the collapse of conventional human relationships (Friends came as unwelcome scars)—yet they’re burdened by the anxiety their awareness of the fact that whatever her/his activity accounts for, it means acknowledging the decomposition of the present. Imagine a lonesome, sick or depressed person, languishing under the dim light of the TV, suddenly discovering the reality that surrounds him when illuminated by the instantaneous lightening of language—and then lost again, faded again in the miserable electronic twilight.
'Foremost, fuck the strong—writes Kilpatrick. Because these are not so much stories about despair and loneliness, as of weakness. That weakness that makes us still human in a world that seems to be the most inhospitable and desolate place—until we learn that the real problem was our own, physical, biological weakness. The author might no be dead, but he’s positively sick.'-- GERMÁN SIERRA, Queen Mob's Teahouse
[The] Heavy Contortionists
'Marcel, being stories collected: stories as dashed-off failures, rubbled; stories as rotten attempts, mounting; stories as odes to others, as burnt journals; stories as misspent youths, urgent; stories as fragments, ugly; a collected puddle of Midwestern or elsewheres ennui, ground up and arranged or scaled; slim fictive etchings toward an erasure of their author.'-- [The] Heavy Contortionists
'While I was reading Grant Maierhofer's collection of fragments, names kept floating up, some ecstatically invoked in the stories, others kindred ghosts-Daniil Kharm's Today I Wrote Nothing, Robert Walser, Shulamith Firestone's Airless Spaces, Renata Adler's Speedboat, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. I felt such connection to these portraits of Midwestern stuckness, where characters cling to art as a way out of and a way into bewilderment and despair. Reading these beautiful shards of stories might make you feel okay for a while with your own loneliness.'-- Kate Zambreno
Excerpt
from Fanzine
TABLOID PHOTOGRAPH OF DAVID DUCHOVNY WIELDING STARBUCKS (AN EKPHRAST)
Lately very few things pull me from the television, which I guess just means I’ve got too much time. I started going to the meetings again cos I thought it was best maybe or would help, I don’t know where I fit but it isn’t here or really anywhere. I’d fit on some weird tiny planet with a disgusting family who just wanted to laugh and fart and swing for centuries then die peacefully together, elsewhere I don’t fit. I’m not a good guy, I accept it because the notion of being either “good” or a “guy” or a “good guy” or any of the relatively small handful of variations therein I might be doesn’t strike me as all that interesting in today’s sense of what those words mean, or any day’s sense I should say, which is more accurate. Don’t get me wrong, though, as in I have a way imagined in which you should get me and that might be termed the right way from where I exist and I don’t want you to get me in a way that contradicts this glaringly enough to be termed wrong to the “right” that I’ve admittedly imagined, so don’t get me wrong, I’m not a revolutionary, I just have less than interest in most things. I watch a lot of television. Whatever you think is a lot of television, multiply this by at least four and that’s probably about as much as I watch and it isn’t all stimulating and most of the time I’m watching it on a laptop computer propped on my chest in bed with the lights off while feeding my facehole from a bag of rusted potato chips. This is all completely accurate at least in that there’s probably a degree of iron in the potato chips (I have no way of knowing this that would allow me to remain in the bed from which I write this note) and thus they could actually be termed “rusted” without the person writing elevating into the metaphorical and the invention of the term “facehole” really isn’t so glaring or ambitious when one considers the pretentiousness of the word “mouth” and the way we’ve comfortably used it for years to refer to this disgusting shitsucker in the center of out melting visages.
I do this stuff and maybe I feel bad about it, maybe not. I don’t think I feel bad about it but then I’m writing this thing and Burroughs said he wrote from a place of guilt after killing his wife so maybe my fat fat paunch is like a dead wife stuck to the front of me and every time I look away from the television long enough to look down at her I feel strong guilt that drives me to piddle thus. I don’t believe in masterpieces. I don’t think human beings have actually done anything that admirable in just about anything and if the structuralist mode is applied to music and the arts we’ve just been rearranging bare essentials and primary colors for centuries calling it ambitious when in the end we’re just imitating something that made us feel good when our privilege seemed to dissipate long enough for us to remove our heads from hinds. I’m like a dog grieving the death of its owner in perpetuity without knowing this means I’m free. I’m a lot like you as in I listen to Mott the Hoople some mornings and feel a bit better adjacent to heating apparatuses. I smell pretty awful. I think of sweaty geniuses and I’m not like them but I’m sweaty. There’s no place in this world for a boy like that. Sweaty without the genius no thank you at least we know why this cauldron of information sweats what’s your excuse. Physiological, alchemical, whatever. I could turn this place to something burning. That’s about the extent of where I exist. I say all these things and they all bear meaning and that’s the problem. We could just babble and swim forever. Babble and swim with alien dead maybe. I like to float out sometimes. I floated out in the lake one time in Wisconsin and it felt real good. I had all my clothes on but they were bunched up a bit so the water wouldn’t stick forever. It feels good sometimes. I watched a video that evening with my young brother and tried to inform him of something great that I perceived but that’s the problem with “great” “things” that you “perceive” it’s as relative as relative gets and by the time it’d finished he was onto the next one. Someone somewhere commented near that there was a “dead pixel” and people seemed to like it. I appreciate that. I appreciate people liking simple things when only things ultimate and spectacular grab attentions. I like simple dumb monotonous things most. I stare at ants if I can. I stare at bugs and let spiders live even while I’m shitting and close and helpless thus. The spiders treat me OK and I treat them back OK. They’re frightening creatures if you watch too much TV and doing this I think they’re frightening but thus I like to press myself toward some deeper humanity loving and even sharing space with those who do not pay rent and in turn frighten. Is this the most frightening thing about spiders. That they do not pay rent? I think it might be. We are so afraid of freeloaders and freeloaders with eight appendages are just too much to handle. I have feelings about this and more, none of which I care to share with the courts. That’s what someone somewhere said. Stay out of churches and courtrooms, something on that order. Then a mate one said “me flucky asshole” and it was too wild. I can’t handle that shit anymore. People are just too nutty. Burroughs man he shouldn’t have been published the way he was. Do you think so? I don’t know. He killed his wife. Accident or not, I just don’t want to read someone who killed their wife. I just don’t want to do it.
