‘In the immediate aftermath of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s murder on November 2, 1975, the Italian press published articles comparing the poet, novelist, filmmaker, and polemicist with a whole “canon of contrarian prophets, talismans and poètes maudits,” according to the literary scholar Robert Gordon, who compiled the list: St. Augustine, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Jean Genet, Federico García Lorca, Cesare Pavese, Arthur Rimbaud, Girolamo Savonarola, Socrates, François Villon, Elio Vittorini, and even the archeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann, as well as Ariel, Midas, Narcissus, Don Quixote, and Jesus. Nearly all those associations have some plausibility, but at least in a certain mood, I might lean toward Savonarola, the 15th century friar who became a populist tribune and scourge of religious and secular powers before being burned at the stake. If Pasolini seemed to profane everything, it was because he wanted everything to be sacred.

‘Born in 1922 in Bologna, Pasolini spent part of his childhood in his mother’s hometown in the impoverished northeastern province of Friuli, not far from the border with what is today Slovenia. Back in Bologna for university, he began writing poetry in Friulian, though he did not know the language well. Meanwhile, his political loyalties were shifting from Italy’s fascism of his childhood to the left. In Friuli after World War II, he declared his support for the Italian Communist Party. In 1949, charged with sexual misconduct with several young men, he lost his job as a secondary school teacher and was expelled from the party.

‘In 1950, Pasolini moved with his mother to a working-class neighborhood in Rome, finding work in the city’s Cinecittà film studio. In these early Rome years, he made his name as a prodigious member of the literary intelligentsia. His poetry was beginning to be published regularly, he cofounded one of Italy’s leading literary magazines, and he started writing novels, beginning with Ragazzi di Vita (1955), which has been published in English under several titles, most recently in 2016 as The Street Kids. But that anodyne rendering of the title hardly captures the implications of vita in this context, comparable to American street jargon in which “the life” means criminal life; maybe Boys in the Life would have been a more accurate rendering. In any case, Pasolini’s fascination with—and deep affection for—the petty thieves and hustlers of the Roman suburbs he lived in had already established itself. As did his love for dialect: The Italian editions came with a glossary for readers unacquainted with the often obscene Roman slang.

‘In the following decade, Pasolini—having collaborated on some scripts for Federico Fellini—began making films of his own, starting with Accattone (1961), a story of the Roman lumpenproletariat not unlike those of his novels. Accattone takes the Italian neorealist tradition to an extreme and transforms it into something far darker and more pessimistic. Technically, the film was striking for a visual bluntness or monumentality reminiscent of early Renaissance painting. Bernardo Bertolucci, who served as Pasolini’s assistant director, recalled for the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, “It was…like witnessing the invention of a new language. And he never spoke of cinema, only of drawings and paintings, altarpieces.” A new study of Pasolini—Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art, and Neocapitalism (University of Chicago Press) by Ara H. Merjian, an art historian and Italianist at New York University—takes painting, which Pasolini practiced fitfully but whose history he studied passionately, as a key to understanding his work as a whole. As Pasolini remarked, “My cinematic taste does not have its origins in cinema but in the figurative. That which I carry in my head as vision, as a visual field, are the frescoes of Masaccio and Giotto.”

‘Not surprisingly, given this heritage, Pasolini’s films would draw on themes drawn from literature, myth, and religion, perhaps more suited to his hieratic sense of style—The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1966), Oedipus Rex (1967)—or would treat contemporary life in an allegorical manner, as in Teorema (1968). Meanwhile, having switched from Friulian to standard Italian, he took on the role of civil poet, commenting on contemporary events to express, as his friend the novelist Alberto Moravia put it, “a lament for the devastated, disheartened, prostrated homeland, and nostalgia for the rural culture,” which he remembered from his childhood and from which the urban proletariat of Rome had only just been expelled, and penning innumerable reviews, essays, and polemics that earned him enemies across the political spectrum, not to mention endless attempts at censorship and legal prosecution. He had fervent admirers too, of course, whom he was always willing to wrongfoot, such as when, amid the uprisings of 1968, he stopped to point to the police as “sons of the poor” and the protesters as bourgeois. Although the same poem clearly specifies, “We are obviously in agreement against the police as an institution,” he was taken by many as supporting them rather than clarifying his thought that students with no ties to the working class were in no position to make a revolution.

‘For a while in the early 1970s, Pasolini’s films—his “Trilogy of Life” (1971–74)—seemed to suggest a renewed belief that some eternal life force, incarnated in the rowdy impudence of the lower classes of all times and places, was irrepressible. But then his vision grew darker again. He seemed to see the multiplicity of life and language being stamped out by the monoculture of bourgeois consumerism, which he saw as a new and more powerful form of fascism, “a ‘total’ form of fascism” that “has also culturally homologated Italy” and therefore amounted to “a real and true anthropological catastrophe.”

‘The line between polemicist and curmudgeon blurred in the last years of his life as he penned screeds on the stupefying power of television, long hair (no longer a sign of leftism), and sacrilegious ads for blue jeans. His 1975 film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, represented this state of affairs under the guise of the rump state of Mussolini’s Italy toward the end of World War II, in which a group of rich and powerful men retreat to a castle where they subject a group of young men and women to unspeakable abuse and torture—a sort of hymn to the death drive and one of the most difficult films to watch in the history of cinema. It premiered three weeks after its maker’s still unsolved murder.

As Merjian points out, Pasolini’s death gave rise to his myth. Both “in the popular imagination and the gloss of countless pundits alike…Pasolini had willed his own death, even sought it out.” Those who believed this forgot that he had not long before declared of his time that “the more I am detached from it, the more I agree only stoically to live in it.” And fantasies of a self-willed death, undoubtedly stoked by the grimness of his final film, were not limited to Italy.

‘Pasolini’s death was no fandango. On the beach at Ostia, near the ancient port of Rome, he was beaten and then run over with his own car. The culprit was supposed to be a young man Pasolini had picked up for sex. Despite a confession, many found it hard to believe the story of cruising gone wrong. Rumors suggested an assassination. Why? “Because he was homosexual, communist, and expressed himself openly against the bourgeoisie, government, Christian Democracy, fascists, judges, and police,” as the Italian collective Wu Ming recently put it. The supposed murderer later retracted his confession, and the case was never solved to anyone’s satisfaction. Pasolini was a martyr, but to what cause?

‘In Italy, Pasolini’s poetry is part of the 20th century canon. Books like Le Ceneri di Gramsci (The Ashes of Gramsci, 1957) and Poesia in Forma di Rosa (Poem in the Form of a Rose, 1964) are unavoidable reference points. Their very titles possess an aura. What made his poetry so urgent? His friend and sometime antagonist Franco Fortini—another great poet-critic—put it beautifully: “Where almost all the poets who were his contemporaries or immediate precursors gave themselves a way out, a path to salvation by way of discretion, silence, or the so-called ‘decency’ that Montale spoke of, he recognized the moral necessity of indecency, of ‘giving evidence of the scandal,’ of the triumph of shame and excess.” If anything, this moral tropism toward scandal and excess becomes even more evident in his films, in which, as Merjian says, “Pasolini pursued what he called a ‘technical sacrality’ in frank emulation of Renaissance panels and Romanesque sculpture.” It was in religious art that he discovered the possibility of a gaze that would not flinch from even the most abject sight.

‘Recently, despite the difficulty of encompassing Pasolini’s manifold oeuvre in poetry, fiction, essays, films, and even painting, the artist seems to have been reemerging from behind the myth. For fellow artists, he’s become a beacon. The normally ultra-sensationalistic filmmaker Abel Ferrara devoted one of his best (and most measured) films—shown at the Venice Film Festival in 2014 but unreleased in the United States until 2019—to a chronicle of Pasolini’s last days, played with characteristic subtlety by Willem Dafoe. As A.O. Scott observed in The New York Times, Ferrara’s film “is less concerned with the realistic reconstruction of the past than with communicating a mood in the present.”

Toward the end of his book, Merjian supplies a list of contemporary artists whose work has explicitly cited Pasolini. The necessarily incomplete catalog nonetheless includes some 80 names, grouped by art forms ranging from painting and photography to music and experimental novels and, of course, video and film. Some of the categorizations seem odd. The Italian conceptual artist Giulio Paolini is listed among those who have cited Pasolini in the medium of theater design, and the great Soviet director Sergei Parajanov (who, like Pasolini, paid the price for his sexual nonconformity) is listed for works on paper. I could add other names to Merjian’s list, such as the African American artist Glenn Ligon (his neon sculpture Notes for a Poem on the Third World [chapter one], 2018), the Moroccan French visual artist Bouchra Khalili (her video The Tempest Society, 2017), and the Albanian Italian video artist Adrian Paci, who in 2005 named an exhibition in Zurich “Secondo Pasolini” (“According to Pasolini”). As Merjian remarks, “One is hard pressed to think of a twentieth-century figure—whether poet, artist, or director—who has galvanized a comparable range of artists in such diverse media and over successive generations.” He’s only right, I suppose, if one adds the disclaimer “except for Picasso,” but to put the two men’s names together that way only attests to the protean protean nature of Pasolini’s cultural impact. …

‘Comizi d’Amore (1963) starts with a gaggle of kids in Palermo being asked the obvious question, “Where do babies come from?” The stork brings them, or maybe a midwife. Next Pasolini meets with Alberto Moravia and the psychoanalyst Cesare Musatti: Is this series of interviews worth undertaking? Sure, says, Moravia, because no one talks about these things in Italy even privately, let alone on film. But Musatti warns, “People will either not answer or lie.” And a bit later on, a young man in a craftsman’s shop in Florence admits that he finds the whole topic of sex sad rather than exciting. A soldier believes that society pushes men to play the Don Juan or else be considered a failure, but his buddies disagree; they feel they are too short or don’t have the looks to play that game. A peasant father in Emilia Romagna, asked if men and women should be equal or if women should be inferior, replies, “A little inferior, but not a wide gap.” His daughter, smiling, disagrees. (Later, a woman sunning herself on the Lido in Venice allows, “We’d like to be superior, but sometimes it’s convenient to feel inferior.”)

‘We also meet university students, a pro soccer team, female factory workers, sex workers, and notably, the elderly poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, who, though sitting on a beach chair, is dressed in a suit and tie. Since everyone is different, he says, “all men are, in their own way, abnormal. All men are, in a way, in contrast with nature.” Asked to be more specific about his transgressions of norms, Ungaretti (who seems utterly embarrassed by the whole conversation) tells Pasolini, “I break all laws by writing poetry.” I couldn’t help thinking that Pasolini must have silently considered his elder’s response evasive—but that the response might have corresponded with Pasolini’s conception of his own role.

