5 books I read recently & loved: Laura Vazquez The Endless Week, Kay Gabriel Perverts, Mark Doten Whites, Charlotte Northall Practicing Dying, Henrietta Dorothy Everett One or Two

‘For all its eccentricity and absurdism, the French poet Laura Vazquez’s debut novel, The Endless Week, grounds itself in the familiar. The quotidian is its object and its adversary. From this Vazquez gleans her speculative material, which could be classified as the hidden life of things and people, a series of micro-inquiries into objects, rooms, body parts, names, terrors and thoughts. Rarely have I read a novel in which so much of what I take for granted – bathrooms, whales, shadows, DMs – is shown to ferry messages from eternity. This is a novel that fabricates its own struts and connectors, a deep (and deeply anxious) inventory of modern subjectivity that feels more contemporary – and less self-satisfied – than any so-called ‘internet novel’ I’ve yet read …

‘The Endless Week is the first of Vazquez’s two novels to appear in English. Ably translated by Alex Niemi, it follows Salim, a poet, and his sister, Sara, as they navigate the mutually reinforcing crises of their home life. There is a grandmother dying of an excruciating illness; a father in the midst of a mental breakdown; a mother who abandoned the family some time before; and the enduring malaise of their own radically online existences. With their grandmother at last approaching her end, the siblings set out with Salim’s friend, Jonathan, to locate their mother and somehow save the family. If these elements sound like the trappings of a realist family drama, rest assured The Endless Week is anything but. The trio’s quest expands and contracts, taking in technology, addiction, anomie, worlds real and virtual, and the troubling inability to distinguish between them. It is an odyssey of the terminally online, rife with paranoiac Google searches and Wikipedia holes, and pitch perfect in its depictions of those painful breaches when we re-emerge into the glare of the actual …

‘Vazquez writes in short, declarative sentences that quickly pile up into surprising structures. It is a prose style that easily mingles humour and horror, the whole of it marbled with subtle but utterly convincing melancholy. Her writing is difficult to quote because its effect is always cumulative and tied to a madcap sense of pace. Individual sentences may lack beauty or profundity but only because they are waypoints, the breadcrumbs of some larger assemblage of meaning or perception. They possess the brisk, energized, granular observation of Adderall-heightened attention. (Jonathan pops pills throughout the novel, at one point suffering a horrific panic attack.) It can at times give The Endless Week a cartoonish surface, an impossible elasticity governing the characters’ thoughts and actions. But such distortion is inseparable from the experience of their daily lives. The text’s absurdist qualities – think Beckett’s virtuosic stalling or the vaudevillian pessimism of Barthelme – throw the grounded agony of its characters into ever starker relief.’ — Dustin Illingworth

 

Martin Riker on “The Endless Week”
‘The Endless Week’ @ goodreads
Hidden Life
“The Endless Week” Offers a Brave, Inside-Out Internet Novel Experience
Buy ‘The Endless Week’

 

Laura Vazquez The Endless Week
Dorothy

‘From the 2023 winner of the Prix Goncourt for poetry comes a debut novel unlike any other, a lyrical anti-epic about the beauty, violence, trauma, and absurdity of the internet age.

‘Like Beckett’s novels or Kafka’s stranger tales, The Endless Week is a work outside of time, as if novels had never existed and Laura Vazquez has suddenly invented them. And yet it could not be more contemporary, as startling and constantly new as the scrolling hyper-mediated reality it chronicles. Its characters are Salim, a young poet, and his sister Sara, who rarely leave home except virtually; their father, who is falling apart; and their grandmother, who is dying. To save their grandmother, Salim and Sara set out in search of their long-lost mother, accompanied by Salim’s online friend Jonathan, though their real quest is through the landscape of language and suffering that saturates both the real world and the virtual. The Endless Week is sharp and ever-shifting, at turns hilarious, tender, satirical, and terrifying. Not much happens, yet every moment is compulsively engaging. It is a major work by one of the most fearlessly original writers of our time.’ — Dorothy

