Please welcome to the world … Mark Gluth Come Down To Us & Mark Gluth and Steven Purtill Crippled Symmetry (Kiddiepunk Press)

A girl and her twin brother watch a storm from the living room of an empty house while a sense of apprehension overtakes them. As the twins move through the house, it becomes an archetypal space from which a series of horrific actions unspool, leading to a sense of overwhelming dread that consumes them both. Focused on a murder and a series of events that both follow and precede it, “Come Down To Us” — written in Mark Gluth’s characteristically unmistakable voice- is a labyrinthine, dream-like world in which motifs recur, fluctuate, and vanish within cycles of overlapping narratives that transcend reason.

“A meticulous little masterwork at once topographically detailed and as privy as a hallway bleared by smoke machines. A novel where every slightest movement counts and every word hinges on the next word and every syllable matters like a lit firecracker.” – DENNIS COOPER on Come Down To US

Come Down To Us
Crippled Symmetry

 

 

Some Other and Separate Iteration: An Interview with Mark Gluth and Steven Purtill by Sam Moss

[Introduction]

We come to fiction with a set of assumptions, basic rules we expect to build the work’s world and which, through their evolution, will bring us to places of novel beauty. It is an uncommon sort of work which effortlessly teaches us a new set of rules from which fiction can be built and brings us to conclusions, realizations and beauty far distant from those we have experienced before.

Through two novels (‘The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis’ [Little House on the Bowery/Akashic], ‘No Other’ [Sator]) and a collection of linked short stories (‘The Goners’ [Kiddiepunk]) Mark Gluth has developed a style – practically a genre in itself – that is at once terrifying, mind-bending, full of challenge and utterly heartbreaking. While these works use some tropes and tactics found in literary and horror fiction it would be a mistake to categorize Gluth’s style as one or the other. Influenced by diverse sources like Marie Redonnet, the players and drama of the WNBA, perfume criticism, Mikhail Nesterov and Black Metal among others, Gluth has a broad artistic gaze and his syntheses of these source materials is utterly singular.

On reading one of Gluth’s work one is immediately struck by the prose style: deceptively simple, marked by short, declarative sentences whose brevity approaches incantatory cadence. This rhythm is occasionally broken by sentences which truncate or invert, wrenching the reader’s attention onto the page. Rich imagery blooms throughout, especially in descriptions of the forests, fields and seasides that the work’s characters inevitably explore. Ubiquitous dripping moss and mud-slicked trails, isolated train stations and storm-wracked rectories, inspired by Gluth’s Pacific Northwest surroundings, serve not only as a backdrop but work further to set the psychological background, evoking a Cascadian Gothic. This world is peopled by characters that, through significant descriptive restraint, appear at first to be ineluctably distant from the reader. It is through the open channel of a pervasive sadness, their utter loss and bereavement that the reader ultimately finds a reflection of themselves in their own sadness, their own loss.

These tangible elements lull the reader into a sense of normalcy, but the true heart of each work is some paranormal element so quiet, so subtle, as to be almost invisible: the titular works of Margaret Kroftis, [the brother in no other], the many (or few) ‘goners’, who all appear to slip through time, space or existence without comment. Dream and waking, text and substance, past and present, life, death and identity weave, fade and interpolate. These occurrences resist explanation and gesture toward a logic beyond logic. Ultimately the metaphysics of these worlds are irrelevant, rather it is the human toll, the emotional complexity, these events generate which take precedence. These events often pass by so quietly that Gluth’s works not only reward rereading wonderfully, they almost require it to blossom fully. At less than two-hundred pages each, the effort is always worth it.

It might be most accurate to categorize Gluth’s work as a sort of literary Drone: moment to moment the narrative varies in minor ways but through the passage of time, the accumulation of moments, the interaction of far distant allusions, powerful emotional and spiritual overtones emerge just at the edge of human perception.

I spoke with Mark about two upcoming works: his newest novel Come Down To Us which will be released by Kiddiepunk this summer, and ‘Notre Mort’ a short film he cowrote with Kiddiepunk editor Micheal Salerno. ‘Come Down to Us’ can be purchased directly from Kiddiepunk. Additionally, I spoke with the artist Steven Purtill with whom Mark worked on the zine Crippled Symmetry which is paired with Come Down To Us in an expanded addition.

 

[Interview]

SM: While the setting in your stories is never explicit, the atmosphere – the weather, plants, earth, air and light – plays a huge role in the work. Can you speak to influences on this atmosphere?

