5 books I read recently & loved: Bo Huston The Dream Life, Robert Glück I, Boombox, Ava Hofmann Love Poems / Smallness Studies, Mathieu Lindon Hervelino, Katie Jean Shinkle Thick City

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‘In the final years of his life—a cruel phrase, really, as he only lived to 33—the writer Bo Huston made several trips to Zurich for experimental AIDS treatments. In his downtime there, between appointments, he read Christopher Isherwood and Patricia Highsmith, slept, and went for walks to fill the days.

‘Huston wasn’t the first writer to hear he was unlikely to live long enough to finish his work. He wasn’t even the first writer of his generation, or his circle of friends. If he’d looked to the past for examples, there was the English writer Anthony Burgess, who famously received a brain-tumor diagnosis at forty and was told he had a year to live. Burgess set to writing, intent on leaving something to support his wife and children. The resulting manuscripts—five novels’ worth, including one entitled The Doctor Is Sick—formed the foundation of his career as a writer. But Burgess far outlived his doctor’s prognosis, dying at seventy-six. …

‘As for Huston, he wrote to the end, or as close as he could get to it. Thomas Avena recounts their final phone exchange in his introductory essay to Life Sentences. “I won’t be around much longer,” Huston tells him and says they should finish their edits. “I said that I had always admired him,” Avena writes, “that his last novel, The Dream Life, was a perfect work, seamless. We went carefully over the edits.”

‘The Dream Life remains in print. It’s the only one of Huston’s books that is, although there’s a viable case to be made for reprinting each of the three out-of-print titles. Yet Huston’s fondest wish has come true: his books are available in libraries in the US and abroad. It’s gratifying to think that, like Remember Me’s unnamed narrator writing his novel about togetherness, Huston can be together with readers more than a quarter-century after his death. Those who encounter his work today may be unable to remember him—much of his generation, sadly and unjustly, is already gone—but it’s not hard to imagine a young, hungry writer feasting on his books, wondering what might have been while savoring the writing Huston left behind.’ — John McIntyre

 

Remembering Bo Huston
Publication Studio @ instagram
Bo Huston @ goodreads
Bo Huston & Dan Carmell
Buy ‘The Dream Life’

 

Bo Huston The Dream Life
Publication Studio

‘Three books by Bo Huston were published in the five years before his tragically early death in May, 1993, and a fourth was published soon after he passed, age thirty-three, a victim of AIDS. The Dream Life, his second novel, was, “Huston’s best work…one of the most startling and powerful novels to appear in years,” Michael Bronski wrote in 1992. The Fellow Travelers Series is honored to republish The Dream Life, posthumously claiming Bo as a fellow traveler, a status that he earned in life through his close friendship with Kevin Killian (an early FTS author) and the inspiration his books have given to the rest of us. Bo’s friend and colleague, the writer Rebecca Brown, has written an afterword for this new edition. The Dream Life is the thirteenth book in the Fellow Travelers Series.’ — Publication Studio

Excerpt

Extras

 

 

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‘I, Boombox is fashioned from my misreadings. In that sense, it’s an autobiography in which I dream on the page. It is my version of the modernist long poem: published in sections and interrupted only by the author’s death.’ — Robert Glück

‘Rimbaud infamously claimed that I is an other, but for Bob I is a flicker of error, or a wandering ear that invents. He has made a home for several decades of errant listening in this sinuous long poem, which light heartedly teases the modernist tradition it also subverts. In true mock-heroic manner, Bob reveals from his gay marble desk how God’s laughter glides in and out of garden festival, action film and sublet alike. I have been waiting for this book for years and it sweetly exceeds all of my hopes.’ — Lisa Robertson