‘In any case, Pasolini finds an absolute difference between the north of Italy, “modern but…confused,” and the south, which with its “poor yet real population” maintains the cruel clarity of ancient ways, and concludes that, as articulated “from the lower classes and the deepest instincts,” “certain impelling desires” are in conflict with “a modern and democratic law”—a situation that is met only “with disarming superficiality or hopeless confusion.” This is, of course, nothing more than a local variant on what Sigmund Freud much earlier diagnosed as “das Unbehagen in der Kultur,” that is, an inherent discomfort or unease with civilized life. (The title of his book by that name is ordinarily mistranslated as Civilization and Its Discontents.)

‘If Pasolini attempts to be almost encyclopedic in encompassing all strata of Italian society, Hayes’s Ricerche, less than half the length of its model, concentrates on a single place, a single age group. Her interviewees were all students at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, one of the last remaining US all-women colleges—which today means that it has to accommodate the increasing porosity of gender identities. As Hayes points out, “The interview unfolds on camera in such a way that you’re not entirely sure how many people are being interviewed as interviewees slowly add in as the camera, following the interviewer, shifts across the group left to right,” which is to say, while her sampling of subjects is very narrow compared with Pasolini’s, its precise limits are ambiguous. The interviewees are a far more diverse group than Pasolini could have dreamed of encountering in the Italy of six decades ago—white, Black, Native American, Latinx, South Asian, East Asian. Their relationship to the category of women is far more varied than could ever have been articulated in Pasolini’s Italy, too, since the group includes gender-fluid individuals as well as trans men and cis women. And while all of Pasolini’s interlocutors were marked, implicitly or explicitly, by the country’s dominant Catholicism (though Moravia’s Judaic roots go unmentioned), the Holyoke students’ religious upbringing and commitments are varied. This is as much of a conclusion as they can reach: “We are talking about different ‘wes.’”

‘Would Pasolini, if he had lived into his 90s, have approved of Ricerche? Permit me to doubt it and not only because his unqualified agreement with anything was so rare. Savonarola wouldn’t have liked it, either. Pasolini might well have derided the diversity of the Mount Holyoke students as an entirely bourgeois diversity, another example of that assimilation of everything to a dominant culture, a dominant language, a consumerist and mass-marketed bazaar of fungible identities “obtained by the imposition of a form of hedonism and joie de vivre,” as he believed.

‘By now, he easily might have become not just a contrarian but an out-and-out reactionary. Merjian makes clear—starting with his title, Against the Avant-Garde—that although today we might like to see Pasolini as a vanguard artist, he came to reject abstract and Pop art, electronic and aleatory music, the literary experiments of many Italian poets and writers of the 1960s, and the anti-narrative films of Michelangelo Antonioni as much as the abstract “cinema of lyric poetry obtained through editing and the intensification of technique.” All of these he saw, not without reason, as toothless attempts to “deride institutions without eating into them.” Many of the back-and-forth polemics that Merjian chronicles among Pasolini and his contemporaries now seem to be of essentially antiquarian interest, although their ferocity might give pause to those who today lament such vehement and ad hominem public disputes as evidence of a newfangled “cancel culture.” What counts is the consistency with which, in what Merjian calls Pasolini’s “all-out war against the present,” he found his fellow writers and artists all too timely in their interventions.

‘As for what Pasolini would think of his artistic beatification in a world that has become, if anything, even more homogenous in its colonization by neoliberalism than the one he decried? He might not have appreciated the 80 or so homages that Merjian notes. I suspect Pasolini would have quoted one of the verse passages of his 1968 novel Teorema:

But begin to understand immediately
that the poets and painters old or dead
in spite of the halo of a heroic air you give them
are useless to you, teach you nothing.

‘But if Pasolini’s great lesson was his pessimism, our task is to learn when to apply it and when it might do us more harm than good. The young people Hayes interviewed gave me hope. And for that very reason, I wonder whether Pasolini was, after all, the right model for her work. Or perhaps it’s that she understands him better than he understood himself when, finally—but “finally” only because of a contingent act of violence he never willed—he slid from pessimism to despair.’ — Barry Schwabsky

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Italian Pasolini Website
Pasolini @ IMDb
Pasolini interviewed by Jonas Mekas
Restoring Pasolini
Pasolini @ Senses of Cinema
Who really killed Pier Paolo Pasolini?
Les dernières heures de Pier Paolo Pasolini
Pasolini @ The Criterion Collection
Interview: Pier Paolo Pasolini 1965
Book: Pier Paolo Pasolini Pasolini’s Bodies and Places
Behind the Myth of Pier Paolo Pasolini
Istituto Pier Paolo Pasolini @ Instagram
PIER PAOLO PASOLINI: THE COMPLETE ARTIST
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Death
THE RELEVANT QUEER
The life and death of Pier Paolo Pasolini

 

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Extras

Pier Paolo Pasolini Speaks

Pier Paolo Pasolini Documentary 1970

Inside the NEU: Pier Paolo Pasolini – Subversive Prophet

Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini – Official U.S. Trailer

 

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Pasolini’s Own Notes on Salò from 1974

 

Foreword

This film is a cinematographic transposition of Sade’s novel The 120 Days of Sodom. I should like to say that I have been absolutely faithful to the psychology of the characters and their actions, and that I have added nothing of my own. Even the structure of the story line is identical, although obviously it is very synthetised. To make this synthesis I resorted to an idea Sade certainly had in mind – Dante’s Inferno. I was thus able to reduce in a Dantesque way certain deeds, certain speeches, certain days from the whole immense catalogue of Sade. There is a kind of ‘Anti-Inferno’ (the Antechamber of Hell) followed by three infernal ‘Circles’: ‘The Circle of Madness’; ‘The Circle of Shit’, and ‘The Circle of Blood’. Consequently, the Story-Tellers who, in Sade’s novel, are four, are three in my film, the fourth having become a virtuoso – she accompanies the tales of the three others on the piano.

Despite my absolute fidelity to Sade’s text, I have however introduced an absolutely new element: the action instead of taking place in eighteenth-century France, takes place practically in our own time, in Salò, around 1944, to be exact.

This means that the entire film with its unheard-of atrocities which are almost unmentionable, is presented as an immense sadistic metaphor of what was the Nazi-Fascist ‘dissociation’ from its ‘crimes against humanity’. Curval, Blangis, Durcet, the Bishop – Sade’s characters (who are clearly SS men in civilian dress) behave exactly with their victims as the Nazi-Fascists did with theirs. They considered them as objects and destroyed automatically all possibility of human relationship with them.

This does not mean that I make all that explicit in the film. No, I repeat again, I have not added a single word to what the characters in Sade have to say nor have I added a single detail to the acts they commit. The only points of reference to the 20th century are the way they dress, comport themselves, and the houses in which they live.

Naturally there is some disproportion between the four protagonists of Sade turned into Nazi-Fascists and actual Nazi-Fascists who are historically true. There are differences in psychology and ideology. Differences and also some incoherence. But this accentuates the visionary mood, the unreal nightmare quality of the film. This film is a mad dream, which does not explain what happened in the world during the 40s. A dream which is all the more logical in its whole when it’s the least in its details.

Salò and Sade

Practical reason says that during the Republic of Salò it would have been particularly easy given the atmosphere to organise, as Sade’s protagonists did, a huge orgy in a villa guarded by SS men. Sade says explicitly in a phrase, less famous than so many others, that nothing is more profoundly anarchic than power – any power. To my knowledge there has never been in Europe any power as anarchic as that of the Republic of Salò: it was the most petty excess functioning as government. What applies to all power was especially clear in this one.

In addition to being anarchic what best characterises power – any power – is its natural capacity to turn human bodies into objects. Nazi-Fascist repression excelled in this.

Another link with Sade’s work is the acceptance/non-acceptance of the philosophy and culture of the period. Just as Sade’s protagonists accepted the method – at least mental or linguistic – of the philosophy of the Enlightened Age without accepting all the reality which produced it, so do those of the Fascist Republic accept Fascist ideology beyond all reality. Their language is in fact their comportment (exactly like the Sade protagonists) and the language of their comportment obeys rules which are much more complex and profound than those of an ideology. The vocabulary of torture has only a formal relation with the ideological reasons which drive men to torture. Nonetheless with the characters in my film, although what counts is their sub-verbal language, their words also have a great importance. Besides their verbiage is rather wordy. But such wordy verbiage is important in two senses: firstly it is part of the presentation, being a ‘text’ of Sade’s, that is being what the characters think of themselves and what they do; and, secondly, it is part of the ideology of the film, given that the characters who quote anachronistically Klossowsky and Blanchot are also called upon to give the message I have established and organised for this film: anarchy of power, inexistence of history, circularity (non-psychological not even in the psychoanalytic sense) between executioners and victims, an institution anterior to a reality which can only be economic (the rest, that is, the superstructure, being a dream or a nightmare).

Ideology and the meaning of the Film

We should not confuse ideology with message, nor message with meaning. The message belongs in part – that of logic – to ideology, and in the other part – that of irreason – to meaning. The logical message is almost always evil, lying, hypocritical even when very sincere. Who could doubt my sincerity when I say that the message of Salò is the denunciation of the anarchy of power and the inexistence of history? Nonetheless put this way such a message is evil, lying, hypocritical, that is logical in the sense of that same logic which finds that power is not at all anarchic and which believes that history does exist. The part of the message which belongs to the meaning of the film is immensely more real because it also includes all that the author does not know, that is, the boundlessness of his own social, historical restrictions. But such a message can’t be delivered. It can only be left to silence and to the text. What finally now is the meaning of a work? It is its form. The message therefore is formalistic; and precisely for that reason, loaded infinitely with all possible content provided it is coherent – in the structural sense.

Stylistic elements in the film

Accumulation of daily characteristics of wealthy bourgeois life, all very proper and correct (double-breasted suits, sequinned, deep cut gowns with dignified white fox furs, polished floors, sedately set tables, collections of paintings, in part those of ‘degenerate’ artists (some futuristic, some formalistic); ordinary speech, bureaucratic, precise to the point of self caricature.

‘Veiled’ reconstruction of Nazi ceremonial ways (its nudity, its military simplicity at the same time decadent, its ostentations and icy vitality, its discipline functioning like an artificial harmony between authority and obedience, etc.

Obsessive accumulation to the point of excess of sadistic ritualistic and organised deeds; sometimes also given a brutal, spontaneous character.

