Author: DC (Page 692 of 1093)

* (restored)
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(photo: Dorothy Dean’s portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe)

 

(photo: Dorothy Dean and Jackie Curtis)

 

Let’s begin at the end, shall we?

—-“Dorothy Dean, a former editor for The New Yorker and for such publishers as Times Books and Harry N. Abrams, died of cancer Friday at the Hospice of St. John in Denver. She was 54 years old and lived in Boulder, Colo.
—-Ms. Dean had also held editorial positions at Vogue magazine and at Harper & Row. From 1963 to 1964, she was a member of The New Yorker’s research department – then called the fact-checking department. At her death, she was a proofreader for The Daily Camera newspaper, published in Boulder.
—-Ms. Dean was born in White Plains. She was a graduate of Radcliffe College, and earned a master’s degree in fine arts at Harvard University. She also studied art history on a Fulbright scholarship in Amsterdam.”

As these things go, fairly accurate. But not accurate enough for Dorothy, the ultimate “stickler for details.” So let’s turn the floor over to my long-time saddle pal Bill Reed who writes of her in his matchless memoir Early Plastic (o.o.p., but available on eBay):

The following definition of the genus fag hag (you won’t find the term in Webster’s) appears in The Queen’s Vernacular: A Gay Lexicon, by Bruce Rogers:
—-“Some are plain janes who prefer the honest affection of homoerotic boy friends; others are on a determined crusade to show gay boys that normal coitus is not to be overlooked. A few are simply women in love with homosexual men; others discover to their chagrin that their male friends are charming but not interested sexually.”
—-All of which-and much more. except for the chagrin part-was true of my friend Dorothy Dean. The Mother of All Fag-Hags, she felt the term had an ugly ring to it, and much preferred “Fruit Fly.” I didn’t get to know her until some time after her mid-1950s glory years during which she was the Queen Bee of a Harvard set that operated out of the Casablanca bar (where Edie Sedgewick later came to shine). And where the men that she hung with —none of whom had any notion that there was anything coming down the line called gay lib—looked to her as a kind of ultimate arbiter of style, attitude and taste. She was an outrageous woman who would say things that no one they had ever met before would dare utter. She would tell people to their face exactly what she thought of them and continued to play this role later on in a number of different contexts. It was almost inevitable that Dorothy would become part of Andy Warhol’s Factory circle, where it was demanded that people be outrageous and try to top one another. But that scene had pretty much disappeared by the time my boyfriend David and I met her in the Seventies. Her breakup with longtime closest friend Arthur Loeb was indicative of a lot of dissolutions and changes that were going on within the social scene. Gay militancy had to some degree turned the fag-hag into a symbol of the past, both in its traditional cheer-leader style and even in Dorothy’s overwhelming she-who-must-be-obeyed approach. In addition, unlike your garden variety fag-hag who fears sex, Dorothy wanted to get it on with her boys-she wasn’t afraid of anything-and was equally inclined toward heterosexual inamorata.
—-Complex to a fault, Dorothy was the sweetest, brightest, and most frightening woman I have ever known. I met her in 1970 while working at a bookstore owned by her friend Arthur, the inspiration for the Dudley Moore movie of the same name (or so it has always seemed to me) and a member of a prominent New York family long perched in the more vertiginous heights of New York’s 400. In exchange for their son’s pledge to put aside his legendarily dissolute lifestyle, Arthur was being backed to the hilt by his parents in this literary emporium that advertised itself as “a carriage trade” operation in the classified ad that I answered for a job. I was on staff when the place opened, and although Dorothy wasn’t an employee, she was so omnipresent a fixture that she seemed like staff. My boyfriend David was dazzled when he found out she hung out at the place.
—-Working for Arthur was not at all like work. A past master of the zippy comeback department, one day an East Side matron came into the store and with a totally straight face asked him what might he suggest for “a man who has everything and is going on safari.” Without missing a beat, he replied: “Have you considered giving him Deborah Kerr?” An avid reader of the New York Times, who always first read the bridge column and obituaries each day before getting on to the day’s less important news, Arthur said that his memoirs were going to be called (in a play on the Rocky Graziano autobiography), Somebody Down There Likes Me. I was surely as good an “audience” as Arthur was ever likely to get.
—-While she may have been black and a woman, in the final analysis, she wasn’t black and she wasn’t a woman: she was Dorothy Dean. Slight, ferret-like, and possessing coffee-with-cream skin, Dorothy wore horn-rimmed coke bottle lens glasses, usually dressed in a simple, tasteful shift dress; and was, without question, New York’s most incurable diseuse. Nearly every time I was with Dorothy, she happened to be drinking; she would invariably ask me the same question: “Did I ever tell you about the time I once danced the ‘Tennessee Waltz’ in Tennessee with Tennessee Williams?” (Which was true.) She claimed that it was one of her proudest accomplishments in life. I don’t think she was joking.

