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DAVE FITZGERALD RECOMMENDS: Mike Corrao’s ‘Smut-Maker’ and Mike Kleine’s ‘Third World Magicks’

September 12, 2024
I was cruising down I-70 aimed at Lawrence, Kansas when I got the email offering me a regular feature here at X-R-A-Y – part of a new “Recommends” series inviting me to draw on the deep backlog of reviews I’d already contributed to Goodreads, and pair them with new pieces exclusive to this site. Naturally I was flattered, and accepted right away from my fake-fancy hotel in the heart of the KU campus, already thinking about the pleasant symmetry of the timing. That is, I was in Kansas for the Inside the Castle 10th anniversary celebration, and as fate would have it, the inaugural title I’d attempted to write about back when I first started doing this some three years ago, was none other than Mike Corrao’s Smut-Maker from that very same small press. And as you’ll see from the next two paragraphs, which comprise that original review in its entirety, I do very much mean “attempted to.”I can't say with certainty that I read every single word of Smut-Maker, but it wasn't for lack of trying. This is not a work that you absorb so much as one that you defeat. With text that squirms across the page in constantly shifting sizes, configurations, and directions, against power-clashing, technicolored background combinations that often seem chosen intentionally to make the eyes bleed, this psychotic, psychedelic drama demands you fight for every page turn. Though it bills itself as a play in 72 acts, and all of the dialogue is dutifully bracketed by quotation marks, it's hard to imagine how it would be performed save by a group of maybe a half-dozen or so actors on a bare stage talking over each other all at once (just to be clear, I would absolutely go see this play). The best I can do for potential touchstones would be to liken it to the nauseating, spiraling, stream-of-altered-consciousness passages in Hubert Selby, tossed into a centrifuge with some of Mark Z. Danielewski's wilder formalist notions – but even that description feels forced.There are characters – I'm pretty sure – or at least references to names that could be characters. The titular Smut-Maker, for one, as well as a number of "Boys" who seem to be involved in various violent and/or sexual relations with one another. Wittgenstein, Bolaño, Sun Ra, detectives, and the author himself come in and out of focus as well. It's pretty much impossible to parse, but parsing it's not really the point. If you swim around in it long enough, little snippets of comedy and pathos, absurdity and wisdom, will start to bob to the surface around you, and by the time you're done, you may well want to flip right back to the beginning and start again. For this is also a work you could read 100 times and still never read the same way twice – like a Choose Your Own Adventure through Hell, where no matter what page you keep your finger on, you’re never getting out alive.I don’t mind telling you, I had no idea what I was getting into with this book. If memory serves, I bought it because it sounded sexy and it was on some kind of sale – but looking back now, I’m not sure I could have chosen a more perfect entrée into both the Inside the Castle oeuvre, or to my review practice in general. Smut-Maker was so emphatically different from any other book I’d read up to that point (that House of Leaves comp is downright mortifying to me now), that I might well mark it as a personal milestone – an indelible leap forward in my understanding of what books can do and be. Inside the Castle honcho John Trefry talks a lot about the importance of texts as physical objects, and as I reread Smut-Maker last week by the light of my office window, watching the garish ombré of each page ripple and morph between hues whenever the sun slipped in or out of a passing cloud, listening to my own brain chemistry crackle and fizz as it interacted with Corrao’s bubbling phraseological soup – “the rhizomatic labyrinth of mirrored buildings”; “subways looped into a Mobius strip”; “the world is not the same as it was a month ago”; “I’d rather just not know what I’m looking at” – I felt like I was finally starting to understand what that means.Of course, Trefry and Corrao would both be quick to affirm what I surmised three years ago – that “understanding” is not the point of reading Smut-Maker, or most any of the now-50-strong corpus published under Inside the Castle’s black diamond sigil; that anyone who does the work of engaging with such “experimental” texts (a reductive catchall term they both find frustrating and tend to avoid) will inevitably end up reading and interpreting them differently, and that the very premise of “understanding” them is a wrongheaded approach (indeed, they both said as much during a roundtable discussion on Joe Bielecki’s indispensable indie lit podcast Writing the Rapids, which I listened to en route to the event). These books are decidedly not puzzles to be solved, but rather environments in which to play.Also part of that illuminating episode was Inside the Castle regular Mike Kleine, who I had the pleasure of meeting in Lawrence, and whose short novel Third World Magicks acts as something of an ideal counterweight to Corrao’s psychochromatics. It’s easily the most straightforward narrative I’ve encountered among the now-ten Inside the Castle titles I’ve read, and yet every bit as much in tune with the press’s enigmatic ethos.Third World Magicks is what you might call deceptively simple. Kleine’s prose zips along with the matter-of-fact ratatat of technical writing or court reporting, whether he’s describing the work lives of indie music journalists in part one, or island-dwelling construction cultists in part two (these two parts are, somewhat mysteriously, separated by an author-mandated two-week waiting period). Without giving too much away – and truly, much of the pleasure of reading Third World Magicks is derived from its inveigling sense of mystery – I think it’s fair to describe it as being about both the conversation, and the conflict between language and art, and the perhaps inherent impossibility of expressing either one via the other. It evokes nothing quite so much as that old, unsourceable quotation – “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” – stretching that adage to its outermost shores from one end, before stranding it atop its innermost promontory at the other.Speaking as someone who put in a solid and committed three years as a music journalist for my local alt-weekly (shouts to Athens’ Flagpole Magazine), regularly attending two and three shows a week, transcribing dozens of staticky interviews conducted on my Motorola flip-phone, and reviewing countless albums for what worked out to, on average, about $25 a week plus cover charges and the occasional free drink, believe me when I say that Kleine’s depiction of the gig is hilariously well-realized. From working on “an exhaustive 100 songs of the decade list” and describing an artist’s live set as “truly something to experience before you die,” to the competitive name-dropping and the militant resistance to being impressed, or even surprised by new music for fear of being seen as not in the know, the trials and tribulations of blank zizou hit as hard as an Abul Mogard Farfisa drone, such that by the time she finds herself having a full-on, out-of-body, psychedelic experience, transcending time and space deep in the balm of that (phenomenal, look him up) artist’s “loud and enormous” sound, the idea of her translating her thoughts to paper feels completely absurd – an absurdity that is, necessarily, mirrored in Kleine’s own ekphrastic rendering of her mind’s ear.It’s that interior disconnect that Third World Magicks gets at most effectively, with regards to both its music writers in part one, and the dedicated, communal followers of black magician in part two (I’ve made a conscious decision to say as little about part two as possible here – much like the white cube at its center, it’s not particularly useful to describe – but rest assured it is worth that two-week wait). I recalled strongly my own eventual burnout with music writing – the creeping dissatisfaction I felt as I tried to bridge that last sliver of impassable distance between the art made by others, and my own latent creative impulse; to close the gap between all our lonely, disparate consciousnesses and somehow express my true self. blank zizou goes so far as to imagine making her own impossible music whilst drifting spaghettified inside of Abul Mogard’s, but no matter how many shows you write about, it’s still not the same as being in the band. And no matter how much brilliant art you make, it’s still not the same as telling people exactly how you feel. I could sit here and write whole essays about similar experiences I’ve had, standing in a packed house for hours with my eyes closed while fiery pillars of Fennesz or cosmic waves of Sunn O))) swept me up into the great beyond. But until you hear it yourself, you won’t know. And even when you do, it won’t be the same. Not for you. Not for anyone.I would estimate that for most people, each half of Third World Magicks could be read comfortably in under an hour, but fighting that impulse at the sentence level are a number of typographical tics (no capital letters, the use of ampersands in place of the letters “and” even when they appear within other words, a book-long commitment to vestigial k’s like the one in the titular Magicks) as well as a parade of ludicrous character names and a handful of science terms that, even upon looking them up, you may still not possess the tools to fully grasp (I certainly didn’t). With all these deliberately cryptic artistic choices pinging your brain like a cell tower, conspiring in their refusal to let you settle into complacency, the resultant sensation is akin to one of those NBA drills where a player attempts to get to his spots and get up his shots while two or three coaches throw extra basketballs at him without warning. Every time you think you’re in a rhythm with Third World Magicks, Kleine tosses a reverse footnote at your head or a sheet of pointillist punctuation at your ribs and makes you readjust on the fly. He keeps you moving, and it’s a joy to be moved.The Inside the Castle 10th anniversary was an oft-indescribable joy as well. Twenty-some-odd people from all walks of literary life – writers, reviewers, teachers, translators, booksellers, avid fans, local friends, and a couple of very cute cats – gathered in an unfinished little barn on the prairie for two days of readings and electronic noise. I expected to be the furthest traveler, coming all the way from Georgia, but visitors from Massachusetts, and Idaho at least gave me a run for my money – a testament to the cult-like, summoning gravity of Trefry’s vision. The chiggers were fierce. The lightning was multipronged and cycloramic. The breakfast-for-dinner was better than anything I saw at my fake-fancy hotel. But more than that, everyone was simply lovely – kind, and open, and thrilled to be there meeting other weirdos like themselves – putting names to faces – bridging our gaps. I wouldn’t claim to “understand” everything I heard across that magical weekend - from the warpfield poetics of Candace Wuehle and Madison McCartha to the generative philosophical would-you-rathers of Kyle Booten to the bleeding edged linguistic produnovas of Grant Maierhofer and Trefry himself - but I felt honored and privileged to hear every bit of it, and to carry it home with me, and to now pass it along to you. Compared to my time in the music writing trenches, I definitely felt like I’d found some of that connection that evaded me during all those mind-blowing shows I’d covered alone. When enough writers get together to share in their work, you all start to feel like part of the band. Even criticism can elevate toward the realms of art.Trefry himself is an ardent supporter of book reviewing as not only a service to the small press community, but as a vital part of any writing practice, as evidenced by quotes like “nothing has clarified my intentions and expectations about literature more,” “everyone should do it,” and my personal favorite, “if you’re writing a book review as though it’s not your work, you’re doing it wrong.” I’ve tried to approach my reviews with this level of care since that first, labored attempt to describe Mike Corrao’s Smut-Maker to the world, and Trefry and Kleine have likewise put their money where their mouths are with Third World Magicks, going so far as to include several reviews of the book at the end of the narrative proper, almost as a kind of ellipsis – a nod to the ongoing discourse in which Inside the Castle and its readers are mindfully participating. Take it from someone who knows. Indie rock is doing just fine. But indie lit still needs all the reviews it can get.In wrapping up this edition of X-R-A-Y Recommends, allow me to paraphrase a popular conceit from my music writing days: these guys are your favorite writer’s favorite writers. Corrao, Kleine, and Trefry may never be bestsellers, but they’ve got cred coming out of their ears. They write pareidolic. They write klangfarbenmelodie. And I love their work for the same reasons I still seek out strange and unfamiliar music every day – for the pleasure of new words, new ideas, new ways of feeling and being surprised. As strange and beguiling as Inside the Castle texts can be, they are, in fact, for everyone. Enjoying them is not about being smart enough to figure them out, but rather finding curiosity and excitement in the incomplete spaces of your own unknowing; letting them live, and breathe, and work on you, quite possibly for the rest of your life; coming back to them again and again, with the understanding that they’re no more static than you are; that they’ll change right along with you, and the chemicals in your brain, and the light outside your window; that no matter how many times you read them, they’ll still be different every time.
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PATATINA by Rosalind Margulies

