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.
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 Podcasthas 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.
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.
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.
A––––– hasn’t been anywhere, or seen anybody, since her unemployment money ran out. Iron wind chimes jangle when she knocks on the door, and jangle again when it opens. Someone named Sara leads her to a table in the center of the shop. Sara is wearing a cloth mask with a red and white geometric print, which makes A––––– feel self conscious about her own KN-95, like she showed up wearing a suit when Sara is just wearing a cozy sweater. Everything inside of the room is white, everything outside is gray. This makes any small moment of color extremely vibrant - each thread on Sara’s Mexican-style embroidered blouse, the raku vase of flowers on the table, the tiny mustard stain on A–––––’s pants extremely vibrant. A––––– tries to believe that she belongs in this space, full of very expensive Japanese home goods and craft objects. If she holds her head the right way and blurs her eyes slightly, she can picture it.“Thank you for taking the time to be here,” says Sara, and A––––– nods. “I want to start by hearing what made you apply.”A––––– remembers her notes, diligently written and rewritten in her notebook. Through research online she’s built this shop into a temple, and not just because it’s the only place that responded to her application. The salvation guaranteed by employment here is the answer to the question that she’s been wrestling with in the months since the pandemic began. She chooses her words carefully.“One of the things I love most about your selection is the way your products call people to slow down in their day,” says A–––––. “Treating everyday objects, like a teacup, even a trash bin, as things worthy of thoughtful design is very inspiring to me. It matters, making small things beautiful. Slowing down.” “Well,” says Sara, “we like that slowing down, of course. We’re not Amazon.” A––––– nods. She almost believes that she’s never ordered from Amazon in her life, even though there are blue and white envelopes in her recycling at this very moment. “But you know,” Sara continues, “In the shop, it can be very busy. We work quickly. There is so much to get done, all of the time. There aren’t that many opportunities to rest. Is this okay with you?”A––––– smiles, and tries to express that appreciating supreme aesthetics and working with unprecedented speed are two compatible characteristics. It’s all very abstract. It’s been so long since A––––– really applied her efforts to anything. She straightens her spine. She shakes off her pre-emptive doubt. If Sara sees her as valuable, she will be valuable. “Well, that’s great,” says Sara. “And you’re aware, this is probably a temporary position? We usually just need the extra help to hold us over through the holidays.” A––––– can’t afford to worry about the future, so she nods. “There’s just one more thing. I’m sorry if this is an assumption…” Sara starts to laugh, raising her hands to cover her mouth, which is already covered by her mask, “but you’re not… Japanese.” “Definitely a correct assumption,” A––––– says, realizing that her mask hides the curve of her undeniably Jewish nose. “Well, you see…” Sara becomes very serious. “You would be the only one. The shop owner, Taku, moved here from Japan 20 years ago. Our staff is always majority Japanese. Even if we were raised over here, we all have Japanese heritage. And there are things we take for granted that you might not really… understand. I wouldn’t want you to feel on the outside.” A––––– bows her head and says, “Sara, I would be honored to learn more about Japanese culture. I wouldn’t feel on the outside when given this kind of opportunity.”Sara’s eyes crinkle into a smile. They stand up to start a tour of the shop. Just outside of the main room, Sara gestures to Grace, who waves at A––––– warmly from a minimal wooden table. Grace’s thick-rimmed glasses, and long hair, trigger a deja-vu type recognition for A–––––. She follows Sara but twists her neck to catch Grace thumb off the lid of her pen. The shop is so quiet A––––– can tell the cap is metal by the sound it makes when it drops. “Taku built that desk,” says Sara, “he built everything in here.” This includes rows on rows of modular cabinets, all crafted from the same unfinished plywood. A––––– learns that Taku selected each silver connecting joint from a vintage collector in Niigata. She learns that Taku designed every ceramic mug, plate, teapot, and bowl in the shop. He selected the cool glazes. He chose to leave some items without any glaze at all. A––––– picks up a small dish. It fits exactly in the palm. . So many people must have palms this size, she thinks, if Taku sculpted this without ever having met me. The plate is completely flat, except for a tiny outer ridge and an even smaller, inner indentation. “For soy sauce?” A––––– asks, but Sara is already at the exit.A––––– returns the dish to its spot on the shelf. The display has lost some of its balance. Price tags, tiny and black, are more noticeable. A––––– senses Sara’s gaze, and taps the dish, trying to leave things just as perfect as they were before she arrived. “We’ll be in touch,” says Sara, and then A––––– is on the outside. She sees a short man, his arms covered in tattoos, maze-like spirals and repeating wave patterns. He walks past her and into the shop. A––––– resentfully identifies him as a rival for her position. She clicks her car keys, and the responding chirp sounds farther away than she remembered. It takes over an hour for A––––– to get home. Meandering through side streets because the I-10 is too jammed, she passes through Culver City, Mid-Wilshire, and Koreatown. On every street, whether it’s lined with palms or apartments, homeless people or lawns, A––––– wonders what the fuck is wrong with her that she would bow her head and describe herself as “honored” to a Japanese woman.Honored.A––––– has never bowed before in her whole damn life. For soy sauce… unbelievable!Like Truman Capote dragging around his baby blanket, or Yukio Mishima bodybuilding with religious fanaticism, sometimes A––––– believes there is something special about her that sets her apart from everyone else. Small humiliations like these are just evidence of the quirkiness that comes along with her true greatness. But other times, the limitations of her world make her feel totally delusional. The “something special” is just a curse, because she has no idea how it will ever materialize. A––––– gets the job. Seiji, the man with the tattoos, also gets the job. Two new hires. No more all alone. She has a place to drive to, early every morning. She has a time card to punch.From the beginning, A–––––’s gestures appear loud, and overexaggerated, around her new cohort. Her limbs feel unpredictable and clumsy, like she might move around too quickly and destroy one of the objects she’s made the commitment to work around.A––––– helps Grace haul four brown boxes into the center room of the shop, placing them next to an oval plywood table. Behind her mask and thick glasses, A––––– realizes that Grace looks exactly like her ex-girlfriend. “Taku built this table,” Grace reminds A–––––. “If you look closely, you can see it’s made from one rectangle. After carving out the oval shape, he used the discarded corners for legs. He thinks every part of the wood is essential, even what others might have thrown away.” Grace scrapes the top of the boxes with a blade, slicing through red stamps and green tape covered in Japanese characters. Inside each box are tens of tiny brown packages, each one imprinted with Taku’s design label. Grace models how A––––– should help, placing each small parcel on the table, spreading them out so no one hides the other. Grace’s hands are tiny. Her hair is long and thick, and it hides her face while they work.A––––– is moved by Grace’s resemblance to her ex-girlfriend, who hasn’t been in touch for almost a year. There is such a disconnect between that old life and this new one. It’s better for A––––– if she doesn’t try to mesh the two and forgets about things like drinking and dancing and kissing. She wants to keep her present and her past divided, like the shop itself, which separates the bright, open, naturally lit showroom and the dark, twisting, back-end passage packed from floor to ceiling with boxed inventory.Grace hands over a sheet full of barcode stickers once all of the boxes are evenly spread out on the table. She shows A––––– how to match the UPC on each sticker to the code on the outside of the box. They stack the boxes, sorting each shape into tilting towers of rectangles and squares. A––––– feels like a child while they sticker. They work in silence, a quiet warmth floating between the two of them. When every box has its barcode, A––––– is left with a glossy sheet of blank paper. It’s done. She’s finished.They balance the barcoded boxes, and sidestep lightly to file them onto black metal shelves. There’s no ambiguity, no room to wonder whether this task was worthwhile or not. It was.