Ironic corrective to all this through a humour which may explode suddenly in details of a sinister and admitted comic nature. Thanks to which suddenly everything vacillates and is presented as not true and not crude, exactly because of the theatrical satanism of self-awareness itself. It is in this sense that the direction will be expressed in the editing. It is there that will be produced the mix between the serious and the impossibility of being serious, between a sinister, bloody Thanatos and curate Bauba (Bauba was a Greek divinity of liberating laughter or better: obscene and liberating laughter).

In every shot it can be said I set myself the problem of driving the spectator to feeling intolerant and immediately afterwards relieving him of that feeling.

 

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Interview

 

What do you know about Swedish cinema?

I know Bergman, like all other Italian intellectuals. I don’t know anyone else. I’ve heard the names of other Swedish filmmakers but I don’t know their films.

Never seen them?

Never. Rome is a terrible city. There are independent cinemas but the occasions to watch them are very rare.

You don’t have independent cinemas in Rome?

We do, just a couple. It’s not like Paris.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Pasolini is here to present his new film. He just finished it and it’s about Sodom…

I think this is the first time I’ve made a film for which the original idea wasn’t mine. The film was proposed to Sergio Citti and as usual I was helping him to write the screenplay. As we went along, Citti began losing interest in the film while I was more and more in love with it, especially since I had the idea to set the film in ’45, during the last days of the Republic of Salo. Citti started thinking about another script and abandoned the project all together. And given that I was in love with this project, I completed it. Being based on De Sade, this film revolves around the representation of sex. But this aspect has changed in relation to my last three films that I call “the trilogy of life”: The Decameron, Canterbury Tales and Arabian Nights. In this new film, sex is nothing but an allegory of the commodification of bodies at the hands of power. I think that consumerism manipulates and violates bodies as much as Nazism did. My film represents this sinister coincidence between Nazism and consumerism. Well, I don’t know if audiences will grasp this since the film presents itself in rather enigmatic way, almost like a miracle play, where the sacred word retains its Latin meaning of “cursed.”

Why did you choose the year 1945 for your film?

I wanted to represent the end of a world, past glory days. It was a poetic choice—I could have set it in ’38, in ’39 or ’37, but it would’ve been less poetic.

What’s poetic about that period?

Decadence and twilight are inherently poetic. Had I set it in the heyday of Nazism, it would’ve been an intolerable movie. To know that all this took place in the last days and that it would soon be over gives the spectator a sense of relief. Substantially this is a film about “true anarchy,” that is, the anarchy of power.

You are a poet and a filmmaker. Is there a relation between these two roles?

As far as I’m concerned, there is a profound unity between the two of them. It’s as if I were a bilingual writer.

What is the title of your new film?

The title is Salò, the name of a town by the Garda Lake, which was the capital of the Fascist Republic. It’s a multipurpose title. There is an ambiguity to it: the complete title will be Salò and the 120 days of Sodom. Anyway, there is no historical reconstruction of that era, no truly historical relation: there are no Mussolini portraits; no one does the Roman salute. It’s all given.

How do you fund your films? Are they commercially successful?

The funding process is the normal one. I have a producer.

You don’t have problems?

I don’t have problems since only Porcile and Medea were commercial flops. All the others did well at the box office. Accattone was the crucial one. It didn’t do super well, but good enough for a beginner. Ever since then, I haven’t had any problems.

Do you work totally within the commercial system?

Yes, totally.

Does this mean that one can make very personal and very poetic films within the “system”?

Yes, in Italy is possible. I’m not the only one. Fellini, for example, does it too.

You and Fellini are very established directors. Is it the same for a 25-year-old filmmaker?

It’s hard for young people, but that applies to all professions. A young doctor, for instance, struggles as much. In most instances, directors like myself help young ones to get started, like I did with Bernardo Bertolucci. Perhaps Bergman, if he had faith in some young director, could help him/her to make a movie.

Since you have the possibility to make movies within the “system,” how do you choose your themes? Do you enjoy the same freedom you have when writing poetry or you need to keep the audience in mind? Isn’t it a problem?

This is neither a moral, political nor a practical problem. It is an aesthetic one insofar as it concerns the metrics and the prosody of a film that in turn influence the readability and “simplicity” of it. Let me be clearer: let’s take into consideration the extreme case of an avant-garde film, an “illegible” one as Philippe Sollers would say, and a literary text of the same kind. Well, between the two of them the film is definitely more legible. There is a higher grade of simplicity and readability that is inherent to the cinematographic technique itself.

Is it possible in Italy to keep making movies if you’re not commercially successful?

It can happen that, in spite of not being successful, one can try again as long as failure is strictly commercial and the film has a certain quality.

Have you bid farewell to the realism of your first features for good?

I don’t agree with this. After 15 years in Italy, they finally showed Accattone on TV. We realized it is not a realist film at all. It’s a dream, it’s an oneiric movie.

Didn’t they consider it a realistic film in Italy?

Yes, but it was a misunderstanding. When I made it, I knew I was doing a very lyrical film, not oneiric as it now seems, but deeply lyrical. I used that soundtrack and shot it in a certain way for a reason. Then what happened was that the realistic world I drew inspiration from for Accattone disappeared; it is no longer there, so the film is a dream of that world.

Mamma Roma is realist…

Mamma Roma is more realistic than Accattone, maybe. I should watch it again. It is less accomplished, less beautiful and that’s because it is less dream-like.

What is your training in cinema?

I’ve got none. I’ve trained by watching films, starting with two great and precise passions, Charlie Chaplin and Kenzo Mizoguchi [sic]. They are the two poles within which everything happens in my films. In fact, my movies are a mix of what stylists call “comic” and “sublime,” intended here as stylistic categories. Even in Oedipus Rex, which is supposed to be a highly stylistic and sublime work, the comic aspect sneaks in. In fact, I have always seen reality in cinema as a comic element. But we have to be careful to not attribute too ordinary a meaning to the term “comic.”

You have been and still are a writer. How did you decide to make movies?

It’s a long story. When I was a boy, 18 or 19 years old, for a while I wanted to be a director. Then the war came along and abolished any hope and possibility. I found myself in a series of circumstances: I published my first novel, Ragazzi di Vita, which was rather successful in Italy, and subsequently, I was asked to work on screenplays. When I shot Accattone, it was the first time I laid my hands on a movie camera. I hadn’t even ever taken a photograph. To this day, I cannot take good pictures.

Where do you see yourself in the future? More in cinema or literature?

At the moment I’m thinking about making a couple of more films and then to dedicate myself completely to literature again.

Are you being honest?

In this precise moment I am. I hope to be honest.

Is the act of shooting a movie tiresome? It seems, though, that in Italy it is more pleasant. Do Italians have more fun?

I have lot of fun. It’s a marvelous game. It is very tiresome, especially for me being a cameraman, too, having to carry the camera all the time. So it’s a muscular effort too, but it’s still great fun.

How is your crew? Are there loads of people?

No, it’s as small as possible.

Do you always shoot in 35mm?

Yes, always in 35mm.

Does it take a long time to learn?

You learn everything in 15 minutes.

You prefer non-professional actors. How do you work? Do you look for a setting and then choose the people?

No, it’s not exactly like this. If my film is set in a working class environment, I choose ordinary working men and women, non-professional actors, since I believe it’s impossible for a middle-class actor to pretend to be a peasant or a factory worker. It would sound false in an intolerable way. But if I make a film set in a bourgeois milieu, since I cannot ask a lawyer or an engineer to act for me, then I pick professional actors. Naturally, I’m referring to Italy, how it was ten years ago. If I were in Sweden, I would probably always use actors since there is no difference anymore between a middle class and a working class man there. I’m talking about physical differences; in Italy, there is the same difference between the middle and working class as there is between a white and a black man.

In your last film, there are no religious elements, is that right?

I’m not sure there were not religious elements in my last films. In Arabian Nights, for example, there is a religious tone throughout the film. There wasn’t any denominational religiosity, any straight religious theme, but a mystical and irrational situation was there for sure. The “Ninetto” episode, which is the central part of the film…

Have you taken part in a dialogue between Marxists and Catholics in Italy?

There are no more Marxists and Catholics in Italy—there are no more Catholics in Italy.

Can you explain the situation to us then?

In Italy, there was a revolution, and it was the first one in its history, while other capitalist countries have had at least four or five revolutions which have unified the [respective] countries. I’m thinking of the monarchic unification, the Lutheran Reformation, the French Revolution and the first industrial revolution. Italy instead had its first one with the second industrial revolution, namely consumerism, and that has radically changed Italian culture in anthropological terms. Before that, the difference between the middle and the working class was as marked as that between two races. Now it’s almost vanished. And the culture that has been destroyed the most is the rural one, that is, the peasants. So the Vatican does not have this mass of Catholic peasants behind it anymore. Churches are empty; seminaries, too. If you come to Rome, you don’t see clerical students walking the streets anymore, and in the last two elections, the secular vote has triumphed. Marxists, too, have been anthropologically changed by the consumer revolution. They live differently, have a different lifestyle, different cultural models and their ideology changed as well.

Are they Marxists and consumerists at the same time?

There is this contradiction—all those who consider themselves either Marxists or Communists are consumerists, too. Even the Italian Communist Party has accepted this development.

When you refer to Marxists, are you referring to the Communist Party or other factions?

Whatever. Communists, Socialists, hardliners. For example, Italian hardliners plant bombs and then watch TV in the evening.

Does a society divided into classes still exist?

Classes are still there but—and this is the Italian peculiarity—the class struggle is on the economic level and not on a cultural one anymore. Between a middle and a working class man the difference is economic, not cultural anymore.

What about the neo-fascist movement?

Fascism is over since it rested upon God, family, homeland and the army, which are now meaningless words. There are no more Italians who get emotional in front of the flag.

There is a general decay of Italian society today, isn’t that true?

I consider consumerism a worse fascism than that the classical one, because clerical-fascism did not transform Italians. It did not get into them. It was totalitarian but not totalizing. I’ll give you an example: fascism has tried for twenty years to eliminate dialects and it didn’t succeed. Consumerism, which, on the contrary, pretends to be safeguarding dialects, is destroying them.

Do you think there is a certain balance between these different forces?

There is a chaotic balance.

Where does this chaos come from?

It’s the Italian “growth” crisis. Italy swiftly passed from being an underdeveloped to a developed country. And it all happened within five, six or seven years. It’s like taking a poor family and turning them into billionaires. They would lose their identity. Italians are going through a period in which their identity is being lost. All the other countries instead are either already developed and have gradually begun to [lose their identities] in the past two centuries or are like the Third World, pre-developed.

Be Tiresia. Make a prophecy. Is there hope for the future?

