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‘Gary J. Shipley’s latest offering, So Beautiful and Elastic is a challenging book and not for the faint of heart, but those who commit to it will be pleased to have done so.
‘On the most superficial level the plot concerns our narrator, Ann, leaving London and returning to the unnamed seaside town from which she escaped as a teenager, in order to bear witness to the death of her father. The journey is twofold and fraught. Ann is full of contempt for her father, her dead mother, her past, life in general, and herself. The reckoning the reader suspects Ann will have with her father will also necessarily be one she has with herself and whatever secrets her past contains and that she may or may not be keeping from herself.
‘There’s plenty to chew on there, to be sure, and the book’s brief chapters skip through time, giving us a kaleidoscopic view of a turbulent life, though Ann gives equal weight to the life of the mind by offering ekphrastic disquisitions on the visual arts, those being her chief obsession in life and the primary way in which she constructs her identity. In the place of what we might call “normal” human relationships, Ann has her intellectual relationships to philosophy and art; Magritte, Cioran, Schneider, Lynch, et al., provide the scaffolding which allows Ann to continue her own insubstantial existence.
‘What’s noteworthy here, besides the elegant sentence construction and rather pointed observation, is the way in which Ann perceives language as a means to imprison, dissemble, and also construct. The book is obsessed with this kind of thing, how tenuous and flimsy the self is and how the essential “lowliness” of the human condition might be mitigated (whether Ann cops to that desire or not) through engagement with intellectual and creative endeavors. About midway through the book, Ann quotes Magritte as having said that “what is important is that in a hundred years’ time, someone finds what I found, but in a different way”, to which she adds, “I too have found what he found. I found it altered and perverse, lucid in its mystery from every available angle, and maybe awake to it, refusing to look away or squint or think it into something else.”’ — Scud
Thek Prosthetics
gjshipley @ Instagram
GARY J. SHIPLEY on film with REBECCA GRANSDEN
LISTEN, MY SISTER, LISTEN by Gary J. Shipley
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Gary J. Shipley So Beautiful and Elastic
Apocalypse Party
‘This brutal book is one of the best-worst nightmares l’ve ever had—as if Kathy Acker had written a movie novelization of a grimy true crime documentary and then studded it with exactly the kind of art-historical and countercultural references I love. Or as if Katherine Faw’s Ultraluminous had an evil twin.’ — Philippa Snow
‘Gary J. Shipley’s So Beautiful and Elastic entwines elegant prose, blistering suspense, and art criticism, all shot through with a dark secret. Exploring creators as diverse as René Magritte, Clarice Lispector, David Lynch, Dennis Cooper, Bruno Dumont, and Gary Indiana, Shipley claims his spot as a singular disciple of this genealogy of experimental art. Ann’s voice will stay with you long after you exit her mind’s haunted house—you won’t even realize its cursed magic until it has already swallowed you whole.’ — Claire Donato
Excerpt
Media
The Face Hole by Gary J. Shipley
Terminal Park by Gary J. Shipley
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Dread Central: Deliver Me is just so gross and beautiful, and that’s my favorite kind of book. How did you come to this idea? Did a character come to you first? A location? There’s so much specificity happening here that I love.
Elle Nash: When I came across this idea in 2015, this really fringe crime happened in the town that I was living in. I was reading the headlines and following the story, and a part of it involved this woman who had faked her pregnancy for nine months. I was fascinated by the idea that a person could create this kind of lie that they lived in for so long, but that no one around her would notice. It intrigued me and it pulled on these questions of, well, what is our community? What are the people around her? Where did society fail this person?
Because it was definitely a crime that was a result of mental illness. And it just stayed with me for a long time. This was before I even became a mom. I think that idea just stayed with me. But I didn’t start writing this book until 2018. So it was like three years that I just was mulling over what this was. So that’s how it started.
But also during that time, I moved to the Ozarks to a small town in Arkansas. I’d grown up in the South as a child, so it wasn’t super foreign to me. When I lived in Arkansas, I lived off the grid for a while in the woods with some friends. Something about how beautiful the Ozarks are, I really wanted to capture those experiences and feelings, too. I just feel like northwest Arkansas is this little gem inside most of Arkansas. The forests and the people and all that were really, I don’t know, really good. It’s a convergence of a lot of different cultures and people all at once.
DC: Well, and I love that your prose because it feels so normal, but then you’re like, “Wait, hold on, there are some red flags”, especially when she’s talking to her mom on the phone. You really realize how toxic that relationship is, and I love how instead of trying to draw a ton of attention to it, you make these things every day. That lends to the everyday horror of the book in a really interesting way.