‘In I, Boombox, Robert Glück makes it clear that dreams are as real as the spurts of sentences we use to discover them. Scoring the “umbilical/ indescribabilia” that accompanies unconscious feeling into a thin strip of thickly montaged verse, the “invisible speakers” that populate Glück’s poem—their misreadings and cant half-truths, their headlines and lies—turn dream’s content into poetic foam. In this mind’s eye—the “suburb” is blithely rendered into a thing “superb,” and “loneliness” roars with the face of a “lioness/and intimacy.” I, Boombox is a poem of frothy divinations tempered by the slapstick of speech. It suggests that desire without sense is desire nevertheless—and this is a delight to understand.’ — Shiv Kotecha

 

Robert Glück @ Wikipedia
Interview with Robert Gluck
‘Bona Nit, Estimat (An Ordinary Night)’
‘Writing Must Explore Its Relation To Power’
Buy ‘I, Boombox’

 

Robert Glück I, Boombox
Roof Books

‘Roof Books presents Robert Glück’s unmissable new work: I, Boombox. Glück is a seminal figure in the experimental landscape. In 1980s San Francisco, he co-founded the venerated New Narrative movement. His innovative prose has long made him an underground favorite, but lately he’s received wider attention through publication by New York Review Books. His contributions as a verse poet are equally exciting, but harder to come by. Fans have been hungrily anticipating I, Boombox, a jolting new provocation full of restless musical desire and “synchronies of/recognition.”

‘This is a sexy poem of bellicose minimalism with a sly sense of prosody. Instigative miscomprehension becomes the mode of discovery and generation: “I cast my net,/inattention.” The subconscious refracts reportage, fiction, poetry, decorative arts, et cetera into streams of meaning, daydreaming, and perverse nonsense. Death lurks in pleasure’s subtext. Glück implores: “Start a genital/uprising,” but “the rest is memory.”‘ — Roof Books

Excerpts

Clean blood and ass,
Caucasian, who
Really want a
Relationship and
Montgomery Libya’s
Lady Bird: the newest
Cross street is Haiti,
Vintage sofa deathbed,
The wide sand plains
Of commerce. The
Penny bounced with
Amazing freedom.
Absent-minded bakery,
A crass scramble
To put the snake
On the first thing
In sight. Education
Lite. In the movie
Sad nipples die.
The minuscule
Essential as will.
Blue room blue eyes
Tried to keep
Me there: Charmed
Steele frame.
The chilling
Potato of prison
Abuse videotaped
This wake of clay,
Political alerts
From the grave,
A scrubbed chicken
At Notre Dame,
Charwoman of the
Architectural Dept.,
Her methodical
Imprecision breaking
A random feast
With a family meal.
Outside the sun
Was straightening up,
And further disrespected
What went wrong,
A superbly scanned
Background. Murky
Ass. Semi
Circles call for
Attacks on Iraqis.
In the suburbs of Los Angeles straight
Rains are rage.
The emotions are
Great fun, who wants
To strobe, tease, such
And look?—a queer-
Sized bed, a
Panoramic intent.
Wet tongue and four
Holes to piss, a
Hint of bamboolary.
Good looking,
Lithe-bellied.
“Single and looking
For exasperation.”
A grinding spirit,
Her nipple meandered
Through grainy expanses
Out going get going
Ex-species wheel
Around a dazed
World looking
For a man to
Court and spank,
Powdered sugar
On abstract skin.
The remarkable
Timelessness of
This incident.
For a thorough fire
She pistols the
Dining room. The lickerish shed
Leans against the
White picket fence,

