INTERVIEWS & REVIEWS Archives

JUSTIN ISIS RECOMMENDS – Neo-Decadence: A Wardrobe Tour

August 28, 2024 · Interviews & Reviews

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

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THROUGH DISRUPTION AND DISSOLUTION: An Interview with Daisuke Shen

August 26, 2024 · Interviews & Reviews

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.

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I WOULD LIKE TO STARTLE THE READER: An Interview with Mike Topp

August 20, 2024 · Interviews & Reviews

I was reading my bad poems and in between bad poems I was telling some stories and Steve said I should quit writing poems and instead tell funny stories. So I followed his advice.

Crow Jonah Norlander

CHASING THE MONSTER: An Interview with Matt Lee

August 13, 2024 · Interviews & Reviews

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!

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TRANSMISSIONS: Writing The Rapids

August 6, 2024 · Interviews & Reviews

Welcome to Transmissions, an interview feature in which X-R-A-Y profiles podcasts.Joe bielecki is the host of the podcast Writing the Rapids, the author of the novel Tired from Alien Buddha Press, as well as several pieces of flash fiction that may or may not still be on the internet. He currently lives with his family in Grand Rapids, Michigan.Writing the Rapids can be found at the website, Spotify, Patreon, Instagram, Youtube and X.Rebecca Gransden: How would you describe the podcast to someone who is unfamiliar with what you do?Joe bielecki: Writing the Rapids is a podcast where I talk to writers about writing. I’m not really clear from one day to another exactly what that means, however. I try to have conversations rather than interviews. I tend to warn my guests that I may simply muse about their writing without asking a question, for example. RG: Does the podcast have a mission or manifesto? JB: Not particularly a manifesto. I pick my guests based on the recommendations of past guests. Some of my goals when starting the show was to read more indie lit, meet new people, and see how people are connected. RG: How long has the podcast been in existence, and how have you seen it grow over that time?JB: My first episode was posted on February 13, 2018. I went from being a guy with a few pieces of flash fiction floating around, to a guy with a podcast. It is clear there are people who are capital F Fans of the show. Based on my Spotify metrics, the show is growing pretty steadily. When I tell people at work my follower count, how many average listens an episode gets, they seem impressed. It’s a niche subject, so I don’t expect it to get huge, but I’d like to think that I’ve helped a few books get sold.RG: Where did the idea for the podcast come from?JB: I wanted to talk to some of the indie writers I was reading that didn’t have lots of interviews available. I’m pretty shy, but wanted to make friends in a so-called scene that I enjoyed reading from. I wanted to explore publishers putting out books I like, etc. It’s hard for me to walk into a room of people, so to speak, and insert myself into a conversation. Creating a podcast seemed like a good way to give people a reason to talk to me.RG: How did you decide upon a title for the podcast?JB: The name came from a segment I did a few times for the morning show of the local NPR member station, I work for. I live in Grand Rapids, Writing the Rapids sounds like Riding the Rapids. When I decided to do the show on my own, and in a different way, I kept the name. Thinking of names is hard.RG: Are there any podcasts that influenced or encouraged you to start the project?JB: Not particularly. I’m a long time fan of Scott Johnson and the Frogpants Studios family of podcasts. I started listening to The Instance back in middle school or so and found the podcast format fascinating. Beyond that, I spent a lot of time in college watching late night talk show interviews with writers like David Foster Wallace and Harlan Ellison. RG: What episode of the podcast would you recommend to someone who is new to what you do?JB: My most listened to episodes are with B. R. Yeager, Sam Pink, and Jackie Ess, so probably one of those. RG: How do you go about selecting what to feature on each episode? If your podcast features guests, how do you go about finding them?JB: As noted above, I have a list of people provided by previous guests. From that list I look for someone who seems like they would say yes, and is writing something that seems immediately interesting to me at the time.RG: If you are a writer, has the podcast impacted your writing life? and conversely, has a writerly disposition influenced the podcast? JB: Having a writerly disposition is kind of the whole reason the podcast exists as it does. I wasn’t even sending my novel, Tired, out when I started. You hear me on the show mention my writing, ask about editing, ask about the publishing process. I ask this not only because I think it’s interesting inside baseball that people might want to hear, but because I largely still feel like an outsider as a writer and am trying to figure out how to get inside.RG: Do you listen to podcasts?JB: Not as much these days as I’d like. My listening time in general is lower than ever due to life circumstances, and what time I do have has largely been spent listening to the Horus Heresy audio books and music.RG: What is the best podcast out there at the moment, the one you are excited for when each new episode drops?JB: When I was listening to podcasts more regularly my favorite was Film Sack, by the aforementioned Scott Johnson. RG: What do you dislike about podcasts?JB: The low barrier to entry allows for a lot of saturation, so a lot of bad podcasts, which seems to have caused a lot of people to write off the medium entirely, which is a shame.RG: Who is your dream guest?JB: Someone very famous who would make the show blow up. Beyond that I’ve had a lot of people say yes who I thought would say no. I’m actually very content.RG: Is there a theme or subject you are burning to cover?JB: More ARGs, more Hypertext Lit, that type of thing. TTRPG guide as literature seems to be a creeping idea, I should look into that more.RG: Is there a podcast that doesn’t exist, but you wish did?JB: I have a couple ideas I’ve wanted to do for a while. That’s not in the spirit of the question, I understand. But it is my most honest answer.RG: Is there a podcast that exists, but you wish didn’t?JB: Yes, for sure. I won’t name them because I don’t want to draw people to them.RG: For techheads, which single item of kit do you consider essential for the production of the podcast, and what would you say are the basics needed for those new to podcasting?JB: Get a decent mic, get one with an XLR connection, not a USB. Get a mixer and learn signal chains. It’s much better to have more control rather than less. Maybe google meeting or zoom will record for you, I’d rather take the sound coming out of my mic and computer, and mix it myself. I also record into a Zoom H4N rather than my computer. That feels safer. RG: If someone would like to support independent podcasts, what are the best ways to do this?JB: As I say every intro, Patreon, Paypal, buy the host’s book. Or just talk about it. Spend more time talking about the things you love rather than hate. People remember what you talk about, so talk about things you want people to pay attention to, please.RG: Looking back on the podcast, are there favorite episodes, episodes that stand out to you, or episodes that didn’t go as you would’ve liked?JB: I just did an episode with Stacy Hardy, she was amazing. Jackie Ess was such a great guest. M Kitchell was so patient with me and informative. I really love talking to guys like Mike Corrao, Mike Klein, B. R. Yeager, John Trefry. A few episodes are out there where I feel like I could have done a better job. That’s life.RG: What are your plans for the future?JB: I plan to just keep going. I really like the show the way it is, and I don’t plan to change it. I’ve been threatening to make a YouTube channel for a while, and I’m really close to actually doing that.RG: If you liked that, you may also like this. Are there any podcasts on a similar wavelength to your own that you would recommend to a listener who appreciates what you do?JB: Wake Island Pod seems to have a lot of crossover fans with me. I’m not sure if they’re making new episodes or not though. I was recently on the Not Worth Living podcast, and I really like the conceit of that one.Writing the Rapids can be found at the website, Spotify, Patreon, Instagram, Youtube and X.