Excerpt

Every week, the grandmother watched a show in which women gave birth. The women would lie down in front of the judges, lift their skirts. The judges took notes; they observed the insides of these women with a magnifying glass. The women spread their legs, they pushed, the babies were born. If the baby was dead, the mother lost a point. If the baby was blue or red, she lost a point. If the cord was strangling it, she lost a point. But if the baby was beautiful, she won a point. If the baby had hair, she won a point. If it wasn’t sticky, she won a point; if the baby was smiling, everyone applauded. If the baby had a proportional, standard body, the mother won a point. The president of the jury would announce: The adventure continues. If the baby cried, that made sense, but it wasn’t recommended. It was tolerated. If the baby cried for a long time, that was a point off; they cut the microphone. A deep voice would say the word: Goodbye. If the mother was beautiful, if she wore makeup, if her hair was done, she got a point. The judges would congratulate her, they would give her compliments, they would look at the camera and say: She understood the goal of the show. If the mother smiled while she pushed, if she laughed while she pushed, if she pushed without sweating, if she pushed without yelling, if she pushed without crying, she could stay. Someone would say: The adventure continues. When the mother was ugly, no one applauded, no one applauded for anything, not her, not the baby. The judges would look embarrassed and sorrowful. They would eliminate her. If the mother died, she lost a point; they stopped filming her, they stopped filming the child. Even if the child was alive, they didn’t film it. It had lost everything. The camera focused on the judges. They were emotional; someone brought them tissues that they patted against their cheeks. High-pitched piano notes accompanied the scene. A judge would say: We must go on. The judges hugged each other, then they danced. They raised their fists in the air, and the audience stretched their arms toward the light. If the father was there, that was a point. If the mother was a lesbian and the other mother was present, that was a huge point. If the father or other mother was absent, that was a point for or against; it depended on the mother, it depended on her hairstyle, her outfit, her appearance. Was the other parent right to have left her? Could we sympathize? The judges decided. The judges wrote things down on their tablets, then they drew a big circle and showed the point awarded in the middle of the screen. When the placenta came out, that was a point, everyone applauded. When the placenta stayed in the stomach, a point was lost because of complications, because of the metal objects they had to use. The scene wasn’t interesting then, it was too long, too complicated. They’d cut the microphone and announce what happens next. If the mother caressed her child, that was a point; the judges applauded, they nodded. The lead judge used the expressions “life event” and “bonding.” If the mother looked at her baby and thought it was ugly, if you could see it on her face, that was a point off. People booed at ugly babies. There were mothers who didn’t like their babies sometimes. People would throw shoes and point their thumbs down while booing. One day, a baby came out of its mother’s stomach almost dead. Its eyes were open, but it wasn’t moving. A judge picked it up and said: Do you want to live or not? Yes or no? We need to know. But the baby didn’t respond. The mother cried without smiling. Then the judges each made their trademark grimace. They moved their heads, and the lead judge turned to the mother: Suicide is the leading cause of death for women during the first year after giving birth, be careful, it’s a statistic.

Sometimes the grandmother closed her eyes. The male nurse muted the sound. The female nurse raised her head. She inclined the bed. The male nurse held the pillow. He pulled back the sheets. He lifted the covers. He opened her shirt. The female nurse washed her neck. She washed her breasts, and the grandmother would sweat. The female nurse rubbed the glove over her sides, into the folds, on the back of her neck. The male nurse pulled up her arms and washed her stomach. He changed the diaper and scrubbed her thighs. They spread cream on her legs and on her back. They turned her over. The female nurse bent her legs eight times while holding her knees. The male nurse bent her arms eight times while holding her elbows. They asked: Does that hurt? And the grandmother blinked twice. Then they put her shirt on, they said other words, they combed her hair. The male nurse would take her blood pressure. If it wasn’t good, he’d say: That’s not good. The female nurse would listen to her heart and say: That’s not good. It’s getting less and less good. And the female nurse listened to her own heart and said: I’m fine. She listened to the heart of the male nurse and said: You’re fine. They covered the grandmother. Cars drove silently past the house. They caressed her hair. They sang to her. Their voices overlapped, and the grandmother fell asleep.

Extra

Laura Vazquez – The Perpetual Week

 

 

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‘Recently, I spent a sleepless night dancing with the eponymous Perverts of Kay Gabriel’s new book and its title poem. There was Patrick, ‘who fell off the roof in a dream’; Shiv, who prefers the word ‘schtupped’; Elena, unbothered by her dream wedding’s relocation; and Patito, whose house Kay can’t reach because she’s too busy removing her fingernails. Perverts is about this other nightlife, where the poet’s role is to get the right dreamers to the function, and then to put dreams into social relation.

‘Perverts weaves Gabriel’s dreams with those of her friends, comrades and lovers. In addition to the expected extra rooms, cocks and symbolic castrations, Gabriel’s characters dream of prison abolition, of how a priest in revolutionary France might protest the salt tax, of DJ Paurro performing in the clouds. The poet claims her sleep ‘metabolized / the news’, but the book is more generative than digestive. In a great canto addressed to her friend Patrick, for example, she combines his dream of rescuing Stalin’s copy of Marx’s Capital (1867) from a university library fire with another to generate an image of a ‘Historical Materialism gathering / white walls, movement egos … David Harvey in his 80s addressing the assembly / says something that sets the factions at war’, in a scene that ends with Patrick tucking Harvey into bed. The speaker longs for this dream image to become real – ‘I’d pay good money to see the caucus theater / the burning library’ – and so makes it real herself.

‘The book pairs ‘Perverts’ with ‘TRANNIES, by Larry Kramer’, a poem that opens by reimagining Kramer’s Faggots (1978) as the fictitious book named in its title. After announcing that ‘In 2016 we used to say: I’m a faggot till I die!’, it considers why trans people might take up the term (whether they be ‘empirical / faggots … approaching leather like monks in their cells’, or women with ‘sunburnt contempt for former lovers’). These acts of self-description share nothing in common with the bitter satire of Kramer’s actual novel, which Gabriel describes reading as ‘like riding a tour bus through a circuit / party where everybody’s shitting in each / other’s boots, except Kramer, who / piously goes in the bushes and comes out / the other side a changed man, without a Gabriel / or a horn to blow on’.