I should be Cassandra rather than Tiresia. I asked two Swedish guys I was talking to today whether they felt closer to a humanist or a technological civilization. They replied, rather sadly, that they feel like they’re the first generation after about thirty generations that’s any different from what has come before. To wrap up, everything I’ve said here represents my own views. If you speak with other Italians, they will tell you, “Oh, that crazy man, Pasolini.”

 

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19 of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 28 films

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Accattone (1961)
‘Pier Paolo Pasolini made his first film, Accattone, when he was almost forty years old. Pasolini had, however, already collaborated on many other films: Fellini’s Notti di Cabiria (1957), Bolognini’s Il Bel Antonio (1959), La Notte brava (1959), La Giornata balorda (1960), and Bertolucci’s La Commare Secca (1962).

‘Accattone was released in 1961. Accattone, known in the U.S.A. as Accattone! and The Scrounger, and The Procurer in the U.K., means “beggar” in English. It is based on Pasolini’s 1959 novel Una vita violenta (A Violent Life). According to Pasolini specialist, Marc Gervais, with whom I had the honor of studying in the early 1970s, Accattone was an “honorable film” which was well received by the Italian press. Gervais wonders why?

‘The film didn’t stand out at the time: the period in which Accattone was made (from 1959 to 1963) is considered by many as being one of the most creative years in the history of cinema: Fellini, Bergman, Hitchcock, Visconti, Bresson, Antonioni, Olmi, Godard, Truffaut, Cassavetes, Monicelli, Chabrol, Camus (Black Orpheus), Rohmer and so many other fine filmmakers would alter the way we experienced film as an art medium. Yet Accattone has aged remarkably well.’ — Antonio D’Alfonso

the entirety

 

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Mamma Roma (1962)
‘Anna Magnani is Mamma Roma, a middle-aged prostitute who attempts to extricate herself from her sordid past for the sake of her son. Filmed in the great tradition of Italian neorealism, Mamma Roma offers an unflinching look at the struggle for survival in postwar Italy, and highlights director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s lifelong fascination with the marginalized and dispossessed. Though banned upon its release in Italy for obscenity, today Mamma Roma remains a classic, featuring a powerhouse performance by one of cinema’s greatest actresses and offering a glimpse at a country’s most controversial director in the process of finding his style.’ — The Criterion Channel

the entirety

 

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The Anger (1963)
‘La Rabbia (The Anger) is an Italian documentary film produced by Gastone Ferranti and directed in the first half by Pier Paolo Pasolini and in the second half by Giovannino Guareschi. It was released in 1963. Both directors, a communist and a reactionary, tried to answer the question: “What is the cause of the dissatisfaction, fear and conflicts that shake society?’ — AGS363

the entirety

 

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Comizi d’amore (1964)
‘Microphone in hand, Pier Paolo Pasolini asks Italians to talk about sex: he asks children where babies come from, young and old women if they are men’s equals, men and women if a woman’s virginity matters, how they view homosexuals, how sex and honor connect, if divorce should be legal, and if they support closing the brothels (the Merlina Act). He periodically checks in with Alberto Moravia and Cesare Musatti. Bersani is intrusive and judgemental, prodding those who answer. The film’s thesis: despite the booming post-war economy, Italians’ attitudes toward sex are either rigidly Medieval (the poor and the South) or muddled and self-censoring (the bourgeoisie and the North).’ — jhailey

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964)
‘Pier Paolo Pasolini was an atheist, indeed a Marxist, and his The Gospel According to Matthew is routinely interpreted as a proto-Marxist allegory. Yet Pasolini was perhaps first of all a poet, and the concepts of the sacred and the divine, far from repelling him as so much religious superstition, held for him a powerful appeal. In 1962 he came to Assisi in response to Pope John XXIII’s call for dialogue with non-Christian artists. While there, he read through a book of the Gospels “from beginning to end, like a novel,” later proclaiming the story of Jesus “the most exalting thing one can read.”

‘As a result of this experience, Pasolini became consumed with the notion of filming the life of Christ straight from one of the Gospels, shooting without a screenplay and taking no editorial license with the text. After completing The Gospel According to Matthew, he dedicated it “to the dear happy familiar memory of John XXIII.”

‘Pasolini edits, but doesn’t rewrite; he omits some scenes and rearranges others, but on a scene-by-scene basis he follows Matthew’s dialogue almost verbatim, neither changing nor adding. (A few very minor departures are allowed, such as putting Matthew’s list of the names of the twelve disciples onto Jesus’ lips.)

‘What most differentiates Pasolini’s method from that of subsequent word-for-word productions such as The Gospel of John is Pasolini’s reliance on the image as the cinematic equivalent of the sacred writer’s narration. There is no voiceover narrative in The Gospel According to Matthew; whatever Matthew tells us himself, as opposed to reporting other people saying, must either be understood from the images or else be lost.’ — Decent Films

the entirety

 

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Sopralluoghi in Palestina (1964)
‘In 1963, accompanied by a newsreel photographer and a Catholic priest, Piero Paolo Pasolini traveled to Palestine to investigate the possibility of filming his biblical epic The Gospel According to Matthew in its approximate historical locations. Edited by The Gospel‘s producer for potential funders and distributors, Seeking Locations in Palestine features semi-improvised commentary from Pasolini as its only soundtrack. As we travel from village to village, we listen to Pasolini’s idiosyncratic musings on the teachings of Christ and witness his increasing disappointment with the people and landscapes he sees before him. Israel, he laments, is much too modern. The Palestinians, much too wretched; it would be impossible to believe the teachings of Jesus had reached these faces. The Gospel According to Matthew was ultimately filmed in Southern Italy. Mel Gibson would use some of the same locations forty years later for The Passion of the Christ.’ — Ubuweb

Excerpt

 

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The Hawks and the Sparrows (1966)
‘Literally meaning “Ugly Birds and Little Birds,” this was allegedly Pasolini’s own favorite among his films — and is definitely among mine — though it’s certainly not for everyone. This is essentially a tale of inherently innocent, naive characters caught up between Marxist (as represented by the crow) and Christian ideals. Nearly all of Pasolini’s early films — Accattone, Mamma roma, La ricotta, and even the documentary Comizi d’amore — reflect these contradictory themes and contain religious themes. Uccellacci e uccellini served as something of a warm, humorous farewell to those themes as Pasolini moved on to a mythic cycle after this. A fact reflected by the whimsical score from Ennio Morricone — and one of the best opening credits sequences of all time where Domenico Modugno sings the credits — this is among the lightest of all Pasolini’s films.’ — Samm Deighan

Trailer

 

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Oedipus Rex (1967)
‘Given Pier Paolo Pasolini’s proclivities towards sex, violence, politics, and spirituality, it comes as little surprise that he would, at some point, attempt to tackle the Oedipus myth. I’m going to assume we’re all somewhat familiar with the outlines of the story and dive right into spoilers, as the story is essentially the same in Pasolini’s film as the legend tells us, with some important changes to the character of Oedipus. Rather than make any decisions logically and intelligently, this Oedipus (Franco Citti, perhaps most widely known as one of Michael bodyguards in the Sicilian sequence of The Godfather) is a raging animal. In the original myth, when Oedipus unknowingly confronts his birth father on the road, their battle stems from an argument over who had the right to travel onward first. In this version, Oedipus simply hurls a rock at one of the guards, instigating a really wild brawl.

‘This speaks to a larger attempt to remove the intellectual overtones of the Oedipus myth, which has long been best associated with the complex Sigmund Freud associated with it. The problem, of course, is that in the myth, Oedipus didn’t consciously kill his father nor fall in love with his mother, and in fact the realization of this causes no small amount of horror within him. While Oedipus was traditionally an intellectual character (here he bludgeons the Sphinx, rather than answer a riddle), the intellectual angle that was later ascribed was never truly part of the original myth. By stripping Oedipus down to almost an animal, Pasolini gets at the simple urges that drove much of his actions and emotions.’ — Scott Nye

Trailer

the entirety

 

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Pasolini intervista: Ezra Pound (1967)
‘Ezra Pound, an acclaimed modern American poet living in Rapallo, was tried for treason because of his radio broadcasts extolling Mussolini. This is Pasolini’s interview with him.’ — IMDb

Excerpt

 

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What are the clouds? (1967)
‘What are clouds? revolves around a performance of Shakespeare’s Othello as a marionette theater—with the marionettes played by actors on strings questioning both their roles and their actions, eventually rebelling against the narrative and the puppeteer.’ — Italian Cultural Institute

the entirety

 

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Teorema (1968)
‘One of the iconoclastic Pier Paolo Pasolini’s most radical provocations finds the auteur moving beyond the poetic, proletarian earthiness that first won him renown and notoriety with a coolly cryptic exploration of bourgeois spiritual emptiness. Terence Stamp stars as the mysterious stranger—perhaps an angel, perhaps a devil—who, one by one, seduces the members of a wealthy Milanese family (including European cinema icons Silvana Mangano, Massimo Girotti, Laura Betti, and Anne Wiazemsky), precipitating an existential crisis in each of their lives. Unfolding nearly wordlessly in a procession of sacred and profane images, this tantalizing metaphysical riddle—blocked from exhibition by the Catholic Church for degeneracy—is at once a blistering Marxist treatise on sex, religion, and art and a primal scream into the void.’ — The Criterion Collection

Excerpt

 

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Orgia (1968)
‘The tragic and self-destructive sexual battle between a man and his wife. A drama for the desperate struggle of those who are different against the normality that rejects the margins. The couple is preparing to consume a relationship of extreme sadomasochism. Recorded theatre production.’ — Ulf Kjell Gür

the entirety

 

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Porcile (1969)
‘Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Porcile (Pigsty) was shown at the Venice Film Festival in 1969 and was harshly criticized for its scandalous and desecrating character. It is indeed a provocative and bleak film, which offers a scathing political critique of ongoing fascism but without seeming to allow for any space for intervention or change. With Porcile, Pasolini continues to distance himself from Marxist engagement and revolutionary politics, and while he characterizes its politics in terms of an ‘apocalyptic anarchy’ that can only be approached with distance and humour, our suggestion is that Porcile proposes abandoning (political) activity and hope for a better future as a paradoxical form of both radical political critique and joy.’ — Manuele Gragnolati and Christoph F. E. Holzhey

the entirety

 

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Medea (1969)
‘In the prologue, the centaur explains the child that he will witness an existence that is based more on deeds than thoughts. Ironically, the opening is a guide for approaching Pasolini’s episodic, carnivorous, operatic impressionism, with bizarre cacophonies of traditional Iranian and Japanese music. Indeed, there are two halves. The first one depicts the story of Jason and the argonauts in their search of the golden fleece. The second half ventures into the revenge plot structure of Euripides’ myth after Jason betrays Medea. This is more a complement than a counterpart to the auteur’s other 1969 release, Porcile. The halves, nevertheless, do not intertwine. The preceding tribal, animalistic nature of the argonauts contrasted with the stunning landscapes of Syria and Turkey is devoid of dialogue and takes us back to a more primal state of humankind; the second episode is also animalistic, using overimposed images to distinguish between imagined fantasies and reality, or so it seems.

