5 books I read recently & loved: Michael Jeffrey Lee My Worst Ideas, Valerie Werder Thieves, Jeremy Kitchen Mr. Crabby You Have Died, Anne Carson Wrong Norma, Chris Zeischegg Creation: On Art and Unbecoming

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Eva Richter: What is the ideal place for a reader to be in order to understand My Worst Ideas?

Michael Jeffrey Lee: A liminal place, an uncertain and unsettled one too. Would be great if they approached the text as a hungry ghost does food.

Who is the author whose work most influenced My Worst Ideas; what would you ask them if you were to meet; and what would be their hypothetical best and worst response?

If I’m trying to flatter myself I would say Robert Walser. If I’m trying to be honest I would say Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, editors of that late twentieth-century American horror anthology Chicken Soup for the Soul. If I met Robert Walser’s ghost, I would ask if things had improved for him since passing on. Best response would be yes, worst response would be no.

What is the plot of your strangest short story in as few words as you can use to describe it?

Sacrificial pigeon helps man overcome friendlessness. Or: baby delivers cryptic messages of doom.

Has writing fiction helped or hurt your life?

When it’s going well I think, I am doing what I was BORN to do. Scaring people, making them chuckle! This is the LIFE! I made a GREAT decision when I decided to become a WRITER. What a FUN hobby I’ve pursued! I feel VINDICATED by my life choices! When it’s going bad, when I’m shut up in my room marinating in my own juices, cut off from friends and loved ones, crying intermittently, I think that I live in hell—that I have chosen to live in hell—and am irrevocably harming myself.

Where would Thomas Bernhard live if he had to move to the United States today; would he still be able to write under these conditions; and what would you sacrifice to see him write, produce, and direct a romantic comedy of Concrete?

Some place with a lot of trees and good air quality. I just imagined him on the Olympic Peninsula, though he’d flee during fire season on account of his lungs. I think he might get along with the Log Lady from Twin Peaks. He would find the US stressful. I think he would probably teach German lessons online to be able to afford his rent. I think his brain would be fried by staring into the screen all day and he would be heavily medicated. If I heard he’d been given the chance to write, produce, and direct a romantic comedy of Concrete, I would smirk and think to myself, Good for him, but I would sacrifice nothing.

 

Michael Jeffrey Lee’s Stories That Will Never See the Light of Day
‘Famoustown’, by Michael Jeffrey Lee
‘The Shivers’, by Michael Jeffrey Lee
MJL @ goodreads
Buy ‘My Worst Ideas’

 

Michael Jeffrey Lee My Worst Ideas
Spurl Editions

‘In the final story of Michael Jeffrey Lee’s MY WORST IDEAS, a disembodied voice asks the narrator to write him a story. The voice asks the narrator to include “my jingle-jangle voice, my queer way with words. My general philosophy.” Strange jingle-jangle voices fill Lee’s new collection, mumbling to each other as the text, full of uncanny and unsettling repetitions, builds into a fugue. Lee’s characters are unable to get comfortable; they don’t feel at home in their cities, their relationships, or even their bodies. With dissonant black humor, Lee explores their sense of dislocation and mounting desperation. In one story, a lonely young man carries a pigeon’s headless body in his pocket that warms when he nears a potential friend; in another, a pretentious lover is carried down a filthy river after diving in to save his sweetheart, who couldn’t care less. There is an innocence and directness to the writing that makes it harder and harder to ignore the work as it circles the drain of its obsession.’ — Spurl Editions

‘With irresistible humor and a fearless awareness, Michael Jeffrey Lee brilliantly deciphers the imponderable strangeness of the moment.’ — Rikki Ducornet

Excerpt

Extras

Budokan Boys – THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Budokan Boys live at UH FEST

 

 

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January 20, 2017 — ‘The man who believes in Kesey and Bukowski’s routines flies to Nashville to visit me. I pick him up at the airport; we drive to a Mexican restaurant to discuss my in-progress manuscript. I tell him I’m examining my life as a generic form, myself as a commodity. I’m reading my childhood journals and transcribing my dreams and adding everything up as I would an artwork’s provenance, its critical reception, its condition, trying to figure out how I’d come together just so. I ask his opinion on the book’s first chapters to make him feel valued. When the check comes, I hand over my card to cover our margaritas and guacamole; he uses the restaurant’s pen to scrawl I love Valerie in my journal. He does not have a job. He worries about money but claims he cannot write and work at the same time. My friends who are writers and poets and students in New York all hold menial jobs as bartenders, nannies, cashiers, receptionists, I think but do not say. He tells me he will work on a screenplay while he stays with me at the cabin; he lays out pens and scatters notebooks but does not write. I pay rent and buy necessaries; he shoplifts expensive cheeses and sweets.