‘In ‘Perverts’, the speaker is defined by her naming function: ‘I’m the one / who calls you perverts. / I’m the high bitch and I push / the button’. ‘TRANNIES’, meanwhile, opens by imagining the kind of social categorizing this alternate version of Kramer’s novel might have enacted. Though he ‘despairs of their pursuits’ – these girls with ‘names like Fleur-de-lys, / Babe, Fanny, Velveteen or Absolut Puss’ – the fictional Kramer takes great care over their descriptions, and ‘every tranny earns her limelight’. From there, Gabriel takes over, performing the kind of scene-portrait Kramer is too outside to achieve. Read against each other, the two poems become less about the revelatory function of sleep, sex or other potentially transformational experiences, and more about the writer’s responsibility to the group. To gather, characterize and put into motion all its members – whether faggots, perverts or other dreamers – you need this archangel that Kramer’s missing, someone to make sense of the revelations.’ — Rainer Diana Hamilton

 

Kay Gabriel Site
“Fucking Is a Form of Knowledge”
from ‘Perverts’
An Interview with Kay Gabriel
Buy ‘Perverts’

 

Kay Gabriel Perverts
Nightboat

‘Against the backdrop of the anti-trans panic, Perverts explores desire as a political problem. It asks two questions at the same time: whose desire is understood as dangerously excessive? And—a classic organizer’s question—how do we turn what we have into what we need to get what we want? Synthesizing her own dreams with those of her friends, Kay Gabriel’s Perverts is an exercise in turning private experience into shared consciousness and illicit desire into common cause.’ — Nightboat

Excerpt

So what would you do as a parish
priest in the 1780s in protest over the salt tax?
A scruffy Jacques Roux bound to himself
dreams of property as an athletic lover
Patrick you dreamt of the CUNY
Graduate Center library
on fire, you dove in to save Stalin’s
copy of Capital
Ruthie arrives to congratulate
you for doing the right thing since,
she says, ‘He likely
never even read it anyway’
then the same week you dreamt of a mass
meeting of the Left, an old-school
gym or auditorium – I’m editorializing
here but I can see this combination general
assembly or Historical Materialism gathering:
white walls, movement egos
everyone’s sitting on the floor in their million debates
David Harvey in his eighties addressing the assembly
says something that sets the factions at war
against each other and especially him
like either he bent the stick too far on
a useful, unfashionable point
or downplayed some real but minor critique –
a chorus of hundreds shouts and exits the dream
but you’d been given a job as his minder
it’s your task to explain the debacle
to the confused and sad Harvey
he doesn’t fully understand why
or how he instigated the split
then you took him back to the house you were renting
together, comforted him and put him to bed
logged onto Grindr and got caught
mid-fuck on the veranda with your app hookup
though not by David himself
I’d pay good money to see the caucus theater,
the burning library, Stalin’s unread Marx
once you starred in a slightly too cinematic
dream I had in which a bearded Trudeau, Jr
arranged in an end of history maneuver
for Ottawa to be secretly populated by robots
he hoped nobody would notice
and maybe nobody would have without,
Patrick, your role in the dream:
you hack the robots such that they stop
moving and start shouting horrible shouts
making such a tremendous
noise they upend the peaceable
and frankly boring capital where nothing
moves except speculation at the speed
of hoisting bitumen out of the ground
now it’s a place of total noise
and chaos, shouting robot shouts
a noise show in a barn somewhere made
public like a social wage
C. had a Merzbow shirt from a show that
‘caused him nerve damage’
when we dated I liked to wear it and pretend
I was the boyfriend, a punching bag for sound
though really I protect my delicate ears
Patrick I’m a sap for pretty shit
Brecht and Artaud make beauty
suspect as it should be
that’s their real point of contact
now my broken doorbell is hissing
at the mouth like a robot in Trudeau
Jr’s house of commons
or that parish priest urging arms over the salt tax
Ottawa has shed its clothes of bureaucratic perfection
in the dream the shouting
robots allowed something to unlock
elsewhere since Ottawa, here and always
a city of squares, was consumed
by its forever droning puppets and nobody died

And nobody died: optimism!
Well I think that’s funny
I’m being dialectical so you don’t have to
I lived with a guy who said: it won’t be
a good revolution if I survive it,
fighting the people’s war in Paterson, NJ
crisis escalated me out of that place
and into the expensive hovel, near the Home
Depot, with the roaches and the infuriating smell
the one long-lasting roommate an aging
beauty and a spy for the landlord
remember how I lived with Stephen and Liam
for a month to avoid her?
Then Stephen towered over my dreams like a nightly
impresario. Here’s one he had about me:
‘I’m at a restaurant with Kay,’ he writes.
‘We join a table where Margaret Mead is sitting.
Kay is like is that Margaret Mead. She starts
going on super Margaret Mead-type rants. She
kind of looks like Joan Didion’ – wait for it –
she starts talking about the last words of W.H.
Auden and transphobia. ‘Nobody’s more
celebratory of the erotic than trans people,’
I said, in Stephen’s dream, at the Margaret
Mead table, or did Margaret say it? Then I told
Margaret about ‘fucking boys’ mouths on day two
of affairs.’ ‘Day two is kind of a Margaret day’:
In Stephen’s write-up of this dream that’s in quotes,
so either I editorialized to Margaret Mead about
dedicating the second, mouth-fucking day
of an affair to her, in quiet contemplation, like
a day in the French Republican calendar dedicated
to cabbage, or she inserted herself into my tawdry
affairs to self-dedicate mouth-fucking to the memory
of Margaret Mead and other Margarets. I thought
she was a Christian Socialist, I mistook her
for Dorothy Day. In the dream Stephen’s holding
me and spooning me, he feels deep Platonic
love and then ‘Kay’s also W.H. Auden and I’m crying
because I love him so much and I can’t speak.’ W.H.
Auden is trans, like poetry is a way
of happening, like Brecht is a strange and useful
megabitch. Patrick says I’m reanimating
his interest in aesthetics, an ‘effete kitten
he’d long since drowned.’ Auden’s last
words are a ‘kind of stuttering monologue
about beauty and gratitude throughout which
he gradually loses coherence.’ There,
Steve, did I get it right?