 

(photo: Henry Geldzahler and Dorothy Dean)

 

In 1995 the New Yorker ran a lengthy profile of Dorothy, entitled “Friends of Dorothy,” by which time she had been dead for nearly a decade. Fifteen years earlier the Soho Weekly News had run a picture of her at a party with “living legend” underneath it, and the New York Times contained a brief obit of her in 1987 when she died; but until the New Yorker, that was just about the only public acknowledgement of the unique part Dorothy had played in at least a half-dozen overlapping social and professional “scenes” in New York in the Sixties.
—-Hilton Als wrote in the New Yorker profile [which can be found in his collection of essays called The Women } that years after her passing, people are still “dining out on Dorothy stories.” One of the many tales not included by Als was related to me by Dorothy herself shortly after I met her. In her usual nasal drawl, which bore a remarkable resemblance to Mae West if she had gone to Radcliffe (which in fact Dorothy had), Dorothy asked me, “Have you ever heard of this person, Kris Kristofferson?” An odd question, because of course I had heard of the hyphenate performer who had just crossed over from recording artist to actor in a series of mildly interesting films such as Cisco Pike and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Dorothy then went on to tell me about a brief and intense relationship (were there any other kind for Dorothy?) with the entertainer that had taken place in Italy fifteen years earlier. She was on a Fulbright and Kristofferson was (hard to believe) a Rhodes scholar, fully one hundred eighty degrees away from the public shit-kicker image he began cultivating in the 1960’s.When it came to pass that Kristofferson resurfaced in this entirely unrecognizable form of movie star-country singer, Dorothy sprang into action. She sent him a letter excoriating him for all the cultural criminalism he was wreaking (“Jesus Was a Capricorn” has to be the all time worst song title ever, she opined) on records and in films. Her missive to him was minus a trace of for-old-times- sake sentimentalism, but instead was a request—more like a pronunciamento—that Kristofferson tithe a reparative ten percent of his considerable earnings to the New York Public Library. She never received a reply.
—-Growing up, Dorothy was felt to be exceptional. Born in 1932 to Reverend Elmer Wendell Dean and his wife, Dorothy was the first black valedictorian of White Plains High School. In 1950, she entered the gates of Radcliffe to become one of the few African-Americans on its campus. Four years later she graduated there with a bachelor’s degree, with honors in philosophy, and then went on for a masters at Harvard where at some point, Dorothy later told me, she had become pregnant by a wealthy student there. The boy, fearful of the consequences of his blue-blooded parents learning that he had impregnated a girl-and an African-American at that!-washed his hands entirely of the matter. Dorothy, even then possessing a fair share of temerity, proceeded to blow the whistle on the cad to his fraternity brothers. Forthwith they, in an act of honor, broke into the boy’s dorm room, stole a small Matisse from his wall, gave it to Dorothy, who sold it for enough to pay for an abortion-and then some. In 1956 Dorothy became pregnant once again; this time, though, she went full term before giving the child up for adoption. Some people believed the father was a Dutch student she met while on a Fulbright; others thought him a certain M.I.T professor.
—-In 1963 Dorothy, her extensive formal studies finally concluded, arrived in New York, where she was immediately taken up by a set of sad young men and bright young things, many of them relocated from Cambridge. Once again, they became seminal to her reputation as the mother of all fruit flies. Now Dorothy also found herself becoming acquainted with the world of Sixties New York debs, druggies and drag queens.
—-Some believed that Dorothy harbored toward fellow blacks an aversion bordering on loathing, as perhaps evidenced by the fact that she ofttimes referred to James Baldwin as Martin Luther Queen, and was not at all adverse to using “watermelon” and “jigaboo” rhetoric when writing or talking about blacks. While this might indicate that even Dorothy found it hard to avoid the tradition of red, white and blue racial self-loathing, it never seemed to bother her that my friend David was African-American.
—-A stickler for grammar, even in the most casual of conversations, one nearly always felt the presence of a giant red pen in Dorothy’s hand ready to strike you down and mark you up for incorrect usage. Thus, it isn’t surprising that her passion for lingual concision led to one job after another in various copy editing and proofreading capacities at such publications as Vogue, Show, the New Yorker and Essence, “the magazine that proves black is pathetic,” she once said. She was fired from the latter after suggesting that the magazine run a picture on its cover of her friend Andy Warhol in blackface.
—-As with most people of slight build, it didn’t take much in the way of intake to get Dorothy drunk. Like my mother, one drink and Dorothy was well on her way to Blotto City. One evening she came to have dinner with David and me at our apartment on West 85th Street and was as charming as ever. . .at first. But it only took a couple of glasses of wine to put her in her cups. She ended up staying the night, and was more or less a royal pain-waking David and me up, tickling us, crashing crockery to the floor, etc., until finally passing out in the wee small hours. A couple of days later we received from her a pluperfect “Miss Finch’s Day School for Young Ladies” bread and butter letter thanking us for our hospitality, except for the postscript in which she profusely apologized for her besotted behavior. We were scarcely the first to be sent such a note. These thank you/apology missives, we later learned, were a part of Dorothy’s dinner going modus operandi.
—-Dorothy often referred to herself as the Black Barbarella, but reminded me more of Dennis the Menace’s prissy friend Margaret, who wanted your friendship and was willing to lose it at any cost. In the last analysis, she was an unreconstructed hipster, cut from much the same cloth as those I had known at Stanley’s Bar on the Lower East Side.
—-At one point Dorothy was hired to guard the portals of a somewhat trendier, slightly more uptown version of Stanley’s, known as Max’s Kansas City. It was home away from home to the conglomeration of failed hippies, artist manques and Euro-trash who satellited around Andy Warhol, and had the back room of the trendy spot pretty much all to themselves. No bigger than a minute, Dorothy Dean may have been the only bouncer ever hired strictly for the brute force of her vicious tongue.