‘During this time, I often think of the cheap metal hangers at the laundromat where I took my boss’s Celine suits for dry cleaning. We love our customers, they proclaimed. The man and I decide to spend the final weeks of my sabbatical in Miami. The gallery pays me to write a 1,500-word press release; I Venmo $1,500 to a stranger for a South Beach sublet. She presses the heart icon below the transfer to make it glow red. My boss often told me she loved me. I love my work, I write on February 12th, though I’m not sure now whether I meant to refer to my in-progress manuscript or my work for the gallery. On April 26th, I write, what is love besides the disavowal of transaction?

April 1, 2018 — ‘Having worked for the past four years as an art writer New York, I type, I’ve composed many personal histories, none my own: curatorial career narratives, blue-chip artist biographies, and dozens of chronologies for women or non-Western artists whose markets a gallery was trying to ‘invigorate.’ I’ve learned that, to make a life legible, one must first invent a thread and then follow it. Fragments, when arranged chronologically, begin to cohere into a causal narrative. One’s little life, once written, can be mapped onto and into broader generalities: for me, for Valerie, the voice of the gallery, the story of contemporary art. My manuscript is complete; it is both an autofictional narrative and a generic account of a gallery girl’s efforts and humiliations. I use fiction writing and performance to address questions of language, legibility, and power, staging theoretical interventions in real time and space rather than engaging the age-old opposition between theory and practice, I write in cover letters to publishers, graduate school applications, emails to potential employers. I want to leave the gallery. Because of my time working as its voice, I know how to use language to fashion objects both fleshy and plastic into legitimate cultural entities, into artists and artworks. This training led me to research the fashioning of myself, which led me to write Thieves, the publication of which, I think, might eventually authorize my own name as a place from which to speak. I feel ambivalent about this, even as I proofread my thrilled and enthusiastic submissions, even as I press send.

August 24, 2023 — ‘Fiction is not reality. It is an autonomous representation of reality in which correspondences have been tightened and details altered so as to make reality’s strangeness more available. This note is an accumulation of fragments detailing the research and writing of Thieves, but the boundaries between living Valerie, researching her, and writing her do not exist: they are themselves fictions.’ — Valerie Werder

 

Valerie Werder Site
Valerie Werder’s Thieves
AN INTERVIEW WITH VALERIE WERDER
Podcast: Valerie Werder on Thieves
Buy ‘Thieves’

 

Valerie Werder Thieves
Fence Books

‘Valerie Werder’s debut novel, Thieves, is an autofictional account of the strivings and humiliations of a gallery girl, also named Valerie. The tale of Valerie’s maturation, her life and adventures in sex and crime, exquisitely eviscerates the industries of desire and consumption which produce, place a value on, and limit her creativity, freedoms, and responsibilities.

‘In whip-smart, sharply humorous prose, Thieves is a wild, dark, and rollicking ride through a beguiling and dangerous Willy Wonka factory of gender, capitalism, sex, and art.’ — Fence Books