*

A great rictus
can be heard.
Nakedness came
out of my mother’s
womb ASAP
to see what the
ideal is:
sacred competence
paving down the
cost of redoing
the dawn. Or to
compile data,
she led him to
the corridor
room. Typical
ice cream maker,
Julia helped
cap negatively,
strode into a
gingham Talbots
dress, seized up her
kissing breasts, joy
infallible,
poem concerto.
Having quite a
dinner, brioche
seems superfluous
reproach. Powdery
casseroles. The
largest glazed doughnuts.
Continually
she feels her furry
compress the leper
exit after
closing the universe:
the hymen trick:
Inside Outlet.
As the call to
fight Israel
have bravely shot
dead groups, has been
encoded or
amplified, an
impala’s eye
view of Hemmingway
history. Their
wedding is sodomized,
like Patty Duke
plays Matt Saunders
as a nymph named
Sorry, but please
don’t obligate
to respond. His
author’s brio
says works in his
father’s brothels.
Continuous
moron, in it
for the denial
coverage with
some nonchalant
options like “up
the bridle path.”
The back door to
resentment slams.
The art houses
of Utrecht made
17 wines
in a minute.
It’s not an animal
but an an. She
gave these distilled
instructions: serve
Hawaiian
Mitsubishi
various with
missing agents,
gaze captors and
managers to
stun on every
page. Cultural
dependence has
a dominant
build, latched closed by
complicated
wire wrists. You
my tiredness,
my empty hands.
Bugger nonprofits.
Cricket-greasy
fingers speak to
be unlonely.
My father spoke
the old lexicon,
shoots zebra in
the erogenous
with his buttery
powdered razor.
I yearn to die
under his knees
watching the rusty
crowds on the vast
night of the drive,
his chest coming
in faster clouds.
Shopping the cock
could look at each
other with so
much sin in our
eyes. A blond sort
of scene unfolded.
I licked my feet
back and forth at
the other end
of the scrotum.
Death suddenly
showed up on the
roses, welcomed
them to the State
Capital of
the World.

Extras

Segue Reading Series:Robert Glück & Ted Rees

About Ed: a reading and conversation with Robert Glück, Alla Efimova, and Daniel Ostrow

 

 

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‘“I write a lot about being a trans woman. I do this because I believe there needs to be more literature in a wider variety of forms and styles about transness, and the lives, experiences, emotions, and culture of trans people. The hardest part of writing is, at a certain point, knowing what you actually want to say, or having an actual idea for the things you’re writing. You can only say ‘trans liberation now’ in so many ways before you start to feel like you’re unproductively repeating yourself.”

‘When approaching the creation of her poetry, this repetition of trying the same thing over and over again has forced Hofmann to consider any implementation of her work: “This [repetition] problem is what prompts me to find weird new ways of writing things, or to devote myself to poetry inspired by research projects […] When you do have an idea, oftentimes the writing will take you alongside with it. […] And because with the type of poetry I do, I can’t really rely on mainstays of poetic technique, I often have to invent a new poetics of tactics of language in order to create something that works.”

‘When asked about what the most joyful part of writing is, she replies “[t]he best part of writing is the part where you actually write. When I’m not writing, I get itchy, anxious. I start to loathe myself for not doing this thing which has basically rescued my life from contexts which go out of their way to squash trans self-realization. I become convinced I’ll never write again. But when I actually sit down to write with a good idea and coherent goals, however, it all comes back. Even if writing is hard work, it’s one of the most fun and engaging kinds of work that I can do.”

‘Having to create a new language and process for poetry is no small undertaking, and a method that encompasses both visual and written components the way Hofmann’s pieces do requires a blending of multiple influences. “The biggest influences on my writing have been visual/experimental poets like Hannah Weiner, Douglas Kearney, M. NourbeSe Phillip, Never Angeline North, Jos Charles, Porpentine Charity Heartscape, and Susan Howe” says Hofmann. “These writers all pushed my ideas of what I thought writing could be further than before.”’ — Shae Sackman

 

Ava Hoffman Site
ava september hofmann @ Twitter
Podcast: ‘Rejoinder: Love Poems/Smallness Studies with Ava Hofmann and Persephone Erin Hudson
RE: […] BY AVA HOFMANN
Buy ‘Love Poems / Smallness Studies’

 

Ava Hofmann Love Poems / Smallness Studies
Inside the Castle

‘Ava Hofmann’s harsh noise poem comic is finally here!