“That’s Taku’s desk,” says Grace, gesturing towards a tiny table in the dark corridor, tucked behind a shelf cluttered with stacks of books, action figures, sketches, and broken inventory. Everything is only half visible, interrupted by cardboard. “I still haven’t met him,” says A–––––.“It might be a while. He only comes into the shop when no one else is around. Very late at night or very early.”“Is he afraid of getting Covid?”“He behaved that way even before all of this. It’s just the way he likes it. Look,” Grace points to a pile of geometric bronze incense holders. “He was here today. I realized I had made a huge error, not having these on display in the main room. He catches every little thing. He always notices.” A––––– looks over her shoulder, half expecting Taku to be right behind her, nodding with solemn approval. She wonders if Taku knows who she is and if he agrees with Sara’s decision to add her to his payroll. Maybe he wants her to keep working after winter comes. Maybe that something special inside of A––––– is the willingness to do exactly what Taku wants. The sun goes down before the end of their shift. Before setting the alarm, they attempt to complete a ritual. “Otsukaresama desu,” says Grace.“I sound so stupid when I say it,” says A–––––.“The trick is to avoid placing emphasis on any vowels. That’s a big difference between Japanese and English. No stress on the vowels.” “No stress on the vowels,” A––––– repeats, instead of saying thank you for your hard work in Japanese. Driving home in the dark, A–––––’s arms ache from carrying boxes. Her back hurts from being on her feet all day. She passes palm trees and her radio drones on with vaccine rumors and diversity initiatives. Her thoughts are strangely calm. She doesn’t have to question her value. The boxes weren’t stickered before she got there, and now they are resting in their correct place, organized efficiently, waiting for Taku’s inspection. Tomorrow there will be more ways to make herself useful. Life outside the shop has shrunk to just a few hours flanking her commute. She doesn’t speak to much of anyone. She mostly watches TV. It would be cool if she could propel the functionality of the shop into her own tasks, like laundry and grocery shopping, but instead they pile up chaotically in her studio apartment. She wonders if her coworkers are like this too, only fully alive when they walk through those shop doors. The store is closed to customers for the first half of each day. It can feel cavernous in its minimalism, yet it’s very difficult for A––––– to find a place to sit and eat lunch. She could irreparably damage Taku’s hand-carved tables with a spill, or scratch. This leaves only three options: the tiny bit of counter space between the microwave and the sink in the kitchen, the tiny bit of surface space on the packing table, and the passenger seat of A–––––’s own car. She feels stumped by Taku’s lack of forethought. Every product in the shop implies a graceful and respectful way of living, yet there is nothing to accommodate a team of people working here for eight hours a day, with a lunch break too short to vacate the premises. It’s uncomfortable. For lunch, A––––– heats up a curry from Trader Joe’s. While it spins in its microwave circle, she crushes up sheets of paper towels to cover her garbage in the trash can. She assumes that she is the only one who doesn’t cook her lunch at home, imagining her coworkers’ apartments as extensions of the shop, while hers just kind of sucks.A––––– carries her Trader Joe’s lunch with sweater sleeves pulled over her hands, buffering the heat of her ceramic dish. The dish is one of Taku’s designs that was ultimately rejected because the clay was too damp when it was fired. Mold is growing inside each piece. The unglazed gray clay will eventually mutate into a greenish tinge. ‘Till then, these dishes belong to the staff. On her way to the packing station, she sees Sara’s bright dress crouched over Taku’s desk. A––––– sees the back of Sara’s head and metal lunch containers, open to reveal thinly sliced pickles, white rice dusted with furikake, and a poached slice of salmon. Sara is holding bamboo chopsticks. A––––– hopes Sara will turn around and A––––– will see her face. Instead, before A––––– can reach her, Sara pulls up the blue surgical mask dangling from her ear.They don’t even have a moment of eye contact. Sara schedules A–––––’s shifts and sets the terms of A–––––’s employment, which feels less and less permanent as the holiday season sneaks closer and closer. If A––––– tries to visualize Sara’s face, she can’t.A––––– eats her curry at the packing station, keeping her elbows drawn tight to her sides. She covers her mouth and nose with her hand while she chews, careful to angle herself away from where Seiji is working. He’s tearing paper, crumpling it, pulling tape across brown boxes with a shriek from the dispenser.As winter gets closer, A––––– starts packing online orders. The shop’s website has become the main point of sale. A––––– feels robbed, watching this influx of Yuletide commerce without getting to meet the customers behind it. There are no faces, or affects to attach to the people out there paying high prices to attain immaculately designed teapots and coffee strainers and metal canisters and etched glasses and iron bookends, only 90210, 90240, 90265. A––––– stands next to Seiji at the packing station. He instructs her.“The first thing you want to do is unpack the object and make sure it doesn’t have any defects,” says Seiji, leaning against a metal shelf full of white paper bags. He pulls a small gray box out of one of the bags and opens the lid, emptying a tiny brass paperweight into the palm of his hand. It’s in the shape of a house, glowing gold. He passes it to A–––––. It’s very heavy and pulls her hand down to the matte surface of the packing table. “What do you think it is about this paperweight that makes it worth…” A––––– opens the packing slip, “$354?” A––––– anxiously watches Seiji for his reaction. She can’t tell if he carries the same idolization of Taku in his chest, or if repetition and physical labor have worn him down. Seiji shrugs but A––––– thinks maybe he’s smiling. “Isn’t it obvious?” he says. He might be scolding, or sarcastic. “Taku designed it.” All afternoon, Seiji shows A––––– how to layer corrugated kraft paper just so to create a 1-inch buffer between each box and its enclosed object. He teaches her that products will break not from impact with the ground, but from impact with each other. This is why it’s important to make sure objects packed together are separated by padding. Once the box is sealed, you shouldn’t be able to hear any movement when shaking it around. Every object should be squeezed together as tightly as possible. No room for any shifts or collisions. Seiji pulls out another order. They inspect a porcelain white cup with three indentations on one side. “You know,” says Seiji, “This was designed to be enjoyed by blind people. Anyone can enjoy its texture. Here, close your eyes.” A––––– closes her eyes. Smooth porcelain coating. Her fingers trail around the cup and she almost loses her footing until she finds the indentations. Three on the left side. Her pointer finger, middle finger, ring finger. They fit. She shifts her fingers around. They fit perfectly again. She raises and lowers the cup in her hand. It’s like playing the piano. When she opens her eyes, Seiji is looking right at her. “It really is beautiful… ” says A–––––, and hands back the cup. “I guess Taku knows what he’s doing. It’s not the kind of stuff I would spend my money on,” Seiji chuckles, “But I can’t deny it, there’s no one else out there like him. He’s one of a kind.” As he says it, the computer screen lights up with news of another purchase. A––––– does mental calculations of how many hours she would have to work to own any of these objects. Like the lack of a comfortable place to eat her lunch, the number makes her feel squeezed. Counted, minimized, contained. They clock out and A––––– gets in her car. She tosses an empty water bottle and McDonalds wrappers from her breakfast into the back seat. Just a block away from the shop, she sees Seiji smoking. His face is softer than she imagined it to be. He looks ten years younger than she had guessed, almost a boy. He doesn’t see her when she passes, but the whole way home A––––– replays the image: his tattoos covered by a quilted jacket, his round cheeks tightening with each inhalation, a silvery cloud above his head. In the