Excerpt

The dream began: In a rigidly stratified New York, people could predict each other’s occupations, where they lived, how much money they made, their favorite bars, their fetishes, how often they called their parents, et cetera, with a cursory glance at a name, a face, a hereditary chart. Valerie, for example, could be easily sorted into a genre populated by other twenty-something tote-bag carrying, art-gallery going, suburban-childhood-having humans. Despite the fact that, sociologically speaking, Sylvie, Maria, and Valerie were roughly interchangeable, they found their minor particularities (small ears framed by a tawny crew cut, a charming snaggle tooth, under-eye circles that fluctuated between you look a little sleepy and borderline mauve) being picked out and deployed against them. Similarly, their banal transgressions and neuroses (regular lunches of wine and oyster crackers, only getting off to muscular gay porn, compulsively ignoring accumulating mounds of student debt) were considered deep, shameful secrets, peculiar to them and only them.
—-Slowly, the three discovered that other genres of professional women felt the same way. Maybe Maria had been sharing stories with an apathetic luxury-car advertiser, or maybe Valerie overheard a conversation at a poetry reading. Regardless of its origin, someone began a group chat, which quickly ballooned to a conversation between hundreds, and then thousands. It was easy to pretend that the group represented the totality of women existing in the world, or maybe in all of eternity, because the message thread was so rap- id and continuous. Statements appeared one after another from unrecognized numbers, and Valerie’s guess was as good as anyone’s as to who, precisely, her interlocutors were. (Such naïveté—feigned by Valerie’s subconscious and excused by digital anonymity—is easy to dismiss with a cursory review of the group’s formation: its network exhausted the social contacts of a select set of professional women living in New York, ages twenty-five to sixty, and better represented those who hired house cleaners than those who cleaned houses.)
—-Around 9 p.m. on a Friday evening, dream-Valerie picked up her phone after a shower and nap to find 637 new message alerts. The thread had recently turned to a museum curator’s anger at being singled out by colleagues for a rather prominent mole under her left eye, and a 917-number proposed that all women in the city do away with their human bodies, implanting themselves instead into mechanized shells.
—-U know thats not a half-bad idea
—-They’d really have to come up with new ways to take us down a notch You know they wld come up with ways.
—-But we’d at least get a few days of reprieve!
—-Actually, I think someone in the group works in AI at DataLab . . . this
could seriously be possible
—-wtf
—-really????
—-Hey, yeah, it’s me that works for DataLab, I’m head of design technol- ogy and robotics. My name’s Gretchen.
—-Valerie opted not to voice an opinion, waiting for the phone numbers of the only two women she knew—Sylvie and Maria— to pop up in the chat. Four minutes later, Maria opined yeah, god, this would be such a relief. Concerns about funding were raised; one member was quite wealthy and assured the rest she’d tap into the usual philanthropic networks. An 845-number wondered how will we get all of the other women in the city, the women who aren’t in the group, on board? A prominent intellectual promised to write an Op Ed in the Times; she’d argue for a beautiful sense of equality, freedom from objectification, release from appearances. A 718-number repeatedly asked what the automated bodies would look like, suggesting maybe we should neutralize race, select an unnatural color, like blue or gray or purple. Members were not sure. Objections were raised, anxieties duly noted. The group would put their collective body’s physical appearance to a vote. On the day of the vote, Maria refused to par- ticipate. They’ve got Gretchen from DesignLab making the thing. I know her. It doesn’t matter if it’s gold or magenta or teal. Any automaton made by Gretchen is going to look like Barbarella fell into a vat of Pantone. Indeed, the final design was silver, with a poufy wig and button nose.
—-Once automated, it was nearly impossible to tell which body belonged to your friend, colleague, girlfriend, ex-girlfriend, and so on. The women didn’t trust each other, and for good reason. After implantation in their silvery new bodies, an initial sense of peace in the city was followed by a great and sudden confusion. Thieving women snuck into homes and workplaces not their own, taking computers and appliances and the like. Identical women emptied one another’s bank accounts, kidnapped those in higher positions to insert themselves by proxy into alternate lives. If you were able to remember a friend’s distinctive walk (flat-footed, slow) or the sour expression she made when she was being insulted—and if you could detect a trace of this gesture on a silvery automaton— you could hazard a guess at the automaton’s identity. Most women, though, were loath to reveal who they were, and even the most idiosyncratic gestures could be imitated by a skilled identity thief.
—-In a highly publicized case, one woman, a professor, locked up her ex’s new girlfriend and took her place, thinking she’d be able to regain her former paramour’s affections, if only by posing as her new love. The presumed ex, though, turned out to also be an identity thief, a woman with tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt and medical bills who was squatting in the wealthy ex’s apartment, paying off her loans using the ex’s credit cards. During courtroom proceedings, the identity thief said she’d barely had to do any work to convince the professor that she was, in fact, her former love. She’d looked through bank statements and old receipts, watched a few videos. Easy.
—-Reporters covering the case found it difficult to transcribe court proceedings, having no way to tell which woman was speaking at any given time. They began to confuse themselves with their interviewees, and lawyers with the criminals, and soon women were speaking in tandem, completing each other’s sentences, infecting each other with the desire to sabotage the entire project. It was a mess. Officials couldn’t determine whether a large majority of women were suddenly participating in criminal activity, or whether a small group of deviants had taken advantage of the new system, mucked it all up. Crime rates tripled, and police were loath to arrest the hard, silvery women. The women in the group were astounded. They had not predicted this.
—-In the confusion, silvery Valerie wandered around Union Square where, in her previous life, pick-up artists and peddlers approached her while she was eating 50¢ hard-boiled eggs and scrolling through art-world blogs. For several days, she watched an automaton with the mannerisms of Sylvie, who leaned against the fake brick of the Whole Foods, smoking, eyeing groups of Guinean men with glinting black plastic bags, who sang, Louis, Gucci, Hermès, Céline . . . snap ’em up before the police do!