 

(photo: The Sugar Plum Fairy (Joe Campbell) in My Hustler)

 

Be they straight or gay, Dorothy specifically had a “thing” for men with high cheekbones-in fact, she could be said to have elevated such a taste to the veritable level of sexual fetish. Her small Greenwich Village apartment was dominated with the famous Personality Poster of a very handsome, young and shirtless Herb Alpert who, say what you will about his corny music, had cheekbones like the White Cliffs of Dover! The same could be said of Clint Eastwood – another Dorothy passion. But the most devastating cheekbones of all belonged to one Joe Campbell, aka the Sugar Plum Fairy who, despite that moniker, was one legendarily tough little number. A co-star of Warhol’s classic comedy of manners, My Hustler, where he does his butcher-than-thou act to the max, this demi-mondaine was the lover of Harvey Milk, when the gay-politico- martyr-to-be was a closeted New York investment banker. He was also, along with Dorothy, a major “character” in Warhol’s taped “novel” A. I never met him, but my friend David certainly did. One afternoon in the basement of the Museum of Modem Art, while waiting for the doors of the film auditorium to open for a screening of something foreign and obscure, Joe spied David (sitting demurely, leafing through a copy of the latest “Sight and Sound”), and made his move. Terrified by Joe’s ability to move from a quick hello to an even quicker “let’s go back to my apartment,” David politely declined. “You turned down The Plum!,” a horrified Dorothy exclaimed when told of the incident many years later, “How could you?” Still for all his cheekboned perfection, Joe didn’t mean as much to Dorothy as her longtime running buddy Arthur did.
—-For a couple who were not married or even sexually involved, Dorothy and Arthur were an extraordinarily famous twosome. For years they had been nearly inseparable, with their main base of operations being Andy Warhol’s inner circle; one so inner that it is unknown to all but the most well-versed in Warholian lore. In A Dorothy appears as “Dodo Mae Doom,” she’s “Gwen,” a central character in Lynne Tillman’s Cast in Doubt (Tillman also features Dorothy stories in her book about the Warhol Factory The Velvet Years); and in James McCourt’s novel, Time Remaining, she appears as herself. Additionally, she pops up as nearly herself in several Andy Warhol films, including My Hustler (a very funny walk-on in the last reel), the original cut of Chelsea Girls (her section, “Afternoon” also featured Arthur, was shot in his apartment, and somehow disappeared during the second week of the films’ initial run), and in several sequences of Warhol’s legendary 25-hour-long Four Stars. The truly Dorothy dedicated can also find her playing a secretary in Jean-Claude Van ltalie’s gay porn classic American Cream.
—-In what Dorothy later described to me as “an act of systematic sobriety,” Arthur began-shortly after opening up the rehabilitationaI therapy/retail establishment where I worked and initially met Dorothy-to slowly chop away from his life all the people and things that he felt had reduced him to his previous, pitiable alcoholic estate. Almost like he was going down a list ticking off people, influences and controlled substances one by one. Just like a tornado which first appears to be miles in front of you and then suddenly is right on top of you, Dorothy never saw her own de-annexation coming. Finally one day Arthur came to her on his mental list and, without provocation, never spoke to her again: she would come in the store, he would leave; she would phone, he would hang up. Previously thought to be as invulnerable as Margaret Thatcher crossed with Loretta Young, suddenly Dorothy was a bundle of raw nerve ends-crying like a seventh grader who had just been terminally dis-ed by someone they had been friends with for a lifetime. Dorothy begged me to intervene with Arthur, but I wouldn’t have known how to even begin, and so I spent a lot of supportive time with her in her cups, while she just sobbed over and over again. . .”Why?” She was willing to do anything, even Alcoholics Anonymous, to regain Arthur’s friendship. But the door of fraternity was inexorably slammed shut. Here was the toughest woman in New York, and she had met her Waterloo. I have never known one human being be so hurt by another’s actions. And yes, as far as I know, the once notoriously wet Arthur is still sober twenty-five years later-a feat comparable to crossing the Rubicon. Shortly after Arthur fired Dorothy from his life, he also gave me, without explanation, my walking papers as an employee. I never saw him after that.