MG: Yeah, I’m not a fan of defining time or location or whatever in any overt way because it’s sort of beside the point to me. In a general sense, though, I do have to say that each sentence in my books has a very specific visual I think about, but those are all within me. As far as your question, I live in Bellingham, Washington which I find very compelling aesthetically. Just grey, rainy. Really awesome skies projected behind black trees. At least in the non-summer seasons. It’s so great.

In CDTU, there’s some of that. There’s forests and shores and stuff, but I also had a kind of retro or nostalgic feeling about certain interior spaces. So I wanted to capture how like, my aunt’s house felt when I was growing up, or how a normal suburban living room can be super compelling to kids because of the way they can view it in a totally different context than just whatever space they’re occupying. So there’s that in it. Also, I was (and am) into the Salinger story Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut to a ridiculous degree, and I kinda want CDTU to be an homage to it. I love the feeling it has with 2 characters in a upper middle class living room. But I kinda wanted the locations to have a sort of archetypal vibe. Like a clearing in the woods, placed in all these different contexts, always has the same sort of meaning because a clearing is a such a powerful thing unto itself. Or like a suburban house. But I don’t want it to be too defined. I like it to be blurry, a bit. I was also heavily influenced by the paintings of Mikhail Nesterov. So there’s a bit of that too.

SM: Your work – so far most notably in The Goners – plays with and examines your character’s identities in ways that are astonishing and novel but which resist easy description. In CDTU we are repeatedly brought to characters described as ‘the boy’ and ‘the girl’, various iterations of which share some characteristics and differ in others.

Do you have any formal or effable thoughts on identity that you can share?

MG: I think I like really liminal things. I also like a sense of mystery as it relates to those things. In the Goners, and CDTU, I guess having characters that are something whilst also being something else is a way I can portray that. I kinda like the idea that the edges of something can give way to something infinite. My writing hasn’t really captured that successfully though. But yeah, I assume a lot of art I love employs techniques that kinda do that to the characters….Most of everything Lynch has done after Dune in one way or another has it, my favorite book of all time The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie by Agota Kristof does too, Alain Robbe-Grillet’s books often do. It’s not like I came up with it or anything.

SM: There are these particular sentence constructions that you started deploying in No Other and have expanded on further in CDTU. These constructions use the unnatural – even alien sounding to the English speaker’s ear – Object-Verb-Subject and Object-Subject-Verb forms (e.g. ‘The shapes of things seemed long as the trio moved through them’ and ‘Her cupped hands were what she gulped from.’).

Aside from the effect on the sound of the sentences, these construction could act as a statement of agency or will; objects take syntactic primacy over the the subject, so that it appears as if the characters are being acted on by the world around them.

Do you have any thoughts on free will or agency, either in the world(s) of your novels or in our own world?

MG: I’m not sure I’ve ever thought about it, but after reading your question my immediate reaction was that all the characters in my books have total free will. A) because that’s my perspective, but also B) because it makes the narrative function more fully, with more emotional weight. But then I started thinking about it, and for what it’s worth, I don’t believe the brother and sister in CDTU – who are what I guess you could call the main characters – consistently behave with agency over their own actions. In CDTU I felt a sense of nightmarishness, like I wanted that to pervade the book, and I think this feeling of the subconscious overwhelming the conscious played into that. As far as your example, I always work on sentences and paragraphs until they feel right to me, and sometimes I’m going for a certain rhythm in the overall paragraph where one oddball sentence fits into that, or there are things that come after or before the sentence that lead me to that kind of phrasing. But a lot of times it’s just something that strikes me in a sentence and I just go with it. But yeah, I do view all the elements of my books as essentially equal, so like ‘a girl sitting in a room watching light come through a window’…’the girl’ is the same as ‘the light’ to me.

SM: You use some nonstandard or archaic contractions (‘neath’, ‘wash’d’ et c.) in CDTU. What influenced this choice?

MG: I dunno. I have a hard time agreeing there was a choice as that infers I was aware of what I was doing and I’m often not when I’m writing/revising. I work on my sentences a ton, rewriting and revising, and any of those contractions just ended up feeling correct in the sentences that worked the best for me. I do think I kinda prefer sentences that have a chatiness to them, beneath a formal seeming surface, and the contractions feel kinda chatty to me. Or I just removed syllables to make the rhythm of the sentence flow better. Thinking about it now, I’d say contractions that we are not used to hearing or seeing can make things more complicated, and I’m usually a fan of situations that become complicated by way of removing an element.