Extra

Kay Gabriel reads for Lunch Poems

 

 

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‘Like Celtics games, Jubilee videos, or first-person shooters, Mark Doten’s fiction makes hatred fun. Almost any contest does it, really. With Doten’s work — encompassing two novels and now a short story collection — the contest is to see what stands out more, the hatred of its characters or the hatred with which it’s written.

‘Whites, Doten’s debut collection of short fiction, collects haters — a grifter-cum-arsonist who SWATs himself, an alcoholic who kills a dog, a self-proclaimed “president of hell” who steals the souls of podcasters, a woman dubbed the “World’s Worst Karen,” and Elon Musk, among others. The stories run on antipathy and resentment, the kind that spurs online defenses and manifestos. Doten doles out punishments and judgments in return. Characters end up homeless, unable to speak, stripped of their parent or pet, detached from reality, jailed, or murdered.

‘Darkness fuels the book’s satire, which is that of Terry Southern and not Percival Everett, unable to suppress contempt for its characters. It’s only with irony that Doten, parroting a Boomercon dialect in a series of epigraphic hashtags and slogans, claims these fictions “SPREAD LIGHT INTO DARKNESS!” Where Whites goes, there is no light. As soon as a character writes a sentence like “Readers, welcome,” he starts the next with, “Lol, but kill yourself.” What follows is a severe and splashy collection, peopled by caricatures and steeped in melodrama, bundled together by Doten’s skill as a mimic and his world-class facility with experimental narrative structures. …

‘Doten makes characters, in fact, the way Americans take in and take on pop cultural identities. The first story in Whites, “Even Elon on Human Meat,” can’t help but remind readers how much of the past few years we’ve given to absorbing Elon Musk. His voice and thoughts, his belated adoption of the MAGA fears over the “woke mind virus,” and his unerring radar for bad jokes have become a part of us. The story, a monologue Musk delivers “at the robot factory with the media here” after one of his rockets explodes, annoys us in the same way he does. That’s part of the impression. “The thing about a joke,” Musk says in the story, “is that if people don’t think it’s funny, that’s funny.”’ — James Butler-Gruett

 

Mark Doten @ instagram
Mark Doten’s new book examines a contemporary American culture that routinely defies satire.
‘Whites’ @ goodreads
White Cough Genocide
Buy ‘Whites’

 

Mark Doten Whites
Graywolf

‘The excoriating stories in Mark Doten’s brilliant first collection dissect the pathological narratives that shape our culture and country. Narrated by a crosscutting array of White people, Doten’s stories spotlight the self-serving logic through which their characters struggle to make sense of, and take control of, the narrative of our time. They run the political spectrum from “well-intentioned” liberals and newly woke CEOs to Trump appointees, QAnon adherents, and believers in replacement theory. There is an anti-vax nursing home employee, an anti-woke billionaire, a nonbinary sneaker podcaster turned January 6 insurrectionist, a nonprofit LA housing president dubbed “WORST KAREN EVER,” an elderly Republican in denial of his COVID-19 diagnosis, teenage YouTubers responding to a shooting at their suburban Minnesota school, a demonically possessed cookie manufacturer drafting a BLM statement with his new Black employee, and a gay White supremacist figure who may be a joke on 4chan, but will have his revenge.

‘While their identities and allegiances differ, all of them are united by a ferocious belief in themselves, certain that everything they’ve done can be justified, if you’ll just hear them out. In Whites, Doten has written a relentless book that confirms their standing as one of the great satirists of their generation.’ — Graywolf

Excerpt

from Pray for Q

It’s not my son’s body in the trunk. It may be his dress, but it’s someone else wearing it, someone bigger than he is. The dress doesn’t fit so great.

I’ve got the folder though, the one with all the sheets I was made to sign.

I don’t know what they’ve done with my son or where he is. He’s in so deep now, I’m not sure if I can save him, but I remind myself: it’s not my job to save him.

I’m talking to folks I trust on secure apps. It’s like everything’s floating. Nothing’s where I thought it was even a few days back. There’s so much information out there, and it’s both a cloud and a knife.

In all the disinfo the Democrat media and the corporations and Zuckerberg are spewing every single day, all day—in that cloud of distortion that’s telling you so many lies and telling you at the same time there’s nothing you can do about it—within that cloud there’s a knife any citizen can grab for.