September 11, 2024
My boss is a dog and today is the dog’s birthday.Okay, not really. I like to say that my boss is a dog, but it’s just one of those things you say to make it easier, you know? But it is her birthday.The dog’s name is Patatina, which is Italian for little potato. The dog’s owners, Mr. and Mrs. Bianchi, are Italian. I’m from India or at least my grandparents are. And Patatina is a Papillon.(Patatina can also mean pussy. In case you were wondering.)Here: Lake Oswego, 15 minutes from downtown Portland but several income brackets removed. Me in my shitbox 1998 Volvo with a busted window and no license plate because it keeps failing the Oregon emissions test; I park around the back of the garage of the Bianchi’s nine-bedroom mansion so none of the neighbors get scared by my car. Pat is in the garage. She does a few happy loops when she sees me, leaving a circular trail of piss in her wake. It’s nice to have someone who’s always excited to see you.My job, basically, is to hang out with Patatina. Mr. and Mrs. Bianchi are too rich and busy to watch her – he owns a firm that creates value for shareholders and she runs a blog on how to practice yoga in a God-honoring way – and Patatina is too much of a free spirit/biter for doggy daycare so I get twelve dollars an hour to play dog nanny. Take her for walks, you know, throw the ball for her, sit on the couch with her and cuddle, pick up her shit. Sometimes when I’m walking Patatina next to a busy street and she shits and I have to pick it up, I imagine that I’m in one of the cars passing by and I’m seeing something about myself that I can’t from the inside, only I have to imagine what it is.Pat isn’t really my boss. I guess we’re more like coworkers. I use a treat to lure Patatina into the back of my car. She knows the routine and settles right in and starts gnawing on the seatbelt. I put the address in Waze even though I mostly know where I’m going. Halfway there, I get an ad for Burger King; “Buy A Bacon Cheeseburger,” it instructs me, and covers the map so I miss my turn. At red lights, I watch Patatina in the rearview mirror to make sure she isn’t eating my carpet or seizing or anything. She’s cute, I guess, the way a stuffed animal is. She has those plumey Papillon ears that little kids love to touch without asking. She’s either descended from four generations of Sicilian show dogs, or a rescue, depending on whether it’s someone from the Women’s Ministry or the Animal Protection Alliance asking Mrs. Bianchi. Today she’s four years old.Patatina, not Mrs. Bianchi.While the groomer washes Patatina, I wander through the Target next door. I get a text from Xiaowei: good morning baby 🙂 and then three red hearts. I send her back four red hearts then use Mrs. Bianchi’s credit card to buy trail mix for me and a pack of doggy salmon chews for her. Patatina, not Mrs. Bianchi.When I pick Patatina up she has pink bows clipped to both her ears. “For her birthday,” says the groomer, scratching Pat on the under part of her chin. Pat closes her eyes and puts on a face that suggests she’s approaching climax and the groomer says aww. I give her a salmon chew and load Patatina back into my car. Pat’s party isn’t until four, which means we have a couple hours to kill. Usually I’d take her to the dog park or for a walk by the river, but Mrs. Bianchi wants her pretty and good-smelling for the party so I don’t want to risk getting her dirty. Instead, we kill time at an artisan pet store. A man in a dirty black sweatshirt with a garbage bag slung over one shoulder paces back and forth in front on the sidewalk screaming garbled obscenities at me and Pat but I ignore him. Inside, I examine bags of dry dog food that cost more per pound than the chicken I buy at Safeway and ask the clerk if they sell hamsters. The clerk, an attractive green-haired person, shakes their head.“We don’t sell any live animals,” they say. “It’s inhumane.” Outside, the man has begun repeatedly slamming his head into the glass wall of the store with a dull thung, thung, thung like a mallet on a held gong. “Okay,” I say to the cashier, disappointed. I wanted to look at hamsters. The cashier tells Patatina to sit and gives her a milk bone even though she doesn’t. Patatina’s birthday party is nautical themed though the nearest ocean is hundreds of miles away and I don’t think she’s ever so much as shit on a seashell. The party was gonna be an intimate thing, Mrs. Bianchi told me, real piccolo affair, just the family and the neighbors and about three dozen of Patatina’s closest well-wishers. Two white tents have been set up in the Bianchi’s sloping lake-side backyard and silent caterers mill around slinging canapes. I accept a beetroot and walnut blini shaped like a dog bone. I can’t relax, though; I’m on duty. This party is a warzone and my weapon is a metal dish. The Bianchis didn’t get shortlisted for the 2023 Lake Oswego Excellence in Lawn Care Award by accident; whenever I see Patatina squat, it’s my sworn duty to get the dish under her and catch whatever excrement emerges before it can hit the ground. If I miss, the consequences to both the Bianchi’s Bermudagrass and my time-and-a-half party pay could be dire.Navy SEALs aren’t under this much pressure.After my fourth trip inside to flush I return outside to find Patatina’s head vanished into my backpack to the general amusement of the guests. I yank her back by the collar and find that she’s gotten into the trail mix. Cashews and raisins and M&Ms rain from her jaws and she tilts her head back like a duck, snapping her teeth as she tries to funnel as much gorp down her gullet as possible. “Stupid fucking dog,” I mutter. Patatina licks me on the nose and I get a whiff of macadamia nut. One of the caterers laughs at me. A little later on, Mrs. Bianchi finds me to say hi. “Dhivya,” she purrs. She wraps me in a hug and kisses me on both cheeks, taking care to avoid the dish in my hand. Mrs. Bianchi is tall and old-lady fit, sinewy and tan like a piece of beef jerky. She’s in company mode, which means she’s actually talking to me and also about 500% more Italian than usual. Mrs. Bianchi talks like Mario whenever her friends come around. She used to hide her accent until Mrs. Tyndall, the wife of some retired Blazers benchwarmer, said she thought it made her sound continental and now Mrs. Bianchi rolls her Rs like politicians roll logs and talks about her childhood spent stamping grapes in Genoa every chance she can get. “I hope-a Patatina didn’t give you too much-a trouble,” she says. “Oh, you know Pat,” I say vaguely and she laughs like I said something very funny, like, yeah, I do know Pat, that darn dog, always getting up to capers etc.By six p.m., Patatina has wearied of begging trophy wives for hors d'oeuvres and retired inside so I am honorably discharged and Venmoed $150 for my service. Inspired by both the knowledge that Xiaowei is at home waiting for me and the three glasses of champagne I snuck from the party, I treat red lights like stop signs and make it home in record time. Xiaowei and I share a studio apartment downtown above a Korean restaurant. It can get cramped and it always smells like bibimbap but it’s air-conditioned and plus I don’t really mind the bibimbap thing. I find Xiaowei sitting on the sunken in part of our mattress, painting her toenails white. “Hi, baby,” she says. Xiaowei and I have been dating for two years. She has a tattoo of a heart next to her eye and kind of a lot of lip filler but I like the way it looks. I tell her about the party and when her toenails are dry we have sex, just the one time, because she has work soon and doesn’t want to get sweaty.Xiaowei is the first girl I’ve ever been sure I loved.When we’re done, I eat an edible and lounge in bed and scroll through Twitter and watch Xiaowei put on her work makeup.“I might order Mexican for dinner,” I tell her.“Mm,” says Xiaowei, who’s doing her eyeliner and can’t move her face too much. That’s when I get the phone call. I roll my eyes when I see the caller ID and pick up on the third ring. “Hello Mrs. Bianchi,” I say.“Dhivya,” she says. Her accent is about as Italian as mine so  the party must have ended. “We just left the veterinary urgent care with Patatina.”“Oh shit,” I say. Xiaowei, now applying glue to a false eyelash, pauses. “Sorry, I mean, oh no, what happened?”“Patatina was throwing up and throwing up. And then she tried to stand up and she couldn’t.”“Oh shit,” I say again. “Jesus.” Xiaowei shoots me a look but I ignore her. “She gonna be okay?”“Well she has to stay overnight but the vet thinks yes,” says Mrs. Bianchi. “It was lucky, Marco went to get a hammer from the garage and noticed Patatina wasn’t well. The vet says it’s lucky we got her here so soon.”“Thank God,” I say. Xiaowei relaxes, turns back to the mirror, raises the eyelash to her eye and begins to fit it in place. “Do they know what happened?”“Yes,” said Mrs. Bianchi. “They gave her some hydrogen peroxide to make her throw up and they found all sorts of things in her stomach. Raisins, macadamia nuts, chocolate candy. All sorts of things that are toxic to dogs. The vet said it was like she had eaten a bag of trail mix.”Ah.“And Clara Tyndall,” Mrs. Bianchi continues, not bothering to hide the anger in her voice anymore, “told me about a thing she saw at Patatina’s party. Do you know what?” I don’t but Mrs. Bianchi doesn’t wait for an answer. “She saw Patatina eating trail mix out of your backpack while you were not watching her although you were being paid to do just that. And she also said she saw you drinking a glass of champagne while, again, on the clock.”My eyes are focused on Xiaowei, who’s moved on to her other eye. She dabs eyelash glue on the band of the lash with the practiced hand of an Old Master.“Well? Do you have anything to say to that?” Mrs. Bianchi asks me. “I had three glasses of champagne. Not one.”“Hilarious,” she says, and then tells me I’m fired.I allot myself four days of feeling bad for/about myself and spend the first two stoned out of my mind playing video games and the second two wandering around in various parks, also stoned out of my mind. The fifth day I log into Indeed and apply for every job that pays at least fourteen dollars an hour and only get medium stoned.I apply as a gas station attendant, a line cook, a budtender, and a cashier at 7/11, and a bus driver even though I don’t have a CDL. Xiaowei tells me she might be able to get me an interview as a barback at her club but I don’t think she means it. I ask if she wants to get lunch with me at the food carts but she says no, she has to get waxed, so I drive down to the waterfront and eat my Chicken Nanban sando alone, sans the occasional passing biker and a probably homeless woman passed out on the grass a few yards from me. It’s a beautiful day; the sky is paint-sample blue and the Willamette River is dotted with sailboats. I’d figured that the one good part about getting fired would be that I’d be able to spend time with Xiaowei outside of the overlapping hour or two a day we got when I was done with work and she hadn’t started. But she seems pissed at me. I’m not sure why.I might know why.I guess I should tell you why.The CliffNotes version: the last time I was unemployed, I cheated on Xiaowei. It wasn’t that cut and dry, obviously. It wasn’t like I lost my job and thought to myself, Man, this sucks. I better go cheat on my girlfriend about it. It just kind of happened. I’d been working as a busser at a French restaurant downtown and failed a drug test. My manager, who I had done coke with during work hours on no less than a dozen separate occasions, told me that he was sorry but there was really nothing he could do. It didn’t matter if he meant it.Xiaowei, who I’d been with for about a year at that point, could tell I was feeling down so she invited me to come to work with her, which you might be thinking doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun but one thing I haven’t mentioned is that Xiaowei is a stripper. So going to work with her meant I got to watch my girlfriend and half a dozen other assorted hot girls waltz around naked, and occasionally she’d bring me a whiskey sour or give me a free lap dance. Basically I got to be the king of the strip club.Except that night there was this Seattle tech-bro type guy sitting right next to me who made it very clear that he was interested in Xiaowei. Four-fifties-in-her-G-string-before-she even-took-her-top-off kind of interested, I mean. So she did this thing where she kind of crouched down facing away from him and put her ass cheeks on his chest, and he was rubbing on her ass and handing her twenties, and I was pretending like I couldn’t see them even though like I said I was sitting right fucking next to him. And he was talking to her, saying all this stupid Pretty Woman shit, like I can get you out of here and You’re way too good for a place like this and Have you ever been to Vernazza? And actually it was that last one that got to me. Vernazza is this Michelin-star restaurant over in Southeast where they make the mozzarella right in front of you. Xiaowei’s always wanted to go but I’ve never had the money to take her. All I could think about was Xiaowei on a beautiful romantic candlelit date at Vernazza with this dickhead, both of them all dressed up, playing footsie under the table, maybe. And that was so much worse than her having her ass on his chest.By the end of the night I was majorly pissed in both the American and British senses and Xiaowei and I got into a shouting match on our walk to her car. I told her that she was basically as good as cheating on me and she told me that that “cheating” was what was paying our rent because, in case I forgot, I did not have a job currently, and I told her that if she cared that much about money we could drive over to the Motel 6 on 82nd and find her her own pimp right now. And Xiaowei told me to fuck off. And so I did.I fucked off to my buddy Max’s apartment for the night to cool down. And his friend was there, some red-headed girl with the kind of face you forget while you’re looking at it. And then Max went to bed.You know what happened next.When we were done, I went outside to smoke a cigarette and I called Xiaowei. I’d had a few more drinks after arriving at Max’s and I barely remember what I said, to be honest. I think I said I was sorry. I think I told her I didn’t know why I did it and that I didn’t know what I’d do if I lost her. I think I cried. I think I said something about Vernazza.I know I told her I loved her.Which wasn’t a big deal in and of itself, honestly. I’d been telling Xiaowei I loved her for a couple months by that point.That was just the first time I meant it.I got the job watching Patatina a week and a half later, which I think went a long way toward smoothing things over with Xiaowei, though it took a long time for her to trust me again. At the interview, I told the Bianchi’s that I’d had a dog growing up, a ferrety terrier mix named Lucy. She was big and scruffy, like the kind of dog you’d see in an apocalypse movie digging through the trash after the bombs have gone off and everyone’s dead except Will Smith. When I was 15 I went on a run with her after she ate dinner and her stomach felt like a balloon afterward. The vet told us that it was gastric torsion and that surgery would be fifty-five hundred dollars, and there was a sixty percent chance it wouldn’t work anyway. I’d actually started to cry a little bit by the time I was done with the story which I was really embarrassed about at the time but ended up getting me the job. Mrs. Bianchi told me that she could tell that I really loved Lucy and that she hoped I’d love Patatina the same way. I return the other half of my sandwich to its box and walk up to the sleeping woman. She’s wearing a ratty pink pajama set and up close, I can see the tinfoil clutched in her hand even in sleep, like she’s so scared someone might try and take it from her it’s become instinct to hold onto it as tightly as possible at all times. I watch her chest until I’m satisfied she’s breathing, then leave the sandwich box next to her and walk back to my car.  It’s nearly one p.m. but the call wakes me up; I’ve begun adapting to Xiaowei’s schedule, which means late nights and later mornings. Early afternoons, really.“Turn that off,” Xiaowei groans from next to me.“It’s not an alarm,” I mumble, sitting up to accept the call. “Hello?”“We have a bit of a situation,” says Mrs. Bianchi without preamble.I yawn. “You fired me,” I remind her. “I know,” Mrs. Bianchi says, and I can picture her rolling her eyes. A strict botox regimen keeps most of her face petrified so this ordinary movement becomes extraordinary on her; it’s like watching a whirlpool in a still lake. “I know, and this would just be a one-off, one-day thing. But we could use you. We could use your discretion. Five hundred dollars?”“For just one day?” “Yes.”I tilt my head from side to side until my neck cracks. “Six-fifty?”Mrs. Bianchi sighs.By the time I’ve gotten dressed and pulled up to the Bianchi’s house, it’s two. I park behind the garage like always and head into the house, an enormous structure of white squares that resembles an angular cloud. The main floor is basically one enormous room, shiny white kitchen and living room and dining room all in one. Patatina is curled up on a leather ottoman but scrambles up when she sees me and runs in circles around my feet, yipping and pissing all the while. Something’s definitely up; neither of us is usually allowed in the house.Ms. Bianchi stands by a polished marble island in the kitchen sector. She’s dressed in a mauve-colored lounge set and holds one hand to her head like she’s nursing a headache. “Hello Dhivya,” she says.“Hello Mrs. Bianchi,” I say, trying to sound dignified, which is difficult while fielding an eight-pound dog who seems to want to lick every inch of your sneakers. I get down on one knee like I’m proposing and Patatina hops up so her front paws are on my bent knee and her face is almost level with mine. Her tongue is out in an expression of vacant ecstasy; I scratch her behind the ears.Mrs. Bianchi sighs. “So, you know Big Sexy,” she says, which would be an incomprehensible question if I didn’t know Big Sexy.“Of course,” I say. Big Sexy is the terrible chihuahua owned by Josh, the terrible crypto-zillionaire California transplant who lives next door to the Bianchis. He’s chased off so many Amazon delivery drivers that Jeff Bezos probably knows him by name. He’s got absolutely no training and free run of the neighborhood. Big Sexy, not Josh.Actually, Josh too.“Well, it seems Patatina has also become acquainted with Big Sexy recently,” says Mrs. Bianchi, grimacing. She gestures towards Pat, who’s still perched on my knee. I notice now that there’s a new roundness to her stomach, a slight distension of her nipples. Pat wags her tail. Maybe she can tell we’re talking about her. “And Patatina,” Mrs. Bianchi continues, “cannot have puppies. I am secretary of the Portland branch of the Animal Protection Agency. I hosted the Spay and Neuter banquet last year. I gave a speech on the importance of pet population control. And I absolutely cannot be seen taking her to get a — a late-term spay. I am a chairwoman of the Lake Oswego Women's Ministry. I co-chaired the Northwest Oregon Pro-Life Dance-A-Thon just last week. They’d eviscerate me.” “Over a dog abortion?”“Late-term spay,” she snaps. “And yes. Last year it came to light that Naomi Zweig’s Persian Max was actually a Maxine, but by that time she was already a month along. Clara Tyndall saw her taking her to the vet, and…” Mrs. Bianchi shakes her head. “I still have nightmares about the Facebook callout posts,” she says. She looks so miserable that it’s hard not to feel bad for her but I manage anyway.“So that’s why we need you,” Mrs. Bianchi continues. “I’ve gotten the appointment with the vet all set up, and everything is paid for. You just need to bring her in, sit in the waiting room while they do the operation, and then bring her back here. Two hours, max.”Patatina licks me on the nose.I put the vet’s address into Waze even though I mostly know where I’m going. Halfway there, I get an ad for Burger King. “Buy Two Bacon Cheeseburgers,” it instructs me. The ad covers the map but I make my turn anyway. I get a text from Xiaowei: Goodluck with the dog abortion lol. See you tn. Xiaowei’s got a rare night off and has agreed to spend the evening hanging out. Nothing crazy, just takeout and maybe a movie. Completely unremarkable except it’s the first time she’s agreed to spend any real time with me in the two weeks since I lost my job. At a red light, I heart react her message and send back Can’t wait! I park in front of the vet's office and bring in Patatina, who’s excitedly wriggling at the end of her leash like a landed fish.I don’t know if she’s too dumb to know that she’s at the vet or if she does and she’s too dumb to care. The receptionist calls Pat’s name and we follow her through the door behind the front desk into an examination room. It’s dingy and smells like cat. The vet, a woman with smooth gray hair pulled into a low ponytail, enters a moment after we do, clipboard in hand. Patatina rushes to greet her.“Yes, yes,” the vet says to Pat, who’s trying to climb up her leg. “Hello to you too.” She smiles at me. “You must be Patatina’s Mom,” she says. “Sure,” I say.The vet writes something on her clipboard. “And we’re getting spayed today, correct?” I dislike her use of “we” but say yes. The vet nods. “I do feel I should tell you,” she says. “We don’t commonly spay dogs while they’re pregnant because it can be very distressing for the dog. They don’t understand what happened, why they lost the litter—any of that. They can get very depressed.”“Ah,” I say. I twist one of my earrings.“I just wanted you to know that,” says the vet.I sit in the waiting room while they spay Patatina and page through a huge encyclopedia of horse breeds that looks like it's meant for children. The woman next to me holds a pet carrier in her lap. An electric green iguana sits coiled inside.“He has a cold,” the woman tells me. Her micro-bangs are slightly crooked. The iguana sneezes.An hour passes, then two. I go for a walk, skirting the large homeless encampment set up in a vacant lot next to the vet’s office. A handmade sign nailed to a tree among the tents reads “IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU’D BE HOME BY NOW.” I find a coffee shop and buy an Ube coconut milk latte that costs seven dollars, not including tip. I spill a little on my shirt and the stain it leaves is purple.At three hours, I start to worry. I return to the vet’s office and ask the receptionist if everything is alright, and she assures me it is.“Patatina’s out of surgery,” she tells me. “The vet just wants to observe her for a little while, make sure she comes out of the anesthesia okay.” I text Xiaowei and tell her I might be a little late, then return to my horse encyclopedia.A half hour later, just as I’ve finished admiring a picture of an Orlov Trotter, the door behind the desk opens and a young East Asian man in blue scrubs emerges with Patatina trailing on a leash behind him. She looks slightly dazed but still manages a slow tail wag when she sees me. The man hands me a manilla folder and a small bottle of pills.“She did great,” he tells me. “You’ll need to watch her pretty closely tonight, and tomorrow. Keep her up and moving around, if you can, to help her recover from the anesthesia, but don’t overexert her.” He gestures to the bottle of pills. “Half of one every three hours or so. She’ll be in a lot of pain. There’s more aftercare instructions in the folder.” I nod and lead Patatina out to my car. She’s moving much slower than usual and needs help climbing in. She sighs and stretches out on the seat and immediately closes her eyes; no seatbelt gnawing for her tonight. I get in the driver's seat, twist open the pill bottle, and dry swallow two. It’s nearly eight when I pull back into the Bianchi’s driveway and lead Patatina inside. I was just expecting Mrs. Bianchi, but Mr. Bianchi—a handsome man with hair that always looks like he’s just got back from the barber—is here too. He’s dressed in a well-tailored three-piece suit; Mrs. Bianchi wears an ankle-length silver dress, and her hair is arranged in a complicated updo. They’re obviously dressed to go out, or maybe they’re just getting in.“Hello, Dhivya,” says Mrs. Bianchi. Mr. Bianchi nods at me.“Hi,” I say. Patatina doesn’t move toward her owners, just stands next to me and yawns. I hand Mrs. Bianchi the folder and the bottle of pills. “The surgery went fine. All the information is in the folder. The vet said you need to watch her pretty closely tonight, but she should be okay after that.”“Oh,” says Mrs. Bianchi. “Well, we were actually just about to head out to the 2023 Lake Oswego Excellence in Lawn Care Awards Ceremony. So if you could stay for a few more hours, keep an eye on her, that would be great.”“I’m sorry,” I say. “I can’t.”“What?” says Mrs. Bianchi. “Why not?”“I have a, um, prior engagement.”Mrs. Bianchi stares at me for a moment, then turns and says something to her husband, too quietly for me to hear. He nods, and she turns back to me. “We’ll pay you one hundred extra,” Mrs. Bianchi says.I think about Xiaowei. “I really can’t.”Mrs. Bianchi purses her lips. “Three hundred extra. Nine-fifty total.”That’s my half of rent, and then some. I swallow. I put my hands in my pockets. I scrunch and unscrunch my toes in my shoes. I think about Xiaowei waiting for me, about our plans for tonight. Barely plans, really. Barely anything. I could take her out to dinner. I could use part of the money and take her out on a real date. I could even take her to Vernazza.“Yeah,” I say to her. “Okay.”Mrs. Bianchi, not Xiaowei. 
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MIRACULOUS AND UNPREDICTABLE AND PERVERSE AND UNKNOWABLE: An Interview with Shannon Robinson by Rebecca Gransden