‘Maria Callas’ sole film participation might be a distraction for those that sought her opera singing talents. Her gaze will never leave your soul, though. The film is uncompromising in its representation of extreme passions and both ritualistic and carefully planned savagery. It is theatrical in its presentation; however, unlike Kakogiannis’ emphasis on spoken dialogue and mannerisms to keep faithfulness towards the literary structure, Pasolini embraces his always transgressive focus on the flesh and exploits, through a very confident and stunningly-looking direction, the more extreme sides of the myth, not for provocation, but for artistic purposes. He never declared himself an historian and it shows in his open adaptations of both history and literature.

‘Undervalued and underlooked Pasolini film. Although much superior cinematic quality was shown by Fellini that same year, this companion piece of Edipo Re (1967) showed that this guy had nothing to ask from Kakogianni’s most prestigious Greek tragedy adaptations!’ — Edgar Cochran

the entirety

 

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Le Mura Di Sana’a (1971)
‘Documentary footage of the city of Sana’a in Yemen, one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world, with a voice-over calling for UNESCO to protect the city’s architectural heritage before it is destroyed by development.’ — IMDb

the entirety

 

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Decameron (1971)
‘Pier Paolo Pasolini weaves together a handful of Giovanni Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century moral tales in this picturesque free-for-all. The Decameron explores the delectations and dark corners of an earlier and, as the filmmaker saw it, less compromised time. Among the chief delights are a young man’s exploits with a gang of grave robbers, a flock of randy nuns who sin with a strapping gardener, and Pasolini’s appearance as a pupil of the painter Giotto, at work on a massive fresco. One of the director’s most popular films, The Decameron, trans­posed to Naples from Boccaccio’s Florence, is a cutting takedown of the pieties surrounding religion and sex.’ — The Criterion Collection

the entirety

 

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The Canterbury Tales (1972)
‘Chaucer is the literary source of inspiration this time. The transgression is pumped up to 11, eroticism is lost and all that remains is a stream of consciousness that, along with Buñuel, inspired the Monty Python Crew to reach the superior heights of The Meaning of Life (1983). This works more as a disorganized stream of consciousness rather than an episodic retelling of several tales that could be interconnected in many ways. A unisone thematic is utterly lost, except for the obsession with sexuality (which shows the human body no longer under a perspective of Renaissance paintings, but as gross-out sexual humor) and that is what I think are the main complaints against this.

‘If this was a lost italian gem rediscovered and restored decades later, like Criterion did, and not directed by Pasolini, this would be seen with different eyes. This is somewhat condemned to be seen under the greater shadow of Il Decameron (1971) and, although the quality decrease is noticeable, an assured auteurism still stands. There are some questionable Chaplinesque stunts and some faith jumps between humor styles that highlight the ridiculousness of the human condition propelled by religious fundamentalisms, particularly the Catholic Church (and, once again, I fully agree). I simply flowed with them nicely: anarchich storytelling does not bother me as long as you keep the creativity engine on. Plus, the use of filming locations and the immaculate art direction are a wonder to behold.

‘Yes, the final sequence is absolutely maddening, and I applaud it. More than obviously, it’s not meant to be Biblical. It’s more like Alighieri’s soul would have a laugh with it. Props for, in my honest opinion, the third best imaginative envisioning of hell in cinema (I know you will be curious enough to ask me what the other two are).’ — Edgar Cochran

Trailer

the entirety

 

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Arabian Nights (1974)
‘If The Decameron represented an intense vision behind its humourous facade, and The Canterbury Tales – the trilogy’s weak point – a loss of ground amid a welter of sexual exhibitionism, the Arabian Nights emerges as a wonderfully relaxed and open puzzle of interlinked tales dedicated to the multiplicity of truth. It yields an engrossing array of mysterious, profound and liberating moments. The tales revolve around slaves and kings, demons, love, betrayal, loss and atonement. Zumurrud (Pellegrina), a slave turned monarch, after her ‘drag’ wedding, amid delightfully conspiratorial laughter, reveals her true sexual identity to her diminutive (and equally delighted) bride. Shot on location in North Africa, the film has rarely been seen in Britain after its release in 1975 by United Artists – in an insanely dubbed version, ludicrously cut by the censor.’ — Time Out (London)

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)
‘The notorious final film from Pier Paolo Pasolini, Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom has been called nauseating, shocking, depraved, pornographic . . . It’s also a masterpiece. The controversial poet, novelist, and filmmaker’s transposition of the Marquis de Sade’s eighteenth-century opus of torture and degradation to Fascist Italy in 1944 remains one of the most passionately debated films of all time, a thought-provoking inquiry into the political, social, and sexual dynamics that define the world we live in.’ — The Criterion Collection

Trailer

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Cool, yeah, the Lucy K Shaw book is wonderful. I don’t know that book you were gifted with at all, and it does sound extremely wantable. I’ll look to score it. Enjoy. Fine weekend to you, sir. ** David Ehrenstein, Thank you very much for including my ‘Swarm’. xo. ** Sypha, Hi. Yes, I’ve been seeing your current reading updates on FB, and you’re Mr. Snuggly Press lately, which I can only assume is a very good thing btw. Any progress on your experimental fiction project. I’m quite curious to see what ‘experimental’ means to your writing. ** Dominik, Hi, Dominik! They’re all very worthy. Maybe it’s just me, but battling against normalising and convention-seeking people in power has been a lifelong war, which is totally winnable if you don’t mind being sidelined by those same powers-that-be as ‘cult’. Wait, your birthday is this weekend? Or maybe you mean the next Sunday. If it’s tomorrow, gift yourself with, well, everything that stupid money allows. Ball doll vs. tattoo … toughie, I can see that. Okay, based on your enthusiasm, I will get my hands, etc. on that Edouard Louis book immediately, hopefully even today assuming the Paris stores have it on sale in English, which seems kind of logical. Thanks! Your excitement is palpable and contagious! So, how was your weekend, possible (or not) birthday person? Thanks for your manic love. Your love giving one of the copies of the books of mine that he bought to a zillionaire whose dream in life suddenly becomes financing a movie co-directed by me and the rest of the copies to sad emo kids worldwide and including in every copy the URL for the new issue of SCAB which doubles as a scratch-and-sniff aphrodisiac, G. ** Bill, Hi. Katie Jean Shinkle published a great chapbook last year and has a new novel coming out, I think, and I’m not sure about Shane Jones, but I assume that something of his must be on the horizon. Yes, I haven’t read Clowes in perhaps as long as that. He drew a portrait of me for The Believer once, and that was a great gift. ‘Stunt’: noted. Restful but propulsive weekend to you! ** Okay. Some of you are probably thinking, This blog has been around forever and it has never done a Pasolini post before?! I admit it is strange. It might be partly because, unlike every other discerning film buff I’ve ever known, I feel kind of ambivalent about Pasolini’s films and, at the same time, perpetually waiting for my moment of enlightenment to occur. One of these days, no doubt. Blah blah … enjoy a Pasolini-dominated weekend. See you on Monday.

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Christopher Higgs: What does your book do and how does your book do it?

Katie Jean Shingle: Our Prayers After the Fire is a haunting disappearing act, documenting what vanishes eventually and indefinitely. The cartography of the book maps violence, queerness, childhood and childhood trauma, poverty narratives, despair and disrepair. It is also a mapping of the smallest moments of joy, of vast human-ness, of what it means to survive and to be alive. There are spaces where ghosts reside, both real and imagined. There are spaces of magic. There are spaces of suffering and mess. It is dirty, domestic realism. All of this is explored through the lens of a shared consciousness, a “we,” a duo of girls whose identities and roles (sometimes older/younger sisters, sometimes conjoined twins, sometimes lovers) shift consistently. A “we” not as an in sync greek chorus of voice/s and experience/s but an interacting collective, anchored and fluid, creating and carrying the shape and echo of the narrative.

CH: Having identified your book’s comportment, could you bring it into focus by describing its relationship to other texts? (By “texts” I mean any relatable objects.) Put another way: if we think about a book as a star in a constellation, or a node in a circuit, I’m interested in hearing about the constellation or circuit in which readers might find your book. Put yet another way: if we think about your book as contributing to particular conversations, could you describe those conversations and their other participants?

KJS: The book’s creation is profoundly rooted in Fluxus art. While the work itself is not in direct conversation with Fluxus, the book was created, in part, by a Fluxus influence based practice. I was in heavy research around the Fluxus movement throughout the entire creation of the work. I ended up engaging in experiments and “happenings” both solo and in groups and the “results” ended up being a significant substantial part of the work. (Some experiments were less Fluxus based and more akin to CA Conrad’s somatic poetry rituals.) I was highly influenced by artists Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, George Maciunas, and Alison Knowles. As far as conversation with writers and writing goes, I feel that Our Prayers After the Fire is in direct conversation with the work of writers such as Katherine Faw Morris, Amelia Gray, Lindsay Hunter, and Alissa Nutting. The work of these writers explores all the problematic elements of its own course and study of dirty, domestic realism, work that is in itself in deep conversation on so many levels with magic, trauma, suffering, joy, and humanity.

 

 

Katie Jean Shinkle The Arson People
Dzanc Books

‘Koharu-Mei lives on this road with her humongous family in a humongous house right on the lake with private beach front access. Koharu-Mei goes to private school and drives a brand new Audi, as does the rest of her brothers and sisters, they do not car pool. Koharu-Mei looks so good in a bikini, which Elsie Davis will never be able to wear. Elsie Davis wore a bikini once in middle school when she was running three miles a day in order to go to the woods far away from her grandmother’s house to smoke exactly four camel wide light cigarettes. That was the first and last summer of Elsie Davis’s life that she wore a bikini. Koharu-Mei lives in a bikini in summer and Elsie Davis, now knowing who she is, sees her at the gas station with all of her equally as beautiful and skinny friends that have glimmering skin and dark hair. Koharu-Mai has a summer uniform: oversized tank top and very small cut-off shorts that make Elsie Davis sink into her skin. Elsie Davis is going to set Koharu-Mei’s Audi on fire.’ — CCM

Excerpt
from The Toast

99 Jerico Loop

Elsie Davis and Nathan are making out in the back of Nathan’s truck and the curved metal of the truck bed is digging into Elsie Davis’s back. She gets on top of him and he reaches up, grabs her breasts, her rounded stomach fat, wriggles up face as if smelling something bad, says, “Your titties are too saggy, there’s nothing to them,” pushes her off. Embarrassed, she gathers herself, making the truck bed bounce. “Fuck you,” she says under her breath, lighting a cigarette. “I want to go home,” she says. Nathan obliges her and they do not speak until

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6701 Buell Street

until Elsie Davis runs into Nathan at a party across town at a mutual friend’s house. After a couple of beers she finds the nerve to say,

“Hey, what’s up,”

and Nathan refuses to make eye contact.