The taillights are so vivid, the way they’re interweaving with the lights of oncoming traffic—it’s almost legible. You can almost find meaning in the flow of light.

And of course there is meaning. Not in some crazy way, it’s just these patterns of lights are all humans going somewhere. We’re all briefly here together, passing one another, riding some lights out on the highway.

I think about that, I let myself feel it.

You don’t think this will be your real life, driving down the highway with a switched body in your trunk, someone wearing your son’s dress at your son’s drag show. But life takes you places, doesn’t it?

And I know I don’t understand it all, I can’t see it all, but I don’t need to. It’s pure vanity and an evil to say you know it all. Maybe that’s why Q talks the way he does.

Whoever Q is, he’s definitely not the Lord, though he’s learned a thing or two from Him, I know that much. He walks in his footsteps.

Now it’s past three in the morning and there are black stretches I don’t know how long without headlights, when it feels like I’m the only one driving and the whole world is asleep, but of course that’s not true.

I close my eyes and open them back up, and I’m still right there in the road. I close my eyes, and I let myself see beyond what’s visible, I pray for my son, wherever they’ve taken him, and for all the innocents trafficked and raped and killed, I pray for our country, I pray for Q.

If I get pulled over, and someone finds the body, I’ll just say, I didn’t know that was there. Then I’ll say, I’m just a little old lady. How did a little old lady like me get a body in the trunk?

That’s a big body, about the size of my son’s, maybe a little heavier. No way I could get a big dead-weight body like that in the trunk.

When I open my eyes I’m still right there in my lane, I’m just going faster. Lord Jesus, I say, dear Lord, give me the strength to do what I must. Make me an instrument of your love in the world.

Extra

Mark Doten — Whites: Stories – with Shannon Sanders

 

 

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‘Practicing Dying is brilliant, rewarding and difficult. Northall offers the most brazen and shocking account of addiction I’ve ever read. Committing herself to the practice of Mahayana Buddhism, she eventually finds a way out, but only on the most rambling, circuitious path. Her account of addiction and loss, displacement and grief is profound and it proves that nothing is ever one thing.’ — Chris Kraus

‘The untamed offspring of Pema Chödrön’s The Wisdom of No Escape and David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives, this is an addiction memoir that coolly refuses conventional narratives of addiction, trauma and recovery; an unflinching, no-holds-barred, seriously intelligent investigation into existence and how to survive it. A gut-wrenching, sublimely rewarding ride.’ — Olivia Laing

‘Charlotte Northall’s Practicing Dying is extraordinary. It had me holding my breath. She writes in the same direct and uncompromising vein as Heather Lewis and Shulamith Firestone about the darkest corners of experience. But hers is ultimately a story of survival and even transcendence, one earned on every page. The existence of the book itself is hope.’ — Nate Lippens

‘Practicing Dying is the kind of book that I always hope exists. It’s raw and personal, it’s dark and melancholy, it dissects culture and society and is also completely compelling and written with the precision skill of a spider laying out fresh gossamer.’ — Thomas Moore

‘Step by step, Northhall’s intellect transcends with detailed perceptions of both grace and misery. Practicing Dying is an original, dire and illuminated addition to addiction literature.’ — Eliot Duncan

 

Charlotte Northall @ instagram
Charlotte Northall @ substack
Excerpt from ‘Practicing Dying’
“Practicing Dying’ – Chapter 1
Buy ‘Practicing Dying’

 

Charlotte Northall Practicing Dying
Pilot Press

‘Practicing Dying is a literary anti-memoir documenting life in a Zen Buddhist monastery in rural France where the protagonist, a woman in her late twenties, attempts to overcome chronic drug addiction and mental illness.

‘Broken and severely unwell, our protagonist arrives at the monastery from London: starving, drug-addicted and disillusioned, having exhausted every conventional treatment route available to her. The book examines how, habituated to a life of benefits assessments, petty-crime and sex work, she struggles to adjust to the rules, discipline and religious life of the monastery—at times to devastating and comedic effect.

‘As the story unfolds, she reflects on her addictions and past experiences, raising critical questions about what it means to be “an addict” and why there may be vested corporate and societal interests in maintaining a narrow, individualistic understanding of addiction.

‘Anarchic and provocative, tender and self-deprecating, Practicing Dying differs from other contemporary memoirs in the genre of addiction-recovery by simultaneously challenging the dominant narratives surrounding mental health while proposing an alternative approach to treating the “sickness of self” from which we all increasingly suffer.’ — Pilot Press

Excerpt

The train brakes, pitching my back into the seat’s plush upright. Neither wholly asleep nor awake, I occupy my usual, preferred state: a purgatorial wonderland in which everything appears possible, for as long as nothing is realised. It takes dedication to maintain such poise. Spells of catatonia were okay; psychosis had its moments. There is something deathly about pursuing either to excess. Every time I end up incontinent – leaking, squirting, dribbling – there ensues a growing marginalisation. Each representing a checkpoint beyond which there is no guaranteed return.

An announcement is made – incomprehensible except for the name of the village: ’La Coquille’. Knees splayed I crouch before the open carriage doorway, pushing my case onto the station platform, where it explodes for a second time. Fuck! Too heavy to lift it has grown hateful – broken to begin with and held together with gaffer tape. An ambiguous gift, donated by a neighbour, whose only offer of assistance in two years had come to hasten my departure.