Extras

On Valerie Werder’s novel Thieves

Valerie Werder reads an excerpt from Thieves

 

 

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‘Jeremy Kitchen, who’s 47, doesn’t look like a stereotypical librarian. He’s a tough-looking, tattooed guy who favors ballcaps and Hawaiian shirts in clashing Day-Glo patterns. He’s been a singer in several punk bands and is a gulf war vet. His unconventional path to becoming a librarian makes him well qualified to meet the needs of a public that is increasingly uninterested in traditional academic matters. He’s able to reach those who aren’t naturally bookish. If libraries have a role to play in our tech-besotted, forgetful age, we could do a lot worse than Kitchen as a guide. …

‘Though Kitchen considers books a driving force in his life—he reads one or two a week—it took him some time to settle on the library as a career. Before that, he worked a number of what he described as “shit jobs”: artillery observer in the army, worker in a flashlight factory, a brief stint at Whole Foods, social work. …

‘Kitchen started Punk Rock and Donuts after working on a project with the design firm IDEO, which led to a library conference in Aarhus, Denmark, and inspired him to create a nontraditional event at his own branch in Bridgeport. He partnered with January Overton and John Almonte of Jackalope Coffee; they supply the coffee and doughnuts at every show. The program has proved so popular that other branches have started having their own punk-rock shows, but Kitchen is quick to give credit to the CPL administration and his collaborators for its success.

‘Of course the primary mission of a librarian is to give his or her community access to information and culture. Kitchen is a positive, no-nonsense advocate for learning and knowledge. “A good librarian can sort out reliable sources, [which] is now of utmost importance in our political climate,” he says. “We are bombarded with a 24-hour news cycle and, of course, social media. Most good librarians can sort out the bullshit and provide people with useful information.” Kitchen assures me that e-books are decreasing in popularity and that interest in the old-fashioned paper-and-ink formats remains alive and well.’ — Dmitry Samarov

 

Jeremy Kistchen @ instagram
Meet Chicago’s punk-rock librarian
Jeremy Kitchen @ goodreads
E94, hosted By Jeremy Kitchen, Michael Sack & Jamie Trecker
Buy ‘Mr. Crabby You Have Died’

 

Jeremy Kitchen Mr. Crabby You Have Died
First to Knock

‘Mr. Crabby You Have Died is a demented romp that sways between memoir and fiction. The first full-length work by Jeremy Kitchen—a public librarian, former dope fiend, and U.S. Army artillery observer in Desert Storm—this book is an involuntary regurgitation of a life that is as comic as it is horrifying.

‘Kitchen lays bare his world through a series of interlocking exorcisms that deny linear time and good taste. Lost years in the Sarin-laced Persian Gulf drift backwards into Detroit’s acid trash landscape, only to corkscrew forward again into a seemingly endless Chicago night of heroin, handguns, and idiot pranksterism. He paints us a picaresque sprawl with blunt prose—ever haunted by the ungraspable shadow of combat and populated by the likes of an evangelical sadist, a sex-positive trustafarian, and an enigmatic preppie known only as Crackhead Anthony.