‘“starting in 2020, i have been gripped with the desire to write or paint on any and all surfaces. notebooks, my computer, random cardboard scraps. if not for the deposit on my apartment, i would very much like to write all over the walls of my office, to be overtaken by the frantic gesture of writing. this book is an extension of that desire to write, and i would like to extend this desire to you.”’ — Inside the Castle

Excerpt

Extras

lkdsfjlsdfjlsdjfklsdfl hi by Ava Hofmann but it’s Dancing Queen

The September Trilogy | Line Rider

 

 

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‘From 1988 to 1990, the French writers Hervé Guibert and Mathieu Lindon lived together in Rome at the artists residency of the Villa Médicis. They’d been friends for almost a decade by then, having met in the late 1970s in the living room of a famous philosopher. Guibert was standing alone in a corner; Lindon asked him, “Are you in time-out, Hervé Guibert?” — and their friendship began. They were both young, gay, and fixated on writing. Guibert went on to publish 18 books during his lifetime, including the groundbreaking novel about his struggle with AIDS, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (1990), a bestseller that shifted French attitudes towards the disease. He died in 1991, 15 months after his return to Paris.

‘“[A]s close as we might be,” Lindon writes in his new memoir about those years in Rome, “why are we so far from one another when one of us dies? And how can that distance change, grow and shrink over the years after?” Published three decades after Guibert’s death — and available today in an English translation by Jeffrey Zuckerman through Semiotext(e) — Hervelino is less a portrait of a friend than of a friendship. The title is an Italian-sounding nickname Lindon gave Guibert, one that made him “think not so much of Hervé as of us both, together in Rome.” In delicate, self-aware, and at times circular prose, Lindon delineates both the contours of their relationship and his struggle to write about it.

‘Loosely structured around their time in Rome, the book oscillates between details of life at the Villa, musings on the ethics of writing about others, and the present-day narrator, trying to remember Guibert. Most of the text focuses on the mundane interactions that shape a friendship — the lunches and dinners, the inside jokes, the testy comments, the shared friends, the rumors started and deflated, the petty jealousies, the mutual admiration. And beneath all this, an undercurrent of dread. Guibert learned he was seropositive just before he left for Rome, at a time when no effective treatment was available for HIV/AIDS. His diagnosis was unknown to most people at the Villa except Lindon, until Guibert published To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. Then everyone knew.’ — Edmée Lepercq

 

Mathieu Lindon @ Wikipedia
When One of Us Dies: On Mathieu Lindon’s “Hervelino”
Mathieu Lindon’s Archives of Love and Friendship
Mathieu Lindon @ goodreads
Buy ‘Hervalino’

 

Mathieu Lindon Hervelino
Semiotext(e)

“Soon that was my nickname for Hervé, what with my habit of italianizing the names of my nearest and dearest … Hervelino: that didn’t make me think so much of Hervé as of us both. The word might not seem like much but it was him and it was me, he took it for himself.”

‘Mathieu Lindon met the writer and photographer Hervé Guibert in 1978. The nickname Hervelino marked the start of their friendship, which was cemented a decade later by the years they both spent in Rome. Guibert was a pensionnaire at the Villa Médicis starting in 1987; Lindon became a fellow pensionnaire the next year, and the two would stay in Italy until 1990. These Roman years are at the heart of this autobiographie à deux that alternates between humor and melancholy. Guibert had just learned that he was HIV-positive and would die not long after returning to France and rising to fame with his searing masterpiece To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life—in which Lindon himself was a character.

‘Hervelino is a book about the difficulty of writing and speaking about someone beloved and revered. In recounting their time in Italy, Lindon contends with the impossibility of writing about Guibert: “To write about Rome is to skip over everything I don’t dare to write because it’s so hard to make sense of Hervé.” Hervelino is a story of a singular friendship, and of the books read and shared by the friend who was loved and lost. As it closes with each inscription Guibert wrote for his friend Mathieu and with Lindon’s present-day commentary below it, what remains are shards and fragments of a friendship sealed by illness and death, enshrined by literature and love.’ — Semiotext(e)

Excerpt
from BOMB

Le Seul visage, 1984.