—-Dorothy was a long time member of the National Board of Review, the fuddy duddy quasi-official film board. This was indicative of her station in life as a frustrated film critic. She once told me an hilarious story about viewing, in her capacity as a NBR member, a particularly racy foreign film, Louis Malle’s Les Amants, in which the heroine and hero are both horizontal in bed nearly naked. When the former, going down on her lover, disappeared frame left, the woman next to her began to question hysterically, “Where did she go? Where did she go?” “To the bathroom,” Dorothy answered. Which seemed to have satisfied her fellow Board member.

 

(photo: All Lavendar Courier cover)

 

Dorothy, David and I had dinner the last night before he and I moved from New York to California in 1975; but it was not the final time I heard from the “Queen of Spades” as she sometimes called herself-along with the “Spade of Queens.” In what was clearly a working out of her long suppressed desire to be a film reviewer. Dorothy began putting out her own rather wild manuscript reply to the NBR’s long-running. But exceeding unimaginative publication Films in Review. Calling her publication the All-Lavender Cinema Courier. we began receiving copies of it shortly after moving to California, starting in July 1976 with issue number 3. Knowing Dorothy there may not have even been a 1 or 2, or else these might have been issued sometime during the Sixties. Enclosed with the issue was a form letter which was a request for money to keep her venture going. In it she wrote:
—-“We are all aware, I fear, that most practicing movie critics are pragmatically useless. They consistently lose sight of the point that the cinema’s prime function is entertainment; they are misleading, pretentious. and needlessly longwinded.” In the letter Dorothy never explains how she intends to avoid such pitfalls. but in the “Courier” proper she cuts right to the chase, heaping praise upon well-crafted commercial crowd pleasers and damning almost all other films, domestic or otherwise, which fell outside these rigidly constructed critical boundaries. Much of the “Courier” is Wonderful Stuff. Here is one entry chosen at random:
—-“The Last Tycoon. Not very good and who is to say precisely why. Let us not forget that F. Scott Fitzgerald, it is said, by definition can never be successfully translated into the movie medium. But given the long string of flash names attached to this latest attempt—Elia Kazan. Harold Pinter. Tony Curtis. Rbl De Niro. Robert Mitchum (gone, sadly to fat). Jeanne Moreau. Jack Nicholson, Donald Pleasence. Ray Milland. Dana Andrews, etc.—one had hoped for much better. However. all is most humdrum and drab. inane and vacant, constituting a movie without a personality. The dialogue comes mostly from FSF. as I remember. except of course for the pitifully false ending; and so it is really difficult to imagine how Harold Pinter. as has been claimed. consumed an entire year in ‘crafting’ a script from what survived of the original MS. It is disheartening to learn that someone brilliant enough to describe scotch whiskey as the ‘great malt that wounds’ (Pinter. No Man’s Land) could fail so markedly at patching together extant Fitzgerald. Perhaps if some of the planes and trains and what have you in the original had been retained, the results would have been perkier. The spectacle of De Niro stalking about in expectation of conveying a commanding presence as the high panjandrum of a big-time Hollywood movie studio is ludicrous; Robert Allen could easily get away with this kind of thing but not the aforementioned mealy-mouthed invertebrate.”
—-Doubtlessly Dorothy’s ad hominem characterization of DiNiro was based on actual experience, for she was definitely not of the school that believed that revenge is a dish best served cold, as evidenced by her remarks re: the film The Other Side of Midnight in issue no. 8 (14 July 1977) of the “Courier”:
—-“[Marie-France Pisier] is eventually in a most enviable position, indeed as regards implementing the revenge of one’s dreams- the very best kind, whereby the revengee is made to hopelessly writhe and squirm and agonize, fully cognizant of the source of his suffering.”
—-As for the film itself, Dorothy deemed it, “Quality trash on a high level, and a stunning paean to [you guessed it] revenge.”
—-Below the “Tycoon” review is one for Brian De Palma’s Carrie (a wish fulfillment fantasy for Dorothy if ever there was one!) which begins: DO NOT MISS!!!! Eight to ten such squibs were included in each issue of the “Courier” which, at the bottom of number three, Dorothy scrawled a personal note to me:
—-“I am dismayed at myself that it’s taken so long to get the ALCC going again. Will answer your letter properly in a few days (I hope)—glad to hear you have settled in, as it were.”
—-But Dorothy never did answer my letter, and then after issue number 8 of the “Courier” dated July 14, 1977, I stopped hearing from Dorothy altogether. Radio silence.