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TRANSMISSIONS: Art of Darkness

July 30, 2024 · Interviews & Reviews

Welcome to Transmissions, an interview feature in which X-R-A-Y profiles podcasts.

Brad Kelly is a writer from Detroit, Michigan. In addition to AoD, he has recently published HOUSE OF SLEEP, a work of literary psy-fi, and is currently developing a novel to be released in 2024 and an experimental text investigating the Tarot card-by-card. He is a former Michener Fellow and has been widely published in literary magazines.Kevin Kautzman is a playwright living in St. Paul, Minnesota. His award-winning plays have appeared around the UK and US and are available in print at Broadway Play Publishing. His dark social media comedy MODERATION was adapted for an online release and can be found at moderationplay.com. A past fellow of the Michener Center for Writers and the Playwrights’ Center, he is a co-founder of Bad Mouth Theatre Company.Art of Darkness can be found here, on Patreon, and on Substack.Rebecca Gransden: How would you describe the podcast to someone who is unfamiliar with what you do?Brad Kelly: Art of Darkness is a podcast about the dark side of creativity, hosted by a couple of very online writers and featuring biographical profiles of dead artists. My co-host Kevin and I cover filmmakers, theater-makers, painters, musicians, architects, writers—anybody creative, influential, and dead for longer than a year and a day is our purview. In our Core Episodes, we go through a person’s life, work, and cultural context, taking as much time as we need to tell an artist’s story. Some episodes run over five hours, and we each take turns leading one another through an artist’s life. These thoroughly researched profiles, presented in a conversational way, are the heart of the show.We also host guests to talk further about one of the subjects we’ve covered in Dark Room Episodes, and we run a Zoom book club for our Patreon supporters called Bookends. Additionally, we record an “After Dark” bonus episode for Patreon, for every episode we do. These typically go for 20-30 minutes. If you’re interested in the arts, biography, and history, Art of Darkness might be your show.RG: Does the podcast have a mission or manifesto? BK: Our goal with every Core Episode is to create the go-to piece of online media about our subjects. Kevin Kautzman: One major meta-thread of the show is an interrogation of what drives creativity, and we hope to inspire living artists and creatives by reflecting on the great artists of the past, warts and all. There are a lot of warts.RG: How long has the podcast been in existence, and how have you seen it grow over that time?BK: We released our first episode in February 2021. The show has grown fairly rapidly since then and regularly appears in the Apple Podcasts charts around the world in the Books category. We knew we had something when people started asking to come on the show, which is why we host the Dark Room interview and discussion episodes.KK: Over the past few years, we’ve brought quite a few guests on to help us with our Core Episodes, but we’ve moved away from that as the Core Episodes have gotten longer. Guests can’t always commit four to six hours to a recording, and it’s a lot to ask of someone. So we have the Dark Room for guests who want to come on and discuss Aleister Crowley’s obscene poetry or all things Virginia Woolf.RG: Where did the idea for the podcast come from?BK: We conceived of Art of Darkness during the pandemic. We’d had other podcasts, together and apart, but we’d never quite found our “thing.” Kevin had an interview show called Get This, on which guests would share their enthusiasm about something—a movie, a writer, whatever. In hindsight, that show is not dissimilar from what we do with our Dark Room episodes. After I came on as a guest on one of these episodes—talking about Philip K. Dick or Harold Bloom—the wheels started turning and a few weeks later we had Art of Darkness, and I started to prepare my first episode, on Burroughs.KK: Brad is going to revisit Burroughs early in 2024, since that first episode is woefully short relative to our format now. If you go back and listen to the show from the beginning, you can see how the concept evolved and grew into what it is today.RG: How did you decide upon a title for the podcast?BK: We think people are desperate for earnestness and authenticity, especially online, and we believe there’s an audience for stories that perhaps tell us the most about what creativity actually is. This requires a complete picture of an artist’s life, including the darkness: abuse, drugs, mental illness, violence, war, betrayal, outright murder, sexual angst—the good stuff, in other words.KK: Sturm und Drang. We knew we wanted to explore that angle, thinking maybe we could answer the question “why do