Dave Fitzgerald

Dave Fitzgerald is a writer living and working in Athens, Georgia. His first novel, Troll, was published in May 2023 with Whiskey Tit Books. He has contributed book reviews to Heavy Feather Review, Exacting Clam, X-R-A-Y, and Strange Horizons, and film criticism to Daily Grindhouse and Cinedump. Find him at davefitzgerald.net or on Twitter/X and Instagram @DFitzgerraldo.

DAVE FITZGERALD RECOMMENDS: Brandi Homan’s ‘Burn Fortune’, Kristin Garth’s ‘Daddy’, and Danielle Chelosky’s ‘Pregaming Grief’

Paint Your Wagon, the 1969 Western musical starring Jean Seberg, Clint Eastwood, and Lee Marvin, was a historic commercial flop, by turns both mindbogglingly strange, and mind-numbingly dull in its depiction of an anonymous, gold rush era mining camp cycling through the increasingly corruptive stages of insular capitalism. While its atonally sing-songy, borderline nihilistic theme reprises (many, many times over, burrowing into your brain and simply refusing to resolve), we watch as some 400 men invest their lucky-struck earnings into six agreeably trafficked women until their No Name tent City grows into a hedonist boomtown—a collection of 20-some-odd saloons that never sleep, and through which the men’s money can change hot hands in closed-loop perpetuity. Why am I telling you all this, you ask? Well look no further than my 2021 review of Brandi Homan’s Burn Fortune, the first title I ever read from femcel/horror-centric small press darling CLASH Books.Burn Fortune is a small wonder; an exercise in concision that nonetheless contains worlds. Written in tight, punchy bursts of poetic wit and poignantly relatable teen angst, it reads like the highly curated diary of a precocious young woman in a hell of a spot. Through the sharp, tilt-shift lens of the smalltown 1990’s midwest—a place which author Brandi Homan renders painfully (and at times hilariously) authentic via deadpan descriptions of flag corps politics, beer runs to the Kum & Go, and hot summers spent detasseling corn—we get to know June, a girl with the kind of nebulous big dreams that only small-town teenagers know how to have; that sense that there has to be more of something, anything, somewhere out there, and that you’re surely destined for all of it if you could only figure out where to go. It’s not until the local librarian introduces her to the films of Jean Seberg (an Iowa native who escaped to France to become the iconic star of such films as Breathless and Saint Joan) that June begins to think more deeply about what she wants, and how to get it.The sections in which she watches Seberg’s films could almost pass for Live Tweeting sessions, and her by-turns entranced and exasperated commentary injects her increasingly desperate circumstances (abusive boyfriend, sexual assault, unwanted pregnancy) with a brilliant levity that will make you want to watch right along with her (I for one will be checking out Paint Your Wagon ASAP). And while the thing this book maybe does best is depict the ways in which even the smartest people can find themselves hemmed in on all sides by seemingly inescapable circumstance—by a town, or a house, or a family, or even a single destructive person—what June finds in Jean (and specifically in her portrayal of Joan of Arc) is the will to break free of it all. To defy fate, raise high her battle flag, and fly like the prairie wind, because small towns hold on the tightest—to young women most of all—and absolutely no one gets out without a fight.I wrote that short review nearly four years ago, in what now feels like a much simpler time, but upon revisiting Burn Fortune’s blighted, broken heartland for this piece, I found that it hit differently under our present banner of red, white, and blue. For all her determination, the thought of June actually breaking free of all that’s tying her to the stake of smalltown, USA feels like a deeply optimistic reading—an astronomical possibility on par with Seberg’s own selection by Otto Preminger out of 18,000 hopeful young actresses vying to play his Joan (a rescue which, by all accounts, still left her beholden to the whims of a tyrannical male authority). The East is sinking. The West is burning. The government is a kleptocracy, and the economy feels increasingly like a game of three-card monte. Maybe June had a chance back in the DIY riot grrrl ’90s, but the futility of the future we now know waits for her comes through in countless devilish details, from her boyfriend’s hours spent duct-taped to an exercycle, to a perfect, microcosmic chapter in which she and her friends cruise “The Loop” on a routine Saturday night, jockeying for position as they mindlessly circle the main drag of their go-nowhere town. “That’s what being a good American is, right?” June muses on their endless, aimless plight. “Be better! Be better all the time!”Homan’s ending is open to interpretation, and I was certainly feeling better about America in 2021 than I am today, so far be it for me to claim any certainty as to what June can or can’t hope to accomplish. But by the time she sequesters herself in an underground culvert to light candles and recite spells—pictures of Seberg taped to the walls—it’s fair to wonder if she’s built herself a chrysalis, or a tomb. It’ll take more than a still-legal-back-then abortion or a fresh start in the next town over to truly outrun her devastating lot. No matter where you go within the invisible borders of the American patriarchy, there you fucking are. Even Jean took her