The suitcase contains all I have left. Nowhere remains to call home. That I have made it this far is a testament to defiance. The first time the case detonated, it spontaneously burst into halves, leaving me wedged between two barrier gates at a metro station in Paris – some subterranean stretch between the Gare du Nord and Austerlitz. No one had stopped to help me. All of this I’d foreseen. Taping the pieces together, I consoled myself by gloating. The rumours about the capital were true: people rude, streets blistering with dog poo. At least Londoners were marginally more considerate. They cleaned up after their pets before sportingly tossing the shit-filled bags onto bus stop roofs, fences, or into trees, where they hung like dubious talismans. The effect was almost joyful.

As for the case’s contents, I couldn’t figure out why I had brought so much stuff. This was supposed to be a journey of renunciation. The selection process had been both spontaneous and egalitarian. I had closed my eyes and stood in the centre of the room. Whatever lay within an arm’s length radius of my body had gone in. Since nothing held any meaning, everything had to come.

I am a hurt and angry young woman. In this sense, not alone. My attempts to manage my feelings have brought me intimately close to death. Physically starving, bones crumbling, I’m rotting from the inside out. I no longer have periods and am stippled with scars from injecting and self-mutilation. I can feel my organs failing – withdrawing their attention with the tired sighs of a disappointed fan-club.

Running parallel to my own efforts are those of the state. Over-medicated, I regard the world through a keyhole. Behind this locked door, my mind is a whistling wasteland. Barely able to formulate sentences of meaningful thought, I read the backs of pill boxes. Pills from the doctors for the downs and the ups. Pills from the project to keep me off the drugs. Drugs I’d used to stop feeling or caring at all, since, to care about what one is powerless to change is a terrible pain indeed. Still, I persist, like creeping mould or an unnoticed rash, a boil on the back of the taxpayer. And whilst the long-term effects remain unclear, my existence is proof of an unnatural right to survive.

The professionals believe there is something fundamentally wrong with me. That my antisocial exhibitions of distress are not symptomatic of the oppression I feel, but of a mysterious mental illness too complex to successfully treat. The government has declared me unfit for purpose, constitutionally incapable of work. Every month I receive two disability payments. Enough not to die, enough not to live – welfare as prophylactic. Over decades, my condition has progressed: poverty, marginalisation, loneliness. Precarious work, sex work, no work. Crappy housing, crushing rents. Benefits sanctions, homelessness. Stronger, more obliterating drugs. More dangerous means of administration.

The objectification of my body has led to the destruction of my mind. Not only by my own hand, but by the messages of society, which began, as they do for all of us, with an attack on my pubescent adequacy – rapidly advancing to declare me insane. All the while, the same dubious doctrines persist, slyly inducing conformity. Ever-seductive promises that the solution to dissatisfaction lies everywhere but within and without. Enough is never enough.

With every loss of means and faith, I have found myself compensated with a profitable new diagnosis. For every label I cling to, I come to know myself less. Every time I am required to use the words I have been taught to explain my behaviour, (to benefits officers, key-workers, therapists, police), I become less certain of the truth of my experience. In this way I lose my power. As for what I believe my sickness is, my answer is Disillusionment.

Following another thwarted suicide attempt, I arrived at a solution. Indifferent about living, I should donate myself to a cause. Having discounted every terrorist organisation I could think of, I remembered religion. Maybe I could join an order. Become a devotee. The idea percolated. Then I met The Abbot. Six weeks later, I found myself at King’s Cross, boarding a train to France, as though by divine direction.

I stand on the empty platform at La Coquille. A day-lit night scene, a deserted set. It’s only 6.12 p.m. but it may as well be dawn. Having read Balzac, I know what to expect from the locals: peasants with egg down their shirt fronts – born and raised not to care. Different from Parisians. Free of whatever bourgeois pretensions might stop someone from helping a person being publicly attacked by a turnstile. Yes, the proletariat know what’s important. And when their livelihoods are challenged, spring to action with a panache those cosmopolitan snobs can only dream of – burning livestock, ramming their tractors down the Champs-Élysées, spraying manure at the bourgeois. I sense the need to urinate. Having spent most of the last forty-eight hours awake, my mind is fragmenting.

An effeminate-looking man in a peaked cap stands beneath a clock. His cap, his uniform, the clock, make me nervous. He may be a gendarme. Checking the time disinterestedly, as only a station attendant might, he lights a cigarette. How very Nouvelle Vague. I feel reignited with love for the French. The way they smoke. The way they fuck. The way they deconstruct. Even their aristos had had some good points – chocolate bread for breakfast, one hundred and twenty days of Sodom. Marie Antoinette, applying make-up before having her head cut-off. Such profound superficiality made one think.

Another man appears. Halting, he considers the case, eviscerated on the platform. Proceeding, he strides forward, one hand extended. His grip rigid and tightly cuffed, head closely shaved. ‘Jérôme Alain,’ he says, by way of introduction.