artists tend to be so screwed up?” The tortured artist is a cliché for a reason. It’s worth noting too that we don’t wallow in the “dark side,” or suggest living artists cultivate or surrender to theirs, but we give the darkness its fair due when it inevitably arises, and that sets our show apart and provides us with our driving theme.BK: After we had the show concept, we played around with title ideas. We’re both fans of Heart of Darkness, and we opened Season III (2023) with a Core Episode on Joseph Conrad. Just before landing on Art of Darkness, Kevin pitched the name “Heart of Artness,” which we laugh about because it’s so terrible. We have the receipts in WhatsApp.KK: Never go with your first idea. You gotta spitball.RG: Are there any podcasts that influenced or encouraged you to start the project?KK: It’s fair to say the show is influenced by Hardcore History and The Last Podcast on the Left, tho we’re tonally quite different from each of these. We’re both Rogan listeners from way back and dabbled with the idea of podcasting as early as 2011. It only took us a decade to figure it out and make something people seem to want more of. I’m also a big, three decade fan of Mystery Science Theatre 3000, which probably won’t surprise listeners. I’m almost always looking for the laugh as we record, because it’s fun and it leavens things. Each of these stories ends the same way: the subject dies, sometimes young, sometimes at their own hand. It gets heavy. On Art of Darkness, we laugh so we don’t cry.I think too we’ve been influenced by various biopics, not least Mishima: a Life in Four Chapters and even something like Walk the Line. Our show is a show, and we try to weave a narrative that’s entertaining and informative or at least not inaccurate. We also have to credit the many biographers whose work we lean on for the core episodes. Without their labor, we would not have a show, and we always note our sources on a given episode. We buy a lot of books.These days too, as the show has matured, we’re more influenced by the idea of “evergreen content” generally, and I know we’re both motivated by the growing catalog and feedback we get from listeners, who binge the show and take away motivation for their own creativity or just enjoy learning about all these great figures we cover. At this moment, we’ve covered 61 core subjects. Our dream is to continue doing this show as long as we can and to have 300 or more core subjects and a massive, high-quality trove of content as a free resource for our contemporaries and posterity. It’s a hell of a project.RG: What episode of the podcast would you recommend to someone who is new to what you do?BK: We take turns leading our core episodes. Kevin prepares to talk about a subject and presents it to me and then I take a turn. Here’s an episode on Edgar Allan Poe, which I led.KK: And here’s an episode I led, on Dante. RG: How do you go about selecting what to feature on each episode?BK: For Season IV, starting in January 2024, we had a retreat at my property in northern Michigan and hashed it out around the campfire. More directly, we come up with a list of subjects largely based on our own instincts about what will make a good subject. We try to cover the artists we love, the artists we think our audience wants to know more about, and sometimes we cover a subject—say Aleister Crowley or John Milton—because we think they are essential to understanding cultural history—they tie many currents together.KK: We’ve yet to argue even once about who would cover a given subject, or “called dibs” or whatever. It all just kind of comes together.RG: If your podcast features guests, how do you go about finding them?BK: Our Dark Room episodes are a shorter format, about an hour, in which we take a closer look at some aspect of a subject we’ve already covered. For a Dark Room episode on Franz Kafka, we hosted Ross Benjamin, the translator of a new English edition of Kafka’s Diaries.We find our guests by being very online, and we frequently reach out to people we want to talk to. Dark Room episodes are a fairly low commitment: ninety minutes between the main episode and the After Dark we do for Patreon, all done via Zoom.RG: If you are a writer, has the podcast impacted your writing life? and conversely, has a writerly disposition influenced the podcast?BK: Kevin is a playwright and I’m a fiction writer. Speaking for myself, I learn a lot about the process from studying a writer like, say, Edgar Allan Poe or Emily Dickinson. You learn that they’re human beings, even if tremendously talented. That they struggled. That they were unsure of themselves and imperfect, haunted sometimes. That their triumphs were simultaneous with tragedy. And you see how their talent develops. How they make use of their lives. Also, of course, as the podcast has grown, new opportunities have presented