dark, A––––– thinks about her life from before. Her old self would be surprised to see this new discipline. No more neurosis and uncertainty. Her stacks of worry and regret now subsumed by categorization, structure, routine, and service. All it took was Sara’s commands, and the presence of a great artist, somewhere, somehow, shifting the scenes. At work, A––––– microwaves her Trader Joe’s meal and clutches her bowl. She sees Taku’s desk. No one is sitting there. She can’t resist. She collapses into his chair. It feels overly luxurious after so many crammed lunches. She thinks, maybe this is how I should have been doing it all along. She chews her food slowly and stares up at the shelves. Unlike the shelves in the store, there is no governing order to the stacks of paper, dusty objects, and images tacked up around here. Unlike the matte minimalism of the objects on sale, here there are bright colors, odd combinations, and unlikely shapes. A stack of small bowls, sand colored and unglazed, have been repaired with bright gold seeping through the cracks. Gaudy and exaggerated, flaunting imperfection, defect. The binding of each shard reminds A––––– of the borders between stained glass in a church. They must have been broken, maybe shattered by an overly enthusiastic hand gesture at a dinner full of wine, and hearty laughter. It wasn’t the end for them. Post-it notes, written in Japanese with a blunt pencil, are stuck to the wall at crooked angles. Further up, there are framed woodblock prints of poodles. The prints are full of bright yellow and pink. The poodles are haughty and expressive, eating bowls of cherries with big silk bows in their curls. There is nothing utilitarian about these decadent dogs, smiling and snarling from their gray walls. Resplendent. A––––– chews her food. Emotion wells up inside of her chest. Her eyes travel over vintage Japanese action figures. I love these, she thinks. She thought she loved the shop, and she does, but it feels so free in here. Like she could come up with anything. Or Taku could come up with anything, she corrects herself. She looks at adverts from ULINE held up with metal push pins, covered in big sharpie circles and Taku’s handwriting. Massive exclamation marks, question marks, underlines. Hanging from a nail above the shelf is an oversized charm bracelet, each charm a different American fast food item. My microwave meals! A _ _ _ _ _ thinks. My McDonalds wrappers! She feels like she has been obeying the completely wrong Taku this whole time. She wonders which one he prefers - the shop-Taku, or the desk-Taku. If he doesn’t sell objects like the ones gathered around his desk, is that because he doesn’t take them seriously or because his customers don’t take them seriously? She wants to write him a note and ask, but her English letters seem foreign and unintelligible. He wouldn’t be able to read them the same way she can’t read the Japanese notes that are already around the desk, trying to pass along messages for future designs and projects and disciplines and inquiries. A––––– remembers Seiji saying with such certainty, There’s no one else like him. She closes her eyes and tries to invent a completely original design. Instead, she can only picture objects Taku has designed before she came along. She can’t come up with anything that just belongs to her and her alone. She wonders if this is a flaw in her DNA, or her cultural surroundings, or the amount of money in her bank account, or just the fact that there can only be one; for great artists to exist, there have to be people that aren’t quite as great, people that only look up.A–––––’s alarm goes off. Her lunch break is over. She returns to the front of the store, her hands washed and her mask in place. Her mind is racing. Sara looks at her and tilts her head with a frown. The next day, before A––––– takes her lunch break, Sara grabs her arm. A––––– is shocked by the physical contact. “Please be sure to either stay in the kitchen or at the packing station when you eat your lunch,” says Sara. Her voice is steady. She’s deadly serious. “Of course,” A––––– says. She’s burning up. She looks at the ground. Sara nods and squints.The rest of the day, and then the rest of the week, A––––– works as diligently as ever, but she can’t stop thinking about Sara’s hand on her arm. It had felt involuntary. Civil and soft yet still tense around the knuckles. A––––– saw Sara sitting at Taku’s desk weeks ago. She was sitting there with her chopsticks and her poached fish. The treasures at Taku’s desk, the mysteries and the idiosyncrasies, are for Sara? Was this kind of exclusivity, and hierarchy Taku’s intention? A––––– imagines them meeting together, late at night. Taku bends Sara over his desk and fucks her, manicured poodles leering overhead. They keep their masks on. In a muffled voice, Sara praises Taku’s intellect while he slaps her ass and tells her to work harder. Her eyes squeeze shut, she knocks a jar of pens onto the floor. Sara likes it. They roll around. A––––– wants to laugh. Huh, she thinks, you really want all this for that?Every time A––––– thinks about Taku’s desk, she feels a yearning for a type of originality that she could claim as her own. If she wasn’t so tired after working all day, she might have the power to figure out what exactly that could look like. She starts to realize that by crowding out the rest of her life, she crowded out this possibility too. December is almost over. There is a near constant line of customers to get into the shop. The team functions, all together, at a high level. Behind a table full of stickered boxes, A––––– sees Grace drinking from her water bottle. Underneath her mask and thick glasses flecked with dust, Grace doesn’t look anything like A–––––’s ex girlfriend. Her nose is longer, her jawline less developed. The resemblance must have come from something in her body language, or maybe the tininess of her hands. “Has Taku ever told you something directly?” A––––– asks. “What do you mean?” Grace responds, pulling her mask back over her nose, “Taku and I talk every day. That’s a big part of my role.” “Well, it’s just that he’s so present in my life, but I never meet him. I never hear directly from him. It’s always, ‘Taku says this,’ or ‘Taku says that.’ Is that really how he is?”“He’s controlling…” Grace says. “Sometimes people don’t like that. It’s probably part of why he’s such a recluse.” A––––– grips the metal shelf. Her paychecks are small. Her commute is long. Her body is tired. When she lies in bed at night, she dreams about stickers and categorization. Customers want something they see on the shelves, and she searches in the back of the shop endlessly for the box, with its embossed label and deliberate packaging. She takes too long. She can’t find it. She’s become undisciplined, lazy, too tall, the word for each object sticking strangely in her mouth—Kenzan, tenugui, katakuchi, donabe, kekkai. She doesn’t even have the vocabulary to ask for help. A––––– walks into the shop, and Sara beckons her into the cardboard box hallway. No one else has arrived. Sara points at barcode stickers A––––– applied the afternoon before. “Do you see how some of these are straight while others are slightly off-kilter?” Sara says.A––––– nods. “It’s really important that you keep the barcodes straight when you sticker,” she gestures at Taku’s desk, as if A––––– didn’t already know about the stained glass church bowls, and the action figures, and the golden charm bracelet. “This is the kind of thing that will drive Taku crazy. It’s impossible for him to concentrate on his important creative work if there is no care put into the details. For Taku’s sake, please sticker more intentionally.” A––––– agrees meekly, too stunned to figure out if Sara is right about what does or doesn’t disturb Taku.In the dull, heavy light of the storage space A––––– gently peels off each crooked sticker and delicately presses them back into place. Perfectly aligned, perfectly straight. She tries to contact some of the childlike joy of those first days. Back then, a job was the only thing she needed. Instead, she feels redundant, or worse. It takes her over an hour. She hears Grace and Seiji moving about the rest of the shop, their voices muffled past the point of comprehension. When A––––– emerges, Grace is at the packing station. “Sara and Seiji are talking in the other room,” Grace says. Her eyes don’t invite any follow up. A––––– walks past Grace towards the kitchen, briefly passing through the main room of the shop. Seiji and Sara are sitting across from each other on the table Taku built. Seiji’s voice is deep enough that A––––– can pick up a few words. She hears “paid time off,” and then she hears “healthcare,” and then she hears “sick leave.” She hears him say “benefits,” and sit back in his chair, hand at his chin, brow furrowed, taking in the explanations Sara