September 10, 2024
Primeval forces threaten to invade the worlds of Shannon Robinson’s short stories. Wild presences haunt suburbia, and folkloric figures surface as manifestations of deep-seated anxieties. For the collection The Ill-Fitting Skin (Press 53, 2024) Robinson presents normal life in all its complexity and confusion, where Mother Nature shows her claws and mythic creatures bare their teeth. This skin is pregnant with dread, imbued with the surreal, and, like a serpent, ready to shed and transform. I spoke to Shannon about the book. Rebecca Gransden: What is the story behind The Ill-Fitting Skin? When did you conceive the collection and how long has it been in gestation?Shannon Robinson: I love your choice of verb – “gestation”: it feels very apt, since many of my stories are concerned with motherhood and nurturing. I’ve been working on these stories for about twelve years, beginning with my MFA at Washington University in St. Louis. Over the years, I’ve placed work in literary magazines, but the more recent stories are exclusive to this collection. RG: The collection opens with “Origin Story,” an unsettling tale that deals with parenthood, childhood, and dark, primeval forces. The house featured in the story begins to experience a type of invasion, initially by something unknown. Why did you choose an ordinary family home for the setting of this story?SR: “Origin Story” is about a boy who turns into a wolf, and while lycanthropy is a fantastical phenomenon, I wanted there to be an underpinning of emotional authenticity. I think the best monster stories hit close to home: the darkness is scary because it’s inside us, or right beside us, implicating us. As parents, it can be so difficult for us to separate ourselves from our children, and this is especially fraught if the child is challenging or troubled or non-conforming. And sometimes the distance itself is the issue—that is, the parents’ anger and alienation. The original title for the story was “This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine,” which is something Prospero says of Caliban in The Tempest, but I eventually settled on “Origin Story,” because it had more directness, more punch … less lah-di-dah.   RG: Several of the stories address the meeting point of superstition and science. Lycanthropy is presented as possible metaphor for a medical diagnosis, and unusually fantastical births suggest underlying psychological unease. Yet, there is the impression that neither pathway leads to a comprehensive or satisfactory answer. What is your approach to the rational and the paranormal when it comes to your fiction?SR: I trust the rational, but that’s not to say I don’t think there are times when we recruit the rational to justify the non-rational, or that the non-rational does not leak in around the edges. The medical advancements of the past fifty years alone have been astonishing, and yet there’s still room to get it wrong because we’re dealing with the incredible complexity of the human body and mind, and we can’t help but be human along the way. Are we still drilling holes in people’s heads to let out the evil spirits? No. But are we sometimes misdiagnosing and overmedicating? I’d say, yes. And here’s the thing: despite the fact that we carry our bodies and brains around, despite their quotidian normalcy, there are times when they seem so odd—miraculous and unpredictable and perverse and unknowable—that they are like magic, for good or for ill.    RG:  I’m wearing purple socks with teddy bears on them in a raised, rubberized pattern. The hospital provided them. These I will keep. I will wear them around the apartment for the next few days until the soles get dirty and I begin to worry about the state of the unswept floors. In “Miscarriages” ordinary items meant to soothe accentuate the sense of disquiet. These objects suggest the search for a type of material grounding in the face of events that evoke much confusion. From Feng Shui, origami cranes and unsettling gynecological crafts, objects in their juxtaposition inhabit a surreal and unsettling space within the story. What part do these objects play? SR: As you suggest, we seek comfort in the material. Our personal possessions, our daily objects, our souvenirs… our STUFF! We seek the concrete because so much of what surrounds us is nebulous and fleeting, and we do this despite knowing there’s no real remedy, hence our chronic dissatisfaction with our stuff. “Purchase”: there’s a lovely doubleness to that word, suggesting something we buy but also the act of trying to find a hold. Many of the objects from the story are artistic items—and art is a special kind of container for our anxiety. The story is written in sections, which I think of as containers, which in turn feature containers of one kind or another (lists, ultrasounds, a medical model …) along with that most profound of containers, the womb.  RG: “The Rabbits” makes reference to the 18th century case of Mary Toft, a woman who claimed to have given birth to a brood of rabbits. There is a fairytale-like quality to the sequence of events. What led you to take on your own version of the story?SR: I came across the historical material after falling down a Google rabbit hole, appropriately enough: I must have been researching something related to maternity, and I somehow came across this hoaxster, Mary Toft. She really did fool people for a time, including the king’s physician; granted, she was very committed to the act, which involved some gruesome props. I was interested in writing a version where Mary experiences her rabbit births as authentic and miraculous—and yet she is perceived as a fraud and a trouble-maker. I like your comparison to fairytales, because their form suggests dream-like exploration rather than settled conclusions. I was interested in writing about the strangeness of conception, pregnancy, and childbirth… about its uncanny aspects and also about how, during these experiences, women can feel their agency is compromised, or at least, complicated. RG: Several of the stories address the idea of lost children. What draws you to this theme?SR: I have lost a child, through miscarriage, so I have that personal connection to the theme. And even though I now have a child, I still feel terror at the prospect of losing him. Which is not to say that I’m white-knuckling it minute by minute, but it’s there in the background (as I imagine it is for every parent). I’m also interested in what we lose as children—the phrase “loss of childhood innocence” comes to mind, but I hope to capture something less corny, or at least, more complex in its presentation. For instance, even children who do not experience an emotional loss directly can have survivor’s guilt, which is its own kind of trauma, and you see that at play in some of my stories.      RG: Animals are presented as substitutes for human children, from a womb-dwelling bird and rabbits, to pets. The nature of attachment, of judgment, of maternal need, is a theme common to the collection. How do you view your use of animals, and the animalistic, for The Ill-Fitting Skin?SR: I love animals… but I also eat and wear them, so I deal with that daily paradox. I think animals occupy such a fascinating category: they are us, and yet they are not us; essential and yet alien. They make for uncanny comparisons, hence the power of fables. And Art Spiegelman’s Maus. With animals, the metaphorical doesn’t want to stay metaphorical, and I suppose I’m drawn to that sense of uncomfortable proximity. And that vulnerability. Animals are fierce and self-sufficient, and yet (increasingly) we see how their existence is fragile.   RG: Truth be told, I had the kind of cleverness that readily alchemizes into stupidity by way of vanity. Five years in a PhD program and nothing to show for it except a box of rambling notes. So this is indeed my penance for being so ineffectual, I’d tell myself as I scrubbed, wiped, scoured. The idea was that it was a temporary gig, a stopgap, and soon a real job would surface. Like a magical island. Or a dead body. One of the characters that has stayed with me since reading the collection is the uncommunicative and off-putting householder Hartley, featured in “Dirt.” How did you go about creating him? There is a sophisticated progression in the dynamic between the two characters central to this story. What was your approach to characterisation in this case?SR: In “Dirt,” the narrator doesn’t sign up to be a “sexy” cleaning lady, but she finds herself playing that role for her new client, Hartley. When the story was first published in Joyland magazine, I was so surprised to find that some people—some women—found Hartley to be “endearing”! I see him as quietly menacing and highly manipulative. Granted, the narrator’s first impression of him is that he’s a dork, and so when he pushes her boundaries, she keeps trying to convince herself that she’s in charge. Or at least, that she’s okay with this, that she’s willing to be a good sport for the paycheck, that making these accommodations isn’t shaming and infuriating. Ultimately, his dorkiness is just a red herring, and she sees he has no qualms about pursuing his desires at her emotional expense. In writing this story, I very much had gender dynamics in mind, but I was also influenced by my time as an office worker, which in retrospect, had shades of the Stanford Prison Experiment.RG: If you decide to hate boys forever and ever, turn to page 92.If you decide to just hate this boy, turn to page 98.For “A Doom of Your Own” you take on the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure form in a way that is psychologically revealing. What attracted you to use this structure? Later in the collection D&D plays a significant role in the story “You Are Now in a Dark Chamber,” and a zombie parade is the backdrop for the interpersonal strifes of “Zombies.” What role do these games and niche cultures play in the collection?SR: I grew up reading Choose Your Own Adventure books in the ’80s, and I loved the way they allowed me to participate in the story, how “you” got to choose where the story went next. At the same time, as a fan of the genre, I became aware that choice was an illusion, and even when you think you’re doing everything right, you get trapped in loops, or end up lost in the dungeon or eaten by the ant people or whatever. I thought that sense of frustration (and gaslighting and self-sabotage…) would lend itself well to a story about a toxic romantic relationship. You don’t have to be a child of the ’80s to appreciate “Doom of Her Own,” but I have found that Gen X readers particularly enjoy its nostalgia element. As for games and niche cultures, there’s an underdog feel to them, which I find appealing. In “Zombies,” the narrator berates another character for referring to zombie cosplay as “hipster”; she says that “it’s full-on Renaissance Fair, Dungeons & Dragons, no irony.” In other words, not “cool”—which I think is a good thing (even if my narrator doesn’t). I also like the fantasy aspect of these activities. There’s often a certain amount of gothic inflection… as well as humor. And horniness. It’s very story-friendly.  RG: A theme that is returned to throughout the collection is that of transformation. Sometimes your characters are in a place of denial, at other points led by unconscious impulses, or have transformation foisted upon them. What use do you make of transformation in the collection? Have any transformative experiences of your own influenced these stories?SR: As I recall, in Charles Baxter’s Burning Down the House, he disparages the notion of epiphany in fiction: he finds it all very phony baloney. My characters don’t exactly have epiphanies—there is no big, “And then I realized…” moment, no definitive pivot into clarity. But the characters come close, and I hope that I leave them (or at least most of them) in a place where they can move towards some positive transformation—that is, towards some greater understanding, strength, or happiness.As for transformative experiences of my own that have influenced these stories… they’re all what you’d expect: motherhood, my MFA, and marriage to a fellow writer who loves me and really cares about my writing. Aging in general has been good for me: less vanity-selfishness-insecurity, more wisdom-kindness-confidence. All that has helped me to become a better writer. A better person, with crappier knees. Fine.   RG: There are many references to myths, legends, and folklore dotted throughout The Ill-Fitting Skin. Is this an area of inspiration?SR: Absolutely! Since childhood, I’ve been interested in fairytales (the Grimm versions; Disney’s versions are fun, but the originals are where the truly fascinating weirdness lies) and Greek mythology. I have a copy of D’Auliares’ Book of Greek Myths, which I won as a Creative Writing prize in sixth grade and have treasured ever since. I had its beautiful illustration of Demeter reunited with Persephone in mind as I wrote the ending of “Miscarriages.”  RG: How did you decide upon the title for the collection?SR: The original title was No Good Will Come of This, which felt like a minor tribute to Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are? (the Canadian title of The Beggar Maid)…  but I ran it by a test audience, and it did not fare well. So I went through the stories and made a list of images and phrases that popped out at me. The phrase “an ill-fitting skin” occurs in the last paragraph of the story “Dirt” in reference to a garment that the narrator is throwing in the trash—a dress that she wore with great ambivalence for a male audience. I thought that phrase really spoke to externally imposed expectations and confining notions of identity: so many of the stories’ characters struggle with these. And I liked the fairytale feel of that phrase, “ill-fitting skin”—like it’s an enchantment, a curse… a prison, but also possibly a chrysalis, ready to be shed.    RG: Looking back on the stories, and the time in which they were written, how do you feel about the collection now? What lies next for Shannon Robinson?SR: I feel very proud of these stories, and it’s always wonderful to hear that people have been moved by them. As for what lies ahead… more writing and more readings. I love giving readings! It’s the theater kid in me. Right now, I’m working on a novel about a Victorian baby killer. There’s a love story in there, so it’s not quite as grim as it sounds. Tenderness: I can promise you that.
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YOU WORK IN THE WORST DINER IN EXISTENCE THAT’S ALWAYS OPEN FOR BUSINESS by Avitus B. Carle