EN: Thank you. That’s one thing that I really love about horror as a genre is that there’s almost no end to the horizon of human experience possible. It’s so deep, truly, almost anything that we can conjure can happen. And that’s on the spectrum of beautiful ecstasy, but also the most horrendous and terrifying things that we can possibly imagine. In some ways, it’s an everyday experience, too. Maybe not for everyone all the time, but yeah.
Elle Nash Site
Elle Nash On Violence And Strange Intimacy
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A Conversation with Elle Nash
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Elle Nash Deliver Me
Unnamed Press
‘The work is repetitive and brutal, with each stab and cut a punishment to her hands and joints, but Dee-Dee’s more concerned with what is happening inside her body. After a series of devastating miscarriages, Dee-Dee has found herself pregnant, and she is determined to carry this child to term.
‘Dee-Dee fled the Pentecostal church years ago, but judgment follows her in the form of regular calls from her mother, whose raspy voice urges Dee-Dee to quit living in sin and marry her boyfriend Daddy, an underemployed ex-con with an insect fetish. With a child on the way, at long last Dee-Dee can bask in her mother’s and boyfriend’s newfound parturient attention. She will matter. She will be loved. She will be complete.
‘When her charismatic friend Sloane reappears after a twenty-year absence, feeding her insecurities and awakening suppressed desires, Dee-Dee fears she will go back to living in the shadows. Neither the ultimate indignity of yet another miscarriage nor Sloane’s own pregnancy deters her: she must prepare for the baby’s arrival.’ — Unnamed Press
Excerpt
Meat chickens are not bred to make life. The internal mechanisms are all there—ovaries with their tiny clusters of eggs, the hormonal drive—but meat chickens don’t live long enough to lay. They are bred to be eaten. Their breasts and bodies grow at an abnormal rate, tripling in weight in those first few days of life, and sent to slaughter at five pounds. Each chicken on my line is only fifty days old. Every one must be processed by the end of the day. If even one person calls off work, the rest of us have to pick up the slack, we don’t get to leave until the work is finished.
—In each section of the warehouse, a massive digital counter on the wall marks the processing of an entire bird. It counts up red, until we hit our death goal. I use it to keep track of the time. There’s no clock and we have to keep our watches and phones in our lockers. A buzzer alerts everyone to breaks, lunch, and shift changes. If we manage to process a hundred-and-forty birds per minute we know we’re near break time when the death counter approaches twenty-six thousand. At fifty thousand, first shift is over and my day is done.
—The deboning line comes with the bonus of not having to see the birds die. They begin their journey feathered and writhing, their feet in fork-shaped hangers attached to a long chain. The chain moves behind a steel wall, where the birds’ heads are dipped into a trough of electrified water before they’re reeled to the killing room, where their throats are dragged past an automatic cutter. Then they’re scalded bald, hocked and beheaded before getting disemboweled and moved to the deboning room. By the time the birds make it to me, they’re so clean they don’t look like anything that’s ever been alive.
—Once the line starts, no one talks. For the next four hours, my ears are filled with the whirring of ceiling fans, the spritz of sanitizer and the slop of flesh into buckets until the lunch buzzer.
I weave through at least a hundred sweaty foreheads lined up for the building’s two toilets to get lunch from my locker. The pneumatic scissors make my palms tingle. I stretch my fingers back to my wrist, pulling out the ache. Daddy is probably waking up, checking his phone for messages or calling around for work. I shoot him a text. Daddy doesn’t text back, and part of me wants his attention so badly I consider telling him right away about the pregnancy. I open my lunch bag and pull out tuna salad on Wonder Bread. My mouth waters as I bite through it, soft on top and soggy in the middle. The tang of mayonnaise and salty flecks of fish separate onto my tongue.
“How did you find out you were pregnant with me?” I ask Momma.
—“Oh,” she coughs over the phone. “I knew the instant I conceived you, honey.” She drags from a cigarette and blows out. “I just knew, the way you know when you’ve got a tickle in your throat that you’re about to get sick. With you, there was an ache in my bones. I told your father the day it happened, rest his soul—Why, Dee-Dee? Are you pregnant again? You can’t think this one will succeed? You know you are living in sin and need to redeem yourself to the Lord.”
—“Daddy promised me a ring,” I say. “He’s saving up from his odd jobs.”
—“God judges all sexually immoral people and that includes you,” Dee-Dee.
—My chapped lips stretch into a stinging grimace. She always pushes past me and into God.
—“He wants the ring to be bought with honest money.”
—“The Lord blesses only those with a pure heart,” Momma says.