is laying out with open hand gestures. She points, she shrugs. No one has ever said these words to A––––– in the shop and A––––– has never asked to hear them. Almost like bringing up the topic would force a decision. Maybe if she never said anything, Sara would keep scheduling A––––– for 40 hours a week. But as soon as A––––– mentions it, it will all disappear - A–––––’s time card, her lunch break, Grace, Seiji, Sara. Of course, there wouldn’t be room for both of them to stay past the holiday season. Seiji will be chosen. A––––– will be discarded. A––––– catches Sara applying chapstick. A––––– has never seen Sara’s face before and tries to look away as fast as she can. It’s like vertigo. Total revulsion. Sara’s nose is too wide, her lips are too big. Nothing looks the way A––––– had imagined. The beauty of Sara’s eyes and eyebrows were lying to her. A––––– got too comfortable trusting their symmetry. She thought she knew what Sara looked like. At the end of the day:“Otsukaresama desu.” “Otsukaresama desu.” “Otsukaresama desu.” A––––– tries not to stress a single vowel. Two days before Christmas, A––––– drives in circles after the shop closes. She pulls over next to glowing windows in dark west side mansions. Maybe they’ve used objects from the shop to give their homes a sense of Eastern authenticity, not knowing anything about the man who designed them, or the intention he had behind each decision. Maybe they rhapsodize their reverence for the handmade when their guests dish out compliments. Maybe they don’t even notice the life of the objects in their homes, having trusted a decorator to populate their shelves. So removed from their own tastes and preferences, they don’t even know what they want. A _ _ _ _ _ watches palms swaying in the wind. She rolls down her windows and smells jasmine. I might as well get ahead of it, she thinks. The writing is on the wall. They don’t have enough space for me. She pulls out her car manual and rips out the last page, which is blank. She writes a note about how much she appreciated everything Sara and Grace and Seiji taught her. She wishes them luck in the new year. She’s surprised to find herself crying. She drives back in the direction of the shop. A homeless woman is napping on the bus stop bench, two streets before A––––– arrives. One street before A––––– arrives, she sees a black cat. The lamps are on in the shop, even though A––––– turned them off, with Sara and Grace and Seiji, two hours earlier. Light pools warmly outside of each window, a golden semicircle forming in front of the curtains. A––––– battles the urge to turn around. Maybe Sara or Grace stayed late, doing some sort of inventory count or reorganizing that had to happen because of A–––––'s turbulence, fully on display despite months of best effort. Her note seems silly. She rehearses what she will say if she is confronted. “I forgot my lunchbox here,” she says, even though she throws away the containers of her microwave meals after every use. “I forgot my scarf,” she says, even though it’s not quite cold enough to wear one. “Sara told me it’s important to check, if you think you have lost something.”The door to the shop is unlocked. A––––– opens it. She has never seen anything so bright. She squints, and stumbles towards the back room. When she gets there, there aren’t any boxes. There aren’t any black metal shelves. No excellently proportioned packaging, no tools encased in soft brown paper. No treasure of mugs and spoons and kettles and bookends - all etched, hammered, sculpted, stitched, carved, and cast. There is only this bright, white, brilliant light. And Taku, more beautiful than A––––– could have ever imagined, hunched over his desk. There’s a bandaid on his thumb, and he’s picked at it till the edges are frayed with loose strings. He turns around when he hears her, softly and fluidly. It’s no surprise that she’s there. “You know,” he says in perfect English, without any hint of an accent, “here, there’s room for all of us.”
The burden of foresight. With Vague Predictions & Prophecies (CLASH Books, 2024) Daisuke Shen mainlines a generation’s insecurities into fiction that is at once ephemeral and psychically probing. These are stories that present longing, whether that be for a sense of solidity, a chance at connection, or a reprieve from aimlessness. Daydreams of lost days and nightmares of days lost. Shen explores how technology melds with the human, and speculates on where consciousness might reside. I spoke with Daisuke about the book.Rebecca Gransden: The book shares its title with one of the short stories you’ve included, “Vague Predictions & Prophecies.” What led you to use this as the title for the collection as a whole?Daisuke Shen: Almost all of these stories, or at least the ones I can think of off the top of my head, feature characters who are awaiting some kind of inevitable doom, or who are searching for something or someone to save them. In times of extreme desperation and terror there is a tendency to anticipate/fantasize about the best and the worst outcomes; rarely is there ever a gray area. While I think it’s human to look for patterns or systems in order to make sense of the world, you can become narrow-scoped, only seeing the things you want to. You forget that the world isn’t as focused on you as you might think. I do believe that there exists the supernatural or spiritual, whichever you’d like to term it, but I also know that the human mind is good at tricking itself. But figuring out where that line begins and ends is impossible at times.RG: A mood of ennui and melancholia runs through the collection, with many of your characters unsure of themselves, rudderless or disappointed with life. A sense of yearning pervades the book. When did you write these stories? Do they remind you of a particular time in your life?DS: All of these stories feel a little distant from me now. The last ones were written around two-three years ago, I think, and are reflective of very difficult times, when I was living day-to-day in fight or flight mode. It’s hard to read some of them, to be quite honest. It’s interesting that you mention yearning as a constant throughout the collection. Yearning is a safe place for people to be, even while it’s miserable. It provides us with the ability to maintain a fantasy, to protect yourself from the potential disappointment of realizing your desire is misplaced. We romanticize destinations, thinking that when we reach a certain place within our lives or relationships, we’ll be saved. But how many people truly want to reach the finish line, where nothing comes afterward? There is a healthy kind of yearning, wherein it allows for us to carry forward in life — we call this hope. The unhealthy kind is the one that renders us sedentary, and we call this fantasy. Much of the collection was written with the attitude of the latter. RG: He wiped the sweat from his nose and looked at us with his granite black eyes, a thin smile spreading across his face. The one he had when he was fighting. I realized in that moment why his momma was so convinced he was a monster. She’d beaten him every night as a kid, trying to get the demons out. The welts on his body were everywhere.For “The Pasture” you address the idea of rules, the way in which the rules of the adult world and those that are the province of childhood can create friction or contradict one another. For your characters, rules present themselves as situational, whether it be school rules, religious guidance, or the social dynamics of a friend group. There is a sense that the rules on display exist to tentatively combat the invasion of the more chaotic forces that threaten the equilibrium of everyday life, imperfect as it is. How do your characters deal with rules? Do you impose rules upon yourself in your writing life?DS: Every day, from the time when we wake up to when we go to sleep, we enter into a negotiation with power. Control and order are needed to some degree or else entire systems devolve. And it is human to break rules even as we try to hold to them. Maybe especially when we try to hold onto them stringently, which is how new foundations are created — through disruption and dissolution. In writing I am drawn to restraint, which is why I am drawn to short stories and novellas. You have to be creative when working with a very short amount of pages, and it’s often when your best writing comes out — under pressure. When someone provides me with a restraint/specific form, I like to see how far I can take it, how I can bend it from its original expectations. I had a lot of external rules imposed on me growing up, which led to this immense terror inside of me of ever messing up or making a mistake. I still have this fear, but not as strongly as I used to. I now know there’s dignity in imperfection though it’s hard to internalize. I think my characters