‘A nausea-inducing affront to sentimentality and the literary arts both, Mr. Crabby You Have Died is a collection of parables about the stupid beauty of youth, the boredom of addiction, and the intensity of dreams. This is a deranged effort of immense power and hilarity that irradiates with an unvarnished heart.’ — First to Knock

Excerpts

Extras

Trailer: Mr. Crabby You Have Died

Chicago Transgressive Authors: Logan Berry, Jeremy Kitchen and Maryse Meijer

 

 

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‘Wrong Norma rings true with Carson’s trademark collisions and signature style. “The Visitors” sees her thread together H.D.’s psychoanalytic work with Sigmund Freud and the development of Roget’s Thesaurus (1805) with the films of Éric Rohmer, jostling for space within an anecdote about the unexpected arrival of a group of unnamed Icelanders, turning up out of the blue: “Did I invite them? I don’t think so.” “Dear Krito” presents an epistolary prose poem in the voice of Socrates, written from his death row cell. Elsewhere, Carson’s titles are enough to indicate their braided subjects, as in her “Short Talk on Homer and John Ashbery,” a moving elegy to the late poet, or “Fate, Federal Court, Moon,” a meditation on the semantics of “fate” and a powerful indictment of judicial bias in North America.

‘As usual, Carson’s thematic range is matched by her ambitious, if occasionally eccentric, formal experimentation; Wrong Norma includes texts that (superficially, at least) behave like classical translations, lectures, essays, prose poems, scraps for stage, passages of literary criticism, short stories, narratives, and what seem like reflections from Carson’s own life (although “taking Carson at her word is a complex business,” notes Elizabeth Sarah Coles in her 2023 study, Anne Carson: The Glass Essayist). Throughout her career, critics have struggled to categorize Carson’s writing. Her famous Short Talks sequence, which first appeared in 1992, was extracted by Susan Sontag for The Best American Essays that year and later repurposed by Ben Marcus for The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories (2004).

‘Carson’s rejection of conventional writing categories has earned her some critics. “How many genres can you mix before your inventiveness waters itself down?” asks Michael Lista. “Is there a limit to pretending there is no limit?” Carson seems both bored and confused to still be answering questions about her use of form. “Sometimes I feel I spend my whole life rewriting the same page,” she writes in Float. “It is a page with ‘Essay on Translation’ written at the top and then quite a few paragraphs of good strong prose.” She admits to Peter Streckfus: “I’m not sure I’m going to find the form I want. I don’t believe it exists.” Rather than spend time deliberating, Carson instead seems happy to expose our need to pin her writing down in the first place. It is as though she prompts these questions deliberately—What genre does this text fall into? What is its form? What type or kind of book is this?—in order to respond with several questions of her own: What does it matter? Why do you care? A page devoted to Carson’s bibliography on Wikipedia bypasses this discussion too, dividing her work into three no-nonsense categories: Writings, Translations, and Contributions. In the words of Coles, “More than asking what a form is in Carson, we might do better to ask where it comes from, how it responds to a given set of ‘facts,’ how and whom it addresses, what or where are its destinies.”’ — Rowland Bagnall

 

Immaculate Imperfection: Anne Carson’s unruly art of renewal
Avoid Having a Self: On Anne Carson’s “Wrong Norma
unjoined-up thinking at its best
ON MOTIFS OF SELFNESS IN CARSON’S WRONG NORMA
Buy ‘Wrong Norma’

 

Anne Carson Wrong Norma
New Directions

‘Published here in a stunning edition with images created by Carson, several of the twenty-five startling poetic prose pieces have appeared in magazines and journals like The New Yorker and The Paris Review. As Carson writes: “Wrong Norma is a collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantánamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget’s Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night. The pieces are not linked. That’s why I’ve called them ‘wrong.’”’ — ND

Excerpt

Extras

Anne Carson: A Lecture on Corners

Presenting Nox by Anne Carson

 

 

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‘I know it’s going to sound weird, but I’m not a big porn guy. Don’t judge. Let me reassure you: I jerk off as much as the next guy, but I don’t do well with unexpected genitals and body fluids. Author Christopher Zeischegg is quite forthcoming and disarmingly honest about his years working as a porn actor in his new essay collection Creation : On Art & Unbecoming, which made my reading quite difficult, but not unrewarding in any way. It’s raw, transgressive and, for better or worst, kind of enlightening.