September 9, 2024
Where the brown leather stools and chairs suction to the patrons’ skin until they bruise. Where the tables wobble and the menus are always sticky and the food listed changes every day. The bar is slanted and the floor dips and your uniform remains the same except for the endless supply of toothpicks you carry in the pockets of your apron. Where you are the only employee. Where food cooks itself. Where you can gaze at a new apocalypse just outside the window every time the bell that hangs over the door sings a brand-new carol and a new customer arrives.

***

A man asks for an eyeball in his large glass of gasoline served with a bendy straw. A foot with clipped toenails dipped in ketchup to go. He’s a zombie and you’re a zombie well versed in the language of snarl. Your hand falls off while pouring a bag of teeth into the coffee grinder and you watch it spin and change into liquid. You return to the man with your steaming liquid hand mixed with the teeth of strangers and snarl that all you have left are shoes. But your jaw falls off and lands in his lap and he takes it, replacing his own.

***

A mother and her two children grab a booth by the window while the ocean consumes the world. Their lips are purple, their skin withered, and they drool mini-puddles when they talk. One child, a girl, tries to detach the menu from her cheek. The other, a boy, rocks the table until the salt spills and dissolves in the water around them. Their eyes turn red, your eyes turn red, and both you and the girl clench your hands into fists. You rub your eyes and she rubs her eyes and you both suck your teeth. You think clutz. The girl says clutz and you laugh because she sounds like you.

***

The man asks for green Jello — no whipped cream — and a single french fry with ketchup. But you’re a mannequin. You are both mannequins and cannot move, which doesn’t matter, since all you have are peaches. You ask the man if he likes mushrooms because that’s what the cloud blooming behind him reminds you of. You don’t hear his answer. He’s suckling two ketchup packets. The cloud, you say, again and again, and watch his jaw melt into his lap. You feel the heat of all his words as they hit you and throw you like the depleted packets flicked from his thumb.

***

The mother asks if you will watch her children. Her daughter has bat wings, feathers instead of hair, and teeth like a shark. Her son’s eyes blink sideways. He has green scales and a tail that curls around your waist. He picks you up and brings you to their table. You’re needed as a guest, a witness for the wedding, at the special request of a toothpick pulled from your pocket. She wears a ketchup packet for a veil and is marrying a butter knife. The girl plucks blue feathers from her scalp and showers them over the bride as she hops down the aisle. You remove a few toothpicks from your pocket and place them on both sides in the audience. After the couple kisses, the children devour them all. They screech and howl, shatter the window between you and the apocalypse, and invite you to go hunting with them.