themselves.KK: Doing this podcast, I learned quickly from subjects like Kubrick and Woolf and Cash that you cannot and must not wait around for permission to make your art, or for some ex machina blessed anointing to fall upon your career. You really have to go and get it, make it happen, just do the thing you imagine, and try not to kill anybody or yourself or alienate too many people.Kubrick wrestled money together from a local dentist and neighbors and family, went to California with a small production crew, and nearly killed his actors with insecticide while making his first feature, Fear and Desire, which then helped propel him into a “real” career. If he’d sat around in New York griping about what a racket Hollywood is, he would have not been wrong and we wouldn’t have Barry Lyndon and the rest of his oeuvre. Impossible to imagine but plausible. Artists do the thing.The show directly inspired me to start our theater company here in St. Paul, called Bad Mouth. Through that, we now do an interview podcast and radio show for the Twin Cities arts’ scene, through which we’ve released a number of play readings online. As for Brad and my writerly dispositions affecting the show, I’d say it’s all over what we do. As writers, we’re both obsessed with narrative form and are earnestly interested in all our subjects. There’s a mysterious Venn diagram of interests, aesthetics, humor, sense of history, educational backgrounds, and approach between us that just seems to work. And the fact we both have our own artistic practices and projects prevents us from being passive observers of our subjects. We’re really invested in understanding what drives creative genius, and how it might be harnessed or cultivated.RG: Do you listen to podcasts?KK: Before Art of Darkness, I listened to far more hours of podcasts than I do today. Now, between regular working life, running a theater company, writing my own plays and screenplays, raising a family, and Art of Darkness, I don’t have as much downtime, and when I have it, I usually throw on music or a film.When I do listen to podcasts, it’s often after a search for one of our subjects, to saturate myself further in their life and see what media already exists about them, or I’ll listen to a show one of our guests is on or does. We have our own little heterodox podcast network through the show, which is a fun consequence of making Art of Darkness. I’m the resident extrovert, so I love it.RG: What is the best podcast out there at the moment, the one you are excited for when each new episode drops?KK: We like Weird Studies and were happy to have Phil Ford on to talk about MF DOOM in an episode.We’re also fans of author Aaron Gwyn, who is a frequent guest on our show and who has a notable Substack where he covers Blood Meridian in exhaustive and illuminating detail. Aaron is joining us for our book club this December to talk about that great novel, in light of McCarthy’s passing.RG: What do you dislike about podcasts?KK: We sometimes joke about “vibecasts,” which is our little term for shows that don’t really have a driving concept and consist of vain chit chat, gossip, and maybe some cul-de-sac politics. Who has time for these, and how many such shows can the Internet sustain? You can feel the series of tubes sag under the flab of all this chatter and pseudo-political kayfabe.Art of Darkness is vehemently not a vibecast. I also really dislike overproduced podcasts of the NPR style, where everything is squished together and there’s not a second of downtime, or any sustained authenticity. The beauty of the podcast format is that it doesn’t need to be heavily edited. It can be rough, and an antidote to overproduced, agenda-driven corporate media.There’s an audience for the real, raw thing. There’s an audience that wants to listen to six unedited hours about the life of Aleister Crowley, with all the umms and uhhs and occasional mispronunciations. That isn’t to say your audio quality should be garbage if you can help it. But you don’t need to labor over editing to stitch a “tight” Frankenstein episode in order to satisfy an audience, with perfect diction and all the verbal fumbles smoothed out.I also get annoyed at how astroturfed social media and the Internet writ large seem to be—a capricious nerd’s Hellraiser box that makes very little sense in terms of who the algorithm picks up and signal boosts and who stays in the digital dark. Little things, like Twitter/X deboosting threads with links, can be pretty aggravating, as can mysterious plateaus of reach on social media, never mind outright censorship. Those platforms are certainly not “organic,” and if they’re the “town square” the town square is a carnivalesque hall of mirrors. There is far more hands-on moderation happening on these platforms than I think most people imagine, as well as obvious pay-to-play, which we don’t