talents to Europe (and even that only helped for so long). “Around here the only way to speak is to leave and if you leave you burn.”For those looking to truly opt out, allow me to pivot to Kristin Garth’s Daddy (from the ever-pugnacious envelope pushers at Anxiety Press), a physically discomfiting collection liable to make any man who’s browsed PornHub in the last twenty years squirm in his boxer briefs. Wielding the second person voice like a VR empathy trainer, Garth slathers her readers in a child pageant’s-worth of Lolital signifiers—bows and hearts, glitter and gloss, plaid skirts and pigtails—corseting us inside the minds and behind the eyes of female bodies we are almost exclusively accustomed to ogling at a safe and powerful remove. Whether building exquisite, tangled poetry from the inner monologue of a babyfaced sex worker bought and stabled for her ability to cry on command (“The Cry Shot”), or avenging the trauma of twin rollerskating ingenues turned sister-act strippers (“Twinkles”), Daddy cannonballs into the fetishization of girlhood with the no-fucks flagrancy of a trenchcoated pervert crashing the ballpit at a Chuck-E-Cheese, outragedly demanding a deeper examination of the semiotics of smut; of what so many get away with when the lights are lowest, and why.Nowhere is this truer than in Plaything—the novella that makes up the book’s second half—which centers around Melinda, a nominally enslaved young woman who is kept in a state as close to that of a living sex doll as one man can arrange for her. Cloistered in the kind of princess bed, fast fashion, Hello Kitty-print prison one might associate with a “barely legal” OnlyFans feed, Melinda is monitored 24/7, and dresses, speaks, and behaves according to the exacting specifications of her misogynist malefactor, existing in a kind of infantilized stasis for his pleasure alone. It’s a chilling scenario to see spelled out, and the degree to which it mirrors so much familiar content on the X-rated web renders bold, lascivious text any remaining subtext regarding the 21st century porn-poisoned male brain—the desire for both absolute physical control over, and absolute emotional detachment from, the female body.Elsewhere, “The Plan” chronicles a daughter’s lifelong pursuit of physical beauty and runway fame in hopes of someday crossing paths with her deadbeat movie star dad, an unwitting, uncaring lothario who proves all too eager to fail her spectacularly anew. “Con Man” recounts in excruciating detail a Rubicon moment in which an aspiring screenwriter must decide exactly how much of herself she’s willing to give up for a shot at the bigtime, and reckon with the instantaneous, irreversible damage she’ll endure no matter which sliding door she chooses. And taking these casual violations into the spiritual realm, the title story unfolds through a series of e-mails sent by a rape victim from her LDS college to her devout Mormon father back in Florida (where most of the book’s stories take place), an evolution of increasingly unhinged reports which reveal her betrayal and exploitation at the hands of men at every turn. All of these stories take square aim at the impossible power dynamics baked into our socio-sexual bedrock—the master’s tools that will absolutely never dismantle the master’s house—and the thoughtless entitlement with which men at every rung of authority and success can and will view women as their rightful spoils, offering a leg up only if they get to cop a feel along the way.I’ve read Daddy twice now, and I don’t believe there’s a good man to be found anywhere among these cum- and tear-stained pages. Indeed, that Plaything’s Melinda ultimately escapes into a lesbian relationship seems to suggest the possibility that, as far as Garth is concerned, there may well be none left to be found. While we’ve undoubtedly made strides under 3rd wave feminism with the subversive reclamation of stripping and the rise of ethical porn, Daddy raises real and fair questions about the academic nature of this kind of empowerment, and the ways in which it can bounce back to bite real sex workers just trying to survive inside institutional sexism’s echo chamber. For so many of these women, the fact remains, men don’t really care why they sell their bodies, so long as they do it. We can always make it work to our advantage. This may sound like polemic, but I’m not even claiming to be above it. It’s a banal, pushbutton temptation the internet hucks at me every day. As Chuck Klosterman famously noted over a decade ago, “the biggest problem in my life is that my work machine is also my pornography delivery machine.”With all that said, Daddy feels like a true blow against the empire. What Garth has done here, brazenly and without compromise, is overload the whole damn system. Her ruthless commingling of adult and underage imagery, taboo and perversity, wanting to look and knowing you should look away, cumulates to effect a kind of autoerotic short-circuitry; a flaccid self-loathing. Her authorial voice is the literary equivalent of your girlfriend finding your browser history and screaming at you—“So this is what you like, you sick fuck?!”