 

(photo: Dorothy Dean and the gang on Fire Island)

 

—-I began to inquire after her; but Dorothy had been on her last legs as a scenemaker, and no one I contacted seemed to know or care much about what might have happened to her. My first trip to New York after moving to California I devoted much of my time toward a search for her, but unlike Thompson in Citizen Kane I couldn’t gain a clue. I went to her apartment, but her name was not on the mailbox and no one answered when I rang the bell. A few weeks later, after I had returned to L.A., David got in touch with a seemingly reliable source, someone from Dorothy’s old Warhol days, now a successful movie publicist, who told him the following story: an extraordinary tale, but one not so far out, considering its subject was Dorothy, that it couldn’t conceivably have happened. It seems that she had attended a cocktail party at the penthouse of a well-known Broadway composer, the gathering composed of the usual witty, brittle people who congregate at such affairs; the kind of event to which Dorothy had probably been to hundreds of times. At one point in the evening, her usual two sheets to the wind, she found herself in the middle of a particularly bothersome conversation with a musician friend of the host. Finally when Dorothy could take no more, she allegedly leveled at the offending party just the sort of attack that she’d launched on hundreds of such boors in the past:
—-“You are a boring, insensitive lout who has misused and mangled the English language exactly 20 times in the last five minutes while in my presence” she said, “and if you had any feelings of regard toward the human race, you would march over to the edge of this terrace and throw yourself off.”
—-Which, according to David’s informant, is exactly what the man did, killing himself and in the process causing Dorothy to have a total nervous collapse, resulting in weeks spent in a mental hospital. Afterwards, she had gone to Boulder, Colorado, to stay in a commune run by Off-Broadway playwright, Jean-Claude Van Itallie.
—-In truth, I was to soon learn, there was not much veracity to the story (the part about Colorado, though, was accurate). Apparently an individual who happened to have been at a party with Dorothy a few days earlier, had killed himself; then somehow the two unrelated incidents had become conflated. An seemingly apocryphal tale, but Dorothy would have loved the idea of someone killing themselves over bad grammar.
—-All the years of drinking had finally caught up with Dorothy both physically and mentally. Thrown out of her longtime Morton Street apartment, she was rescued by sympathetic friends who began the process of trying to help Dorothy put her life back in order.
—-After obtaining Dorothy’s address in Boulder, I wrote her a simple chatty letter, making no reference to the recent unpleasantness. I received no reply from her. Then in February 1987, the same week that Andy Warhol died, I opened up the paper to the Death Notices to learn that Dorothy had succumbed to cancer. She had long been associated, the notice informed, with the likes of Vogue and Harper and Row and at the time of her death was a proofreader for the Boulder newspaper, The Daily Camera (what fun Dorothy would have had with inept Boulder cops and the Jon Benet Ramsey case!). Otherwise, the obituary—the only such New York Tunes unpaid obit ever accorded a mere proofreader?—was short and perfunctory and with no hint of the “real” Dorothy. Such as that—as I later learned—-after moving to Colorado she had not only joined a bible study group (!), but Alcoholics Anonymous as well. Joining AA, regardless of her sincerity or lack thereof, must have finally given her what she had been looking for all her life: complete and total command of a room full of people. Just like the old joke (one that the old Dorothy would have loved) about the comic who tells a friend he has to go to an AA meeting. His pal replies:
—-“But you’re not an alcoholic.”
—-“Yes, I know, but I need the floor time.”