do (in terms of advertising, paying for clicks, whatever). All that said, we’re thrilled with the audience we have and we’re sure it will grow over time as we press on and release more episodes.I also have to say that podcasts as a whole are a massive net positive for free expression and “the little guy.” We’re just two obscure Midwestern writers who had an idea and some consumer-grade equipment and computers, and now we have devoted listeners all around the world. We’ve made real friends and authentic connections through the show, both with guests and our audience. It’s genuinely pretty cool and would have been unthinkable twenty-five years ago. I suppose maybe we could have done this as a cable access show in the 90s, but it’s hard to imagine how that would look and sound. Party on, Brad.RG: Is there a podcast that doesn’t exist, but you wish did?KK: I wish David Lynch had a podcast, but I’m also glad he doesn’t. He needs to be making films and another season of Twin Peaks. Please, Lord, give us another season of Twin Peaks.RG: For techheads, which single item of kit do you consider essential for the production of the podcast, and what would you say are the basics needed for those new to podcasting?BK: A real microphone, not just whatever is on your computer. We use Blue Yetis, and there are a lot of good, reasonably-priced USB mics. You need a good internet connection, and you need audio editing software like Audacity.KK: I do the audio engineering for Art of Darkness. A proper mic is essential. Our formula is:1. Blue Yeti microphones with boom arms and pop screens.2. Ethernet connections, not WiFi.3. Zoom, which has an outstanding noise gate. We each record, so there’s a backup if there’s an issue.4. Audacity for post-production, with some special sauce.5. WordPress for hosting and distribution via RSS.6. A Mac Studio, which is optional really. You can do all this on a decent laptop, tho it’ll take you a bit longer to do the work in Audacity.7. Brad edits the punched-up audio into the video file and posts to YouTube.I typically post an episode within 20 minutes of recording. You really don’t need much to produce a professional-sounding podcast, which is part of the charm.I will say too: if you’re going on a podcast as a guest, do the bare minimum and get a Blue Yeti with a boom arm and a pop screen, and find a way to connect your computer directly to Ethernet. It’ll cost you maybe $150 and more or less last forever. The hosts and audience will thank you.RG: If someone would like to support independent podcasts, what are the best ways to do this?BK: The podcasts will usually tell you. For us, it’s our Patreon. Subscribers not only materially support the show, but they get a bunch of extras for the money, including the bonus “After Dark” episodes and book club access. Maybe the most important thing you can do to support an independent podcast you like is to simply tell people about it and share links. Don’t be shy. If you love an indie podcast, share it with the people in your life who you think might appreciate it. That’s how media spreads and gets more support. It costs nothing to share a show and consciously signal-boost truly independent media.RG: Looking back on the podcast, are there favorite episodes, episodes that stand out to you, or episodes that didn’t go as you would’ve liked?KK: The Kubrick episode was something of a breakthrough for us, when we realized we could stretch toward upwards of three hours and still not exhaust a biography, and our audience would come with us. As for episodes that had issues, I’d moved some cables around and mistakenly recorded into my webcam microphone when we did our Disney episode, which was extremely aggravating to discover after the fact. I punched up the audio as best I could, and it’s listenable, but that haunts me. Always triple check your settings before you record.RG: What are your plans for the future?BK: We’ll continue to release roughly two Core Episodes and two or three Dark Room episodes each month for the foreseeable future, and run our book club for Patreon. We also have a second live show in development, which will take place in Detroit sometime in the back half of 2024. We hope to do more live shows and more exclusive content for Patreon as that audience grows.KK: If the show grows enough to support it, I’d love to do a proper tour and really figure out our live show format. We’ll keep grinding and see how it goes. Art of Darkness could theoretically go on forever, because artists keep dying like everybody else. We’ve said on the air that if one of us dies unexpectedly, the other needs to find a new co-host and go on, after a respectful hiatus of a few months. And wait a full year and a day to do the episode about the unexpectedly dead co-host. BK: That’s the rule.Art of Darkness can be found here, on Patreon, and on Substack.