“What are you doing here?” he asks.

There is a girl next to him she recognizes but doesn’t know.

The girl is tiny with bleach copper hair because her hair so dark true blonde won’t happen, a black velvet choke chain with a metal rose pendant hanging from the middle, a chevron patterned bikini top with an oversized black tank top over it.

“Can I talk to you?”

“No.”

Elsie Davis looks at the floor, ceiling, bites her lower lip until it bleeds so she doesn’t start to cry.

“I’m going outside,” the girl she recognizes but doesn’t know says to Nathan while giving her a sad, pathetic look, poor stupid fat girl what is she even thinking?

Nathan watches the girl step out the sliding glass doors, looks Elsie Davis in the eyes.

“Look, leave me alone. Whatever happened the other night was a fluke thing. I am trying to get with Koharu-Mei, alright?”

Whispers: “I’m sorry but you’re gross.”

Loudly says: “So stop trying to talk to me OK? God, I don’t like you.”

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3333 Aiden Terrace

Elsie Davis starts with the back deck area which has a Hawaiian theme. Nathan’s parents are renown for their tiki parties and the backyard is always set for a party.

She pulls all of the decorations off of the enclosed fence area, cut outs of ukuleles and hula-dancers. There has to be at least 100 of them and she carries armloads, piling them in front of the door leading to the backyard. She stealthily douses the entire two tier deck in gasoline, three cans from Nathan’s parents’ shed and two cans she clumsily brought with her.

Once that is done, she hops the fence. Before she hops the fence, she throws all the unlit tiki torches over with her. She lights each one individually and throws them like a javelin back over the fence and into the yard. She watches the first one as it hits the edge of the stairs, it makes her heart jump, makes her palm sweat like she is kissing. She throws the rest of them, one right after the other, and doesn’t matter where they land—whoosh—whoosh—whoosh.

She runs to a very small patch of trees the alleyway behind Nathan’s house to watch the entire back of the house go up in flames. This is the best part, the watching. It is so beautiful and the beauty is what kills her the most.

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8900 Circle Road

Koharu-Mei lives on this road with her humongous family in a humongous house right on the lake with private beach front access.

Koharu-Mei goes to private school and drives a brand new Audi, as does the rest of her brothers and sisters, they do not car pool.

Koharu-Mei looks so good in a bikini, which Elsie Davis will never be able to wear.

Elsie Davis wore a bikini once in middle school when she was running three miles a day in order to go to the woods far away from her grandmother’s house to smoke exactly four camel wide light cigarettes. Her grandmother was convinced that she was doing it to get fit but really she was doing it to smoke. After she would spend the morning smoking, she would come back to the house and lay out in a pink halter hand-me-down. That was the first and last summer of Elsie Davis’s life that she wore a bikini.

Koharu-Mei lives in a bikini in summer and Elsie Davis, now knowing who she is, sees her at the gas station with all of her equally as beautiful and skinny friends that have glimmering skin and dark hair. Koharu-Mai has a summer uniform: oversized tank top and very small cut-off shorts that make Elsie Davis sink into her skin.

Elsie Davis is going to set Koharu-Mei’s Audi on fire.

 

The Arson People #2

The Arson People #3

 

 

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‘If you’ve ever read Melissa Broder, or if you follow her on Twitter, you know her spirit is entrenched somewhere halfway between the club and the void. There’s an odd balance of metaphysical transcendence and material bling-brain to quite a number of her lines, and she is unafraid to have her idea of God bump shoulders with both blood and Tumblr.

‘Broder says shit like: “Nobody bleeds white like I bleed white / Into a ditch the shadow of my bloodbag is white / I want a darker aura, like I want to be gorgeous.” There’s a weird brand of inner loathing mashed with inner haunting lurking here, but what I like best about Broder, oddly, is her morality. As coal-black as her imagery gets, and as overriding as the sadness in her ongoing personal desolation might be, there is an unrelenting sense that there’s a reason for it. That humans, perhaps, carry hell because they are hell, and that really the self is just a vessel toward something no one really has a name for.

‘That Broder wields this, and isn’t just pumping out poems full of wry cartoon loathing and social exuberance, shifts the center of the book not onto the self but onto something larger, undefined. I don’t know what a book is if not a latch to elsewhere, and Scarecrone has pressed its skull against the hidden door. It is neither drunk nor ecstatic to be here—it is a state unto itself.’ — Blake Butler, Vice

 

 

Melissa Broder Scarecrone
Emily Books

‘Scarecrone largely avoids poetic language — metaphors and similes are few and far between; sentences are largely in the present tense, declarative to the point of aggression. There is no circumlocution or retreat into artfulness here. A book that, at times, comes powerfully close to advocating for death, Scarecrone refuses to look its subject anywhere but squarely in the eye. The book’s conversational, un-prettified language reflects the urgency of its subject.

‘One of the most immediate responses to Scarecrone is the desire to give Broder a hug, though that might be an unwelcome gesture for someone who views the body as a death, and the body’s death as freedom.’ — Open Letters Monthly

Excerpts

TEST FOR A FAULT

Every airplane is sleep.

I point my finger at a jetliner to rest my eye.

Boys smell holes in a neon blue banner I keep in my wallet.

The banner says RELAX GOD IS IN CHARGE.

Stephen Dedalus you are never on my mind.

You come to my island and I am the island.

You are well-traveled but that is arid.

My eye is on the sky.

I say Helios.

You say Brian Eno.

I say Charybdis.

You say I’ll show you hetero.

This instant must be sustained.

I pour black flower milk into a goblet but you refuse to hallucinate.

The breeze sounds an alarm.

I tongue your overlip in an air raid.

You go to the sea to swim with a nymph.

Crocodiles rattle shells.

I look at you long through my one eye.

You become the island.

 

REMOVE OBSTRUCTIONS SIMILAR IN SIZE

What are you looking

in the water for?

I am looking

to fall in love with

my opposite. Narcissists

are on their own side

so that is not me.

I would be a sensualist

if there was no such thing

as numbers. Get naked

it’s too much to count.

Hang me upside down

over the water

as a waif

whose pubic hair

is back in style.

Give me a year as her

to fuck who I want.

I will invent

a new style

of fucking

called fuck-your-wish

and still feel nothing.

Who would you be

with no body?

Fire. Next wave

Make me fire.

 

JUDGMENT

When the shaman comes to town I try to hump the shaman

I try to hump angels

My guardian angels are mine and all for me

When they leak they leak me

Still there are cracks between us

And you have to fill up cracks with candy

If I am not allowed candy I use my body

If I am not allowed my body I use the internet

Television is going to deliver me from the internet

The angels pray over my screens

My angels are probably lonely

Also disillusioned with me

I have always felt the presence of a disappointed being

The shaman says I am not dead

I am definitely dying

I am already digging out of my coffin

I dress in cicada skins

I go bright blonde

Above me is the blonde angel Raphael

And I try to make the blonde angel french me

The blonde angel has a thick tongue

He wants to talk about healing

The violence no one has done to me

Every violence I have done to me

When I leak I leak me

What was so hell that I violenced me?

There were eighty years of candy magick after all

There were also beautiful horses

There were cracks in all the horses

When I stuffed their mouths with candy they turned to rotten

I made candy luncheons in the pasture

It tasted very desire

I poured cherry soda into all my cracks

Tell the angels to give me sugar

If they do not want to hump me

A supreme being should heal me

But only for forever

 

Melissa Broder reads poems from SCARECRONE

MELISSA BRODER // CUTTY SPOT INTERVIEW

 

 

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‘Angel Dominguez’s BLACK LAVENDER MILK is a poignant debut that brilliantly tethers between alchemist’s notebook and somnambulist’s reflection, where ‘water thickens with memory, and begin[s] to pour…’ In what Dominguez subtitles ‘a failed novel,’ are powerful reclamations of family histories, and self evolutions fused through carefully attuned modes of seeing, dreaming and feeling: ‘I ran downtown and up a mountain, found him sleeping in my bloodstream still smiling as the sun beamed beyond the reach of the pack of clouds bringing down a soft rain…’ Perhaps this fluid notion of failure is bound up in the author’s rendering of memory as what must be held onto, even if it cannot be fully grasped. If this novel is ‘failed,’ then it is necessarily so, delicately captured as ‘—the trace trapped in a molecule,’ Dominguez’s ‘liquid-watch,’ a site of richly widening realization and recognition, where ‘colloidal materials…form a constellation.” — Ronaldo Wilson

‘To read Angel Dominguez’s debut novel BLACK LAVENDER MILK is to slowdive into a deep cenote of the psyche, where murmuring dreams and vivid memories slide up against the silky, aqueous skin of ancestral unknowns. Each section rises in soft permutations, emerging as a book in perpetual arrival—with suspension, like a series of perfectly timeless clouds. I’m stunned at his intuitive intellect, touched by the quiet reverence expressed in his endless search for Xix—a body, a history, what remains yet always eludes.’ — Sueyeun Juliette Lee

Angel Dominguez is a Los Angeles born writer and performance artist forming Dzonots with notebooks along the California coast. His work can be found in The Berkeley Poetry Review, The Bombay Gin, and online at Open House Poetry and spiralorb(dot)com, with work forthcoming in FENCE. He was the co- founding editor of Tract/Trace: an investigative journal, and presently curates the ongoing series: Bodies/Pages. Along with Hannah Kezema, he co-founded the performance art collaborative: Dream Tigers. BLACK LAVENDER MILK is his first book.