—until you die of shame. Even the book’s title and teenybop trapper-keeper cover art were enough to make me feel uncomfortable reading it in public. The fact is, none of this is new. Men have spent the past century building an objectification ecosystem that learns, commodifies, and enables our worst behaviors, and until we take responsibility for dismantling it (a prospect that looks less promising today than it has at any point in my lifetime) it will remain too big to fail. Considering everything that’s working against her, it’s a testament to Garth’s writing that she can still find ways to make us blush.As for those still looking to work within all that the patriarchy hath wrought, I’m not sure any writer has nailed the experience with as much honest, and self-aware precision as Danielle Chelosky, whose diaristic Pregaming Grief (my long-overdue first read from small press bellwether Short Flight/Long Drive) details her coming to terms, at the tender cusp of her twenties, with her own conflicted masochism. Torn between two older men—her manipulatively needy, hopelessly immature, yo-yoing heroin-addict first love (direct-addressed as “You” throughout), and an obdurately withholding, overtly condescending, all-too-familiar brand of “telling it like it is” aspiring comedian (Andrew)—Chelosky offers herself up as the sacrificial embodiment of Carson McCullers’s timeless relational paradigm—that of the lover and the beloved—and makes a strong case for the nature of human desire as little more than a pendular dialectic between the two. It’s strange to write about these presumably very real guys in such judgmental terms, but Chelosky is nothing if not cleareyed about exactly who and what they are, and her own complicated feelings for both of them. After centuries of men reducing all women to mothers and whores, she matter-of-factly flips that dichotomy on its head, making plain as day its unavoidable cognate: that all men must then be children or johns.Whilst ping-ponging back and forth between these two lunkheads, Chelosky forges a fledgling career in music journalism, tests the limits of her alcoholism, and does a lot of driving around with her bestie Quinn, at first trekking to well-known vistas like Joshua Tree and Death Valley (both places already being ravaged by climate change), and once the pandemic descends transitioning to shuttered prisons, defunct amusement parks, and even the faithless remnant of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Heritage USA. The more of these long-distance interstate sojourns she takes, the more she starts to feel like a video game avatar butting up against the invisible boundaries of its world map, looking for some elsewhere that simply isn’t there. Though she has all the freedom she could want—all the practical freedom that June and Melinda long for—she still finds herself always and inevitably returning to the places and people from whence she came.“I felt suffocated by a nameless grief” she notes at one point. “This inexplicable feeling of ending,” and through her trespassing journeys into abandonment and decay, coupled with her dystopian descriptions of New York under Covid lockdown, and her dedicated attachment to outdated media formats, her tone begins to convey a palpable sense of lived-in doom—of an already-gone world that she somehow both misses, and never really knew. It’s in many ways the same grief we see in the black parade of album anniversaries (a trend for which, somewhat amusingly, Chelosky’s chief publisher Stereogum is directly responsible) and celebrity deaths that daily clog our interconnected plexus of screens—the collective, performative mourning of the past that feels communally engineered to continue into the future in perpetuity, like some hellish Oscars In Memoriam eternally regurgitating the nostalgia of how much cooler and realer everything used to be. But when everything becomes nostalgia, then soon enough all of life starts to feel like cosplay—a dissociating from our present reality for fear that there’s nothing left to achieve, or even hope for—that anything worth doing has all already been done.The same could be said for the numerous men she meets around the margins of her two bigtime loves—a string of largely interchangeable music industry bros and app swipes that only serve to reinforce her disinterest in her own generation’s algorithmic romantic compromise. ExPat Press honcho Manuel Marrero observed in his own phenomenal review of this book that “people used to like things in a way they don’t anymore” and in addition to the physical books and albums Chelosky so clearly treasures, those “things” very much include “each other.” While her peers often present as a shallow cavalcade of responsible(ish) drinkers curating themselves through detached, disposable hookups, she repeatedly, and belligerently disingratiates herself from their ranks, determined to chase a more permanent, transcendent attachment through the self-abnegation of submissive, rough sex and the consumptive void of blackout, like some questing, flagellant Mystic. “I writhed in never-ending hysterical fits” she laments, twisting at the ends of all her fraying ropes, “wishing to escape my body, this city, the whole world.”Something the book explores as well as any narrative work I know on the subject, is the necessary tradeoff between trust and danger within a mutual S&M arrangement. Chelosky is generous and fearless when it comes to sharing the details of hers and Andrew’s sex life—a thrilling, and occasionally frightening affair that hews much closer to the reckless violence of Año Bisiesto than the contractual fantasies of something like 50 Shades. Her acceptance of risk—her need for it, even—is part of what makes it work for her. “I regretted everything I did the minute I did it, I deserved a punishment for it, for