SM: Artists who make cryptic or abstract work tend to take one of a few different attitudes toward their work: some enjoy explaining ‘what is below the surface’, some – including one of the notable influences on your own work, David Lynch – prefer to allow the reader to form their own conclusions or otherwise shy away from exposition, while others state that there is ‘nothing beneath the surface’. Which camp do you fall into?

MG: I like a sense of mystery. I love when I don’t understand something, and conversely having a thorough understanding of something feels really dead to me. Truthfully, there’s parts of CDTU that I don’t understand fully, and that’s by design. To me, any book is a whole thing and it might be interesting to talk about how it functions, but not in any manner that makes the sense of mystery leave. In CDTU, disparate and sometimes contradictory sections sort of accumulate, and they aren’t placed in conventional narrative structure. The way I saw it while writing it is that the accumulation is kinda the main thing, whatever is there for the reader after they’ve read the last word is the point.

SM: Is the Natasha Howard the second epigraph quotes the WNBA player?

MG: Totally the WNBA player. She’s an amazing player, but more than that. To paraphrase Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, ‘she’s more than an athlete, she’s an artist’. On offense she has really great footwork, which coupled with her shot making ability makes her really impactful. But her true shining moments are on defense. She’s a great shot blocker and turnover creator.

SM: The title of the novel Come Down to Us comes from a song by the artist Burial. Can you point out other influences on the novel?

MG: Oh, um. Burial for sure. I love the way he takes his music and creates structurally complex suites like things. Also, I’ve gotten into perfume criticism of late, and understanding how perfumes are structured, how perfume is an art. I try to take what I learn from that and apply it to fiction. A well composed perfume develops, and different notes and accords fade in and out for aesthetic reasons. I tried to do that with CDTU … have different aspects of the fiction come in and out of focus, with no concern for linear narrative coherence. Also, the music of Morton Feldman. I don’t have a vocabulary to really discuss it in any serious way, but I find it really compelling. Also, I’ve been doing screenwriting with my pal Michael Salerno, and this is the first thing I’ve written after working on texts structured around what they will become when they are filmed. It gets more complicated, thinking, perhaps, more visually, than I am used to. Aside from that, the whole idea started with this Hardy Boys book I found at the used store. The Witchmaster’s Key. I posted a picture of it on Instagram and the writer Gregory Howard commented that I should rewrite it. That kinda struck me as a good idea. So I dropped the novel in progress on which I was working, and started on this. I never read the book but I based the initial draft off of the chapter titles. This is the first of my books where I wrote an initial draft that was designed to be a complete thing. I rearranged and edited heavily after it.

SM: What was the process of writing Notre Mort like?

MG: Well, Michael and I are kinda very similar in many ways and he liked my Instagram which led him to reaching out to me. I loved his film Silence and somewhere in conversation we decided we should write a film together. He had a bunch of ideas that he’d been collecting for decades for this one particular project, and he sent them all to me. Out of that I assembled a very rough draft that kinda allowed the ideas to cohere, then we went back and forth for like for five years, adding stuff, removing stuff, reimagining things….I think the whole time we both felt like we were centimeters away from being done, but obviously we weren’t. Anyway, towards the end of that process a producer agreed to give Michael some euros to make a short film, which ended up being Notre Mort. In both cases there was an idea, or ideas, and then we kinda had a back and forth, the way a band might jam when they’re writing a song. I think Michael and I have very similar ways of looking at things and thinking, and unique skill sets as individuals that compliment each other.

As far as a role in the film making? Not really. Michael is super generous about soliciting feedback and stuff, but he’s the filmmaking genius. For the feature length film we wrote GIANT, which he just finished shooting, he’s talked about using some images from my Instagram in the film, which I’m all honored by, particularly because I don’t really consider myself a visual art person.

SM: Many of your previous works deal in some way with ‘life and death’ or ‘the afterlife’ but you seldom come out right and invoke these by name. Was there something specific that caused you to refer to ‘the afterlife’ explicitly in Notre Mort?