—I wipe crumbs from my face, from my shirt, place my hand on my abdomen over the new fragility. Then Momma mumbles something I don’t hear. I’m too distracted by thoughts of a pregnancy test and what else I need to buy on the way home.
—“Swollen?” she asks.
—“What?”
—“Are your hands still swollen? I can hear people in the background. I know you’re at work, honey.”
—“I woke up this morning with my rings cutting off my circulation,” I say. “Had to soak my hand in a bowl of ice water to get them off.”
—It’s a lie, but I want her sympathy. I hold my palms out even though she can’t see; they’re red where I’ve been rubbing them.
—“Sometimes aspirin works,” she says. “You know, you should call Sloane soon.”
—“Momma,” I say.
—They kept in touch years after Sloane moved away. I don’t know why. Probably Momma wanted to pretend she had a daughter that did all the things she liked. Probably her and Sloane did pretend that, that they were family all these years, and they talked about how I wasn’t very good and how I was dating a criminal now, and how I’d never have a baby because the last five have died inside me. Probably Momma loved to tell Sloane she thought my womb was a coffin and about how I quit going to church, and how proud she was of Sloane for going back to God after all her mistakes. Sloane would have everything I couldn’t, a good husband as hot as a movie star who didn’t care about her teenage pregnancy, maybe she even got to keep it, all while he was funding her stay-at-home life.
—“Sloane doesn’t want to talk to me,” I say.
—Momma tuts. She tsks. She sucks on her cigarette. Momma says, “I know she would love to hear from you.”
—Every time I think of Sloane I go wet with envy. A gnawing hunger for her life, unnameable, as deep as sex. Sloane and her husband in bed, her nose pressed into his inky hair, the two so close they smell as one. Babies sleeping, soon to wake up and adore them. Scribbly drawings and colored handprints all over the fridge. Sloane for sure would have a life full to bursting. Whenever a girl in the church got married, we’d all gossip about who’d be next, and how many months it’d be until the newly married couple announced their pregnancy. Before wedding season, Sunday school teachers had the preteens write letters to their future husbands, encouraging us to imagine being blessed by a man who would bring us closer to God. Some girls kept purity journals where they described all the ways they would serve these men. I prayed that God would surround me with an assortment of devout males laid out like a buffet—short men, tall men, feminine men with slim wrists and long torsos, silky hair, amber eyes. I prayed for jutting pectorals, beefy arms. Religious men to make me right. Rebellious men to make me slick and thirsty. Most of all, virile men. Someone who could make me a woman, give me the chance to grow—to become a doorway for something greater than myself. (Before every great doorway is a doormat, Sloane loved to say.)
—Within months of her wedding, the newlywed girl would become something else. Her skin would ripen, she would glisten. Her arms flushed pink, her hair grew longer, shinier. Her breasts swelled. We’d gossip, write our letters, dream about a man passionate for fucking and following Christ. We’d imagine our bellies inflated, too, hump our pillows at night. Then we’d sign the letters, Yours in Christ, Your Future Wife.
—The buzzer rings harsh, and I tell Momma I got to go. Lunch is over. I check my phone once more and Daddy still hasn’t messaged me. Amidst the crumple of lunch bags and the scrape of chairs against concrete, I pet the fat beneath my belly button as if it’s a blanket tucking in the multiplying cells—my manic, buoyant new life.
Media
Introducing DELIVER ME by Elle Nash
Body Horror, Religion, & Working Class Narratives w/ Elle Nash
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‘The cassette tape is the audio equivalent of the AK-47: cheap and easy to mass manufacture; highly usable with the minimum of skills and experience; and a symbol and tool of revolutions.
‘Marc Masters doesn’t use that metaphor in his excellent and truly exciting book on cassette tapes, but he doesn’t have to. He outlines the story of how the cassette came to be the dominant recording medium on a global scale during the 1980s and into the mid-1990s, and by doing so shows how essential cassettes were to so many musical movements that they would have been impossible without the tapes that, as he points out, are so easy and satisfying to hold in your hand.