 

 

Angel Dominguez Black Lavender Milk
Timeless, Infinite Light

‘Black Lavender Milk is an experimental lyric that dreamt of becoming a novel only to wake up as notebook. Employing and smudging elements of poetry, prose and memoir, Black Lavender Milk offers the space of a “novel” as a site of mourning, inquiry and recuperation. Through a complex, hypnotic blur of language, the lyric-as-novel functions as an extended meditation on Writing in relation to the Body; Time, Loss, Ancestry and Dreaming.’ — T,IL

‘Paranormal poetics never sounded more redundant, more welcome and welcoming. Angel Dominguez writes, “I occupy a continent within my body. / I am going there today to bury my grandfather.” He has a continent in his body of the most extraordinary poetry turning the dream over to the soil and water of the dreamer. From orchard to ocean his omnipresent tenderness maps our way to the poet as shaman. I shudder with disbelief at his words and want them to knock on all our closed doors. There’s a home in this book like strategy where we meet to stop the hemorrhaging loss. Please read it NOW!’ — CA Conrad

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Excerpts

Xix: you were a watchmaker with a jewelry store in downtown L.A.; a dealer in time, you tuned quartzite: 32,768 Hz and whistled for me to follow through the subway. A bag of avocados and lemons, 3 oranges kept us quiet while waiting to arrive. I’ve kept every departure: they occupy a small wooden box below blue jars. I want(ed) you to know how I’ve roamed in search of stones, in search of other portals, in hopes of finding you somewhere with(in) a dream; I’m always trying to blur reality, nodding off into the person next to me, running into me running into me running into 4am instability. Breaking into an airport; running for the orchard. I remember things that are (not) happening, say, continuing from where we left off: soft syllables made of mud; water witching up a spell for something like transport, something like continent, something like crystal-memory; I press a tip of quartz to my tongue and run west up mountain, far from the ocean; I still smell salt when there’s a hint of blood—I bit my tongue—caught managing a mongrel timeframe not fit for linearity: somnambulism(s) last(ing) a flock of years; here I find myself failing to write an “orchard,” attempting instead: a continent within a dim body, not yet formed and tired from running:

*

Some notes on forming dzonots:

Step 1: locate the event boundary; rub the soil into your
skin. Begin digging.

Step 2: ________________________________

Step 2a: make black water: the water my grandfather described to me the morning after he had a vision: milky black midnight, thick; something that smells of salt and blood. His vision was standing on a narrow alabaster bridge in a dark space—no moon—bodies everywhere in the
water. I wonder if I too was a body in the void of dream. He didn’t know how to help them; the next day there were reports of a tsunami somewhere on the other side of the pacific. We watered the avocados and lemons. We buried salt beneath the orange tree.

Step 3: stop when you reach your elbow, or shoulder; you’ll know when to stop.

Step 4: equip the hole with a plastic bag membrane: this is not biodegradable and perhaps reminds you of an ocean or airport.

Step 4a: continue to make black water: crush charcoal
from burnt palm trees, add cold coffee and day old wine. Stir. Continue, adding salt to the liquid—watch for colloidal materials to form a constellation. Add lemon juice for avor. When the water thickens with memory, begin to pour.

Step 5: deposit what you remember losing; lower your fingers into the water and retain: rough, yet soft. Hands.

Step 6: go for a run. Continue until you reach a body of water, or become a body of water.
Step 7: return home via aeroplane. Take notes:

A room full of atoms beckons a body across the void; voice a portal with an outline—find the route that requires the least oxygen—language cryogen: Xix, I brought you a pint of old blood under the orange tree, drunk off whiskey and trying to bury notebooks behind me in a time that precedes and haunts me; I want memories to bring (me) back

Language cryogen: find an earth scab; catch a bit a glass from the nearest car crash, press the substance to skin; hints of then, buried in our blood.

Buried in our blood: a body of night, curved across a planet.

Our molecules call across the void and bury sunlight in our sleep; how will I know to meet you when I arrive?

 

Black Lavender Milk by Angel Dominguez Media Statement 1

Other Dzonots / Other Orchards

 

 

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This is the story of how I got to publish Lucy K Shaw’s first book, The Motion. Besides editing Real Pants, I run a small press called 421 Atlanta. The Motion [was] released on March 31. … You can [order] it now and I suggest that you do.

Here’s how it all happened. The story is a list, in honor of the stories in The Motion that are told in list form.

1. I met Lucy K Shaw at a bar on a July night in Baltimore. We played cards, and I ate a bad oyster.

2. This was at the end of a short impromptu trip I took to visit Adam Robinson. Nothing was settled between us yet, but we were hopeful.

3. I got sick every time I ate oysters for the next 18 months.

4. In September, I talked to Adam about starting a small press named after my street address in Atlanta, 421. We were in line at a Chipotle in Baltimore. Things between us were more settled, and we were still hopeful. I would need Adam’s help to start a press.

5. By January, I had published two chapbooks, my own and Daniel Beauregard‘s. Adam designed the covers and the insides. I had asked Mary Ruefle and Maggie Nelson for manuscripts, but they both politely declined. To figure out what to publish next, I held a short prose chapbook contest, judged by Mary Miller. We got 78 entries or something, and I picked 10 or 11 finalists.

6. Adam processed the entries so that I could read them without looking at who wrote them, but I knew or strongly thought that one of the finalists was Lucy K Shaw, based on her mention of a friend named Gabby and these lines: “I had just learned where the phrase, ‘What would you do for a Klondike bar?’ comes from. An instance which had reminded me, cruelly I felt, that I hadn’t grown up in America like the rest of my friends.”

7. At that time, the manuscript was called, Pain Always Produces Logic, Which Is Very Bad For You. It had 6 stories. I knew I wanted to publish it whether or not Mary chose it as the winner. Mary chose The Passion of Joan of Arc by William Todd Seabrook, who turned out to be an experienced winner of chapbook contests. It was great fun to publish Todd’s manuscript. We had two release parties, one with Natalie Lyalin and Seth Landman, and one with Laird Hunt.

8. In the meantime, I confirmed that Lucy wrote what I suspected she wrote, and I asked to publish the manuscript later that year. Because of the time difference between Atlanta and England, the email timestamp shows that she said yes 4 hours and 9 minutes before I asked. There’s no way to know what really happened.

9. By the time we announced in April, the manuscript didn’t have a title anymore. We planned to publish the chapbook in November.

10. That didn’t happen. But we were working on it. Lucy revised and added a story, and I sent editorial notes, and by November, the manuscript had a title—The Motion, a cover image, and 7 stories. The Frank O’Hara quotation that original title came from had become an epigraph. Six months before, Adam had moved to the house that I named the press after, and we’d made plans to start this website.

11. We launched Real Pants on January 1. On January 3, I ate oysters and didn’t get sick. We had oysters again at our launch party and I still didn’t get sick.

12. All that was involved with starting the website afforded me little time to devote to The Motion. I wanted to give Lucy’s manuscript the serious attention it deserved.

13. We got back to work when the time was right. Lucy had written two more stories in the process of moving to Berlin. I continue to be astonished by how Lucy works. The last story in the book, “Wedding,” is extraordinary. (There is a tenth piece after Wedding but it isn’t a story).

14. I didn’t know it yet, but “Wedding” took The Motion from chapbook to perfect-bound book with a spine.

15. We did a quick back-and-forth with edits and sent the manuscript to the 421 Atlanta design department (Adam). He laid it out as a chapbook but asked what I thought about publishing it as a small book instead.

16. With some trepidation, I asked Lucy what she thought. I loved the idea, but what if Lucy didn’t want The Motion to be her first straight-up book book, with an ISBN and an Amazon listing and all that? What if she didn’t want her first book to come out from 421 Atlanta? The press is very small and new, with no budget to speak of, and I didn’t want to assume that just because she entrusted her chapbook manuscript to me, that she would be okay with this bait-and-switch.

17. Plus, formatted as a small perfect-bound book, The Motion is 78 pages, which is a lot fewer than most full-length books of short stories. It is the length of a full-length poetry book, maybe, but The Motion is prose.

18. I phrased my email to Lucy more like a statement than a question, to inspire confidence and trust. I called it “a short collection of prose. A short book of short stories.” It worked. She reacted like this.

19. We decided to publish a first edition of 500.

20. It’s definitely the right way. A chapbook is a singular thing of its own. Chapbooks love to be read all at once, and they don’t love to be reprinted in new editions. They come in all different shapes and bindings, sometimes sewn and sometimes stapled, but I don’t think they ever have spines. They are invertebrates. I believe in the form, and 421 Atlanta will publish chapbooks again in the future.

21. A book is an elastic, expansive, enduring thing. A book, long or short, has bones and multiple systems within it.

22. The Motion is a book. It is Lucy K Shaw’s debut collection of stories and it will be published by 421 Atlanta.

23. It’s really an honor.

— Amy McDaniel, Real Pants

 

 

Lucy K Shaw The Motion
421Atlanta

‘If my first book, The Motion, was being made into a movie, it would be very expensive to make. It is set in five different countries. There are scenes at The British Museum, at Sylvia Plath’s house, in Central Park, in Brooklyn, in Queens, at an office building close to Toronto airport, in an apartment in the center of Paris, and outside of a courthouse in the suburbs of Berlin, to name just a few of the locations. If my book was being made into a movie, I would want for it to be directed by Meggie Green.’ — Lucy K Shaw

Excerpt

I Like to be in the Sea for That Reason, I Think

1. Five years ago, on my 22nd birthday, a friend sent me ‘The Easter Parade’ by Richard Yates in the mail. I had read his two short story collections, ‘Liars in Love’ and ‘Eleven Kinds of Loneliness’ two summers previously, but she didn’t know this, I don’t think. She had just read a lot of American fiction and had a good sense for what I might like too.

2. Those are the best titles though.

3. Liars in Love

4. Eleven Kinds of Loneliness

5. I have always been, I feel, the worse friend in that particular friendship. So many of my emails started, ‘I’m sorry it took me so long to respond,’ that eventually, I just stopped responding altogether.

6. Gabby recently read ‘The Easter Parade’ and we talked at length one time about how the main character, Emily Grimes, is basically just Richard Yates, as a woman. Gabby had read an interview in which Richard Yates said something like, ‘Emily fucking Grimes, that’s me.’

7. Whenever we have a conversation about writing characters who are very similar to ourselves, Gabby quotes, ‘Emily fucking Grimes, that’s me’ and I laugh and I say, ‘Yeah. Well, yeah, exactly.’

8. Emily Fucking Grimes, that’s me.

9. There’s a section in ‘The Easter Parade’ where Emily Fucking Grimes goes to live in Iowa with a bad poet who takes himself too seriously. I don’t remember too much about that part of the book except it seemed quite good at first and then soon enough, she was miserable. Also I can recall, vaguely, the layout of the house they lived in.

10. If Gabby and I went to live in Iowa, we wouldn’t write books about ourselves thinly-veiled as male characters.

11. I feel at my best when I can see very far in every direction.

12. The first line of ‘The Easter Parade’ is, ‘Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life.’ The first line.