***

The man is a teenager covered in boils who asks for the cure but you only have a bowl filled with Imodium. You push the bowl closer to him and notice your hand, soft, but your fingernails are chipped. Your reflection displays your teenage self, listening to a young man talk about football. How he loves the sport, but math is his passion, and you reach and touch his hand. The boils that burst beneath your fingers remind you of the poppers you threw with...who? You weren’t alone then, you aren’t alone now, and recognize the surprised look on the young man’s face. He pulls away, knocks the bowl of Imodium over, and you watch them spill into his lap.

***

The boy is a robot who detaches his jaw and places it on the table. The girl, who is a floating orb made up of the sequence for Pi levitates a toothpick between her brother’s metal teeth. She clicks about humans; how helpless they would be without them. But instead of “humans” you hear “mothers” and “if she ever wonders about me.”

***

The man is back to being a man and asks if you at least have pancakes that look like Darth Vader and ketchup he can use as a lightsaber? And you tell him no, you don’t, because the microwave and oven and stove and dishwasher all quit to rule the world but you provide him two packets of ketchup.

***

The girl picks her nose and pulls a clone of herself out and she tells you, on her planet, children rule. She keeps picking and pulling clones of herself until the diner is filled with clones. You search for her brother. Didn’t you promise their mother you would keep an eye on them? You search for him amongst the girls but all you find is a toothpick sinking into a perfectly swirled pit of ketchup.

***

Are you ready to go? The man asks, holding the door open. All the humans have left, except the two of you, boarding a ship to the moon. You tell him not yet, that you’re waiting for someone. She’s not coming, and you know you’ve heard this before. You look for the children, reach into your pocket, feel your palm fill with pinprick kisses of toothpicks. Are you ready to go? And you still aren’t sure until he removes the ketchup packets from his pockets.She never comes back, you hear him say, and you can’t remember ever seeing her leave.
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JESSE HILSON RECOMMENDS: David Kuhnlein

September 5, 2024
Jesse Hilson recommends...David Kuhnlein Decay Never Came (Maximus Books, 2023)The text of this chapbook is less than forty pages long but it can’t be read in a hurry. It can’t be gobbled up like a small package of black licorice. Slow down and take in each line one by one. You are now reading at the slowest setting of the necro-metronome. The book’s title is Decay Never Came, suggesting that a jump into a different, longer timescale is required to get what the poems are doing, with the risk that even then this could not be possible. A strong atmosphere of aesthetic death exists throughout the collection: the beauty in death, or maybe more accurately, the beauty of a body’s biological trajectory plus inevitable time. “Herniated before I was biology, in decay that never came,” Kuhnlein writes in the titular poem. And maybe it didn’t come, but was perhaps expected to, since we have passed into the empirical envelope of death. Bodies, in Kuhnlein’s world, are sites for exhibiting value-neutral damage, illness, injury. In “Wooden Spoon,” the speaker of the poem likens bruises suffered in BDSM encounters to stars, saying “I’d let you whack an entire history of / hot white stars // the galaxies in me! & isn’t it funny / how pleasure w/in pain / & not the other way around surrounds / me // w/ pieces of the everyday”In “Bloodborne” we seem to eavesdrop on a corpse asking “is this a body bag or a river I’m in”: My fingerprints dehisce their perimeterLike psychotropics darting through bloodRed ants bite me in swells of cursiveRelatives’ prayers teem, gleaning as they flayI’m stuffed into a burlap sack…The weak taxidermy of my surname thawsAshes melt up my knuckles without me A morbid tone pervades the collection, which is nothing new, but what tends toward the original about Kuhnlein’s writing is the spectacular variety of phraseology about bodies in extremity, the chorus of voices singing about rot, abuse, or even just some other living morphology. Several poems describe sea lifeforms with a fascination that is not as gothic as the rest of the productions might be (to resort to idiotic shorthand: “gothic” is a term prone to some of the worst misprision and I apologize for using it here—and yet Kuhnlein is unquestionably macabre). Starfish, sand dollars, and seahorses have dreams shaped by anatomy known to science but alien to human creatures. “Pacific townsfolk crave my cross-shaped uteri,” the sand dollar apostrophizes. It isn’t clear whether the speaker in “Starfish” is a starfish or is addressing a starfish, but some form of relationship is being referenced: My bag of blotted capillaries eversible inside my oral diskI scarf your milk teeth, suction cup shoes, and pillowcase tonguesMy weeping thirst carves a singular graveFor us in this ruin of beach sans melodyAs the cackling sun crisps your tendons to mine, alphabetically Kuhnlein’s vocab choices have just enough clarity to make meaningful reference to his subjects but just enough reverb to put you under a cloak. A somnolent gel floods all spaces, like that seen in the surreal cover photography for old 4AD records or Brothers Quay animations. You’re having a nightmare but it’s hypnotizing in its beauty, and the really bad part hasn’t happened yet. It’s an atmospheric buildup.Kuhnlein recently wrote a short zine’s worth of film reviews, horror movies, called Six Six Six, and his facility for coming up with fresh, engaging language was as much on display there as it is here. But the poetry is perhaps hazier because the goals are more abstract than “communicating to you about some more or less fixed popular culture.” Writing that can swerve into the territory of spooky phantasmagoria and still come back out as original is not so easy to come by. Decay Never Came does manage to have the lineaments of that. My main criticism of the collection is that it might have had too much the lifespan of a gentle moth as opposed to some organism that was more robust and sustained over time. Chapbooks are like micro-ghosts trying to scare up a living room, when what Kuhnlein needs is to unleash a poltergeist, something destructive that breaks doors, shatters mirrors, melts fireplaces, inspires more elemental fears.  Die Closer to Me (Merigold Independent, 2023)Die Closer To Me is a slim novella but a considerably large jigsaw puzzle that needs to be reread in greater detail in order to see where the pieces interlock. A novella-in-stories, as the back cover reads, the book is a literary sci-fi tale comprised of thirteen short stories that have tantalizing overlaps. Blink and you might miss the slivers of the Venn diagrams where one story interfaces with another. This is not to suggest this is a design flaw; rather, it is a spring-loaded mechanism which unleashes its potential energy and sends the reader back to the beginning of the book to put it all back together again.Plot-wise, it’s a little unclear — chopped into chunks as it is — but the central mass of the story seems to concern another planet named Süskind, which has existed unseen in our solar system and become a vast experimental home base for people with disabilities. Indeed, medical ailments and their treatments form the background scrim against which the story is told. Or untold. Narrative canvases are painted and arranged into triptychs or tetraptychs (?) that may not be delivered in sequential order, like an artwork not meant to be taken in a linear fashion. The stories allude to one another through revealed names, bags of drugs, Buddhist texts, hyper-developed senses of smell, photographs, motorized wheelchairs, and other incidental details and clues with interrelated matrices that don’t vex the reader (at least they did not vex me) but give a pleasurable teasing sensation. It’s a book to be reread and taken apart and fitted back together for fun.The prose style of the book should be mentioned, as on first reading (there will be more than one) it upstages everything else, including plot and character. Not that those are lacking. Kuhnlein has shown himself to be a poet and skilled weaver of lyrical, surprising linguistic units. Much care has been put into crafting paragraphs, such as this description of an Earth-bound psyop to re-scramble domesticated dogs for nefarious purposes (it has to do with Süskind, I promise):“Spontaneity is regarded with suspicion. The result of a universal love based on abstract principles is meaningless since any extreme contains its opposite. Too much love becomes hate. Project House Dog didn’t anticipate that dogs would become cognizant of what they’d lost, or what might happen when they did. After a while, eunuchs thank those who sever them from time-consuming and pointless arousal. Imagine the potency of a reverse orgasm spilling backwards against the sense organs, bittersweetness increasing by the bite. Lying with a proper muse can rebuild an inner banquet in minutes. By way of encrypted audio files hidden in DOG TV videos on YouTube, dogs were reprogrammed with their original fertility and virility, as well as their predatory instincts. These dog-friendly messages slipped under the radar, unheard by human ears, spraying across a sky of satellites, scrambling themselves into domesticated tissue.”Dogs activated by YouTube videos as if Manchurian candidates or sentient masks in Halloween III: Season of the Witch are just some of the fiendish creations in Kuhnlein’s novel. Homicidal bounty hunters, psychopathic anesthesiologists aboard interplanetary spacecraft making jaunts to the disability planet, dangerous insects, Buddhist cults — all are found there, yet they seem to transcend genre fetters as we might imagine them and are instead written about with delicacy and inner penetration. The literary/genre divide is straddled and, in many instances, smashed as thoroughly as a marble bust by an iconoclast, if only to have the pieces reconfigured into some new pattern that retains allusive hints of the old: it is sci-fi, with the trappings and atmospherics, but the speculation and imagination are taken in fresh directions.It’s dark, it’s cyberpunk, it’s as fleshy as Cronenberg’s most outlandish charcuterie board. It’s alive, it’s menacing, but, in addition to that, it’s sensitive and human writing. It’s a spiritual act to go among these broken people and glitching relationships, and to reflect that in the distant future Buddhist concerns — the freeing of the material from disappointment and suffering — will still be on people’s lips. The natural order of things is probed, lanced, massaged, and bombarded with mutagens under Kuhnlein’s pen. Bloodletter (Amphetamine Sulphate, 2024)David Kuhnlein’s Bloodletter, at 112 pages, would be a quick read, if the brakes weren’t everywhere applied by the enigmatic, impressionist prose that requires extra consideration, damn near divination, on the part of the reader. Each carefully toned and balanced sentence could contain a shelf full of poetry volumes. A lot of people call themselves writers, but few can lay claim to the title of “prose stylist.” Kuhnlein easily fulfills those requirements in Bloodletter. The only question is: Is the reader ready to stomach two historical true crime novellas written at high pitch which feature some of the most ghastly descriptions of serial murder you’ve ever seen?The novellas were undoubtedly based on a formidable amount of research on Kuhnlein’s part into; 1) the Narcosatanicos, which was a Santeria-practicing cult of homicidal drug smugglers in Mexico in the 1980s, and; 2) Bela Kiss, a prolific Hungarian serial killer in the early 20th century who fought in World War One and kept dead bodies in barrels. Maybe you didn’t understand when I said “formidable amount of research.” These narrators of Bloodletter are lived in, to the extent that you may as well be reading the transcriptions of their fevered, inward-most dreams filtered through a finely etched aesthetic prism.Kuhnlein’s murders are not presented coldly and clinically, which would seem to be a preferred method in true crime when it indulges in its aspirations to journalism. In contrast, and happily from an artistic standpoint if not a moral one, he writes murder from a heated, lush, rococo perspective, full of nooks and crannies for the reader’s mind to catch on. It’s gorgeous but it’s so so evil.“Downwards,” the first novella, takes place in Mexico, where “cops, lawyers, actors, border patrol, gang members, doctors — everyone pissed their soul away for protection.” A female member of the Narcosatanicos gives this description of the ritual preparations she goes through:“At the end of the week, I break into a cemetery, carrying a set of clothes, exhume a criminal, and dress the corpse. During the next twenty-one days, I follow a rigid schedule of baths that consist of mint, basil, camphor, and other purifying herbs. I return to the cemetery, dig the corpse up again, and put the clothes back on. By the time I’m back at the ranch, I only smell death when the sleeve is placed against my nose. Tan splotches cover the rags, which feel breezily ethereal. The sky is lit by oil. Adolfo says spirits flood me, but I feel emptier than ever. I’m given a white candle on a dish, a human tibia, my scepter.”Kuhnlein’s catalogs of ritual objects and ingredients — the macabre set design of the cult’s headquarters in Mexico strewn with dead body parts and dead animals — are described with evocative, wild squalor. “The federales who serve my warrant will puke up a squirrel,” cult leader Adolfo Constanzo foretells, out of narrative time-flow. “Once their eyes adjust to the dark, what they see within my walls will live inside them forever. No one who works this case will be long for the force.”The second novella, “Backwards,” follows the killer Bela Kiss into World War One, where he hides in plain sight as a cannibalistic monster. The historical war scenes were the strongest part of the second half, I found on my first reread of Bloodletter. Bela Kiss recounts a foraging excursion:“Raiding the pantry of a house on the outskirts, a dog finds us well, competing for victuals. We slice an ear off first. When it runs, yipping, another of us claims a paw, saber-spearing with accuracy…The ribs are stomped dislocated, exposed and everted, a wet integument of fur snipped to dry in the sun…Freedom fighters come to avenge their dog…We skewer their Belgian bellies, plop them on the spit out back.”“Backwards” was perhaps more difficult to read, harder to track exactly what was occurring plot-wise. Kuhnlein’s fiction, I have learned, is not particularly meant to be read as pedestrian, suburbanite “stories,” with a narrative edge clearly coming across, but as sibylline recitations more akin to intoxicating prose poetry. It’s a high artistic accomplishment and seems to fit with publisher Amphetamine Sulphate’s coterie status as purveyors of refined, skin-crawling, cursed Sadean literature for the 21st century.
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CONGRATULATIONS by Graeme Bezanson