‘Calling Creation : On Art & Unbecoming an essay collection would be selling it short. It’s a collection of essays, autofictions and what I believe to be short stories? It’s sort of a phantasmagoric journal that folds the line between reality and fiction like a piece of paper. In one of the stories where he uses his real porn actor name Danny Wylde, Zeischeff ends up in a Columbian field without his arms and his legs. Now that ain’t true, but that’s the whole point of the endeavor. Walking that tight rope between what it real and what is felt.

‘”How the Fuck Do You Read a Book Like That?” Glad you asked. There is no right or wrong way to read transgressive fiction except perhaps checking out mentally. It is supposed to be a personal experience like all reading is, but a book like Creation : On Art & Unbecoming doesn’t give you a moral framework to operate from. It questions yours instead. One of the essays that spoke to me the most was On the Moral Imperative to Commodify Our Sexual Suffering, which wasn’t only original, but also heartfelt and unnerving in its own way.

‘In this essay, the narrator is telling a story and the assistant narrator (which acts as the narrator’s anxious brain) comments the said story and foreshadows that it is going to take a turn for the worse. I’m not gonna spoil what this story is about, but I do believe it’s an autofiction based on something that really happened to Zeischeff in his Wylde years where he extrapolated a bad ending for himself. As you read it, you can’t shake off the latent feeling that the assistant narrator is manifesting this horrible ending. …

‘Creation : On Art & Unbecoming is a different animal. It’s quite marginal, confronting and fragmented. I feel like a stiff saying this, but I like the raw emotional truth that transpired from it and the dedication Christopher Zeischegg showed to live and breathe through his creation. It isn’t exactly a mainstream pleasure (on the opposite), but it is an undeniably subversive and magnetic work of literature. If you’re sensitive around sex stuff like me, maybe proceed with care. But otherwise it’s a trip!’ — Dead End Follies

 

CHRISTOPHER ZEISCHEGG
Chris Zeischegg @ instagram
Reviewed @ Dead End Follies
The B.E.E. Podcast – 7/26/18 – Chris Zeischegg aka Danny Wylde
Buy ‘Creation’

 

Chris Zeischegg Creation: On Art and Unbecoming
Apocalypse Party

‘A phantasmagoria of the violences comprising an artist’s life. The pursuit of clout a violence of hemorrhage, of taint, of rotting from chest outward. The pursuit of intimacy a violence of sculpting, of repair, of transforming one toward divinity. How the ‘art world’ violates the divinity of creation. You can let art kill you, let it skin you and sell your hide to the highest bidder (like you have a choice). Or you can take your flayed muscle and pile it into cathedral. Here, you may find another—a surrogate twin, skinned as you’ve been—and press your blood into theirs, intermingle your capillaries, and claim, ‘Oh yes, I know you now. I always have. The rhythm of your true heart.’ It may not be truth (in fact, you know deep down for certain it cannot be), but it’s enough of a lullaby to soothe your aches; a siren’s call to rouse you to wake, to push you to your feet and move you about the world for at least another day.’ — B.R. Yeager

‘Christopher Zeischegg’s new book is a fascinating combination of essay, memoir and fiction. It opens with a new novella, which starts at the logical point to pick up from Zeischegg’s previous book, the blank and raw LA noir that was The Magician. Dark, transactional affairs are informed by selfishness and self-survival.

‘From then on, we are given a masterclass in dissection as the writer examines and pulls apart relationships of all kinds in all kinds of ways. We are shown the relationship between an artist and their work. We are made to think about the relationship between art and the viewer–we are all pulled in.

‘One of the main focuses seems to be on the body. The bodies that we all have. How do we use these bodies? How are our bodies used? What happens when there is no pleasure left in the body that we have and what if there never was?

‘Ultimately though, Creation casts its view on friendship. Using the artist Luka Fisher as a muse, a character, a subject of documentary, Zeischegg can consider the notion of platonic friendship—​what it means to have a friendship without transaction, and how do you really know someone? It’s a powerful thing to be witness to, and it’s a moving thing.