operate much in the same way — terrified of disrupting the order of things but also knowing that transformation is inevitable. This is the only option afforded to us in life. But apart from the above, my rules for myself in writing tend to be subconscious and uncontrollable. Most of what I’m finding difficult these days is how to recreate the same intensity, movement, and emotion in a long-form work that I would in short stories. I don’t like the idea of any one sentence feeling unpurposeful. Thus I will agonize over one sentence for a long time and wonder about its intent. It is painful and annoying. RG:I can’t stop staring. Staring, and laughing, and scared. I want to join our consciousnesses, join my body with its, forever. I feel the urge to kill for it. I would do anything it wanted me to.The story “Vague Predictions & Prophesies” deals with the angelic, a theme that recurs throughout the collection. In this case you make reference to the Binding of Isaac and the archangel connected with the Biblical account. For angels come down to earth, a complicated grounding awaits, where the human element must be taken into account, with its troubles and flaws, and the relationship with God gains new dimensions, sometimes resentful, often with baggage. The angelic can be as terrifying and awe-inspiring as much as it is comforting or guiding. What drew you to explore the figure of the angel, and to the story of Isaac in particular? What is God’s plan for His angels?DS: I think a lot about the story of Isaac. I was introduced first to the story as a young child in church and Christian school, and it was a rather simplistic sort of explanation that God never meant to kill Isaac and was simply testing Abraham to see if he would prove that his love for him was stronger — Abraham knew that God would never truly make him go through with it. Then I was re-introduced to the story from Kierkegaard’s viewpoint, which is that Abraham both fully accepted the fact of Isaac’s death while at the same time maintaining nonetheless that Isaac would be brought back to him somehow, even as he brings the knife down to perform the act.It is postulated by some scholars that Zedkiel is the referenced angel who intervenes before Isaac is killed. Zedkiel is the angel of mercy, yet some people mistake mercy for kindness. But I think mercy can also be cruelty and necessarily so — in that it forces people to keep going, which is another kind of suffering altogether. But there is also the hope of a better life. In the video game Nier: Automata, there is a point in which you learn that everyone in the character Pascal’s village, including the children, have been slaughtered. He begs for you to kill him, after which you are presented with three choices: You can kill him, or take his memories, or walk away. If you choose to take his memories, you come back later and find him selling his dead children’s body parts, as he thinks they’re just machine parts. If you kill him, he thanks you. But if you walk away, he yells out to you that you’ve betrayed him. And you never see him again in the game after that.I chose to kill him, but a better option in my opinion would have been to walk away and leave him with a weapon. I am always anticipating the impossible to happen. For some this is termed magical thinking, but I call it faith. RG: Many of the stories deal with the nature of consciousness and perception. When thinking about theme, what part does exploration of these areas play in your work?DS: The fact that there are so many different ways to perceive any given situation is something that really messes with me. “Home Video” grapples with this some. A conscious being is one that is afflicted with the terrible awareness of its own existence and its limitations. And if you live through too much, rationality and logical perception can be overtaken by instinct, the necessity of survival. How much do we truly know about ourselves and what keeps us alive? What parts of ourselves do we expose to others that we aren’t fully aware of? People always say they know themselves best but I don’t know how true that is. But at the same time, you have to build enough mental fortitude so that your general perception, as well as your understanding of who you are, is not easily swayed by anyone who comes along. I am not always great at trusting my own judgment, and neither are my characters.RG: “Damien and Melissa” explores the potential of technology when applied to human relationships. The story poses many questions, and led me to muse on issues of intrusion and the boundaries it is necessary for us to set for ourselves. When it comes to your work, what areas of technology are you drawn to investigate?DS: I was not allowed to have boundaries as a child. Technology is not healthy for us in many ways because it encourages a kind of enmeshment, I think, an erosion of the self as we are encouraged to be in constant conversation with others and to absorb as much information as possible in a limited amount of time. Of course it is good to have friends and to learn as much as we can, but how comfortable are we nowadays at being by ourselves for more than a couple of hours? Discipline is lacking nowadays. Strong relationships, becoming an expert in a specific area of study, are things that are built over a very long period of time, with intense concentration. I don’t want to engage with anything or anyone in a shallow way.Loneliness and the way technology has been created to aid people in their isolation is of great fascination to me. Also the way people use technology to take advantage of others’ loneliness, too. Pig-slaughtering scams, for instance, wherein scammers either text numbers at random or create fake dating profiles on apps, and then slowly begin to drain victims of their money by asking them to invest in cryptocurrency online, then taking it and disappearing forever. There were two stories in the news I remember, which was a guy who worked in cybersecurity for a university and then a woman who worked in finance. Both people were victims of this scam, which seems unbelievable until you learn that both of them had lost their spouses right beforehand. In times of insurmountable grief we can see a trap clear as day and still walk inside of it. RG: The presence of God recurs in various ways throughout the collection. Whether it be the Abrahamic God, a personal God, or something less concrete is, for the most part, dependent upon how your characters interact with the divine. Do you have a spiritual belief, and if so, how is that reflected in the collection?DS: I believe to one degree or another in the following: Ghosts; different lives and realities outside of this one; angels; karma; hexes; divine protection; spirits evil and good and neutral; gods; God; messengers; fate; altering the course of fate; some type of afterlife; prophetic dreams. Reincarnation, too, maybe. RG: It was darker than I’d expected. Shirts fluttered on metal racks, like ghosts without frames. Every time I shined the flashlight into a room, I imagined that now would be when I’d see them: the lovers, their bodies forming into one another’s; a man with a vendetta who would plunge a knife into my back. Humidity clung to my face as I searched for them. But there was never anything but my own shadow, grotesque and overgrown, hunting me through the corridors.The story “The Rabbit God” features a security guard who is haunted as much by imagined phantoms as he is inner ghosts. Many of your stories deal with the ghosts we carry with us. What is the nature of the ghostly in your work, and how do spirits manifest in Vague Predictions & Prophesies?DS: In Chinese and Japanese culture ghosts are very real and serious business. So too in the South. They manifest because of the fact they are wronged in life, because their deaths were painful or tragic. There are so many different types of ghosts across cultures, within our bloodlines, inside of the soil. They are reminders that history follows you. The cruelty and destruction of humanity or the human soul is remembered and resistant to our attempts to stifle it. RG: “Duckling” raises the issue of privacy, and what it is reasonable to share with another. Passwords become a measure of trust, passcodes a signal of access and connection. The story presents a character willing to sacrifice identity and personal autonomy, to relinquish oneself. Many of your stories deal with the nature of the self. How do you approach your work on a philosophical level?DS: Questions I wrestle with often include how much sacrifice one should make in love. The constitution of a self is primarily one made in relations to others. But a core is so easily suffocated at times. A self is a taught line that is at times pliant. Moldable. Some foundational aspects will remain despite anything else but it’s also silly to think that selves are