September 4, 2024
After work I met Alexa because we were trying out the idea that we could be just friends. Together we walked to Barnes & Noble where they were having an event for Dan Dashiell, author of a celebrated sad novel about a dying husband who spends the last month of his life teaching his wife how to cook the family’s favorite meals. Every chapter is a different dish and life lesson. Alexa knew Dan from the internet and I think they read together once, before he became a successful young novelist. Also I believe he was at one point fucking Yvonne. After a store employee introduced him he read an excerpt from the book, an early chapter dealing with regret and spinach lasagna. Afterwards people lined up and Dan sat and signed books for them. I went to look at magazines while Alexa hovered around waiting to say hi.Upstairs I found a couple of literary journals I’d recently been rejected from and read their lists of contributors. In one I only recognized a few bigger-deal poets but the second had like ten people I know, including a popular new Irish poet who had recently read at K Bar. I remember a bunch of highly-emotional poems involving a lot of muck and root vegetables. I flipped to his page and read the fragment “plough nigh / upon aching furrow” and closed the magazine and put it back in the wrong place and tried to leave my body for five heartbeats.Alexa and Dan were chatting when I got back downstairs. Dan and I shook hands and he kind of leaned in and half-patted, half-hugged my shoulder even though I couldn’t remember us ever being friends. I told him congrats on the book.“And how’s your writing life going?” he asked me. I told him I was chipping away. He sighed in a way that I think was meant to convey affinity or professional understanding and then steered the conversation to his book tour, so for a while we all compared notes on the people he’d met along the way. Alexa told a good anecdote about the organizer of a longstanding Seattle reading series involving a Top Gun-themed party and a bag of angel dust. I tried to think of quotes from Top Gun while Dan listened intently and laughed. Eventually a bookstore lady stepped in and started to kind of politely corral Dan towards the back of the store.“Let me know whenever you have a reading,” Dan said to Alexa. “I really want to hear your new stuff.” Alexa made a mock-shy, flirtatious expression. “You too,” Dan added, swiveling part-way towards me as he was swept away by the bookstore lady. “Love all that stuff you do. So great. So great.”I had three good poems and maybe two hundred starts of things, dumb ideas, abandoned drafts. God keep me from ever completing anything says Moby Dick but I’m pretty sure that’s meant to cover stuff that’s already pretty much finished. E.g. Moby Dick is like six hundred pages, not five lines and a working title.At home after the platonic bookstore outing I opened a file where I’d started collecting physical descriptions from profiles of dead writers: Ted Hughes has a huge face; Simone de Beauvoir is clear-eyed and rosy-complected; Borges’ features are vague, as if partially erased. Adrian was online and I messaged him to say I was considering rebranding from poet to “text-based artist.” “Ok,” said Adrian and I waited for him to write more but he didn’t. I added some line breaks to the dead writers document then clicked away and read a NY Times article about a recent outbreak of violence in Central Africa. The phrase “crucible of war” popped into my head, somewhat melodramatically, I felt. I searched online for “crucible of war” but couldn’t find a satisfying answer for why the phrase seemed so ancient and indestructible. I cycled back to see if Adrian had written anything then scanned through my chat contacts where recently people I didn’t know had started appearing, maybe via a technical glitch or some runaway algorithm. I recognized the name of a successful early-career artist and briefly considered messaging her about her recent show in which everything had been extremely black. Instead I opened a new document on my laptop and wrote “The worst thing about being the darkness must be knowing there’s no darkness coming,” which, for the time being, seemed good and sad and true. I stared at the page and wrote “Black” then deleted it and wrote “Black” again, then closed Word completely. On my laptop I put on an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which there’s a C plot involving Riker falling asleep at Data’s poetry reading. Midway through the episode Data asks Geordi for feedback on his poems and Geordi, whose first impulse is to spare the android’s non-existent feelings, ends up advising Data to focus more on what he wants to say with his art, and less on how he says it, which struck me as good advice for an android and very bad advice for everyone else.I put on the end of a Knicks game and idly scrolled through old pictures while drinking a poly-vegetable juice for I guess dinner. My phone ran out of battery just as the Knicks surrendered and emptied their bench. Mourning doves strafed each other outside in the darkening space between buildings. I sat very still and, while everything grew deep blue and gelatinous, thought about an iron plough tearing through the deep black earth.
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EIGHT QUESTIONS FOR MIKE TOPP by Sabrina Small

September 3, 2024
A memory of my interview with Mike Topp, which I forgot to record, and then turned into a pseudo-transcript, at which point I solicited interjections from the artist.The first thing I tell Mike Topp is that I didn’t realize who he was. That I hadn’t done any homework beyond reading his tweets and a few poems on Hobart. I tell him his name is so gay it approaches drag, so I was picturing a young gay dude who had watched a lot of Warhol films and revered Peter Sellers in Being There, a practicing naif, a retro naif even. It was the poet Tyler Burn from the Lo-fi Lit podcast that alerted me to Topp’s legendary status. In the few hours leading up to the interview, I learned about his age (late 60s), his status as a poet, and his wife. I read about his stint managing Artforum and the numerous books that he created with William Wegman and Tao Lin. His interviews are full of a steady drop of luminary art names that sounded famous and important and filled me with a shocking amount of adrenaline, which I wasn’t planning to feel before our interview. I told myself, Maybe this is cool? Maybe it’s cool to be so purely attracted to someone’s writing on Twitter that you seek them out for an interview? This is how the interview begins. I tell Mike Topp that I think it’s a good thing I believed he was young, fresh, and gay. It means your voice is young and fresh and gay.Mike Topp Interjects: I think so too.I tell Mike Topp that I can’t believe he agreed to this interview. I think specifically about a DM I wrote asking if he wanted to discuss The Curse and my budding concept of “Punishment TV” which he responded to briskly and positively, though it must have looked like a fool’s scribblings to him. Winging it now, faced with our reality, I try to approach the interview as hasty performance art. I bring him my list of questions, prepared over the last hour, scribbled on torn journal paper in silver marker.Question 1: Who is the most beautiful person you’ve ever been around?I ask this question because I have conflated Mike Topp with Warhol and I want Warhol’s answer to this question. But I learn very quickly that Mike Topp is not Warhol because he can’t answer. No one comes to mind. And when he finally succumbs to the interview rules I’ve imposed, he totally subverts my expectations and tells me sweetly, my wife.Question 2: Have you ever met Warhol?I was sure there would be at least a brief meeting between Mike Topp and Andy Warhol but I was wrong. The artists that hung around Warhol in the 80s were in his orbit, but Mike Topp is careful not to make too much of their associations. He says he saw Keith Haring working or ran into Basquiat during that time. It’s a common trap to fall into, this idea that if people existed in the same city at the same time in a similar milieu, they must have met.Mike Topp interjects: When I moved to New York City in the 1980s, Andy Warhol’s studio was on Union Square–just a few blocks from where I live now-–but I never saw him. But the beauty of New York City is you can so easily meet people in such a random manner. I’d work as a messenger and meet the producer David Merrick, or I’d go to pick up a book from someone and the person who comes out and hands it to me is the literary critic Harold Bloom. Or I’m at a party and I’m like, is that Matt Dillon? Hey, there’s David Berman from the Silver Jews. Or look, there’s David Byrne browsing in Tower Records. (I am a little star-struck–my wife always makes fun of me for this.) I remember when I started working at Artforum, they sent me to interview Sonic Youth. I was not listening to music at the time and I had no idea who Thurston Moore or Kim Gordon were–I just thought to myself, “Wow, they sure have a big apartment.”Question 2: Would you prefer a sudden death or do you want some warning?At this point, maybe 5 minutes in, I’m nervous and flooding with a sensation that it’s over, I’ve failed. It’s gonna be a bad interview and it will prove something about both of us. That Mike Topp was out of my interviewee league and that I am a joke that no one laughs at. Sudden...that’s his first answer. I start explaining that I would choose the opposite. My mouth is just moving and keeping the conversation going, mostly out of polite duty. I have asked him to talk and so I must do some of the talking. But a different interview could have emerged here, one where I say very little and it becomes a slightly Dada-esque audio poem that lasts 2 minutes and Mike Topp lays down tight staccato answers that have a sharp or mystical edge to them and we set it to music and release it as such. And it’s a perfect little diamond that gets tossed around the indie-lit world and someone DMs me and says, That was cool. If I have some awareness that my death is imminent, I will write a will and make sure my kids are covered and then I will move all of us somewhere with natural hot springs.Mike Topp Interjects: Sproing.Question 3: You’re a writer that comes from the art world. Your art world includes writing but now we have such distinct categories. Are you annoyed by this? This segmenting?Poets are either artists or they’re the most unpopular writers. When I think about Mike Topp’s place in the world of literature and art, I’m envious. He is old and his life has been defined by artistic impulse. He creates books with his art friends. He gets turned on by new writers and new artists and creates projects with them. He is guided by this pursuit. It’s how he spends his days. I’m envious of what I perceive to be his lack of introspection on this question and when he answers, it is as if he hasn’t understood the question at all. He talks about his early days in the city, where he hung around galleries and was invited to quietly look at drawings in a back room.Mike Topp interjects: When I first started writing poetry, I aspired to be someone like Dylan Thomas, or Georg Trakl or Federico Garcia Lorca. Unfortunately, I had no talent in that arena. I wrote really terrible poetry. I remember one line I wrote: “Banana rites on metal beds.” And I thought that was good! I was so blind.I had no money at all in my twenties and so I’d see a lot of art, and meet a lot of artists. During the 1980s and 1990s I published many people and everyone was very friendly and super encouraging. I loved guest-editing art and literary magazines because that gave me an excuse to write to some of my favorite writers and artists. I published, among others, John Cage, Ida Applebroog, John Baldessari, Eileen Myles, William Wegman, Joe Brainard, Sue Williams, Jean Michel Basquiat, Ron Padgett, James Schuyler, Paul Violi, Jessica Diamond, Raymond Pettibon, Gregory Crewdson, Hal Siorwitz, Dominique Dibbell, David Lynch, Richard Prince, Amy Yamada, and Sherrie Levine (Oh no! name dropping!).The inspiration behind all this publishing activity was the poet Ted Berrigan, who said if you lived in New York City, you should grab a phone book and write to people you admire and want to publish. Incidentally, using this same strategy, Berrigan did publish Andy Warhol in the 1960s in Berrigan’s C Magazine.Question 4: Tell me about William Wegman?When I was 14 and growing up in Los Angeles, I learned who William Wegman was. I saw that art could be something funny and easy to digest. It seemed so easy to me at that moment, so easy to be an artist. You find a muse and you create. But William Wegman’s fame also made me the most nervous about talking to Mike Topp. The two of them make books together. Mike Topp’s words and William Wegman’s drawings. I expected to uncover the story of a long robust friendship but after decades they are still two shy artists who discovered they enjoy working together and building little monuments out of their collaboration.Mike Topp interjects: I’ve never met Bill Wegman, although he has written me, called me, texted me, and emailed me (and vice-versa). The poet Sparrow and I have known each other for thirty years, but we didn’t meet in person for the first five years we knew each other–we just sent each other postcards, even though we lived five blocks apart. Raymond Pettibon and I have collaborated practically every day for the last two or three years, but we collaborate online. I might occasionally visit Ray if we work on some art together. I think in the last ten years Ray and I have written about 300-400 pages and collaborated on about 70 pieces of art.Question 5: When you’re in your house upstate, do you feel like landed gentry?Mike Topp likes to talk about his life outside the city. He lives in a town where an annual Scrabble tournament takes place. It is the town where Albert Butts, the inventor of Scrabble, was born. Mike Topp was the 2023 Scrabble tournament champion. He told me that he gives himself little challenges. He’s not a numerologist but he selects a number and tries to create within the constraints of that number when he is writing. He looks for the perfect amount of letters to satisfy both the expression and the exercise of staying under a word or character limit. Someone who writes like this is certainly building Scrabble muscles. I love this recognition. It’s perfect for an eccentric poet and I hope he wins again in 2024.Mike Topp Interjects: I came in fifth place this year, but I beat this year’s champion in a pickup game after the tournament. I am unhealthily competitive. I’d like to remind everyone that I used to play pool every week with Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset (that name-dropping again!), and my nickname was “Money.”Question 6: Are you comfortable being vulnerable with people? Have you ever tried to quit your persona? Have you ever been in therapy?This collection of questions was my attempt to investigate Mike Topp’s awareness of himself. Was it a shtick? He is a poet when he writes anything. His words are hard to categorize but they are not confessional. Sometimes they have an ascetic naivete to them. Sometimes they are acerbic and witty and playful. Sometimes they’re almost purely cynical, though not often. But it’s hard to know where Mike Topp the writer ends and Mike Topp the person begins. Steve Martin came up, organically, while we were talking. One of his poet friends was compared to Steve Martin and didn’t like it. Earlier–on the day we spoke–I had tweeted that I found Mike Topp fascinating and unknowable in a Steve Martin sort of way. In the interview, I mention this comparison to Steve Martin and he is not insulted. He sees it as a compliment.Mike Topp interjects: Sure, I’ve been in therapy. I don’t think of myself having a persona, except when I read. I never get nervous reading. I’m not really “me” when I’m reading. Some might say it’s a pose.Question 7: Do you like the vulnerable position open swimming puts you in?Open swimming is a big part of the life Mike Topp and his wife lead. They are swimmers. It’s an identity. They swim long and cold and it requires stamina. I find that people who are in their heads a lot like swimming. I think it has something to do with a disconnection between mind and body. Swimming is an instantaneous submersion into the body and it’s another plane. Neither earth nor air but water. Humans are among the select few who can swim. What a wondrous place to exist. I think everyone, even the swimmers, will lie on their deathbed and wish they’d done more swimming.Mike Topp interjects: Swimming is terrific because it teaches you not to panic.Question 8: What did you like about writing while high?In a couple of the interviews I read, Mike Topp refers to his “junkie friends” and mentions that he used to get high before writing. The word junkie is inextricably linked to heroin, so I assume that’s the drug he’s talking about but it seems too rough for Topp. Maybe it was heroin at one point and it’s something else now. I don’t gravitate to this question with everyone but certain writers include it in their own writing, and when they do I feel a member-of-the-tribe duty to investigate. It’s also an attempt, only lightly veiled from myself, to figure out if I’m allowed to see myself as above board. I get high to write. It usually starts that way. I smoke a little pot and read with the intent to get inspired and then once it hits and my brain starts doing that beautiful manic thought dance, I leave the book and write my own shit.Mike Topp interjects: I’ve never tried heroin–I have too addictive a personality.The final thing I wrote in silver marker is not a question but I say it anyway because I want him to know what I think:Your boxing title would be Featherweight Champion. You’re the Featherweight champion of the writing world.
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TRANSMISSIONS: The Collidescope Podcast