just existing. I wanted to get perpetually drunk so I could be liberated from this prison of insecurity, no longer having to be aware of or responsible for myself and my inevitable mistakes” confesses one passage in this relentlessly quotable book (I must have copied down at least 50 while making notes for this article, often snapping pictures of whole pages for reference). “I felt ashamed of the videos I watched when I was alone. The degradation I desired felt so antithetical to the feminist beliefs I held” admits another. Where Daddy adamantly refuses to allow for this kind of counterintuitive ecstasy, Chelosky’s journey of abject self-discovery argues for a different kind of personal and ideological freedom. Andrew exhibits, pretty inarguably, an unapologetic chauvinism (I’ll never forget the anecdote in which he mansplains why her choice of favorite Beatles song is wrong), but he also proves capable of tenderness and affection and, most importantly, seems to get what it is she needs from him, even if he’s not always willing to give it. Regardless of all she ostensibly knows and feels to the contrary, for her “A place of pain [is] just another name for a home.”There is so much resignation here, for an author so young—so much hard-won truth and understanding of the limits of human relationships, and the very real possibility that to fully love anyone is to spend your whole life overcorrecting for how you first loved, or failed to love someone else. I’ve barely touched on “You” so far, but his presence in, and influence upon her worldview is pervasive, bordering on omnipresent. For anyone who’s ever held onto someone too hard, for too long—or conversely, had someone refuse to let them go—Pregaming Grief will carry a visceral weight. The neurotic ghosts of memory and regret. The constant replaying and reimagining and repenting of all that might have been. “I’d learned the hard way that getting older only made things worse” begins my favorite line in the book. “I was an expert at waiting out my problems until they ruined my life.” If you know, you know, and Danielle Chelosky knows.Indeed, for as much as I wanted to examine Pregaming Grief within the same feminist framework as the two books above, it ultimately forced me to expand my thinking. For as much as I kneejerk loathed Andrew and “You” and felt depressed by the tired, ubiquitous tropes of modern manhood they represent, I was also regularly mortified by moments of recognition in them both—in Andrew’s pop culture didacticism and dogged resistance to vulnerability, and in “You”’s willful naivete and cowardly, druggy self-sabotage. And for as much as I wanted better for Chelosky (whatever judgy, paternalistic vision for her that might entail—yet another blindspot writing this piece made me confront), even more relatable were her own patterns of rejection and subsumption—of the contradictory desires to be someone’s “nothing” and their “everything at the same time”the lover, and the beloved. I can sit here wanting these guys to do better, but Chelosky herself might well contend that they’re both already doing their best (frustrating as it might be). In the end it’s clearly far more than just these two privileged, flawed men, or even the patriarchy under which they were forged, that’s hemming her in. It’s the pain of existence itself.So where do we go from here? What do we do with all this baggage piling up between us, and around us, and upon us—saturating our brains and our neural net of feeds—filling our country up to its glass ceiling, sandbagging its invisible walls, and spilling over its eroding edges from sea to shining sea? If Paint Your Wagon is any indicator, we may be out of good options; decamping from this No Name City and these rigged systemic structures may simply not be in those three Monte cards. For plucky Jean Seberg, after two hours of subpar musical numbers and chemistry-free love triangulations, the gold dries up, and the entire settlement literally sinks into the Earth—destabilized by an elaborate system of tunnels the male protagonists have dug in order to rob their fellow workers blind (how’s that for metacommentary?) Her cabin still stands, and Clint Eastwood sticks dutifully by, but as the rest of the prospectors pull up stakes and the principles bid their farewells, the film leaves an existential taste in the mouth—the nagging suspicion that, stay or go, there’s really nothing else to do but the same things they just did all over again—the master’s tools just waiting to rebuild in the next town over, and the next, and the next.So yes, it’s hard to feel as hopeful for June as I did four years ago. And yes, the U.S. is feeling more every day like a place we may need to escape (though Europe today is hardly the expat safe haven it once was). As she herself puts it, heartbreakingly, near the end of Burn Fortune, “It isn’t that I don’t want this it’s that what I want is something else and that is not this”as shifty and vaguely tautological a summation as you’re likely to find of our National sexual politics in 2025. If she wriggles her way off the pyre, it’ll be a miracle deserving of Sainthood. I’d like to think she could find a friend like Melinda, someone to help her break free of men’s possessive, binary bindings. Or else one like Chelosky with whom she could roam the dying countryside, blasting cassettes and CD’s and chasing her own tortured version of peace; standing in the flames and “learn[ing] independence because [she] had no other choice.” 