You know I’ve never smiled while my throat was cut. Most of the aquiline politicians about can’t seem to understand this matter, but no matter, I hobnob with them nonetheless and sink my teeth into wheels of curdled bacterium to go inside my head a bit. Perhaps our teeth are something we don’t yet understand. To visit a dentist is to visit a grave. I once slept without my molars and marauding gangs fled my cough at every snore. This world just isn’t making sense and I can’t make sense of it. I’ve never smiled while someone metaphorically or literally cut my throat as one can readily assume that the reception of a hickey at one point or another likely drew blood i.e. “cut” my throat and I doubt in these moments if smiles came. Politicos smile whatever the cost. I don’t mind as I simply “eat emotionally” to ward off the hounds of hell. I’ve never trusted dentists, boy. To remove the teeth of wisdom is to gain entry into the human palace of decadence and American royalty circa the 1990s, babe. See you’re just like those dogs you ward off, methinks. Is this some tepid answer to some placid riddle that’ll only be unveiled on death’s bed and then we’ll be too withered to hear or care? I’d argue, yes.
CUTTYSPOT/grant maierhofer
first portion of 'had thoughts, blue thoughts'
bronchitis reading of 3 poems from 'ode to a vincent gallo nightingale'
*
p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, D. Me too. So great that you got to meet him, and those are wonderful stories. ** James, Hi. Thanks, man. Yeah, I hope I'll get to find out what Gaspar thought. That film still you like is from 'Zabriskie Point.' ** H, Hi. See my answer to James about that image's origin an inch back. Nice to see Roger Laporte's name and thoughts mentioned. He's such a very overlooked writer these days. Oh, did the post seem erotic because of the film stills I chose? Maybe I unconsciously looked for that type, I don't know, ha ha. ** Sypha, Hi. 'Ocarina' is pretty different. And I think they've just upgraded it to contemporary tech standards if you ever want to try it. I never played console games until the N64, so I missed all those formative games that weren't computer based. The La-Bas Day would be an amazing thing to have, if you find the time to finish it. Thanks so much for wanting to! ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. 'Blow Up' was huge for me when I first saw it. Still is, of course. Rather embarrassingly, the only reason I went to see it at the time was because I knew that the brief, classic Yardbirds line-up with both Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page were in it. Oh, okay, about the age of that film. I just saw this morning that a Ben Wheatley film played at L'Etrange Festival where 'LCTG' played, and I had a free pass to everything, and I totally missed out. ** Étienne, Hi, E. Wow, thank you so much for that. That's very, very interesting. I mean, I can believe that the film could do that, I think. I'm as happy with it as I am with anything I've made, even though Zac was at the wheel. Yeah, Zac and I have this almost supernatural connection, both personally and artistically, to a degree I wouldn't have imagined was possible. We're starting work on the early stuff re: our new film, and it's going to be even infinitely better than 'LCTG', I'm pretty sure. I got your email. I'll write back to you, but those dates you suggested should be good for me. Great! Enjoy the raining, if you can. ** Steevee, Hi. I totally agree about those films being underrated. For me, the only dreadful Antonioni film is 'Beyond the Clouds', and I think it's safe to entirely blame Wenders and his tropey, boring input for that. I have not seen the China documentary. I've always wanted to, of course. ** Styrofoamcastle, Hey! I did. Yesterday ended up being swamped with film-related stuff, and I was still in its midst when you called. I think maybe today, or tomorrow. My schedule is tricky. Maybe, if later today opens up, as I hope it will, I'll try calling you. ** Thomas Moronic, Thanks, Thomas. We're very happy. It really went as well as I think it could possibly have gone. Oh, I'll go look for those photos of Zac and me at the festival. I haven't seen them. At the moment, I don't know if we'll get chance to screen 'LCTG' in the UK. Attempts are being made, but I think the DVD will come out there early next year, so it's matter of whether we can score a screening before that or not. No, the images in the film posts are never organized. Apart from trying to space-out the gifs, I just stack them in same the order that they hold in the folder I make to house the stuff I need to build the posts. So all the exciting connections in them are excitingly coincidental. ** Misanthrope, Hi. I don't know. Why do you think that? Technically, he could remotely have still been alive, I guess. I need to find out when the WWE event is. I'll do that. If I go, you'll be the first to 'enjoy' the asides' fruit. Wood knocked forcefully on my end too. ** Bill, Hi. You'll probably need to rent them unless some film series there does a retrospective. He just had a big retrospective here plus exhibition of film-related materials at the Cinematheque. Maybe it'll travel? Psychic TV is hitting SF? Well, of course, duh. Curious to hear how their current incarnation is. ** Kyler, Hi, K. Oh, thanks about the VICE thing. Do people ever literally drool when they say they drooled? I know I haven't. I mean yuck. Dogs can pull it off, though. ** Okay. With that, I hope you'll give your attention over to the four books I read recently and loved up there. All of them are very worth your time, if you have time, I most sincerely assure you. See you tomorrow.