Steeple-tall and dressed in black, he gives the impression of an undertaker. Once had, this thought is impossible to retract. It has children, similarly stupid but exhibiting variation: his large nose seems ill-fitting, suggesting prosthesis. It may be attached to his spectacles, comprising part of a crude disguise. His accent, which sounds German, is unmistakably that of a war criminal.

To a drugged and sleep deprived brain, this seems plausible. Starved of reality, my mind has begun to consume itself, simplifying the world to caricature. Many people with dubious backgrounds choose to dis-appear into closed institutions. Prior to learning of the monastery, I’d considered the French Foreign Legion. Especially since, under a pro-vision known as Français par le sang versé, or ‘French by spilled blood’, any soldier wounded during a battle for France can immediately apply for citizenship. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d seek to benefit by shooting myself in the foot.

The undertaker drags my baggage toward a car parked in front of the station. Climbing in, I am surprised to find myself behind the steering wheel. Jérôme Alain’s face looms through the side window. He taps the glass with a forefinger and watches as, rather than getting out and using the passenger door, I raise myself sideways over the gear stick. It’s an automatic manoeuvre that, once begun, is impossible to abort.

Within a minute, we’ve crossed what appears to be the vill-age’s main thoroughfare. Oh, merciful death. Not a nail bar or betting shop in sight. No one passed out on the pavement, no blow-dried dogs in coats. Recognising nothing, I feel happy. Goodbye London, with your cramp and contradictions. My eyes float upwards, drawn by the benevolent pulse of a green, neon-lit cross. Thank God, a pharmacy. I immediately think of codeine and wonder how easy it is to obtain without a prescription.

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‘I struggle with my weight, as many people do. I am wrestling with it as I write this newsletter, in fact, because I need to drop a few pounds to fit into the suit pants I hope to wear to a wedding next week. I hadn’t owned a suit for years, because I feel I look awful in them, and I dread the humiliation of trying them on at a store or, even worse, being told the store does not carry my size. I recently ordered a suit online because a) this wedding was coming up, and b) I know I really should have one in my closet. I took it out of the box and tried it on. Donna said the jacket looked nice on me, but I couldn’t button the pants. Panic. Should I crash diet? Back out of the festivities? I went to the menswear store’s brick-and-mortar location hoping to buy larger pants, but, as you can guess, they don’t carry that size. It’s now being shipped, and fingers-crossed it gets here on time, or I’ll have to mix and match the jacket with some slacks from when I was heavier and hope I don’t look like a mess. I tell you this long horror story because while I was going through it, I was reading One or Two by H.D. Everett, a wild novel that involves extreme weight loss.

‘In One or Two, (Henrietta Dorothy) Everett offers a fascinating and harrowing examination of how our self-esteem and self-image issues can drive us to extremes, and she explicitly comments on how society’s rigid beauty standards, particularly about one’s weight, can compound those issues for women. Here’s a quote from page five, where the unnamed narrator asks:

Is it possible to interest the reader in a heroine who is a victim to adipose tissue?—A fat man is not so hopeless. Readers by the hundred thousand have thrilled over the villainies, have delighted in the daring, of a certain Count Fosco, perhaps the fattest serious character in Victorian fiction. But a fat woman is beyond the pale of sympathy. Her aspirations must of necessity be ridiculous, her very woes become comic, and all because of that fifty or sixty pounds of unnecessary flesh. The fat woman of fiction may serve as a devoted nurse or a passably good cook, but she is completely out of place in any situation tender or tragical: no average novel-devourer could be moved to drop a tear over her woe.

‘One or Two reads like a product of its time—Everett’s writing can be stiff, and she occasionally veers into ethnic tropes as well as those that equate being overweight with laziness. Nevertheless, the novel is a quick and enjoyable read. A clever addition from Mandylion are footnotes included throughout the text that lead readers to a visual glossary of images that help contextualize the settings and actions of the period inhabited by Ursula and Frances. Frances is a complex character, at times unlikeable, but also someone with whom I could empathize. Who among us hasn’t wished we could alter our appearance? We all dream life will be better if we could just lose the extra weight. While we’re meant to disagree with, and even be repelled by, her actions, I completely understand her motivation. I mean, I’d love to cast a spell to fit into those pants, believe me. Alas. Instead, I’ll watch what I eat and keep an eye on the mailroom. If you’re looking for an intense and weird read, definitely check out One or Two.’ –BOG–

 

H.D. Everett @ Wikipedia
Henrietta Dorothy Everett @ goodreads
The Death-Mask and Other Ghosts
Mandylion Press @ substack
Buy ‘One or Two’

 

Henrietta Dorothy Everett One or Two
Mandylion Press

‘Mrs. H. D. Everett, though adhering to very old and conventional models, occasionally reaches singular heights of spiritual terror. — H. P. Lovecraft

‘Frances Bethune is desperate to lose weight before her husband’s return from India―in just two weeks. On the advice of a bad-breathed spirit, Frances undertakes a slenderizing séance. While she succeeds in her quest for thinness, she is horrified to discover that her discarded weight has taken on a new life of its own. Of this chilling, revolting tale, H.P. Lovecraft raved that Everett “reaches singular heights of spiritual terror.” This new edition from Mandylion Press restores Everett’s 1907 masterpiece. It features an original introduction written by Mandylion cofounder Madeline Porsella, as well as a glossary that provides visual, material and affective image footnotes.