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Dave Fitzgerald Recommends: Etiquette, Shit List, and The Berlin Wall

It’s election season! Of course, it’s always election season now. And for anyone young enough to not remember life before the internet, it’s pretty much always been election season, and maybe always will be. The very idea of it being a discreet “season,” separate from some other stretch of time in which elections are not happening or being talked about, likely makes little sense. I’m actually a few months older than current Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance (a first for me), and even I can only vaguely recall the pre-infinite-screaming-doomscroll-chyron version of our American Democracy in action. What’s more, the further we get from that simpler time, the easier it becomes to question my own memory of it. Were things ever actually better than they are now, or was I just younger and less cynical, with more future ahead of me to feel optimistic about? Were candidates actually more genuine and respectful toward the institutions of which they were vying to be a part, or were we just more susceptible to accepting biased official narratives as fact? Were things ever actually simpler, or did we just know less?Today, implicit bias is a given. There is so much information not just available to us, but thrust upon us daily, and so many avenues down which we may pursue it further according to our own personal tastes and prejudices, that even if a truly objective news source did somehow exist in the world, it would be all but impossible to identify it. And though we have certainly seen a fracturing within my lifetime of not just information or “the news,” but of reality itself, such that political leaders and those who cover them are no longer operating in good faith, or even from a shared understanding of the issues, we’ve also reached a place where it feels like most people know that too, and it doesn’t change a damn thing. As one of the authors I’m discussing here today – David Leo Rice – has posited for a while now, the zeitgeisty notion that we can somehow escape the matrix is not a particularly useful one. The systems within which we live – vague enormities like society, identity, and reality – do not have meaningful exteriors; only waveforms we might surf; permutations we might engage. When even the once-unifying concept of common sense no longer has a common definition, there is no out; only through.Enter Joey Truman.If you told me that the original draft of Truman’s Etiquette was a single typewriter scroll delivered in a shoebox along with some scribbled-on diner napkins, bodega receipts, and NYC subway maps, I’d absolutely believe you. Truman’s terse, incisive prose reads unfakably off the cuff (likely of a thrift store corduroy jacket), and yet still feels as lived-in as a Lower East Side squat. In this loosely organized catalog of personal anecdotes and common social situations – each appended with numbered directions for, yes, proper etiquette in same – he nimbly identifies the cracks in our foundations – the infrastructural niceties that we’re letting crumble in the name of technological advancement and capitalism run amok – and sets about duct-taping, and plastering, and slapdash painting over them as fast as he can manage. This slim volume had me laughing out loud with both its seemingly simple observations about 21st century humanity, and its palpable impatience at having to explain such seemingly simple observations to anyone.Covering everything from waiting rooms to crowded bars; cohabitating to co-parenting; dinner parties to book events (in between many, many screeds on common subway courtesy) Truman possesses a lowkey, DFW-esque gift for breaking down monolithic ideas about modern society into their most basic, component parts, such that they look so quaint and manageable that you’ll find yourself scratching your head in disbelief that no one’s ever quite addressed them in this way before. And more than that even, it feels as though he’s almost doing it by accident; like he’s not “writing” so much as just thinking on the page, and allowing us to watch as he dissects his daily routines – those of a proudly working-class small fish making his way in a big pond life – with a charmingly grumpy sincerity, and more honest-to-goodness heart than I’ve found in just about anything else I’ve read this year. With short, punchy chapters full of humor and ideas, Etiquette is a great book to read in those in-between moments, because every time you look up, you’ll see some way to apply its lessons right in front of you. It could just as easily be titled Don’t Be an Asshole: And Here’s How! Maybe take it on the subway.Alright. I know what some of you might be thinking. “Hey. Wait a minute. Isn’t Joey Truman a Whiskey Tit author? And didn’t they publish this Fitzgerald guy’s book too? What the heck? Who’s feeding us biased opinions now?” And you’re not wrong. Etiquette was, in fact, the first book I ever read from what is now my beloved small press home, and the above two paragraphs constitute the first review I wrote, at least in part, in hopes of introducing myself to them while shopping my own debut novel Troll. Guilty as charged. Now, none of that is to say I didn’t mean what I wrote, or that I don’t stand by it, because I absolutely did and do. I love Joey’s work. I probably wouldn’t