unmovable objects. RG: What relationship does the past have to the present in your stories?DS: The past and the present are in a very codependent situationship in my work. Neither party wants to let go despite knowing it’s not going to work out. It’s decades long at this point and may very well never end.RG: The story “Machine Translation” addresses themes of appearances, metamorphosis, and the use of technology to deliver fundamental needs, such as the emotional and spiritual. How can data be a measure for life? How do you approach the use of dream logic in your work?DS: In terms of the things that we buy or watch or eat, the places we go, the people we contact, patterns begin to emerge. Data surveillance is used for really evil purposes, for instance, racial profiling. I don't think data is a measurement of life. I think that you could probably make some assumptions, or make new ones about me if I told you what I bought at the grocery store today, what my search history is like, who I’ve spoken to on the phone. But it cannot serve as a reflection of a whole human being, can’t replace an actual connection, which is part of why the mother in that story loses her mind — she wants for the world to fit into compact facts in order for her to overcome her past traumas but it won’t stay shut. RG: How do you view the collection as a whole entity? When looking back, what stands out to you most about writing it?DS: If I’m being honest? I want it as far away from me as possible. I want to pretend it’s not coming out. But I also want people to know that I did work really hard on these stories. And it took a very long time. And I was unhappy with almost all of the stories after long periods of not hearing back, and I kept wanting to include different ones. I begged my agent to pull it many times. But he believed in my stories.That’s all to say that if you’re reading this and you want to write a short story collection don’t be fooled by people who give you a formula for success. I often tell my students I am pessimistic about publishing. It makes me sad, to be honest, that there’s such a huge need for writers to become businesspeople nowadays. I am just not good at it, and I don’t think it comes naturally to artists. We are committed to our work most of all and that’s how it should be, not spent having to sell ourselves on whatever platform it might be. But I also tell them there are presses that will love your work and take good care of it. Long story short if you have a story inside of you, get it out. You owe it to yourself.
BUY A COPY OF 'AMERICAN AIR' HERESPOKESPERSON FOR MELLINGER CO., LOS ANGELES, CALIF., DEPT. 54Friends, you've heard me speak before in praise of Barns for Nobles. Well I'm no longer with that company. I'm here today to tell you about a new product I'm even more enthusiastic about called Count Branula. It's a new cereal that tastes like bran. In fact I can't even tell the difference. THE EARLIEST SALADSProbably the earliest salads were nothing more than some greens dumped in a bowl. VASEI was at Mom's and I dropped this vase. I was upset cuz it was her favorite and there was no way to replace it. I remembered I was playing a record when I dropped it. So I just played the record backwards until the broken vase came together again on the floor and hopped up to my hands. SIMPLERWhat could be simpler than the gift of a solid gold baby? STRAY DIALOGUEA tooth fairy so much as touches my kid I'll blow his head off. MOSQUITODid you know that a mosquito in really bad storms can hang onto a raindrop and ride safely toward the ground? A PLAY"Do you want to give the babysitter a ride home, honey?""I let Freddie Kruger drive her home.""Oh, no!" TOP TIPI read somewhere that the female praying mantis always cannibalizes the head of her mate post-coitus. Take it from me, fellas, my wife tried this stunt when we were on our honeymoon and it seemed to take FOREVER!! NEW YORKERSNew Yorkers have always had trouble with those idle low-lives called poor people. Ever since NYC was built, poor people have been plaguing it--sitting on park benches, buying fruits and vegetables from the farmers market & so on. You can hear them at night sometimes playing the piano. BUY A COPY OF 'AMERICAN AIR' HERE
The human heart on the street wasn’t mine. It came from the crumpled body thirty feet away. Another thirty feet behind the body was a pair of boots, which may or may not have had feet in them. Just behind the boots was the sedan. The bumper was barely dented from where it had struck the man.A severed vein sticking out of the heart looked big enough to stick my thumb into. Black skid marks streaked the fat on the lower part, as if someone had plucked out the heart and skipped it like a stone across the street. A few flecks of goo dotted the concrete around it and there was a smear where it slid to a stop. Somehow the heart had sailed all that distance and stayed intact.We hadn’t slept at all that night. There’d been one medical call after another, and fire watch from three to five A.M. (Fire watch is one of the cruelest assignments an engine can get. We sat around making sure a fire that other crews had put out didn’t rekindle). After that, the heart called me here.“Mantis,” said a voice.It startled me. “What?” I looked up. “This mess isn’t going to sweep up itself. Get the kitty litter.” The voice came from behind me. My driver, Jimmy.I got the absorbent from the fire engine and dumped it on the pools and streams of car juice. “How did it stay in one piece? I can make out the vena cava,” Jimmy said as he started spreading out the absorbent with a push broom brush-side up so the absorbent could be ground into the street with the flat wooden bar. I picked up the other broom. I wished every person who’d ever written a song about a broken heart could see this. A heart doesn’t break. Everything around it mangles and disintegrates until the heart lies alone on starless asphalt.“The heart is one tough muscle,” I said.“I want to take it and put it in a jar. Do you think anyone would notice?” Jimmy said.“The owner might want it back,” I said.“I doubt it.” Jimmy flipped his broom and used the bristle side to push the used absorbent into a pile. I got the shovel and industrial trash bag.“How did it get out?” I said when I got back.“I don’t know. I tried to check. But it’s like the guy is missing half his bones. He’s just a pile of meat.” Jimmy grabbed the trash bag and I started shoveling the absorbent into it.“You’re not really going to take it, are you?” I asked.It was gross. It wasn’t his. Someone would notice it missing. The saint of lost hearts would come for us both.“I’ve got to.”“No, you don’t got to.” Sometimes it could be hard to know if Jimmy said something because he believed it or because he was worming me. Not this time; I could tell he wanted it by the way he didn’t pause to enjoy my outrage. I wasn’t going to let him have the heart.“How badass would that be,” he said as he tied up the bag.I put the shovel and brooms back on the engine and then came back to Jimmy, who stood by the heart.“It would make the best conversation piece. Maybe I could put it in a lava lamp. I’m gonna get a bag.”“You can’t take the heart.”“Why not?”“Because it’s wrong.” Because it wasn’t his. Because it had done its part.“It’s not like he needs it. I’ll be putting it to good use. Reduce, re-use, recycle.” He made for the engine. Everything was cleaned up and we were ready to go but he didn’t pull the chock blocks from the tires. Instead, he opened a compartment.I had one last moment to listen to what the heart had to tell me. Maybe it would tell me what to do, tell me how to save it. As I waited for instruction, I started to become one with the wrecked car, the deflated body, the grief of those who knew him, the sorrow of the person who’d struck the man and tore his heart from his chest. The heart had grown and I’d stepped inside it.The sound of two paramedics and a cop talking pulled me from this vision. Jimmy took a bag from the engine and came towards me. “Y’all aren’t going to believe this,” I shouted to the paramedics as I waved them over. The cop and the paramedics were standing by the body. They looked at me but didn’t move. If Jimmy could have shot lasers out of his eyes, he would have torched me right there. He walked faster. If he could get to the heart before they did, he knew I wouldn’t proactively rat him out. “It’s the dude’s heart!” I shouted. That got their attention. They trotted over, arriving just after Jimmy did. There was no way for Jimmy to get it now and I was sure that no one else was going to trap it in a lava lamp. There wasn’t anything more I could do for it. Although it would remain free a little longer, the heart would soon be incinerated. Back to ash. After a lifetime of service, that seemed a better fate. Dawn came and sunlight fell on the heart for the first time.