August 30, 2024
Welcome to Transmissions, an interview feature in which X-R-A-Y profiles podcasts.
Rebecca Gransden: Does the podcast have a mission or manifesto?George Salis: The Collidescope Podcast has the same mission as my online literary publication The Collidescope. The goal is to shine a light on neglected literature and celebrate uninhibited creativity. Art for art’s sake rather than something commodified and packaged for mass consumption. To quote from my site, “We love to see the mental fireworks of a writer wrestling with their imagination, with language itself.”  A good deal of the stories, books, and authors on the show are those that most people probably have never heard of. I hope listeners can find new favorites and feel inspired to do some deep digging into neglected literature on their own.RG: Where did the idea for the podcast come from?GS: I loved listening to Levar Burton’s podcast in which he reads short stories accompanied by music/ambience and some other effects. His reading of Ken Lui’s “The Paper Menagerie” is one of my favorite episodes and it tugged some tears out of me. However, Burton’s podcast features commercial authors and popular short stories. I wanted to create a podcast that also features short stories but focuses on the lost or forgotten ones.RG: How long has the podcast been in existence, and how have you seen it grow over that time?GS: I started in late 2021 with Joseph McElroy’s soft and somber “Night Soul,” then read Alexander Theroux’s hilarious and mean “A Woman With Sauce,” and finally the snowily Borgesian “Oono” by Patricia Eakins. I then did an episode with Alan Singer, which is the first-ever audio interview with this author. We talked about his new book at the time, Play, A Novel, violence in literature and film, his failed attempt to visit Djuna Barnes, and much more. After this, the podcast went on an unannounced hiatus for a little over a year as I continued working on my second novel, Morphological Echoes, almost a decade in the making and now practically finished aside from a few narrative off-shoots. This means I’ll have extra free time to do more episodes, and have already released two, with others currently scheduled. The show has come back with a new segment called Invisible Book Buddies, a title based on my Collidescope column, Invisible Books. The concept is simple: I read a neglected book in tandem with a friend and we discuss it on the show, but I try to have some sort of angle to the episodes. In the first episode, I discussed the surreal Hollywood novel Movieland by Ramón Gómez de la Serna with filmmaker Matthew Taylor Blais, and the second episode was with Jewish filmmaker/writer Jacob Pascoe, and we discussed the Jewish author Mark Jay Mirsky’s debut novel, Thou Worm Jacob. Some near-future episodes include an ostensibly comic novel, Donald Newlove’s Sweet Adversity, featuring the stand-up comedian Henry Gelinas as a guest, and the lost Brazilian masterpiece Devil to Pay in the Backlands by João Guimarães Rosa will be discussed with my Brazilian friend, the doctor Ulisses Brandão.RG: If you are a writer, has the podcast impacted your writing life? and conversely, has a writerly disposition influenced the podcast?GS: Had I not gone on the hiatus, the podcast would have impacted my writing life by getting in the way of it. Although, the truth is that recording episodes with friends is a great way to take a break from writing while still doing something creative, and also collaborative.RG: Do you listen to podcasts?GS: I was never fanatical about podcasts but I’m slowly getting into it more during my walks in the woods. I love the A24 podcast because I’m a raving cinephile. Depending on which episode you pick, it’s a great way to learn some things about filmmaking. One of my favorites is the episode with Willem Dafoe and Isabella Rossellini.RG: Who is your dream guest?GS: Although far from neglected authors, it would be a dream to interview Salman Rushdie and Don DeLillo, two authors whom I’ve loved for as long as I can remember.RG: Is there a podcast that doesn’t exist, but you wish did?GS: I had an idea for a podcast in which I read childhood favorites with guests and indulge in nostalgia while seeing how one’s perceptions of the books have changed over time. My personal pick would be the Deltora Quest books. It could be a fun project but it’s far from a priority for me mostly because it doesn’t seem as important as the other work I’m doing.RG: What are your plans for the future?GS: It’s been great doing these book buddy chats and I have a long list of potential guests, but I also want to do more author interviews and short story readings. The next author I’m hoping to have on the show is my friend Michael Brodsky. I just facilitated the publication of his hefty magnum opus, Invidicum. As for short stories, I’ve been meaning to read William H. Gass’ “Order of Insects” for the longest time after receiving kind permission from Mary Gass. I would also like to read a couple of spiritually disturbing stories by Garielle Lutz. My ideas and passion for projects far outreaches what’s actually possible, but I do as much as I can while also working a measly-paying day job.
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LEGATO TONGUE by Timothy Boudreau

August 29, 2024
In the mid-eighties most Prescott High band members cheat on the terminology test, since Mr. Madison can’t see past the front row. Brass and woodwinds retreat toward the percussion section, sit with answer keys on their music stands. Percussionist Colin Andrews sits alone, no cheat sheet, scores a 96%.All three percussionists, Colin, Danny Gabriel, and Liz Reynolds, live in Perch Hollow Trailer Park. Colin gets it: growing up on the poor side of town naturally makes them want to pound the shit out of something.Liz lets all the neighborhood boys practice on her in her father’s shed; they learn tricks they’ll use later when they’re out with their real girlfriends—at Lavio’s for pizza, the Prescott Theatre for Ghostbusters. Liz is tall, with broad shoulders, narrow hips. She stands behind the bass drum with a mallet in each hand, thrashes both sides like it deserves it, like it used to be her friend.   The percussion section chills while Mr. Madison rehearses the clarinets.“Why didn’t you cheat on the terminology thing?” Liz says.“I just like to know them.”Colin doesn’t mention his favorite, legato tongue: the subtlest of articulations, a connecting pulse on a wind.“You keep staring at the flute section. You have a thing for Keri, maybe? Missy?”“No.” Colin imagines the sweetness of Missy Lavender’s voice, her flute’s soft trilling. “I don’t have a thing for anyone.”Colin’s the oldest sibling, the first to go through puberty. Bad breath, smelly armpits, straggly chin whiskers, barbed wire crotch hair that’s constantly itching: of course he has a thing for the flute girls; he has more things than he can tally. But Missy is his primary. Across the band room he admires the flicker of her fingers, imagines the warmth of her breath, the moistness of her dabbing, darling tongue.   “Believe me, I have nothing to hide.”Liz is alone, singing “Open Arms” in the band cloak closet when Colin goes in to find a marching band jacket. She laughs, tells him all the jackets are too big for him, he looks like a scarecrow.Behind school at lunch she lights a cigarette. “Jesus fucking Christ,” she says, watching Denny Carpenter walk past with Missy, who’s wearing Denny’s football jersey.Liz exhales while Denny and Missy sprint across the street through the drizzle, says “fuck” again, as if she’s telling it to the rain.Colin nods, shifts away from the smoke, understands. Of course Liz has things, for Denny, for whoever: her mom left them, her dad is the neighborhood asshole. Everyone hears him yelling at the dog, yelling at Liz to quit thrashing her drum set, the rattle of slammed doors, the shatter of plates as he screams at her to keep those boys in the shed, don’t bring them inside, it’s nasty.   Liz and Colin are sitting on the grass behind her father’s shed.“So you want this or not?” Liz says.“Yeah, sure.”Liz gives him a beer. “You’ve done it before?”“I’ve done a couple things.”“You have a few beers, it'll be fine.” She sips. “I'll show you my tits.”Halfway through his second beer Colin’s head is swirling. “Where’d you get your drum set?” His tongue feels thick. “I hear you playing sometimes.”Liz touches his leg and Colin’s heart jumps. “Mind if I have another beer?”On a mattress in the shed, between broken lawnmowers, Liz shows him her breasts, but they’re not like the ones in Playboy. They’re damp, patchily red with a couple large moles, wispy hairs around the nipples.“Just let me take care of this.”She kisses his forehead, nose, chin, belly, with each leaves a splash of spit with her tongue—then goes down, uses her whole mouth to caress and envelop him, as if his penis is the most precious thing on earth. She gets him into a rubber, eases herself onto him. He’s taking deep breaths, trying not to panic.“That’s it, follow me.”She grunts with him as he climaxes, eyes closed.“Just be quiet about this, okay?” she says after, reaching for a cigarette while Colin tugs up his underwear, bangs his forehead on a lawnmower. “Nobody needs to know.”   From your percussion section admirer, reads the note Colin slips into Missy’s locker, with a drawing of a flute and a snare drum.The kids pass it around at lunch the next day, laugh uproariously. “What a douchebag.”Two days later in band class, Colin’s sitting near the trumpet section, laughing when they laugh, pretending he's part of it. They’re loud, everyone can hear them. Liz keeps her head down as she walks past.“I hear Miss Austin found Liz and Bonkers Benny going at it in the janitor’s closet,” someone says. “She was sitting on a slop bucket, fucking wolfing up his dick.”Liz sits in the back corner, reaches for her Walkman. Colin tries not to remember her tongue twisting between his lips, her breath mingling with his when they kissed: sour cigarettes, the slanted sweetness of warm beer.Liz stays in the corner, doesn’t play at all, bobs her head to her Walkman. No one takes over her bass part, but Mr. Madison doesn’t say anything.   That weekend, while his parents are away, Colin drinks three of his mom’s wine coolers, walks to Liz’s trailer in his marching band uniform, and knocks on the door. Her dad opens the door, stands in the doorway: tank top, red-rimmed eyes.“Is Liz home?”“Why the hell are you wearing that?”Colin sways, steadies himself. “Tell her it’s Colin Andrews, from down the street.”Her dad disappears; after a minute he comes back with a wicked grin. “She says she never heard of you.”What can Colin say? His stomach’s roiling, the world’s sliding to the left, soon he’ll need to throw up. He lowers his eyes; his band pants swish as he turns and walks away.“Get the fuck outta here!” Liz’s dad calls after him.
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JUSTIN ISIS RECOMMENDS – Neo-Decadence: A Wardrobe Tour