make that Wallace comparison again today, but that’s more a product of my growth as a reader and reviewer than any kind of intentional deception or disingenuous flattery (knowing Joey, he’d probably prefer I hadn’t made it to begin with). But more than anything, I love that Joey doesn’t give a shit what I think. Or you. Or anyone. Just about any writer you talk to has a spiel about how they don’t care if they ever get famous – how they do it for the love, or the craft, or because they simply can’t do without – but deep down, I think most of us harbor at least small, quiet dreams of more traditional success. I’m not sure Joey does though.Having grown up in the DIY punk scene of Wyoming, Truman understands better than most what it means to have no audience, and no income, and just keep at it no matter what. He knows what he’s about. He lives his principles hard. And somehow, he still finds time to write like a busted fire hydrant. Etiquette is only one of nearly a dozen projects he’s published with Whiskey Tit, and that’s on top of his long-running SubStack Screed City. The dude legitimately can’t turn it off. And his bullshit-free brand of conviction can feel cleansing amidst the barking of the 21st century attention carnival. It’s not that he’s unbiased. It’s that he’s all bias. Which in the end, kind of amounts to the same thing. One gets the sense he’s not trying to convince you of anything except to think for yourself.As for me, if I write about a book, it’s pretty much always because I want you to read it. I won’t deny a partiality toward Whiskey Tit, or a propensity toward reviewing kindly the work of people I know and like, but I’ve never written anything I didn’t believe, or couldn’t back up if push came to shove. Indie Lit is a community, and not a huge one. Nothing is automatically tit for tat – ask anyone you like about that – but we’re all out here hustling in very similar boats, and there is unquestionably an incentive to be our own rising tide. Indie publishers do yeoperson’s work on infinitesimal margins. Every book they take on is a bet against the Big 5 house. A surprise sensation on the order of B.R. Yeager’s Negative Space or Eric LaRocca’s Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke can single-handedly keep a small press afloat, and all of us would love to be that for both our benefactors and our peers. As such, praise tends to be effusive, and truly uncharitable reviews are rare – generally reserved for books whose hype and/or financial backing are perceived as being undeserved, if not disqualifying toward the “indie” label altogether. All of which is to say, if I don’t like a book, I tend to just not write about it. As with our modern political climate, things can be simplistically binary in this regard, and there exists an ongoing discourse as to whether or not that’s a problem – the “praise or ignore” debate. If indie lit really is a community (as we so often claim), or an underground artistic movement of merit (as we hope to be seen), then how can we expect to be taken seriously when we’re not willing to provide each other, and our readers, with meaningful, nuanced critique? How will any of us become better writers – or even understand the ways in which we might need to – if we only ever talk about how great we all are? These are fair questions, to which I can see both sides. As an author, I’m practically a poster child for this conundrum. Having written a novel that courts controversy on every page, I fully braced for and expected some sort of negative feedback upon publication. I would, frankly, have welcomed the chance to engage. But a year-and-a-half later, I’ve yet to read a bad word about it. Another thing most any writer will tell you is that they want to “start conversations,” but again, just as with our us vs. them, all or nothing politics, honest, open-minded debate can be hard to come by.As a reviewer, on the other hand, I totally get it. Writing negative reviews is no fun (and just as much work as writing positive ones), especially when it comes to books barely anyone’s reading in the first place. If that makes me biased, then I guess to a degree, I’m biased. There’s a reason this column is called “Recommends”.Likewise, my fellow Whiskey Tit author Dan Hoyt wears his political biases right on his sleeve. His new novel Shit List is both an unapologetically broad, and line-item specific evisceration of the first 100 days of the Trump administration. Through barely-disguised caricatures of the whole unseemly cabal, as well as a kooky supporting cast that includes a clear stand-in for LeBron James, a hapless stand-in for that stand-in, and a guitar goddess turned unwitting cult leader, Hoyt attacks that tumultuous stretch of recent history like a man in the throes of an apoplectic trance (in NBA parlance, you might say he was writing lights out).Evoking nothing quite so much as the cockeyed absurdity of the great Tom Robbins, Hoyt’s characters pinball madly around Cleveland and DC, their disparate stories periodically pinging against one another by way of that adorable little critter on the book’s cover: a Whitehead’s Pygmy Squirrel that elicits intense bouts of empathetic shame and remorse in any person it comes near. As the grotesque President Kukla and his satirical (but again, only barely) sycophants work feverishly to seal borders, separate families, and repeal healthcare laws, the