Where lives the creature? The Backwards Hand: A Memoir (Curbstone Books, 2024) chronicles Matt Lee’s experience of growing up and into adulthood. Matt’s hand marked him out as different, and it is the nature of this difference, where it resides, that comes to the fore. Out from the unconscious arises the monster, but once unleashed, even a monster must live in the world. As the monster is seen, is reflected, perhaps even reconciled with, it remains powerful but also hard to pin down. In whose eyes, in what skin, does the monster live? I asked Matt if he’s any closer to finding out.Rebecca Gransden: Fear THE CLAW! Near the start of the book you describe a game of The Claw that you played with your dad. This obviously put me in mind of the Jim Carey film Liar Liar, where Jim’s character uses The Claw as a way to jokily terrify and bond with his son. What prompted you to venture into the domain of memoir?Matt Lee: You just unearthed a long-buried childhood memory of renting that movie and watching it with my father. We’ve been estranged for many years, but I will give him credit for letting me check out all sorts of bawdy, violent films when I was (probably) too young.I consider myself a failed poet. Writing creative nonfiction, much less a memoir, had never crossed my mind. I wanted to be a teacher, so I went to grad school (add failed professor to the list). My adviser suggested I enroll in a creative nonfiction course, and I figured it would allow me to get outside my creative wheelhouse. I was soon so enamored that I repeated the class.One of my assignments was to write the first chapter of a memoir, which became the genesis of The Backwards Hand. At that stage of my life, I was cagey about discussing my disability, and I wanted to figure out why, so the memoir served as a vessel of self-interrogation. When I began framing my story within the larger tapestry of disability studies, I felt even more compelled to share it, to move beyond mere solipsism and invite others along for the ride, a collective investigation into a topic which many prefer to sweep under the rug—our attitudes surrounding the disabled body. RG: Facts From Hell! You intercut passages on films with factual historical accounts. Your personal history and experience is recounted alongside cold, hard statistics. How did you go about choosing the structure for the book?ML: The “literary collage” style is something I adopted and developed while working on my first book, Crisis Actor. The subject of disability is so vast and mercurial that a fragmentary approach felt natural, and it formally mimics the organized chaos of my mind. Throwing this onslaught of information at the reader likewise invokes one of the book’s central concerns: abjection. My intention is for the book to overload one’s sense of being, the same way you might react to seeing a corpse (or a cripple). I use the personal narrative as a ballast—I tell my story in a linear fashion to help ground the erratic miasma of references surrounding it.RG: You Won’t Believe Your Eyes! The book draws from many sources. What did the research process look like? Were there discoveries that made an impact on you, or the direction of the book itself?ML: I started with a few key touchstones. Tod Browning’s Freaks, Diane Arbus, Julia Kristeva, etc. Once I went looking for it, though, I began seeing representations of disability everywhere, and the research started to balloon. I had to be diligent about what outside references best complemented the autobiographical portions. The final bibliography includes more than two hundred sources, and there were loads of other “unofficial” sources not directly referenced in the book. What’s ironic is that, despite having been born disabled, I was grossly ignorant about the history of disability, so the journey was rife with discovery, much of which turned my stomach. Learning about eugenics and the mass killing of disabled people in Nazi Germany, for instance, was much more frightening than any horror film and presented opportunities to juxtapose real-world monsters with their fictitious counterparts. It was important to keep the process organic. I let the research lead me.RG: Behold, the Monster! The book confronts and examines the concept of the monster head on. Physical deformities and abnormalities are understood via the lens of the fantastical, the mythic, Hollywood monsters. The tension of the book lies in the point at which the monster exists in the eye of the beholder and as a universal idea. Did your view of the monster morph over your time spent writing the book?ML: The monster is a strange conundrum because it is a universal concept, as you mention, but everyone’s criteria of what constitutes a monster is unique. A central question from the book is What makes a monster? The more I considered this question, the less confident I felt in my answer. Ultimately, I think the only fair way to define the monster is by action (the Latin root of the word means “to show,” but do we show by doing or purely by the facade we display?). After all, you can look perfectly ordinary on the surface and still be capable of committing a heinous act. What I most struggled with were notions of culpability and condemnation. Does a single monstrous deed classify someone as a monster in perpetuity? When does the scale of monstrosity remit any chance of redemption? Does even the foulest monster deserve forgiveness, whether or not they ask for it? I continue to wrestle with these questions.RG: You’ll Die Laughing!People I know have told me they attempted to go a day without turning their hands and found it utterly impossible. They cannot help themselves. Neither can I.Humor, sometimes wry, often dark, plays a large part in the memoir. How did you decide upon the tone for the book?ML: When cripples aren’t an object of fear, they are often instead the butt of a joke, so it felt right to mix comedy and horror. I can also personally attest that many disabled people develop gallows humor simply from existing within a society that is frequently keen on our exclusion (or demise). Laughing in the face of ableism is a form of resistance. Humor is also an excellent tool for disarming the reader. It lulls you into a false sense of security. One line might have you chuckling, the next recoiling in shock. It’s my way of saying, Don’t get too comfortable.RG: Don’t Look in the Mirror! A recurring theme is that of the mirror. Mirrors are sometimes absent, a source of discomfort, of not wanting to see the reflection. There is projection onto deformity, that a person with a physical disability reflects ideas of decay and disease, uselessness: a mirror showing uncomfortable truths or imagined futures filled with aging or incapacity. Film is also a type of mirror, potentially a cracked or funhouse one. Is The Backwards Hand a mirror?ML: There’s a strong argument to be made that all art is a mirror, and The Backwards Hand is no exception. My intention is to force the reader to examine their own capacity for monstrosity, to wrestle with their prejudices and biases. That’s certainly what I was doing while writing the book, and I think it’s a healthy exercise to confront the monster within us all. Disability itself is like a window into the realm of possibility—it reveals the human body’s potential, the limits of mortality, which is why it triggers such a strong response. It simultaneously attracts and repels. I hope my book has a similar effect.RG: Movie Mayhem! One of the great joys of the book is the impressive array of films you cover. Are there films that stand out to you? Any discoveries you made in the gatheration of titles that you’d recommend?ML: Many of these films surprised me upon revisiting them after a number of years, namely Cronenberg’s The Brood, Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, Medak’s The Changeling, and Cohen’s It’s Alive. Their emotional intensity profoundly resonates with me—I actually found myself crying at the end of It’s Alive during my rewatch. I realized, of course, all these films deal with parenthood and children, so with my being a new father, I was especially sensitive.In terms of discoveries, I would point to Browning’s The Unknown, a silent-era precursor to Freaks, which boasts an astonishing performance by Lon Chaney. For horror fans, I’d recommend Eric Red’s Body Parts. It’s one I don’t see discussed too often. There’s an incredible sequence of on-screen