‘That’s the most important part of the cassette, its size and therefore not only its portability but that of its accompanying recording and playback devices (and their low cost). Invented by Phillips engineer Lou Ottens in the early 1960s, the cassette was the everyman medium—anyone with a blank tape (or a prerecorded tape they could record over) and a basic recorder with a built-in condenser mic could record, well, anything: their own voice, audio off the radio or television, even their band playing, like Dinosaur Jr. Omar Souleyman was a local Syrian wedding singer, captured on hundreds of impromptu, live cassette recordings that were later found by Mark Gergis (one of the several obsessive tape collectors Masters profiles), and now he’s a global star. …
‘Masters also covers the live taping culture that grew up around the Grateful Dead and developed a mutually beneficial relationship with the band, and of course the mixtape, a right of passage for the formation of one’s personality that just cannot be replaced by a streaming playlist. Yes, one can agonize over the order of the songs, but that’s nothing like calculating the times for each track and figuring out how many can fit on the side of a cassette—and also, who gets the Maxell XL-II copy (not to mention that making a mixtape is a real-time endeavor).’ — George Grella
Marc Masters @ Instagram
‘High Bias’ @ goodreads
‘Reconsidering the Ordinary: On Andrew Simon’s “Media of the Masses”’, by Marc Masters
Audio: High Bias: Music from the Book
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Marc Masters High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape
The University of North Carolina Press
‘The cassette tape was revolutionary. Cheap, portable, and reusable, this small plastic rectangle changed music history. Make your own tapes! Trade them with friends! Tape over the ones you don’t like! The cassette tape upended pop culture, creating movements and uniting communities.
‘This entertaining book charts the journey of the cassette from its invention in the early 1960s to its Walkman-led domination in the 1980s to decline at the birth of compact discs to resurgence among independent music makers. Scorned by the record industry for “killing music,” the cassette tape rippled through scenes corporations couldn’t control. For so many, tapes meant freedom—to create, to invent, to connect.
‘Marc Masters introduces readers to the tape artists who thrive underground; concert tapers who trade bootlegs; mixtape makers who send messages with cassettes; tape hunters who rescue forgotten sounds; and today’s labels, which reject streaming and sell music on cassette. Their stories celebrate the cassette tape as dangerous, vital, and radical.’ — UoNCP
Excerpt
Media
Trailer for ‘High Bias’
Marc Masters’s Favorite Tapes
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‘When eminence in the field of affect theory Lauren Berlant passed away last year at the age of sixty-three, they had, like Columbo, just one more thing to say. Duke University Press is publishing On the Inconvenience of Other People posthumously, and it sports some unfinished-feeling parts toward the end. But on the whole, it is a coherent and helpful addition to the ideas, now influential throughout the culture, that Berlant wrought in 2011’s Cruel Optimism, and—despite being written in the torturous style affect theory is notorious for—it clarifies a few points.
‘Cruel Optimism is a detailed book, but its argument is concise: what we want hurts us. At one level, this is the most conventional of observations, a notion from a song lyric (the term “affect theory” always makes me hear Morris Albert’s “Feelings” in the distance). But Berlant means it in a political sense, and in the sense of a machine that can be taken apart in order to articulate its elements.
‘The most direct illustration in Cruel Optimism concerns what people used to call the American Dream. “The conditions of ordinary life in the contemporary world even of relative wealth, as in the United States,” they note, “are conditions of the attrition or the wearing out of the subject.” Writing on the brink of the Occupy movement’s transition into a major news story, their argument tied the daily fear of living through major recession to a form of irony. By dwelling on the ironic fact that “the labor of reproducing life in the contemporary world is also the activity of being worn out by it,” Berlant finds “specific implications for thinking about the ordinariness of suffering.” Constantly looking toward the future, when we will finally roll that rock all the way up that hill, we “suspend questions about the cruelty of the now.”
‘On the Inconvenience of Other People delves into the consequential implications of a seemingly glancing passage in Cruel Optimism in which Berlant transforms a local problem into a general principle through one massive, bravura sentence about neighbors:
In the American dream we see neighbors when we want to, when we’re puttering outside or perhaps in a restaurant, and in any case the pleasure they provide is in their relative distance, their being parallel to, without being inside of, the narrator’s “municipally” zoned property, where he hoards and enjoys his leisured pleasure, as though in a vineyard in the country, and where intrusions by the nosy neighbor, or superego, would interrupt his projections of happiness from the empire of the backyard.
‘The context is their analysis of a John Ashbery poem, but it’s a general idea. Neighbors are annoying, an intrusion into the perfection of bourgeois leisure, one which Berlant compares to a hypercritical superego.’ — Jo Livingstone
HOW TO READ LAUREN BERLANT: ‘ON THE INCONVENIENCE OF OTHER PEOPLE’
Love thy irksome neighbor
In Theory, Anyway
I feel sorry for sex: Lauren Berlant’s Maximalism
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Lauren Berlant On the Inconvenience of Other People
Duke University Press
‘In On the Inconvenience of Other People Lauren Berlant continues to explore our affective engagement with the world. Berlant focuses on the encounter with and the desire for the bother of other people and objects, showing that to be driven toward attachment is to desire to be inconvenienced. Drawing on a range of sources, including Last Tango in Paris, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Claudia Rankine, Christopher Isherwood, Bhanu Kapil, the Occupy movement, and resistance to anti-Black state violence, Berlant poses inconvenience as an affective relation and considers how we might loosen our attachments in ways that allow us to build new forms of life. Collecting strategies for breaking apart a world in need of disturbing, the book’s experiments in thought and writing cement Berlant’s status as one of the most inventive and influential thinkers of our time.’ — DUP
Excerpt
Hell is other people, if you’re lucky.