I’m the most lamentable model because I’m incapable of posing for a photo, it makes me uncomfortable straight away, I fidget and I don’t know how to hold my body.

The photo below, titled “Berlin-Est,” was taken under the following circumstances. We were both on assignment in Berlin for the film festival, Hervé for Le Monde and me for Le Nouvel Observateur. It was in 1982, Fassbinder’s Veronika Voss won the Golden Bear. Hervé was already familiar with the city and suggested that we skip a day of the festival to visit East Berlin where he wanted to go to a tearoom as gay as it was possible to be at that time in that part of town. We went, the tearoom was as empty as the bathroom of some floor I can’t remember of some West Berlin department store I can’t remember that he’d been told was a cruising spot, to be clear it was so deserted that after having come with high hopes we’d ended up giggling nonstop. As soon as we’d arrived, Hervé took me determinedly up the stairs to some floor I can’t remember of some building I can’t remember where we went into a room where I was totally disoriented and scared by the sounds I was hearing: it was an institution for the deaf and mute, and he hadn’t warned me. When I read Hervé’s fictionalization of this little jaunt, I told Michel Foucault that it was all wrong, it hadn’t happened like that, and he responded by saying of Hervé: “Only false things happen to him,” a line I liked so much that I’d parroted it to Hervé who’d liked it enough to refashion it in To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life.

We’d left West Berlin very early and it was still early when we were walking down Unter den Linden. A little boy was hanging around there and with a few smiles we’d struck up a rapport. He didn’t speak a word of French or English but he was so excited to meet strangers. Hervé was able to manage in German. There wasn’t any discussion, but at that point he went with us like a guide, all smiles and full of joy and charm, taking us wherever he wanted, showing us whatever he wanted. We invited him to lunch (it might have been just a sandwich or a snack) then the rest of the afternoon was the same, he was comfortable with us and we with him. There was something odd and natural, we’d set out as a pair and ended up a trio, well, that was that. It was February, night was falling quickly, and Westerners would leave East Berlin just as they’d come, by taking the subway, a simple thing that wasn’t so simple for East Berliners because that was where the checkpoints were. The little boy whose name I’ve forgotten went with us to the station and came down with us to the platform to wait for the train to come. We still made a natural trio. The subway came into the station and we got in. The doors shut. We’d barely said good-bye to him and then everything happened quickly all of a sudden. It was clear that we’d never see each other again. And, on an impulse, Hervé pulled out his camera and snapped a picture of him through the subway window. No photo of Hervé’s touches me as much as this one.

Extras

Mathieu Lindon “Ce qu’aimer veut dire”

Mathieu Lindon, Ma Catastrophe adorée

 

 

________________

‘What You Said at 1:00AM

‘Three years ago: “That sounds reasonable:” a response to a text message from my current girlfriend while I am in the childhood bed of your childhood home with you. The text message is telling me not to come back to her apartment in the morning as was the previous plan and that she needs space, this new arrangement that was fully worked out is no longer applicable and that she is going to hold all of my belongings hostage until she decides she will give them back to me. I will have to threaten to call the police, something I never do—threaten or call—to be able to retrieve my things. Since we are in a long distance relationship, everything I have with me for this trip is at her apartment, I no longer had access to anything.

‘What You Said Through Your Teeth

‘Before I see you again, I spend time staring at “Dune” by Joan Mitchell: a painting of squares, white space. I get lost in the green, black, ivory. I feel so deeply staring at this work. Joan Mitchell says “There has to be meaning to what you are putting on.”

‘Three years later, we are in the city where you still reside to this day. I am sitting on your adult bed in your adult bedroom in your adult apartment that feels like a hotel in a gentrified neighborhood of a large city. Even in this moment, a moment I have been waiting for for a long time, I am escaping feeling. I say all the things I have wanted to say to you: how my emotional landscape is so large and how I hold all of these feelings in place, how you changed my life years ago, and how my life would not be the same without you. I tell you how incredible you are, how if I could go back in time I would do a lot of things differently. You say nearly nothing in return. You apologize for “being a dick” back then. I bring up the break-up email you sent me: Yes, remember, you broke things off through email, not even to my face, or a phone call, or something decent. You say “I don’t even remember what it said.” The words from that email are burned brazenly inside of me. I will never forget what that email said, even though I have long since deleted it and then deleted it permanently.