‘Henrietta Dorothy Everett (1851–1923) was born in Kent, England. Between 1896 and 1920, she published 22 books under the pen name Theo Douglas. She was an influential figure in the early days of science fiction and fantasy writing, and was cited in H.P. Lovecraft’s extended 1927 essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature.”‘ — Mandylion Press

Excerpt

It is the amiable few, and not the irascible many, who are patient when interrupted; though the urchin scholar may hail any disturbance which breaks in on his detested lessons, and perhaps the devotee does not quarrel with a summons calling him away from that dismal business of the self-inflicted scourge. Ursula Adams drew her dark brows together in the pucker of a frown, as she laid down her graving-tool, and took the dainty envelope her landlady held out, a fold of apron protecting it from the impact of a blackened finger and thumb.

‘Yes, ma’am, just come from The Mount, and the messenger seemed in a hurry. He said as how Mrs. Bethune had told him to take back word.’

The good woman fell back a step or two, and folded her hands complacently. The situation afforded her a certain satisfaction. Her cottage lodgings were cheap and small, such as suit with narrow purses; and it pleased her to have a real born lady in them, if only for once, on intimate terms with Mrs. Bethune of The Mount, which was the great house of the neighbourhood. She felt her own importance exalted when liveried servants called at her door, and sometimes a carriage and pair stopped the way in the green lane below, and Mrs. Bethune waited there for Mrs. Adams. For Mrs. Bethune was accustomed always to be driven, even the short distance between the great house and the cottage. Though still quite a young woman, walking had become irksome to her by reason of a certain misfortune—an ill that flesh is heir to, and more especially indolent flesh.

Extra

The Death Mask by H. D. Everett Ghost Story Full audiobook

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, Gunpowder Plot is a cool name for fireworks. If I’m ever with you during a fireworks display, I will come prepared. ** Bill, Angry, haha. What a curious transposition. It was: intense. I agree back. Mm, no, I don’t think I saw his ‘Pinocchio’. No one seems to ever talk about it, even the Del Toro-ites, so that probably tells us something. ‘Frankenstein’ looks pretty blah in the preview at least. ** Dominik, Hi!!! That book makes your hands look weak, which is good. Good question re: the designer. My guess is probably not? (He or she or they are being kept a mystery to Zac and me.) I’m going to go find those addictive videos and get addicted. Love excited because on Sunday he’s going to see this annual Paris film festival event featuring experimental films made by 14-17 yo teenagers, G. ** Carsten, Kudos to the technology that has made printing books with images involved financially doable. Right, van Peebles and Rob Zombie. Zombie’s first two films are quite good. I did a search, and I guess Frank Sinatra directed a movie. And there’s Questlove and Mike Figgis. I don’t know Boots Riley, but I will endeavor to. ** Steve, Okay, good to hear about the Jude. I’ll see it when it gets here, and I’m sure it will since the French are still seeking out the adventurous in at least sufficient numbers to get film adventures minimally released. A la ‘Room Temperature’. My dad’s ego was something else. I can’t imagine myself dressing up for Halloween or really any occasion. I like looking peripheral too much. As for Halloween, probably just going to the Parc Asterix Halloween makeover event, and probably not on Halloween itself. There’s not much else to choose from over here. But that about you? What are you going to dress up as for Halloween IRL or in your imagination? ** Hugo, Cool you can go to the Ghent thing. So sorry about your Granny. Death is so sadistic. No, I never met Parfey. I only know the things he edited, and the Feral House books he published, etc. ‘Apocalypse Culture’ was such the go-to book back in the day. Sure, you can cultivate a post for the blog, of course That would be very welcome, thank you! Hang in there. ** Steeqhen, Nice how logistically available Dublin is. Hope you aren’t in fact getting ill of course. Good question re: the boat which of course no one can answer, possibly not even him. The filmic ‘Steve’ is just the usual Jack Black wearing a particular outfit. ** HaRpEr //, It’s for the best, trust me. The only good thing about American repression is that it usually reads as shyness. Oh, shit, that’s scary about your cousin’s son. Any news? I hope that somehow he’s just hanging/hiding out with a soulmate. Yeah, let me know. That’s scary. ** horatio, Hi, h! I’m happy to hear you’re healing although the sick as fuck part is an undercut. I assume you’re drinking all the tea and popping all the pills necessary to do the Phoenix rising number required to get you right again. As I guess you know from my writing, I find the objectifying of the appearance of youth and how it turns adults’ groins into gearshifts of their brains really, really objectionable. You have the power in that equation. It just sucks that you’re pulled into that equation. But at least you can find it kind of interesting. And, yes, make art from it. Need I even say. Turning that stuff into material is, what … the answer. I went through all kinds of hells in my life, but art made me tough as fuck. I encourage you to do it, if the impulse sticks around, and, yes, I would really like to see it you do. Thank you about my sinuses. If I could, I would bestow impeccable sinuses on you. xo. ** Okay. This weekend I present to you five books I’ve read recently that I am highly recommending to you. See if any of them suit you. And have a massive, noisy, and very powerful No Kings Day. And see you on Monday.