August 28, 2024
Relax, for the moment.Your enduring boredom with contemporary art, writing and poetry results not from the sirenic tug of allegedly competing media, but from the soporific stupidity/sincerity to which most artists, writers and poets have willingly reduced themselves. Is there a solution?One often wishes to fall at the foot of AI and implore: “PLEASE, dear statistical large language model, with saintly expeditiousness, render these arriviste mediocrities obsolete, financially and culturally! We’re sick of hearing their ‘raw’ and ‘authentic’ thoughts as they froth themselves into a lather of cliché over representation, compassion, empathy and all other vanities worshiped by fundamentally uncreative and constipated types. Can’t you, the fairy of technology, simply exile them to abject poverty, to the extent that they will either lapse into total silence, or do something useful—such as manual labor?”A cesspit of craftsmanship. A memoir and autofiction culture. A “reality hunger” (pure fraudulence). An inverted Christianity of the stylistic spleen. And the flipside?The dismal mallcore playpen of “transgressive” adults who are really nothing more than overgrown teenagers. A predictable fondness for film and music—of the unwatchable, unlistenable kind. And MINIMALISM, the first retreat of the inept. Tossing around buckets of fake filth. What to make of these antiquated children? It feels, at best, unhygienic. The scab-picking of the small presses. The remedial grammar. One sometimes observes the “transgressive academic,” a sort of mongrel hybrid who believes that Deleuzianal jargon combined with tenure combined with a subscription to Weird Tales must result in something like an avant-garde. Instead they are about as threatening as a diabetic lapdog. When reading their prose, one is reminded of an enervated chihuahua forcing itself upon a particularly degenerate pug to sire something which cannot really move, cannot really breathe, and cannot really perceive anything around it. It simply sits there, stultified by its own self-reference. Is this excess? Of a kind, but one quickly wearing out its welcome. The tortuous trained tricks of academic pets merely make you feel sorry for them…when you remember in whose lap they are sitting. And their complete extirpation would inspire the same sense of satisfaction one feels when removing an isolated bloom of mold which has formed on the underside of a toilet seat. The pristine surface SHOULD be restored, shouldn’t it? Can’t technology help us destroy the livelihood of all professional artists and writers?The technology, unfortunately, is not that sophisticated yet. So, regrettably, we must take up the burden ourselves.After all, perhaps things simply haven’t gotten bad ENOUGH. Why not push the tendency further and see what the creatures will do next? There probably can’t be a truly appealing Post-Naturalism, a truly modern art, until Neo-Decadence, that sybaritic-saprophytic decomposer on the dead log of culture, has finished its work. We hope that it concludes within the next few decades, but who knows? The Future-Passéists are there at the end of the century, waiting to enact their moral panics, their redemption arcs, their transcendence over enjoyment. Monastic life beckons, but try to resist that too. It’s been done. In the meantime, here are some fun books which have been written purely in service of style. They’re full of monstrous, ignorant and unlikable characters. Their language is fervid, ornate, excessive. Often they are unironically mystical. They effortlessly skate past the tired binary of “real, blue collar, ‘authentic,’” and “referential, academic, ‘maximalist’” that holds back most writing from America and other less artistically-developed pseudo-countries. You may find your “empathy” decreasing as you read. You may find yourself growing tired of the gang warfare primates known as human beings and wishing for a decisive nuclear conflict to scour the Earth of the species that created UNIQLO and Amazon Prime. You won’t, however, be bored. Since declaring Neo-Decadence in 2005, Brendan Connell has done his best to present it in its most concentrated form. Works like Miss Homicide Plays the Flute (Eibonvale Press, 2013) and The Metapheromenoi (Snuggly Books, 2020) push into genuinely avant-garde prose territory while uniting classical Decadent themes of ennui and social decline with modern settings and recent, recognizably grotesque characters. Heqet (Egaeus Press, 2022) stands as the purest distillation yet of this aesthetic. Protagonist Félix traverses the gutters of Switzerland, his consciousness deliquescing as he willingly offers himself to frauds, dilettantes and ersatz Spiritualists. In this book we see the human animal admirably reduced in physical, mental and spiritual circumstances. At one point, there is a giant dead frog.I have worn out iron boots wandering the streets after dark, looking for fresh vices, aromatic gums, some place where I might relax on the skins of leopards as I lick at divine dews, my flesh being kneaded by nudities. Where are the festal halls? Where have they imprisoned the dreamers and fanatics? The sacred courts have been erased. All the glories have been mutilated; the vaults pillaged; splendor ransacked; glory corrupted. Giant heads lie in the piazzas; the dead stares of bankers and businessmen pollute the valleys; the heroes have emasculated themselves with logic and degenerated themselves with electrical apparatuses; the horizons have been painted with an ugly brush; the windows of houses and apartments are blind eyes; fatidic fish with vampire mouths lurk in the lakes; extended hands become a quin of vipers that sweat poison.The book can be read in a few hours, and with its brief, impressionistic chapters, often no longer than a page or two, could plausibly be taken as poetry (without falling into the standard “prose poetry” traps). Reading Heqet feels like tuning into crackly mental illness, individual words throwing off glints that barely illuminate the vast surrounding shadows. The deliriant vibes match the milieu, highlighting the detritus of a rapidly-decaying Europe. Damian Murphy, a heretical apostate of the G∴D∴ magickal system, has for most of this decade been releasing several books a year of technically rigorous and stylistically-immersive Post-Naturalist fiction. Unlike the majority of those claiming to write occult fiction, Murphy is as serious about his practical occult work as he is about his prose style. If you’ve been wondering where the real Arthur Machen or Aleister Crowley of the present day is, Murphy has completed the same systematic work they did, and applies the resultant visionary faculties to his narratives—which, despite their esoteric concerns, are always executed with an architect’s sense of precision and structural integrity. And unlike the earlier writers, Murphy’s prose is closer to Robbe-Grillet or a more phallically-endowed Fleur Jaeggy: clean, sinuous sentences wresting clear sense from perilous astral explorations, invocations of planetary spirits, and divinations based on everyday forms of trespass and subversion. His stories and novels take the forms of extended descriptions of nonexistent retro video games, psychogeographic assaults on foreign cities, and corporate workplace sabotage in service to theurgic experiments. Murphy offers a truly 21st century take on his subject matter that’s backed up by a wealth of personal experience, placing his work far beyond the pop shallowness of “Occulture,” the banalities of the worthless “horror scene,” etc. The Exalted and the Abased (Snuggly Books, 2021), his most recent full length collection, is also his most varied and compelling. Stories like “The Ivory Sovereign” and “The Hieromantic Mirror” present microcosms of occult experience that reward multiple close rereadings, while the complex novella-length “A Night of Amethyst” unfolds entirely as a description of gameplay in an occult-themed text adventure from the early 1980s. Quentin S. Crisp’s forays into darkly Romantic and morbid, neurasthenic fiction have won him a small but devoted worldwide following of obsessives who seek out his every story, essay and obscure blog post. The luxuriant syntactic tangle of his immediately recognizable prose and his distinctive take on the downbeat abysses of Modernity form a necessary contrast to our stifled era of techno-utopianism and moralistic Scientism. Graves (Snuggly Books, 2018) is on the surface billed as a “gothic novel,” although it breaks nearly every rule one would expect to find upheld, given the tag. Taking place firmly in the present reality of smartphones, therapy speak and advertising hype, it nevertheless portrays a modern necrophile, a true antihero seeking liberation through an elusive superposition of life and death.  He is still young, but already he has followed the skittish beam of an attendant’s electric torch along the grid of pathways between graves one summer night in Zôshigaya, seen the stone angels and broken columns among the mist-exhaling, ivied trees of Highgate, wandered forgetful of all time the citadel-park of winged hourglasses at Père Lachaise where the narrow houses of the dead stand like streets of dovecotes in which nest only shadow and silence, listened to the homely tones of the volunteer guide, explaining with familiarity the distinguishing traits of the stacked skulls of St. Leonard’s ossuary, been witness to the tribute paid by autumn, in fresh reds and yellows, to the spirit of human continuity where the slopes of Kensico are a neat, endless now of monuments and epitaphs, felt warm peace in the scent of pine resin and paraffin as he watched an ant crawl over the marble of a grave in a well-tended site overlooking the Sea of Crete, and already his instincts have been gloriously confirmed by the ten decorated skeletons of the Basilica of Waldsassen, posed and made opulent by Adalbart Eder the goldsmith for whom death was no barrier to speech—the dazzling encrustations of pearls, rubies and other myriad jewels on the bones with which this craftsman communed, impressing Damien as the ultimate efflorescence of decay. The long fifth chapter, in which the protagonist goes on a nighttime odyssey to exhume a child’s corpse while evading discovery in urban London, has more sustained realistic tension than anything Crisp has written to date, and thoroughly gelds all more self-conscious works of “genre horror” from the untalented and unambitious scene types.Elytron Frass’s MOIETIES (Subtle Body Press, 2024) combines High Modernist extravagance with intertwined narrative braids of trauma, ritual, and self-exploration. Five separate text threads physically surround and impinge on each other, sustained by two main opposing yet interlinked stories that mirror both the interaction of cerebral hemispheres and the divided dance of a primal couple—sister-brother, wife-husband, savior-destroyer. This ergodic assault of a novel is a Gnostic parable of the “ultimate completeness of incompletion” and a physical marvel of typographic-pictorial provocation. Frass updates classic esoterica with an appropriate level of technical frenzy for our current epoch, and in the process renders most other occult fiction irrelevant.Shifting to poetry, Golnoosh Nour’s collections Impure Thoughts (Verve Poetry Press, 2022) and Rocksong (Verve Poetry Press, 2021) are a catalog of languorous yet often violent eroticism, truly peacock-plumed constructions of consumptive immodesty and internal fire. Paul Cunningham’s Fall Garment (Schism Neuronics, 2022) is an elegiac examination of fashion and destruction, compressed with rural post-industrial history: as if a beautiful dress had become entangled with the corpse of a pregnant doe in a trash compactor, creating a sort of stillborn animal nativity jerked into a semblance of life by Cunningham’s extreme stylistic rigor. Industrial wastelands, paleontology and camp humor illuminate this collection. Magdalena Zurawski has described it, accurately, as “hot, wounded and reptilian.”Colby Smith’s poetry, united with the artwork of Josh Bayer in the recent Fish Turn Colors Then Break in My Hands (Stone Church Press, 2023), is a dissonant and lyrical look at the life of musician Jeffrey Lee Pierce.Shifting again to graphic novels and visual art, the author of the Neo-Decadent Manifesto of Comix, Aaron Lange, is worth investigating for his ongoing project Peppermint Werewolf (Stone Church Press), which functions as a nonlinear take on advertising hype, alongside classical Decadent references to Huysmans and others; the black and white artwork presents the dissected, laminated beauty of recontextualized fashion ephemera. In zines like Venomous Feathers, artists like Fergus NM, Ila Pop, Callum Leckie and Sailor Stephens advance a corresponding visual aesthetic. Try out Elytron Frass and Charles N.’s collaborative work Vitiators (Expat Press, 2022) too.  Finally, Seth Wang is a writer to watch, who, in stories like “Mirror for Princes (A Perfume Ad)” unites synaesthetic and hyper detailed approaches to consumerist obscurities with a terminally online sensibility and insight into the darker corners of the mind. Seth stands poised to abacinate readers with the incinerating brilliance which is really everyone’s right and due after enduring the sincerity of much uglier, uglier, uglier, uglier and clumsier writers who publicly worry about world events that don’t personally concern them.
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