‘The question on your lips years ago was: How Do I Become A Better Writer? and my answer was Read A Lot, Write A Lot, Read More Than You Write. That was not the answer you were looking for, you got so angry. In this new moment you ask again How Do I Write a Poem? Do You Have Any Advice Or Tips To How To Write A Poem? and I say Sit Down And Write, There Is No Other Way. You are annoyed with me. Annoyed and angry into perpetuity. I realize in this moment there is no real meaning here.’ — Katie Jean Shinkle

 

Katie Jean Shinkle Site
katiejeanshinkle @ Instagram
KJS @ goodreads
Podcast: Katie Jean Shinkle on the Trailer Park of Her Mind
Buy ‘Thick City’

 

Katie Jean Shinkle Thick City
Bull City Press

‘Thick City is an attempt at reconciliation of need and desire: the cyclical characters adjacent and sutured together create a constellation of a cityscape caught in its own fists. In the space of innovative prose, Thick City focuses on language and how language escapes, begins, reemerges, and lives.’ — Bull City Press

‘Thick City is a dark mood whispered in delicate prose. Prepare to be haunted by this ghostly journey through Katie Jean Shinkle’s imagination. — Timothy Willis Sanders

‘Thick City is a wild collection attempting to manage the intersecting lives of narrators all broken by the same disruptive environment. At times disturbing, other times raw and sad, each section bleeds into the next, pulsing curiosity, betrayal, regret, and repentance, asking the reader to try to breathe without oxygen, without promise, without a real reason to exhale.’ — Monica Prince

Excerpt

Meanwhile, my ex-girlfriend, R, and I finish our relationship like this: Five bamboo plants I gave her as gifts left outside on the doorstep of my new apartment. When asked why she left the plants, she says “Because fuck you that’s why.”

A pool party on the top deck of our old apartment building that will burn down soon, though we don’t know this yet. When the pool party begins, the water is too cold so no one is swimming, everyone loafing around longingly gazing at the water. –Someone will drown tonight—I tell R.

I am ending our relationship with a pool party and a prediction. The worst thing: Two drunk people get locked out of the building, have to sleep in Adirondack chairs.

There is a note on the new door to my new apartment in R’s handwriting: “Who was your New Year’s kiss?” The note is not meant for me but for my new roommate. The handwriting is not

R’s but someone else’s, a forgery, a thin disguise. Who was your New Year’s kiss? –It certainly wasn’t me—I say aloud to the note, which is lineated like poetry, taped with Christmas-themed gift-wrapping tape, all pine trees and golden garlands.

A few months ago, R and I were driving towards the mountains and the mountains were on fire. At a certain point, under an overpass on a one-way dwindling road, we were stopped by the authorities, large men in huge gasmasks, and were told to turn right around, the fire is spreading quickly, get away from this place, you don’t belong here.

But here was where the scene doubles back. Here was R in the moment before our apartment catches on fire. Here was R taking over the wheel as I passed out behind it on the mountain’s gradually thinning road just before we were asked to turn around.

R says she is a power bottom, and I am aware by the way she says yes, yes, when I am on top of her, yes, yes. When I say –yes, sir—I mean it. “Don’t call me sir, it drives me nuts, especially when you say it in public,” she says. When we are on the train, we see a mistress & a submissive acting out a power dynamic and I nod to R and say –see—see—do you see what I see—you see—.

Our world was ending and R said, “I am taking you to the mountains to break up with you. Pets 4 Less is no place to end things.” We were using her new girlfriend’s car, but I did not know this yet, I did not know she had a new girlfriend. –You don’t have to drive me to the mountains to tell me anything—I said. When we drove back from the mountains, the apartment was on fire.