MG: Not really, I guess considering the types of ideas I find compelling, my work was bound to eventually cross into some sort of metaphysical place. But even with Notre Mort Michael brought the afterlife stuff to it. My initial idea which started the whole thing was kind of simpler and blanker.

joyful thing @ instagram
joyful thing @ blogspot
cultoftusk @ bandcamp

 

Interview with Steven Purtill/BLACK DROP & Crippled Symmetry

Sam Moss: Tell us a little about yourself, what sort of art you make, projects you have been a part of etc.

Steven Purtill: I think of most of the stuff I make as collage I guess, since I almost always work with found images which are manipulated and repurposed, if not always juxtaposed or assembled. If I use original images they are treated in the same way. I try to blur the line a bit by taking stills from video footage in many cases. So it actually is an original image in some way. Aside from still images, I have done a fair number of video and audio works, installations, etc. I’ve been very lucky to collaborate with a couple of my favorite writers – Mark Gluth and Thomas Moore, and to have been published by Kiddiepunk and Amphetamine Sulphate, two presses whose output I dedicatedly follow and collect.

SM: What are some of your influences? (visual art, music, literature, cinema, anything that you think is relevant)

SP: I’m sure all kinds of influences come into whatever I do but I’m not always so aware of it. I could waste a lot of space listing artists in all of those mediums that I love… When I was sort of initially starting to do the kind of thing I do now I was into a lot of film and video art – Kurt Kren, Paul Sharits, Valie Export, Peter Tscherkasky, Stanya Kahn, Gary Hill, Jordan Wolfson, Ryan Trecartin, Andy Warhol, Mike Kelly, to name a few. Outside of video Dennis Cooper, Thomas Moore, Simon Johan, Michael Salerno, Kier Cooke Sandvik, and Philip Grandrioux seem relevant. I’m not sure how much of that is influence or just inspiration.

SM: How did you meet Mark? What is it that draws you to his work? Was there anything in particular that drove you toward Come Down to Us?

SP: I came across Mark’s writing first. I picked up his debut novel because it was published by Dennis Cooper’s imprint at the time. I’ve been a huge fan of Cooper’s since I was a teenager. The book made a deep impression and Mark’s style really got to me immediately. After seeing that he inexplicably lived in the same smallish town as me, I think I made contact through Dennis’s blog. We soon met up for coffee, which is still our standard practice. Many things about Mark’s writing appeal to me – the spareness, the melancholic emotional weight that is conveyed so effectively and devastatingly with seemingly so little. But it’s his prose, I just love reading his sentences. He creates a mood that is completely his own.

SM: For your collaboration with Mark, what drove the decision making for the sections you pulled to use from Come Down to Us?

SP: Mark gave me the text for Crippled Symmetry before the novel was completed if I remember correctly. I had little to no real awareness of the larger context and reacted to it as a complete work. I was aware it was related to a longer piece, and to the content used in BLACK DROP, which was done before.

SM: What can you say about the process of making these works? The images, the sounds, the text and their relationship. How did they come to you, where did they come from, how were they made?

SP: In both cases the works began with Mark’s texts. Responding to these visually was pretty natural to me since his stuff consistently evokes imagery for me when I read it. I never try to illustrate a text, but I try to react empathetically, for lack of a better term. The audio stuff involved a lot more back and forth between us, as Mark’s actual voice was included and we needed to find a point where he was happy with that. The main sound source besides his voice came from Hildegard von Bingen’s music, a shared love of ours.

SM: Some of your earlier work [i.e. vimeo and some other content I could find online] looks at childhood, especially the darker parts of being a kid and teenager. Doser [I think this is the title, correct this if wrong] for instance takes these naive, childhood rituals, these forays into things unknown, and amplifies the terror and confusion that comes along with them. This sits in very closely with the aesthetic Come Down to Us and most of Mark’s other works evoke.

What can you say about childhood, and that unique terror that comes along with it? What draws you to this aesthetic?

SP: When I was in school (as an adult) I was once told by a visiting artist that I was self medicating for personal trauma with my work and should seek therapy as soon as possible. While that interpretation was pretty out of line and misguided, there may be a kernel of truth there. Whatever it is that drives me to do what I do goes back to childhood. The anxiety and confusion I deal with today is an echo of something that started when I was young. Also, I have an interest in physical representation of emotional states, like involuntary facial and body language driven by emotion. This is much easier to see in younger people maybe because they haven’t learned to effectively hide their feelings yet? I think the way we treat children and childhood, adolescence, etc. is kind of strange so I guess I try to look at things differently based on my own experience to some degree.