book slowly but steadily reconstructs the relentless dread of its era – that low-simmering, “oh God, what now?” nausea that accompanied each new day – until even the funniest one-liners stop being funny.And that’s the real power of Shit List. It may start off feeling a little goofy – a little immature even – but as it piles on the infuriating headlines, it reveals itself to be a honey-coated bear trap; an unhinged SNL sketch that drags on for months, until all the players have broken, and everyone just wants to go home. It’s not so much about parodying Trump as it is about the Trump Presidency marking the death of parody. No matter how many pointed jabs Hoyt takes at the Donald’s limited grasp of the NBA rulebook, or the Bible, or the English language, he never quite breaks through to a joke that feels outsized or over the top – a gag that goes “too far”. It’s all just a little too believable to laugh at, and that’s kind of the point. For Gen X’ers like Hoyt, and millennials like myself, who’ve relied on detached snark and “Tweeting through it” for decades to manage our political ennui, Shit List demands that we examine ourselves, and the world we’re leaving to future generations, more deeply. To ask what it says about us if we decide, as a country, to run this particular experiment back. Sure, it’s ok to let through an incredulous, inappropriate chuckle from time to time – we all have to stay sane somehow – but at the dawn of this still-young century, where events that happened as recently as last week can already start to feel fungible, and the powers that be are constantly working to revise and shape “the narrative” – wrestling for that 51% controlling interest in our fractured, shared reality – Hoyt refuses to let us forget a single, despicable detail.It’s hard to know how the extreme specificity of Shit List will play in another 10-20 years. So much has happened since that puts those first 100 days to shame, and even much of that has already been spun, spoonfed, compartmentalized, and forgotten by the endless churn of the 24-hour news cycle. For God’s sakes, the man was nearly assassinated twice in the last 100 days and we’ve already almost completely stopped talking about it. So if you’re having a hard time this election season laughing to keep from crying like Dan, or screaming on street corners like Joey, then perhaps your best bet is to step through the looking glass with the aforementioned David Leo Rice, and his revelatory The Berlin Wall (also from Whiskey Tit).Rice notably remarked in an interview he gave to this very site a few months ago, that he has always endeavored to “be a genre” unto himself, and speaking as someone who’s read most of his work and written fairly extensively about it, I feel pretty comfortable coming right out and saying that The Berlin Wall is both his most expansive, and most accessible novel to date. Zooming out from the spooky small towns that populate his previous books, this latest finds Rice operating on an international scale, vacuuming up whole countries like a late-stage Katamari and folding them back in on themselves in service of his cycloramic grand design. Indeed, The Berlin Wall could easily have swallowed up all 3,000 words of this article too, such is its ambitious, omnivorous scope, but to nutshell, in Rice’s alternate-timeline Europe, the non-italicized Berlin Wall is a living entity whose disparate chunks (including Uta, one of several rotating narrators) are working their way across the continent in hopes of reassembly. Whether their intention is to usher Europe into a newly divided era, or return it to an old one, is somehow beside the point. They simply feel drawn toward the accretion of solidity. Meanwhile, a wayward young man named Gyorgi is burrowing deeper by the day into a burgeoning eugenicist putsch (led first by a kind of method-acting troll demagogue, Ragnar, and later by the shapeshifting, teleporting, semi-corporeal figure of Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik), in search of his own version of the comfortingly concrete. Concurrent to these, we also get Anika, a history professor descending into a kind of self-imposed Bavarian nostalgia cocoon as she attempts to rewrite German history so convincingly that she effectively alters German reality. Lars Von Trier also makes a brief, memorable appearance. This book is nuts y’all.With the fascism creep of the past decade clearly top of mind, Rice sets out to fasten signifiers to a whole host of ominous vagaries – to give form and shape to these nascent dangers in our midst, and in so doing, better map their ongoing self-sustenance. For regardless of all the reprehensible thoughts we read passing through the minds of his wandering players, with the exception of Breivik (who, despite his being a real person – or perhaps even because of it – behaves here more as the avatar of an idea than a functional character), none of them ever feels exactly evil – only lost, or compromised – and Rice finds a powerful empathy for all of them within the nexus of larger forces they’re simply trying to react to and survive. It’s a case not so much of the characters serving the plot as the characters being the plot – each of them a cog within wheels turning predestined, but which we still desperately hope to see them find a way to break.Rice’s nonjudgmental rendering of Gyorgi in particular, with his hardcoded longing for