I am in my new apartment by myself. R wants to come over and I let her and within an hour my fist is in her mouth. I try calling her a dirty little slut. –Talk to me, you little slut, tell me how you like it—and she pauses. “Who said you could call me a slut?” she says. The words echo and the echoes become echoes until echoes are not enough, never enough. I call her a slut and she stops moaning, moving, breathing, all her air is choked as if caught inside of her. –What happened—I’m sorry—are you OK—I’m sorry—is everything OK—I’m sorry—hello—hello—talk to me—I say. An hour later, she is gone again.

When I first met R, she almost stopped talking to me when she heard the kind of films I like to watch. She is very picky about these types of things “Have you seen this film? That film?” she asked, and I said –no—and somehow, still to this day, I am ashamed I haven’t been pickier about my film choices. “It was almost a deal breaker,” she said.

R was leaving me to a soundtrack; a soundtrack differing greatly from the soundtrack of our lives. How music I never thought I would hear was playing itself throughout our apartment, an apartment about to burn to the ground. R was listening to the The Who’s Tommy. “I love Tina Turner in this film,” she said. And then, looking sideways at me, “Oh, you’ve never seen it, I forgot.”

One-by-one the bamboo plants show up outside the door. I don’t know where R is, and I can no longer ask who she is with or what she is doing because it is no longer any of my business.

We were sitting on the corner of the street, our apartment building on fire, and everything she owned was gone. She wanted me to drink her blood. There was an explosion. Her body was bloody and she offered her arm and said “Lick it.” She smashed her open wound into mine. My knees were scraped and bleeding, too. “Together forever,” she said.

But we will not be together forever. We were on top of the mountain and she said “No, no, no, its all wrong, this is too much, too intense, we have to end.” –I haven’t even given you much intensity—I said to the trees, to the mountains. R was no longer listening. “There is a possessiveness here I cannot wrap my head around, and I can no longer go there with you,” she said. She was the largest tree in the forest. She was a tree split two ways, an opening so large you can drive a car through. We were driving her new girlfriend’s car through the gigantic hole in the tree. We were driving through and I wanted to get out of the new girlfriend’s car and take a picture. I wanted to look up inside the innards together, what guts. I wanted to take a picture of us inside of the gigantic opening in this tree in the middle of my heartbreak. She refused to take a picture with me.

Extras

Katie Jean Shinkle 2021 Lambda Literary Writer’s Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices Reading