Steven Purtill @ Vimeo
stpurtill @ instagram

 

END

 

Interviewer Bio: Samuel M. Moss is from Cascadia. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Dim Shores Presents, Vastarien and decomP among other venues. He cohosted Hespera, a quarterly reading series in Minneapolis concerned with the distant and ineffable and is an associate editor and web lead at 11:11 Press. He travels between, lives on and writes within North American public wilderness land. More at perfidiousscript.blogspot.com and on twitter @perfidiouscript

 

Excerpts

The sea rose then clipped against it’s own rise. Directionless wind drafted thin on the pricked surface. Collapsing white caps capped black swells then. The wind wore at the shore, all the land beyond it. Swept at trees brushed buildings they grew beside. The girl sat up in bed. Tears ran down her cheeks as crushed feelings buried her. Rain drowned out the sound of her crying. She lay back. The line beneath her door was hall light. Her hand felt damp when she coughed into it. Something caught in her throat. She closed her eyes, or the dark room fell away revealing something darker. Her dream masked how sleep’s so unloaded: These woods were dark the way fire is bright. Rain rattled leaves above her head. She came on a clearing. It was inseparable from this other clearing the way she was inseparable from herself. She just knew it. She felt like she was falling. Twigs hooked at her feet. The woods and the clearing all fell away. Blood pooled on damp grass. The surface of this pond was all tumult and bloody foam. The sky looked blurry like she was beneath something that smeared it. It looked so beautiful she began to cry.

 

The girl thought her eyes were shut though they were so wide. She bit her cheek. Coat liners pressed on her neck. The boy’s name rang when she shouted. It gave way to train sounds the way the air gave way when she reached wildly for him. Knocked over luggage jogged the cupboard door. She pushed it to the side. A draft ran on her arm. She hit the door with her shoulder. This strip of light lay on the floor beneath it. It shook when she saw it like her voice did when she said her brother’s name again. She felt the grain of the door-wood on her palms. The tip of her index finger bore along the hinge seam then the jamb. She knew it, that there was no way that the thoughts that ran through her head could help her run away from where it was that she was. She undid her sit, hugged herself. There was a sound then, like if a tight cable snapped then slapped back on itself before it turned slack. Her ears popped. She fell after being thrown. The train started to sink. The girl was a crumpled and pinned thing on the ceiling. The cupboard filled like a lake dumped into a tub. She choked when she gulped air. She arched her back when she tried to breach a surface that didn’t exist.

 

The girl dreamt of light. She woke. A bare bulb showed from in a recessed fixture. Her eyes darted as she turned. It was her brother that she didn’t see anywhere near her in the train station. A wall sign reflected streaks on its’ glass facing. She walked past a brochure rack, said her brother’s name. Her footsteps rang as she walked to the doors that led to the street. She walked through them and into the rectory foyer. Her fingers ran on the wall paper. This door handle didn’t turn. She walked to the end of the foyer and into the living room. The corners were dim the way the lines where the ceiling met the walls were.

 

This afternoon was what everything occurred within. Idling engines made the rail yard smell like diesel smoke. Sun showed on tracks, the hill they ran beneath. Heat shimmered off a tiestack past the edge of a train-shadow. Chipped ballast locked against other ballast as workers walked on it. The building they made towards was in front of the sun. Thus how the bricks came off as golden. This girl and boy detrained from the back of a passenger car. They ducked then strode through clangs and whines. The sky arced blue. Gulls drifted high and distant. The kids came away from where the trains were. The yard was just open where they stood. The sun fell on their faces and their arms.

 

 