“Hell is other people” is a phrase from Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit, although its continued appeal as a thing people say has little to do with the play. In Sartre’s version, characters are sentenced to occupy a room in Hell, exposed eternally to each other’s bodily presence and, much worse, to each other’s insufferable sameness. When people utter “hell is other people,” though, the phrase confirms more than the miserable effects of the relentless repetition of other people’s personalities. Freed from context, “Hell is other people” is an affirmative quip, too, emitting a comic, even courageous, air. Such a blunt cut can generate the conspiratorial pleasure of just hearing someone say it: it’s other people who are hell, not you. They really are, it’s a relief to admit it.
In other words, along with describing a saturating disappointment in others and expressing a kind of grandiose loneliness that aspires to fill its own hole with the satisfying sounds of superiority and contempt, “Hell is other people” has become a consoling thought.
Of course, some other people are hell, relentlessly saturating situations so fully that it’s impossible to relax while being around them—so much so that the very idea of them becomes suffocating. This affective sense of the stultifying person or kind of person also girds the affective life of racism, misogyny, ethnonationalism, and other modes of population disgust that Judith Butler points to in her work on “grievable life.”
Mostly, though, other people are not hell. Mostly, the sense of friction they produce is not directed toward a specific looming threat. Mostly, people are inconvenient, which is to say that they have to be dealt with. “They” includes you.
“Inconvenience” is a key concept of this book: the affective sense of the familiar friction of being in relation. At a minimum, inconvenience is the force that makes one shift a little while processing the world. It is evident in micro-incidents like a caught glance, a brush on the flesh, the tack of a sound or smell that hits you, an undertone, a semiconscious sense of bodies copresent on the sidewalk, in the world, or on the sidewalk of the world, where many locales may converge in you at once materially and affectively. It lives on in the many genres of involuntary memory—aftertaste, aftershock, afterglow. It might be triggered by anything: a phrase, a smell, a demanding pet, or someone you trip over, even just in your mind. It might be spurred by ordinary racism, misogyny, or class disgust, which can blip into consciousness as organic visceral judgments. The sense of it can come from nothing you remember noticing or from a small adjustment you made or couldn’t make, generating an episode bleed that might take on all kinds of mood or tone, from irritation and enjoyment to fake not-caring or genuine light neutrality. In other words, the minimal experience of inconvenience does not require incidents or face-to-faceness: the mere idea of situations or other people can also jolt into awareness the feel of their inconvenience, creating effects that don’t stem from events but from internally generated affective prompts.
The important thing is that we are inescapably in relation with other beings and the world and are continuously adjusting to them. I am describing more than “being affected” and sometimes less than “being entangled”: this analysis is grounded in the problematics of the social life of affect, drawing from situations involving genres of the sense of proximity, physical and otherwise, that might involve a sense of overcloseness at a physical distance, or not, and might involve intimate familiarity, or not. It might involve unclarity about how one is in relation to what one is adjusting to, or not. At whatever scale and duration, “inconvenience” describes a feeling state that registers one’s implication in the pressures of coexistence. In that state the body is paying attention, affirming that what’s in front of you is not all that’s acting on or in you.
Whatever tone it takes, whatever magnetic field it generates, this latter kind of contact with inconvenience disturbs the vision of yourself you carry around that supports your sovereign fantasy, your fantasy of being in control. This state is a geopolitically specific one, too, insofar as its model of the individual-with- intention includes a political and social demand for autonomy as evidence of freedom. The sovereign fantasy is not hardwired into personality, in other words: as US scholars of indigeneity such as Jessica Cattelino, Jodi A. Byrd, and Michelle Rajaha have demonstrated, sovereignty as idea, ideal, aesthetic, and identity claim is an effect of an ideology of settler-state control over personal and political territories of action that sanctions some privileged individuals as microsovereigns. This fantasy, which saturates the liberal colonial state and the citizenship subjectivity shaped by it, is thus seen as a natural condition worthy of defense. But sovereignty is always in defense of something, not a right or a natural state.