The Arson People #2

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, Thanks, Ben. Yes, no small relief. Happy the class went well, and didn’t end for all intents and and purposes. I’m guessing the new class’s distinction is just that the flash novella is lengthier than the flash fiction concentrated on in the last class? Or is there an added concentration on narrative drive in a tight space? Maybe you don’t know yet? ‘Pleasure’ sounds interesting. I’ll seek it out. The little clip they show on the IMDb page looks very porno. Huh. What’s up today? ** Misanthrope, Thanks. Yeah, I was more than a bit terrified during the data rescue mission, let me tell you. From now on, everything goes into the cloud regularly. I was avoiding doing the cloud thing ‘cos I don’t trust it, but … Yeah, let me know about the publishing thing if you want. I’m here. I unsurprisingly have a weekend full of film stuff I have to do plus my biweekly Zoom book club plus seeing some friends. Should work. Enjoy the Mexican food. I miss it already. ** Cody Goodnight, Hi, Cody. I’m pretty all right, thank you for asking. So the TV cameras are still connected by all those cables. I somehow imagined all of that was WiFi connected by now. Interesting. Watching TV shows get filmed was pretty fun. And living in LA, it was kind of a fun/random thing to do for my friends and me. I’m sure you know, but they had/have these prompts to tell you when to laugh and when to applaud and stuff, and when we didn’t laugh loud and hard enough, which we rarely did because the ‘funny’ stuff wasn’t very funny, they’d stop and redo it. Deep dish pizza, assuming they do it right, is among the most insanely good mouth fodder there is. Yeah, I get exhausted by everything, sure. I’m pretty driven and high energy so I can usually forge my way through it. When you’re shooting a film, it’s so fucking much and exhausting all day and sometimes night too, day after day with no break, because you have to stay really attentive and focused, and that’s a real toughie. But amazing too. No argument about the Soft Cell album. That O’Connor story is truly great, for sure. Tip top. That’s fantastic about your film club! When I was growing up there was this one amazing film series in LA that showed experimental films, and I was addicted to going, and I honestly think being exposed to that work at such a young age is a lot of why I’m who I am. So, obviously, I hugely admire you doing that. Something like that can totally rewire some naive young, or not even young, person’s mind and make them want to strive for the innovative and unforeseen, and that’s so important, I think. Especially these days. I … don’t think I have seen Juraj Herz’s films, no. Huh. I’ll go investigate that work. Maybe I’ll do a post at some point even. Thanks, Cody. What’s on your immediate agenda? ** Steve Erickson, Okay, I’ll try the new Orbital. I’d given up after that last one. Yury is trying to save the murdered laptop mostly out of curiosity, but it was very damaged, so that might be a fruitless goal. Because language failed NIGHTMARE20 and emojis are too vague to fail? I’ve heard nothing of the new 100 gecs album. Your report isn’t getting me very excited for it, but of course I’ll give it a stream. ** Meg Gluth, Thanks, Meg. Things are good, very busy, but good. With you? My guess is that the earlier you come down the better since things will get increasingly busy and nuts the closer we get to the shooting start date (20th), but either is okay. I’m not sure if I’ll be in LA or out in Yucca Valley at the location then, probably more in LA if it’s the 4th, but check in with me beforehand, and we’ll figure it out. Cool! ** alex, Hi, a. Thanks, yeah, no actual casualties as far as I can tell, apart from the laptop itself, but it was getting old anyway, truth be told. When I’m writing something, I feel like I never stop thinking about it, even though I obviously do. I’ve read reviews of the Kelela album, but that’s it. As soon as I get some downtime, I’ll lock it in. Thank you, sir! Have a very fun weekend. ** Gick, Hi, Gick! Me too about being glad I’m back. Life without a computer is so unbelievably boring. I was shocked. We haven’t shot our film yet, we’ve just been getting ready to. We shoot it in mid-March-ish. Thank you about the films. That’s ultra-kind. Really happy to see you! What are you doing, what’s going on? ** Bill, Hi, B. Ha ha, I always thought I was the world’s biggest text concision nazi, but I think you get the crown. I haven’t seen ‘L’Homme Blesse’. Our old d.l. pal Frank Jaffe is distributing it. I hear it’s good, but I hear all kinds of garbage is good. Take a chance? ** shadeoutmapes🍝, And hello to you! Totally, when I was writing ‘I Wished’, which accessed a lot of my deepest stuff, I had to pause all the time. I tried not to though. Me, I’ll dig in and write and bail on everything else if I possibly can, but breaks do help, I suppose. Did you see your friend? The video was for the track ‘Wondering’. I personally would like to just release it on Vimeo or something, but Zac feels too burnt by the experience and doesn’t want to. Jamie starred in the video, so we spent a bunch of time with him. He was cool, very complicated, of course, but it was mostly really fun. When the record company rejected the video, he kind of bailed on supporting us with them, and that left a sour taste, to be honest, but, like I said, he’s complicated. ‘The Outsider’, gotcha, I’ll seek it out either here or once I get back to the States if I can’t score it locally. It’s exciting to read your intense connection with what you’re writing. I know how that is, and I miss it at the moment when writing has to wait on my filmmaking side. Say more anytime obviously. What happened during your weekend, eh? ** Right. This weekend you get to peruse five books I recently read and recommend to you, and I hope you’ll find a book or two or more in there that you want to grab and devour. See you on Monday.