vehicular carnage, and the whole movie is a lot of fun, with Brad Dourif in peak, deranged form.RG: A Stage Set for Damnation! Make a choice. Is the cripple an object of pity or a source of inspiration? Shall you exploit or glorify the invalid? Are you entertained? Disgusted? Amused?You have a history in the acting world, and have taken on the parts of disabled characters, as unflinchingly implied in the book, a cripple playing a cripple. How is the concept of the mask addressed in The Backwards Hand?ML: Drama is a philosophically compelling medium because of its paradoxical nature. The actor strives to behave truthfully under imaginary circumstances, but a genuine performance is still a performance, the illusion of something real. I’ve known many actors who say that they “come alive” onstage, as if the artifice gives license to tap into ways of being we might otherwise suppress. Masks can have a similar effect—when the outer self is hidden, the inner self seeps to the surface. The monster, like the actor, often adopts a mask, and this new face gives him courage to act in a new light, typically with grisly consequences. I’m reminded of a character like Leatherface, who dons different masks (in his case, literal faces) for certain occasions.Is the memoir itself a type of mask? Nonfiction is only a representation of reality and, being limited to the author’s memories and point of view, is inherently fallible. Still, this layer of removal, this distillation of experience into a form, gave me a certain level of courage to be explicit in the way I try to portray myself. Perhaps wearing a “literary mask” can reveal something authentic. In the end, The Backwards Hand is my attempt to strip bare, an unmasking.RG: The Nightmare of Reality! The stats you include are at once hair-raising and bleakly illuminating. Looking back at the book, at some of the hard truths it presents, what is your personal relationship to these generalized facts?ML: The scope of something like 300,000 people with disabilities were executed in Nazi Germany is almost incomprehensible, which is why I tend to give statistics in the book a standalone line. Unadorned, they are quite staggering, but I also want the information to not just be numbers on a page. The individual stories illustrate the examples and, most importantly, humanize the cold, hard facts. One of those 300,000 was a little boy named Richard Jenne, whose photograph appears toward the book’s end. It’s a painful reminder that we mustn’t reduce people to data, to abstractions, especially within the context of disability, when logic and science are often used as tools to dehumanize people, and thus provide justification for atrocities.RG: You Won’t See Them Coming!Invisible disabilities are those that are not immediately apparent. An estimated 10 percent of Americans fall into this category, myself included. One area I found compelling is the book’s attempt to grapple with the idea of categorisation. Where does condition end and anomaly or disability start? Where do the terms cripple and invalid come into play? How did you set out to approach language for The Backwards Hand?ML: This fits into the debate of essentialism versus constructivism, the former arguing that disability is a diagnosed, medical condition, the latter positing that disability is a social construct. Some theorists might suggest that disability does not exist, others that everyone is disabled. And the spectrum is so wide and multifaceted that it resists easy categorization. I do think it’s important to remember that disability imposes very real material conditions on a person, but that no two people experience a disability the same way.Co-opting outdated and offensive terms like “cripple” and “invalid,” for me at least, is a way to reclaim these hateful words and flip the script. I choose to wear “cripple” as a badge of pride. At the same time, it’s a way to challenge readers to consider the implications of ableist language, much of which is bandied about in everyday conversation without a second thought.I use pretty plain and straightforward language in The Backwards Hand. The approach I’m going for is understatement. I try to employ an even-keeled tone that belies the often disturbing nature of the subject matter, so the prose sneaks up on you.RG: Pity the Freak! The American artist John Callahan was twenty-one when he became a quadriplegic. He’d spent the day barhopping with a buddy, who was driving Callahan’s car when they wrecked. After the accident, Callahan decided to become a cartoonist, gripping a pen between both hands to produce crude but clever one-panel gags. His macabre sense of humor and his tendency to deal in taboo subjects, most frequently disability and disease, landed him a fair share of critics, who decried Callahan’s work as tasteless.Callahan said his only compass was the reaction from people in wheelchairs or those who have hooks for hands, people like himself who were sick of being pitied and patronized. The truly detestable ones, he said, presume to speak for the freaks themselves.Assholery is a recurring theme. At the extreme end is assholery of the homicidal and genocidal variety, and at its most mundane it manifests in everyday thoughtlessness and casual bigotry. You don’t spare yourself when it comes to assholery. What place does the asshole have in The Backwards Hand?ML: Anyone can be an asshole, just like anyone can become disabled. I write about both able-bodied and disabled people who have done bad things, some of which are minor transgressions, others unspeakable acts of evil. I do believe that disabled people have to put up with an immense amount of assholery in our day-to-day lives. There is so much open hostility toward people with disabilities. And what is our crime? Spoiling the scenery. Needing accommodation. Requiring care and time and effort and money. How dare we have the gall to demand such resources without lifting a finger to contribute to the altar of capital! What is most sinister is when bigotry masquerades as mercy. The Nazi doctors described their extermination campaign as an act of benevolence.But of all the assholes in the book, and there are many, I’m chief among them. If I draw the conclusion that actions define the monster, it would be hypocritical not to put my own bad behavior on full display. There’s a tendency to deny and deflect accusations of wrongdoing, especially with men, and I wanted to take ownership of all the times in my life that have made me feel like a monster. I’m attempting to reconcile with my regrets—a reformation of the asshole, if you will.RG: The Monster Must Die! The eternal truth that death is the great leveler visits the book in myriad ways, and this concept seems especially pertinent to The Backwards Hand. As you put the book to rest, the writing of it behind you, what is your view of the project as a whole?ML: Progress has been made, and I believe there are more people than ever fighting for a just, equitable world, but disability advocacy still seems somewhat relegated to the sidelines. There are so many misconceptions, so much discomfort surrounding disability, despite it being a phenomenon that we are all guaranteed to experience at some point. Disability is not something we must overcome or erase. If The Backwards Hand achieves anything, I hope it offers a new perspective and provides space to broaden conversations about disability. I encourage readers to lean into their discomfort and work through it to find acceptance, just as I have done.RG: Back From the Dead! A monster with charm is the most frightening of all.Does the icon of the monster dazzle with its own mythology? What does the future hold for the monster? Where does Matt Lee go next?ML: Monsters are an inextricable aspect of mythology, and people will always be drawn to their stories—there’s a reason horror is such a beloved genre. The monster will continue to evolve with the times, reflecting contemporary ills and anxieties. Monster as AI. Monster as microplastics. Monster as ecological collapse. Monster as militarized cop.As for me, I’m still deciding on my next move. I’m mulling over a couple concepts for novels, or I might put together an essay collection. The ideas need to marinate. A few long walks and several months of late night writing sessions ought to do it. If I can find the time, I’d love to get back onstage or do some film work. Maybe I’ll direct a horror movie!