As I will argue throughout, the sense of the inconvenience of other people is evidence that no one was ever sovereign, just mostly operating according to some imaginable, often distorted image of their power over things, actions, people, and causality. It points to a style of being in relation and a sense of how things should best happen. People use phrases such as chain of command or the commons of x to describe what to do with nonsovereignty. The fact of inconvenience is not the exception to one’s sense of sovereignty, therefore; sovereignty is the name for a confused, reactive, often not-quite-thought view that there ought to be a solution to the pressure of adapting to “other people” and to other nations’ force of existence, intention, action, entitlement, and desire. Sovereignty is thus a fantasy of jurisdiction. It is a defense of entitlement, reference, and agency. Wounded sovereignty is, in some deep way, parallel to the concept of wounded narcissism. For if you or your nation were truly—as opposed to retroactively—sovereign, what then?
We know that, just by existing, historically subordinated populations are deemed inconvenient to the privileged who made them so; the subordinated who are cast as a problem experience themselves as both necessary for and inconvenient to the general supremacist happiness. All politics involves at least one group becoming inconvenient to the reproduction of power; that power might be material or fantasmatic, in the convoluted paranoid way endemic to the intimacy of enemies. The biopolitical politics of inconvenience increases the ordinary pressure of getting in each other’s way, magnifying the shaping duration of social friction within the mind’s echo chambers and the structuring dynamics of the world.
As an affect, inconvenience can thus encompass all kinds of intensity but still be cast as a mode of impersonal contact that has an impact, opening itself to becoming personal, creating images of what feels like a looming social totality, and making a countervailing social organization Imaginable. Think about Cheryl Harris’s staging of Blackness as “trespassing” on white consciousness as it strolls and scrolls through the world expecting not to feel impeded; think of the pervasive sexual violence women imagine concretely when they’re walking somewhere alone. These sensations of threat are ordinary to the people moving through in the lifeworlds of a supremacist society and its entitlement hierarchies… When is a body an event because of the kind of thing it is deemed to be, as when they walk into a room or cross a state line? What price and what kinds of price are being paid in order to live a life as other people’s inconvenient object?
To a structurally and/or fantasmatically dominant class, though, the experience of inconvenience produces dramas of unfairness. Take, for example, the paranoid reversals of “incels” and other entitled persons who experience their vulnerability as an injury of unjustly denied deference. It is predictable that the structurally dominant feel vulnerable about their status and insist that if the historically subordinated deserve repair, so do the entitled. It is as though there is a democracy in vulnerability, as though the details do not matter.
This means that inconvenience, though intimate, inevitably operates at a level of abstraction, too, where we encounter each other as kinds of thing—but not necessarily in a bad way, because there is no other way to begin knowing each other, or anything. We cannot know each other without being inconvenient to each other. We cannot be in any relation without being inconvenient to each other. This is to say: to know and be known requires experiencing and exerting pressure to be acknowledged and taken in…
Thus, the inconvenience of other people isn’t evidence that the Others were bad objects all along: that would be hell. The inconvenience of the world is at its most confusing when one wants the world but resists some of the costs of wanting. It points to the work required in order to be with even the most abstract of beings or objects, including ourselves, when we have to and at some level want to, even if the wanting includes wanting to dominate situations or merely to coexist. The pleasure in anonymity and in being known; the fear of abandonment to not mattering and the fear of mattering the wrong way. I am describing in inconvenience a structural awkwardness in the encounter between someone and anything, but also conventions of structural subordination. Thus “people” in the title stands for any attachment, any dependency that forces us to face how profoundly nonsovereign we are. The concept also points to hates and to the danger to our sense of well-being that is produced even by the things we want to be near; it clarifies some things about the registers of power that attach dramas of such disturbance to bodies living approximately in the ordinary.
Media
LAUREN BERLANT Interview
Lauren Berlant – Cruel Optimism (Online Lecture)
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Jesse Hilson: One aspect of writing which is endlessly fascinating to me is the decision to write in genre, or out of genre. I spent a little time when I first came onto Twitter lit land in indie crime lit, and I’m still interested in that but I swerved away from genre for various reasons. I think finding the right amalgamation of genre and so-called “literary” elements can be a fruitful path forward in the future for certain writers: writing post-genre, or extra-genre, if we wanted to get really pretentious and pointy-headed about terminology and prefixes. What was it about sci-fi and horror that drew you in?