To quote James McCourt in Queer Street quoting Joseph L. Mankiewicz via Bette Davis, “Slow Curtain. The End.”

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. Very happy today to restore Mr. Ehrenstein’s long dormant guest-post about the fascinating Dorothy Dean. If you want to have fun, you’ll have it. ** David Ehrenstein, And there you are! Thank you again from the future, David! Funny, I just made an upcoming Hanna Schygulla Day for the blog on Saturday. ** Sypha, Hi. ** _Black_Acrylic, Ha ha but … wait. I thought Eurovision was cancelled. Did they do a Zoom Eurovision or something. If so, no way! ** Tom K, Hi, Tom! Great to see you here! ** Bill, Hi. My weekend was all right. I watched Bruce Boone do a Zoom reading last night, so I was actually in your neighborhood in a way. Didn’t get to effedupmovies’ trove yet, but I think today. Yeah, I’ll expect to see whatever I see there while doing a shooting gallery number with pop-ups, ugh. Great about the progress with the little technical stuff! ** Thomas Moronic, Hey, T! I would imagine that your new masterpiece should be getting freed up and announce-able any day now, no? If you want to do a ‘welcome … ‘ post for it or anything just lt me know. Mark’s book is crazy great, no surprise. The Mark/Steven thing is on the other side of Paris still awaiting my grab. It’s definitely so, so much nicer being semi-reopened. It’s starting feel like a bit of normality. I hope you get your version soon, if it’s the right time, of course. Jesus. ** Damien Ark, Hi, Damien! It’s well worth the dough. Whoa, amazing progress on your novel! That’s great! I’m very careful with my novels. I only show them to one trusted person, and even then only once I think they’re completely finished, before I send them out to hopefully be published, so I totally get it. Nice that you’ve got an ideal cover artist committed. Well, ha ha, there are those who would have zero problem reading 400+ pages on that subject, but it’s true that the best seller lists might be walled-up. So sorry about your hand. Having broken both of my wrists at the same time, ouch. But I’m glad you’re feeling more you-like. Very good to see you, D., and love you too. ** Jeff J, Ace about the four tracks! Can’t wait to hear them! Yes, there’s a fantastic new Boone book from Nightboat, basically a selected/collected Bruce Boone (fiction, essays, poetry, etc.). It’s incredible, of course, and there was Zoom launch last night where Bruce read from SF. That was great. My weekend was pretty okay. Still enjoying the amount of freedom I have very much. Yours? ** Misanthrope, Hi. If you want the Steven/Mark one, you’d better order it lickety split. It’s way ltd. ed. There you go: all your LPS problems solved in one bite. Well, hundreds. Nice, the bonfire, the kids, the weekend. Sounds like a keeper. And … enjoy the grind? ** Mark Gluth, Hey, maestro! My supreme pleasure and honor! Such an incredible novel! ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Yes, that was an unexpected and happy surprise that Twilley got that late period hit. I hope you like ‘Twilley Don’t Mind’. The ‘Lost’ Twilley Band album is great if you’re a ‘Sincerely’ fan and don’t have it. Haven’t heard the new Ka yet. I did listen to a few things from the Charli XCX, and it sounds quite good, and I think I’ll go ahead and get it. The super neg stuff I’ve read about ‘Capone’ did seem very suspicious to me. I don’t how or when I’ll get a chance to see it, but I’ll take the future chance. ** Right. Dorothy Dean! David Ehrenstein! Power Couple! See you tomorrow.

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.