13. We have resolved, like most sensible people, to read more books actually written by women.

Trailer

‘after you’ve gone’ – cover by lk shaw

 

 

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Q: I was telling someone the boiled-down set-up for Crystal Eaters – a village believes in crystal count: that every person contains within themselves a number of crystals that designate how long they have to live, and once they reach a zero-count they die; so a young girl named Remy, in an effort to save her sick mother, sets out to discover a way to increase one’s crystal count – and the thought occurred to me that the premise sounds somewhat like a videogame. Many games that I remember playing – Myst, Zelda – have a fable-like quality to them. Have videogames influenced you at all?

Shane Jones: I think videogames from my childhood influenced me a lot and while writing Crystal Eaters I remember looking at images from a bunch of games like Zelda, Super Mario Bros, and Myst. I think the fable-like quality you mentioned probably comes more from reading fables early on, or just some hardwired thing inside me that leans toward alternative realities, or hating on reality. But some of the images in games like Zelda and Super Mario Bros I really love, I think they are just beautiful pieces of art, and I’m sure they burned into my brain early on. Sega had a game called Alex Kid In Miracle World which was basically a more fucked up Super Mario Bros, more raw and poorly developed and just weird, and I played that game religiously. And a lot of those old school Sega and Nintendo games have main characters with health points or HP and I just love that. The idea of a number you have and you’re losing the number and always trying to increase it to avoid death. That’s a detail from videogames that influenced this book. I will say I don’t play videogames now. The last system I owned was the original Playstation. And here’s a confession: I never owned a Nintendo as a kid. I’m not sure I’ve ever told anyone that. I went to a friend’s house whose Dad was a heroin addict and we’d play Nintendo all day and cook hot dogs in a fire pit in the woods. For some reason, I only had a Sega. I was the weird kid playing Alex Kid In Miracle World. You should look that game up if you don’t know it. If I remember right, at the end of each stage you had to play rock, papers, scissors, to defeat a boss, which seems really lazy on the developers side and just strange. This is after you spend the entire stage punching things and avoiding skulls.

Q: Crystal Eaters contains this incredible line: “As a child what you see is creation. As an adult what you see is destruction.” What do you see?

SJ: If I talk to people or read the news I see a lot of destruction. Adults tend to talk about everything that is wrong with the world. Tell a coworker the weather for tomorrow and they’ll probably say what’s wrong with it. But if I just keep to myself and my family and, I don’t know, just walk around and be inside my own head, I see a lot of creation and beauty. The books I read and the books I write are a reflection of destruction and that reflection leads to creation. It’s a cycle, right? The line from the book you mentioned singles out Remy and her father and how the two see the world differently, which creates tension in regards to the dying mother. Sometimes adulthood feels like a trap because the responsibilities, the mundane nature of work and shopping and eating every day, can wear on you and I think that can feel like destruction. That can feel like you’re moving through mud. But not kids, no way. They are constantly in forward motion, always discovering, always creating, and I try and tell myself that often when writing: be a kid and play, don’t be an adult and complain it’s been cloudy for three days.

 

 

Shane Jones Crystal Eaters
Two Dollar Radio

‘A grounded epiphany of the highest order, revealing the stark and majestic grace that is present within the loss each living thing must endure. Page after page, Jones’s exquisitely styled prose drugs the ear like otherworldly music—this pyretic, hallucinatory novel stings with beauty at every turn.’ — Alissa Nutting

‘Remy is a young girl who lives in a town that believes in crystal count: that you are born with one-hundred crystals inside and throughout your life, through accidents and illness, your count is depleted until you reach zero.

‘As a city encroaches daily on the village, threatening their antiquated life, and the Earth grows warmer, Remy sets out to accomplish something no one else has: to increase her sick mother’s crystal count.

‘An allegory, fable, touching family saga and poetic sci-fi adventure, Shane Jones underlines his reputation as an inspired and unique visionary.’ — Two Dollar Radio

Excerpt

The sky is laced with turquoise worms, and where the sun normally is there’s two red lips, a parting mouth with clouds for teeth. Remy’s bed contains 24 stacked pillows that form a wall. She gets into bed and looks up at the black crystal drawn on the ceiling. She closes her eyes, steadies her breathing, and touches the pillows. The mouth in the sky fills with red and the teeth vanish and it’s the sun. The worms wail and turquoise cascades down an arc in the sky.

The first pillow Remy places on her feet. The next, her legs. The next, her stomach. Finally, her chest. She builds layers until she has to balance the pillows on her body with her breathing. She puts the last three pillows on her head and hugs her face until she passes out. Her arms flop off the sides of the bed and her fingertips dangle near the floor.

She’s a baby. She takes wide, unsteady steps, and on a few occasions, tips backward, arms extended as her diaper thumps the floor. She wears a blue shirt with a hand-drawn black crystal (Brother). Her face is blond hair. She stumbles from her bedroom and into the hallway where she falls down the stairs, blond hair blown open and her body awkwardly sliding down the stairs as Mom shouts from below. Afterward, Remy cried for fourteen hours. Mom stayed awake the entire time, tapping her back in sets of ten, feeding her sips of tea, telling her it would be okay, they will come back on again.

Remy twitches in the wobbly picture and her eyelids flicker. Her arm as baby arm snaps like a bird’s spine beneath a boot. The pillows fall. One hits her arm. Mom moans from her bedroom. Her negative weight floats upward from her refusal of food. Her falling numbers hurt everything around her, even the carpet looks depressed. Dad skips between loving companion to distant husband to angry father. He spends his days alone. Each day this week he’s been sitting gargoyle-perched on the roof. Recently, Remy thought the problem of Mom’s sickness isn’t Mom’s sickness exactly, but Dad’s reaction to Mom’s sickness.

Remy writes in a notebook:

FELL DOWNSTAIRS AS A BABY -5 CRYSTALS.

SUBTRACT -1 FOR EVERY YEAR AFTER FROM AGING.

She puts three pillows on her face and grips tight until she passes out again, her hands falling off the bed, eyes now moving over a dark road. She’s riding her bike with the blue and yellow tassels tied to the handlebar. She wanted red and green, to be special, but Dad bought the commons. This vision like the last is broken from reality but more severe – Remy riding her bike on the road to the mine, blue and yellow tassels blowing endlessly backward and touching her home. Her hair is also endlessly long and it touches the house. She’s followed by a spotlight. Her feet blur on the pedals. She’s trying to escape the light. Skin three inches above her right ankle catches on the rear derailleur and the bike breaks into a severe slide. Water sprays from where the tires skid. The road becomes a beach and Brother is standing there covered in glistening sweat, jogging in place, with Harvak at his side who is also jogging in place. Sea crystals the shape of hexagons colored white foam then harden to black stone on the sand. An octopus is flung by the sun across the sky. The spotlight disappears and the man, who looks just like Dad, who held the spotlight, twirls his hand goodbye, bows, then jumps off the cliff at the top of The Bend.

(cont.)

 

Shane Jones reading from ‘Light Boxes’

Trailer: Shane Jones ‘Daniel Fights A Hurricane’

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Ferdinand, Thanks, man. Hope things are spotless. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, B. Indeed! The late period is kind of hit or miss IMO, but, yeah, every once in a while they totally nail it. ** Misanthrope, Nice that you’ll get a little break. And, obviously, great that you have Kayla as a fellow warrior. Hm, I wonder if you’ll like The Fall. Hard to predict, knowing what I know you like. But you might, yeah. He was a helluva wordsmith for one thing. ** David Ehrenstein, Thank you! ** Sypha, I’d recommend starting with ‘This Nation’s Saving Grace’ or ‘The Frenz Experiment’. Good about Golem. As I’ve probably mentioned, I fucking hate bosses. I usually beg someone I know to beat the bosses for me so I can keep going. ** Dominik, Hi!!!! Awesome that you’re a Fall fan. ‘The Undead’ wasn’t our best piece, mostly because we collaborated on it with this theater director who had boring ideas that we were constantly fighting with. But parts are really good. We’ve talked about doing a drastic remake of it, but I don’t think we ever will. Thanks about it! Gisele has an amazing balljoint doll she brought back from Japan. Next time I get down there I’m definitely going to hit the shops that feature them. I’ve heard so much about Édouard Louis, but I’ve strangely not read him yet. People I know in the US seem really into his stuff. My friends here in France are more mixed about it. Are you reading him? What do you think, if so? Ha ha. Are there still TED talks? I guess there must be. Love as an inflatable sex doll listening to some boring guy wearing a Love Halloween costume drone on and on about his marriage while slowly deflating and making fart noises, G. ** Steve Erickson, Ah, you started with ‘Hey Luciani!’. What a great single. I haven’t read Brix’s memoir, no, but I want to and keep forgetting to score it. I love the Brix era of The Fall. The book’s good, huh? Okay, I’ll write a reminder on my hand with an ink pen like we used to do in the old days. That seems right about the feasibility of horror movies over or dramas, although I guess if ‘Nomadland’ wins Best Picture that might change? Probably not. RIP Bertrand Tavernier, yes. Wonderful director. He got in some hot water here in France for weirdly supporting Sarkozy for President several years ago, but I think all was eventually forgiven. ** Jeff J, Thanks, Jeff. I never saw ‘I Am Kurious Oranj’, unfortunately, no. The album is great. I did see the Michael Clark company a couple times when their pieces had Fall soundtracks, but it was pre-recorded. Haven’t read the Mark E. Smith autobiography, and I have no idea why, really. Mostly just because I’m so much more geared to read fiction for whatever reason, I guess. Was surprised (and delighted) to find so much of Belson’s stuff online, especially since he forbade that, oops. ‘Utz’ is the Chatwin I’ve always been drawn towards but haven’t yet read. Maybe I’ll try that one. I’m not involved in the day to day editing of the ‘Jerk’ film, but, for instance, I’m going to spend most of today in the editing room giving my thoughts on what Gisele and have done so far. I’ll probably do that again once or twice before it’s finished. The whole film is a single shot — well, with two cheats — so the editing is a different kind of process, mostly picking the best three takes to mush together. Great luck and sanitised hugs to Stephanie, and, of course, to you, maestro. ** Jack Skelley, (1) Thank you, as do you (have good taste) apparently since you wrote that, ha ha. (2) No way, Lawndale played with The Fall!!! And at the I Beam! That is some unbelievably seriously coolness right there. Wow. *bowing* (3) That would be nice, yes. A totally wired weekend. Would that even be technically possible under these circumstances? Maybe. Never say never. Totally weird might be more likely. You, however, are in a much better position to have a totally wired weekend, so, no excuses, have one! ** Okay. I decided to do a books/loved post but about books I read a little while ago, for instance those five jewels up above that were published around five, six years ago and were well received at the time but which I don’t feel people are talking about very much these days. And they should be talked about, in a nutshell. So I recommend that you read them, n’est pas? See you tomorrow.