‘Creation is an excitingly original book made by one of our sharpest contemporary writers. It is a book with so much going on inside it that it is still with me now, after multiple reads. And each time the reader rethinks it, they can’t help but rethink themselves.” — Thomas Moore

Excerpt (Preface)

My father called me in 2018, shortly after the publication of my pseudo-memoir, Body to Job, a book that read as both a sincere account of my career in pornography and a violent piece of auto-fiction.

I believed that my father had seen none of my prior work and had no interest in discovering what I’d written on the subjects of sex, identity, and money. Yet, I’d told him of my new book and that it had received some positive reviews. I suppose I’d wanted him to be proud of me.

He purchased Body to Job as a gesture of support and flipped through, as one might do with a book one owned but found unreadable. Then, he came across a sentence I’d placed somewhere near the end: “I heard about my father’s death on the first day of my new job.”

*

My father’s voice was quiet and filled with hurt. He asked what I meant by all of it, the story I’d written that blended fiction with reality, that carried facts about my life, my father’s interests and his failings and also many lies.

I tried to explain that I’d meant no affront against him (false) and that I worked in a tradition spawned by artists I admired. He listened while I spoke of my minutiae. When I was done, he laughed, as if to say he understood. “You just like complaining.”

I thought for a moment and decided what he’d said was true. My writing was the sort befit by grievances. I was of my time, a millennial writer. I penned books about my sexual exploits, scorched-earth relationships, lack of money, and dreams of unearned grandeur. Early on, I’d likely blamed my unhappiness on capitalism.

I laughed with my father and made a joke of the whole thing. Yet, I couldn’t help myself from turning back toward my addiction. I wrote myself into another novel and wrote my family too.

*

My father called again in 2018 to say that he had cancer. I went to visit him and talked by his side while he lay on his deathbed. It seemed cruel and also wonderful that we saved our best conversations for the end.

He passed something on to me in his stories, the way he lived, perhaps his blood: his belief that the profound existed just beyond his grasp.

My father was prone to yearly revelations. “I’ve been looking for this all my life,” he’d say about a new discovery in his work, a spiritual philosophy, a way to relate to men or to his wife. The next year was the same; the past held disappointment; there was hope in something new.

I made fun of him behind his back for repeating his own patterns. Then I became a man entrenched in cycles that felt impossible to flee from.

How could I fault him?

He was searching.

I, his son, was searching too.

*

In compiling my texts, a collection of a book titled Creation, I came across some great embarrassments. Patterns emerged, at least these two:

1. I wrote mostly about myself as a dumb hooker.

2. My characters were often those closest to me – my family, friends, and foes. At my worst, it seemed a joke to paint them purely awful.

What did I mean to fantasize about my father’s death while he still lived? I couldn’t say. But in his absence, I loved him. He remained a hole inside my chest.

*

I went on stacking stories for the book, adding essays too, repeating to myself that what I’d written had much to say on art and violence, subjects that seemed dear to me despite my lack of clear position.

Sex work was a theme that wove through all but a few. Because I’d been a pornstar, hustler, and camboy. Sometimes proudly, on a soapbox, claiming I’d earned some kind of freedom. Though, time had clouded every nuance that I’d labeled ‘good’ or else ‘political.’ In retirement, I learned to let my body rage and seize. My memory of porn was like an ocean, vast and punishing; at times, there seemed serenity or an exploration of the deep that few had shared. All in all, I felt myself a piece of driftwood, thrashed about without control.

(cont.)