a traditional masculinity the world no longer values as it once did – the ways in which leaders like Ragnar and Breivik prey on reasonable insecurities felt by many men in the 21st century, only to insidiously slow-walk them toward a darker radicalization – make for some of The Berlin Wall’s most moving insights. There are passages wherein Gyorgi despairs at his physical and intellectual limitations, and his more existential lack of purpose, that feel near-universal in their human relatability, and when he joins a mob of Ragnar faithful in chanting “All hail the absolute!” it drives home exactly what such movements offer people, and what all of the book’s characters are ostensibly looking for: clarity, simplicity, certainty in a time of constant upheaval and complex change. Despite the Eurocentrism of the narrative, it’s impossible not to see in Gyorgi, and his persistent suspicion that he is operating entirely within the framework of some kind of globalized VR game, the scores of people emboldened into storming the U.S. capitol four years ago, only to be abandoned, dumbfounded, by their perceived leader as their fever broke and they were met with real world consequences on the other side; shocked that anything they’d done might actually matter.This breakdown between physical and virtual spaces, and the stratification of our shared reality, are themes Rice has explored throughout much of his previous work (most notably in his seminal essay “Long Live the Heroic Pervert” – maybe my single favorite piece of writing to yet emerge from this now half-cooked decade), but where the heroes of Angel House and The New House make their way toward enlightenment or ascension, the cast of The Berlin Wall seems harder pressed to find any path outside its deepening rabbit holes and rising seawalls. Tonally, the book can often feel like a psychedelic come-up – all rippling roots and skin and Déjà vu – that just refuses to peak. One gets the sense of being in the midst of something that hasn’t quite happened yet, and possibly never will. It sometimes takes characters hours to cross entire countries by car, while others walk for full days only to end up right where they started, their paths in physical space outlined behind them as though they were traipsing through Jell-O mold. As our existence becomes less concrete and more permeable, Rice’s writing grows ever less constrained by conventional narrative structure. At times, the book feels like it’s editing itself right in your hands.With both the plot, and Europe, fast folding in on themselves, Rice nimbly weaves together the threads in his tightening web of homegrown semiotics – the hard and soft illuminati, the Black Forest and the taiga, the Iron Curtain and the Living Wall – every piece encroaching inward like Birnam Wood on their own inexorable timelines until, with one deft final pull of his drawstrings, he cinches everything up tight – a surrealist cat’s cradle of past and future collapsed into a single, perpetual present. No matter how far Uta travels, one gets the sense she’ll someday return, in one form or another. No matter how beautifully winners like Anika and the Chancellor write their latest revisionist history books, papering over the past only dooms us to repeat it. “The communal forgetting that it’s happened before mingling with the communal hope that, soon enough, it’ll all be alright.”And so it’s election season. Still, forever, and always. There have been times in recent years when I felt certain that the rhetoric couldn’t get any uglier, the divisions any starker, the stakes any higher, but to hear the candidates and their most vocal opponents and supporters tell it, that never quite ends up being the case. Each election of my lifetime has been “the most consequential election of our lifetimes.” Each President we’ve ever elected has, for roughly half of us, spelled certain and irreversible doom. And yet, here we are, doing it all again. I’m not here to tell you who to vote for (though anyone who’s read literally anything I’ve ever written can likely guess my thoughts). I’m just here to tell you what to read to get through it. I may be biased toward Whiskey Tit, but that doesn’t mean our books don’t rock, or that I don’t rep other presses I love every bit as hard (anyone who’s read literally anything I’ve ever written knows that too). The indie lit review economy might be a little insular and self-congratulatory, but through the process of writing this article I think I’ve talked myself into being more mindful of that going forward. After all, at the level I, and the authors I write about, are all hustling on, pretty much all press is good press; all engagement is good engagement. And the kinda sad, but mostly common sensical truth of the matter is, everyone’s trying to sell you something here in late-stage capitalist America, pretty much all the time. All any of us can do is to take a cue from Dan Hoyt, Joey Truman, and David Leo Rice – to try to understand our own biases, and ride our chosen waves. Whether that means tuning in, dropping out, or burrowing on through to the other (which is also maybe the same) side. To quote Rice one last time, we can but hope that “The future will not resemble the present forever.”

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

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

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