David Kuhnlein: It was predestined that I’d publish a book of science fiction. Though my cards have been read by some fairly intuitive individuals, never have I experienced a reading as specific as the one my entire family had done at the church we attended when I was young. I remember sitting at the front of the church, empty except for us, while a man without shoes had the four of us take ours off. He closed his eyes and we pressed all the soles of our feet together. Then everyone opened their eyes real wide. He looked into each eye, past the eye, deeper, noting the blood vessels, then surfaced, commenting on the color of the iris, and size and shape of the pupil. He said simply that I would write science fiction novels. Ten years later I had forgotten about this when I got sucked into a Phillip K. Dick mass-market paperback. I worked from 5pm until 4am delivering pizza, reading between orders. I still think about Dick’s best: some of which were very short like “Roog,” “Beyond Lies the Wub,” and “Expendable.”
My attraction to horror, however, is a different story: I had an abdominal surgery in 2016 that nearly killed me. Several inches of my intestines were scarred shut and had to be cut out. The gore I continue to experience, in combination with the major shift in my gut bacteria (change a creature’s gut and you change its behavior), got me into the genre. It was in recovery, when I started renting DVDs from the local library, that I noticed the disturbance. Pain made so much palatable. The abdominal wound in Videodrome paired nicely with the one I rested the remote on, Salò felt like my biopic. Reading Stephen King and John Avid Lindqvist before bed ensnared my dreams in the conversion. I only wish that I appealed to observe murder over and over sooner.
JH: Die Closer To Me, your new book. Could you describe it a little more? We know it’s a sci-fi novella told in stories or pieces. And that it has something to do with medical issues and illness. What other works have influenced the book?
DK: Die Closer to Me follows a single character, Jo, as she cares for her mother on planet Süskind — Earth’s failed disability experiment. The chapters that don’t explicitly feature Jo instead give glimpses to Süskind’s origins, or reveal Jo’s mysterious past, including how she came to be a bounty hunter. While the main narrative only spans twenty-four hours, the flashbacks paint a broader picture. It poses (and possibly answers) some larger questions: Was collecting the disabled on a planet far from Earth just an excuse to get rid of them? What good are good intentions? Were those in charge truly making an architecturally friendly planet for neurodiverse, cognitively and physically impaired individuals, or was it all a ruse?
David Kuhnlein’s
David Kuhnlein @ goodreads
THE BODY’S NO TEMPLE: ON ‘HEREDITARY’ BY DAVID KUHNLEIN
The Rain Made Nudity Impossible
Buy ‘Die Closer to Me’
David Kuhnlein Die Closer to Me
Merigold Independent
‘David Kuhnlein’s debut novella-in-stories Die Closer to Me follows Jo as she cares for her mother on planet Süskind – Earth’s failed disability experiment. Along the way we meet a suicidal construction worker, a waitress who secretly eats her tip money, a jaded poet, a militant monk named Bhikkhu Brendan Fraser, and a small blue hypnotist named Bath.’ — Merigold Independent
READING DIE CLOSER TO ME FEELS LIKE IT’S STORY TIME ON THE ASSISTED LIVING PLANET THEY RESERVE FOR PEOPLE WHO CAN’T AFFORD A FRESH LOBOTOMY, AND THE ONLY BOOKS LEFT IN YOUR LANGUAGE THEY’VE GOT ON FILE AFTER THE FIRES ARE SAMUEL DELANY AND UNICA ZÜRN. AN ENDLESSLY TWISTED, LINGUISTICALLY WICKED EXPERIENCE, DISTASTEFULLY PRIMED TO SHANK THE DEPENDS OFF COSTCO SCI-FI. SUCK IT UP, POPS—KUHNLEIN SLAYS. — BLAKE BUTLER
HANDLING WARNING!! NO ONE CAN IMITATE HIM. READERS ARE ONLY CORRODED BY DAVID KUHNLEIN’S SILENT INSANITY. — KENJI SIRATORI
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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yeah, dilemma on the self-promotion thing. I guess there must be some way to just use yourself to promote a thing you made or feel strongly about without barging into people’s heads and being manipulative, and I’ve had to do that with the film fundraising, but it’s hard. Grr. You made it through the proofreading, good. Yeah, I mean maybe it’s a little like editing a film, which I just love doing even though it’s very, very labor intensive. Anyway, yay. Here’s to the quick arrival of your fee. I think a lot of people who go “crazy” from “drug-laced candy” are just pretending? Gosh I don’t know. Love accepting my thanks for making my neighbor finally get sick of The Eagles, G. ** Misanthrope, Okay, Facebook. I’ll go find it when I’m outta here. I really need to gather my few Halloween loving friends here and do something. Hm. ** scunnard, Good, grateful for small favors and all of that. Very nice interview @ 3:AM. Big Friday to you, pal. ** _Black_Acrylic, I went over to the IKEA across the street from me hoping to buy some GODIS SKUM, but, apparently it’s been cancelled, if you can believe