Extras

Christopher Zeischegg & Thomas Moore in Conversation

[NSFW] Somesuch Presents: Danny Wylde

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Well, one of those fun houses, Urgewalt der Giganten, is in Prater, hint hint. For me, coke kind of electrified me, made me feel sharp, energised, and more extroverted. The problem is it makes you want to keep doing it, and, when you do it a lot, you don’t feel right without it. Nice that you connected with Anita’s mom. Aw, thanks for using your love card on the Kunstverein. Love writing a dissertation about his usage during the hippie era, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, I remember Pat Sharp by looks. I don’t know how or when I would have seen him. I do see the mullet sneaking into Parisians’ hair-based repertoire. Not in a bonafide phenomenon way, but here and there. ** Harper, Hi, Harper. Congrats on the big break. I would imagine it’ll stop feeling strange very soon. And obviously get your throat righted ASAP. I always carry a nicotine patch with me in case the metro breaks down lengthily while I’m on it. That is a lovely, funny Nabokov quote. That dude could write. I hate first drafts too. It’s like purgatory. Eyes on the prize (aka editing, which I do love). Forage on, though. It’ll be worth it. How’s it going at the very moment? ** Allegra, Hi, A. Thanks! That is kind of beautiful to think about, the blind knocker over guy. Poem-like kind of. Thanks for link. I’ll devour that. I used to know this famous body builder Lisa Lyons. Mapplethorpe photographed her a lot. She was married to this experimental novelist I knew. She never seemed to do anything but lift weights, but I guess she must’ve. Anyway, blah blah, I thought the same thing about Bean 4. Amazing that there was even one. Happy day! ** Otto, Hi. What a nice image: the kid so swallowed up by a ball pit that he couldn’t be found. I’m looking for ideas for Zac’s and my new film, and maybe I’ll swipe that one. How nice: you getting that Tobin Sprout album. It’s a really good one. Um, I really love ‘Water on the Boater’s Back’. And, what else, ‘All Used Up’, ‘Get Out of My Throat’, … Enjoy. Oh, shit, I don’t have anything to do with that Dennis Cooper site, but I told the guy it was down months ago, and he said that was a mistake and he would restore it, but I guess he didn’t. I’ll push him again. Thanks. ** Justin, Hi. Well, of course, I think you seriously need to go to a theme park soon, being the devotee and junkie I am. Thanks about the collection. Now I have to decide what to do with it. Hope you’re doing great, and, assuming you are, how so? ** Steve, Ah, okay, understand. So when was consumerism fun? It sounds like, relatively speaking, it’s okay and par for the course with your parents. That’s good, especially with wifi. The Ethiopian was great. Zac’s and my favorite Ethiopian place went out of business some months ago, or we thought it had since the front was boarded up, but we just found out they didn’t die, they just moved from the Left Bank to Montmartre, so it was great to relive the tastes. The Ethiopian place I like in the East Village is on Avenue A just north of Tompkins Square Place. Is that where you got sick? ** Derek McCormack, D! I thought or hoped you might like that batch. Yay! Yeah, I’m waiting to hear possible dates! I haven’t read at the Poetry Project since the 80s, I think, and to break the dry spell with you, whoa! Love, me. ** Brightpath, Hey Brightpath. Oh, yes, don’t read my blog while driving. Incompatibility central there. I’m glad you’re through whatever rough patch in the program. If your profs want to have a coffee with me, I’ll talk you up, not that you need an external enhancer. With Wenders, I would concentrate on the earlier films, up through ‘Wings of Desire’. I don’t think his fiction films are so good after that. Uh, hm, so many great filmmakers to pore though. Terence Malick? Godard is a god, if you haven’t done him. What are you working on right now if anything? ** Darby😴🛌, Hi. Ace on the conquering of your cassette library. I have read Gunter Grass, but not for ages. I remember it being very serious, and, yes, very German. Huh, I’ll dip back in. If I’m doing what I usually do, staying home and working, I don’t do breakfast. If I have to go and do things, I’ll stuff something in my mouth for fuel in the mornings. I do kind of miss cereal. Grape Nuts particularly. And pancakes. Mushrooms rot away really quickly, so I’m careful about buying them. Just last night I ate a very delicious nutella and banana crepe, in fact. I grew up with a trampoline in my backyard, and I miss it too. I won a few trampoline jumping contests when I was a kid. I still have the blue ribbons somewhere. ** Uday, Hi. Oh, frozen, duh. I used to even like canned pears, but I don’t think I could handle them now. Our film has a haunted house where nothing scary or particularly exciting happens, so I like that non-event idea. Uh, it’s not very much like Denton Welch, but when people ask for recommendations, I often immediately recommend Agota Kristof’s ‘The Book of Lies’ novel trilogy (‘The Notebook’, ‘The Proof’, ‘The Third Lie’). One of the truly great novels, and not nearly read enough. So, that. Exciting day, awesome, and enjoy your recovery. ** Okay. Up there are five books I read of late that I recommend to all of you. Have a look. See you tomorrow.