*

p.s. RIP Phil May (The Pretty Things) ** Hey. This weekend the blog has the supreme pleasure of doing its part to help usher Mark Gluth’s new novel and Gluth & Stephen Purtill’s ltd. ed. (act fast!) collaborative zine Crippled Symmetry into this wreck of a current world. I can tell you that Come Down To Us is just incredible, and I very strongly recommend you grab and read it at the soonest possible opportunity i.e. this weekend (at least for the grabbing part). Use your local time to scour the post until further notice, please. Thanks! ** chris gugino, Hi. Oh, you’re your real self. Steely Dan is great. They’re like ABBA for brainiacs. I’m on board. I’ll go find that Beauty Pill thing. Fuck knows when I’ll be able to get stateside again. For now, if I did, I’d be quarantined for two weeks on arrival and then I wouldn’t be able to come back to France since its borders are locked to non-French people for who knows how long, for instance. Plan is for a Halloween trip to LA if that’s possible by then. I’m beginning to doubt it will be. Uh, … I’m pretty sure I haven’t done a Natasha Lyonne Day. Some of them say that. Well, hang in there whatever it takes, bud. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. The escorts over here in Europe are back in business in some way or other now that we’re free to come and go, or rather cum and go. ** Ian, Hi. You love them because they’re awesome, ha ha? Tell your girlfriend it’s all about the text, about how objectifiers and self-objectifiers experiment with ‘the personal address’ because, honestly, that’s my interest in those posts, with the photos just being either proof positive or examples of unlikely juxtaposition. Being back inside bookstores is so nice. And you can even smell that bookstore smell, albeit slightly, through one’s mask. Wait, is Nitepain you? Is that guess logical? If so, or if not, I’ll go follow that link and see what’s going on shortly. Thank you! Everyone, If you hit this link, you might (or, as this has yet to be confirmed, might not) end up on the blog of our fine d.l. and scribe Ian, and, in any case, that little trek will do you a world of good. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. Yeah, using memes as sex ad tools is not uncommon. I’m pretty sure I’ve had a number of meme-using escorts or slaves here before? ** Dominik, I did notice, or, okay, plan that this week was particularly beset with the dark and out-there and scary/sexy, I will admit. And I think the pile-up worked like a charm maybe. Well, there you go: Jung. I’m waiting for Zac to get back to me with his thoughts on my script transformation attempt and, assuming he thinks there’s something there, add his considerable input. Gisele is pushing me to read it, but she won’t see it until/if Zac and I are confident about it. I like it. It needs something/work. But I like it. Oh, shit, about your panic attack. Understood, though. Big shifts are stressful before they actually happen. For me, at least. But then they happen, and you’re, like, ‘Oh, this is fine. This is great.’ You’re moving to Amsterdam? Is that new news? Am I spacing out? Wow. That seems like a good idea, no? Cool. I’m glad you’ve becalmed. My yesterday was pretty nothing. Walked around, emails, a bit of work. Today I’m venturing over to the Marais to see which (if any) galleries or chocolatiers or bookshops or falafel take-out places or etc. are open and get the new vibe in that part of town. And you? Any cool weekend plans, or, well, weekend goals accomplished? Ha. I think that particular form of love for which you feel impatient will arrive on June 1st, I’m told. Love that keeps hitting the SCAB link repeatedly while anxiously awaiting the new and amazing, Dennis. ** Bill, Hi. One of the big sites where I gather escorts is based in Germany, and I think the posts end up being dominated by the Germans most months? The escort posts are unreliable narrator central. And let’s not even talk about the slave posts, whoa. I agree, although it would probably be safer to do a GoFundMe thing since meeting that goal isn’t a slam dunk. I think I will mosey over to effedupmovies.com this weekend, thank you very much. I am in the mood for some Dots, so thank you yet again and even more so. Have a fine weekend however it transpires. ** Jeff J, Yes, the clockwork escort posts are a good reminder that the world remains the world. Phil Seymour’s album … it’s not great. He’s great, his voice is great. Not all of the material on that album is. If you’re loving Twilley, I would give it a spin. There are a few excellent tracks on there, the ones that sound the most like his work with Twilley basically. Yes, exciting about Ken’s book. And last I checked, it was basically funded already. When Blake Butler was here last year he mentioned to me about those novels by Ken, but then I forgot. I’m tracking them down almost as I type. ** Steve Erickson, Hey. Thank you. I have no doubt I will enjoy that parody. New bed, new sleep, new you, whoo-hoo! Mm, here is not there, but we’re all falling right back into our friendships and acquaintanceships and other relations like time hadn’t passed over here pretty much. ** Corey Heiferman, You feel that way about people you aren’t even paying for sex?! Dude. If memory serves, I don’t believe I line-edited ShitTwink’s text. It’s possible he’d written an intro or outdo that I found extraneous and cut, I can’t remember. Today is my galleries and Mexican food — although I’m more in the mood for falafel now — searching day, so we’ll see. Yesterday ended up being a wash for no good reason. Thanks for the teleport invite, but I hate heatwaves more than words can describe, so I will decline politely. Although gazpacho is very hard to reject. Oh, separate tracks, gotcha. Cool. ** Right. Do let the birth(s) of Mark Gluth’s and Steven Purtill’s book/zine fill you with exuberance! See you on Monday.