that. ** Audrey, Hi, Audrey! Oh, my pleasure. Good luck with the guitar. I played guitar as a teen, but I never got good at it. I was a barely passable rhythm guitarist at my peak. But barely passable. Director of Photography, that’s an excellent goal. Having made three films, the DP is so important and really has a huge impact on what the film is, not just what it looks like. And it’s been extremely interesting to work with our DPs, it’s really a collaboration and not at all like having a gun for hire kind of thing. I suppose with blockbusters that may not be the case. But, yes, amazing if you could find a conducive director and put your heads, etc. together and make a film, even a short film to start with. Do you know any aspiring directors you feel a possible kinship with? Maybe when Zac and I get to the point where we’re starting to develop a new film, we can talk. ‘Modern Times’, okay I’ll get that straight away. Thank you so much. I can finally start my Dylan catching up in a knowledgeable way. I’m happy you’re interested in Rimbaud. I would recommend starting with ‘A Season in Hell’. I think that’s kind of his masterpiece. If you can find the version translated by Enid Peschel, I think that’s the best one. I hope his works have something for you. How is your weekend looking? Love, me. ** Steve Erickson, High time. Everyone, Steve has weighed in on the new batch of recorded sounds, in this case specially the new full-lengths by Troye Sivan and Yeule right about here. I didn’t know that Scottish clown is still out there pulling his prank. It’s been years now. He must be serious about it. I’ll check in on his latest. I think the soonest we’ll hear from the festivals is in the next couple of weeks. That’s possible. Or early November. ** Damien Ark, Oh, yeah, Jake Evans. I followed that one. Nice mugshot, indeed. Thanks. You sent the email? I don’t think it has arrived yet. I’ll go check again. There’s a spooky house in Guadalajara, if you’re interested. I can’t remember the name. I found it when putting together my upcoming international haunt theoretical faves post. Have fun. ** Cody Goodnight, Hi, Cody. I could’ve used a couple of more hours of sleep last, but I’m sitting upright. The art was so-so, as art can so often be, but my friend was great, as friends so often can be. I hope you saw your friends and your mood skyrocketed as a consequence. I have to figure out something to do today that I can tell you about. Good Friday (without the religious connotation). ** Jeff J, Thanks. I will, this weekend: check out the Calendar EP. At least one of the two days will be film day-off day. Exciting about the Harry Smith films screening. You’re doing such good there, man. I kind of figured about HS’s evil, ‘cos when he started on me, my friend who knew him who was with us just kind of rolled his eyes and said, ‘Please stop, Harry’, as though it was kind of business as usual. We’re currently finessing the score, such as it is, with Puce Mary, who just made a bunch of new tracks to try out. The full sound mix/design and special effects can’t happen until we finish the edit, which should happen very soon, and, more importantly, when we have funds to pay for that, which we don’t. We’ll need to do that by the end of year no matter what, even if we have to beg on our knees for money. Not so many people have seen the film yet, but the responses have been very enthusiastic. So far so good. Thanks for asking, man. I hope your pain is in whatever constitutes a lull. ** Mark, Hi, Mark. My pleasure. If by chance you go to Dangling Carrot’s Grisly Garden in Santa Clarita, let me know how it is. That’s the haunt I’m most miserable about missing. I do know Julius Eastman. I mean his work. Yeah, he’s amazing. What a startlingly good zine subject. I saw Dinosaur L live once way back. ‘Rotting in the Sun’? Nope, don’t know it. But now I will make sure I do. I’m on it. Thanks, Mark. ** 2Moody, Yeah, that ramen kit is pretty charismatic, isn’t it? I feel you. I live near the Japanese district in Paris, so maybe I’ll see if by some miracle it’s in local stock. My saliva tastes like a cigarette at the moment. Nah, by the rime I heard about the tea cup dropping, I wasn’t very interested in Blur anymore. Graham from Blur likes my work. Or did at least. He wrote me a nice email once. I would toss mini Japanese candy confetti wildly in the air right this second if I had any. I am going to buy some American Halloween candies and things at the American food store here this weekend. Maybe by now sweet, edible confetti is an American thing too. What precisely did you do with Friday’s available resources? ** SP, Hi, SP. Welcome. I haven’t heard about the Austin dead guys sequence. I’ll look into it. I presume if you’re there I don’t have to recommend you carry a little canister of mace with you. Anyway, thank you. Good to meet you. ** Okay. Above you’ll find or already have found, more realistically, five recent books that I loved and recommend, and everything from now on re: them, is up to you. Se you tomorrow.
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