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“TORN BETWEEN THE PAST AND THE FUTURE […] UNSURE IF ANY TANGIBLE PRESENT EXISTS”: An Interview with David Leo Rice

July 16, 2024 · Fiction

The artistic ambition and imagination of David Leo Rice seem to know no bounds. His latest novel, The Berlin Wall (Whiskey Tit, 2024), carries forward investigations and ideas worked out in his earlier books while exploring new landscapes, deeper heresies, and alternate means of storytelling. I’d heard rumblings of this novel’s existence quite a while ago, and was excited to finally get my hands on a presale copy earlier this year: it did not disappoint. David was kind enough to sit down with me for a conversation about the book, its generation, genre, fanaticism, heroism, and various “hatchings” of selves (among many other things).Danny Elfanbaum: The Berlin Wall —an alternate history of 2020 — nevertheless brought up a lot of what I remember from that year and the early days of the pandemic, with resonances about the news, missing- or misinformation, and the memory of a kind of passive, omni-present terror, but I gather that this wasn’t strictly intentional.David Leo Rice: I actually wrote the first draft in 2018, after traveling in Norway. It was written then as a work of near-future speculative fiction about what 2020 might look like, and then just because of the nature of editing and publishing, it ended up coming out in 2024. So it’s become a work of revisionist history instead, which is maybe more fitting because the book itself is so much about revisionist history, driven by people arguing about what did or didn’t happen in the recent past.In terms of how those arguments tell the story, and how that might relate to our real experience of 2020, I wanted YouTube to almost be the narrator, a voice that on the one hand feels neutral — like it will just tell you anything, with no agenda, because it’ll take all comers, a very promiscuous type of narrator, and one that’s not conscious of the meaning of what it’s saying — but also a narrator that you fear does have a hidden agenda, in which all these clips and partial stories are coming together to lead you somewhere. Maybe they’re leading you in an exciting way toward the “truth behind the illusion,” or in a sinister way toward a horrible conclusion that you’ll then be stuck with.Through this lens, I hoped the reader would experience some of the news paranoia that I think everyone experienced during the first Trump years, where you could never be sure if what you’re taking in is converging towards a kernel of what’s actually real, away from nonsense and spin and propaganda, or if it’s all divergent and you’re just going through the wood chipper, spraying your mind across the screen. This is a version of the cosmic question about whether the universe converges if you understand it deeply enough, upon something like God or a singularity, or if true wisdom means overcoming the illusion of convergence and accepting the totality of chaos for what it really is – though what if this acceptance itself is also a kind of convergence? And on and on, maddeningly.I wanted this narrative approach to create the feeling that something horrible was happening offscreen, but so far off that it might not be happening at all, and therefore the horrible thing might be the idea that it’s happening, seeded in your mind by forces seeking to control you. In a series of essays that I wrote at the same time as this book, I called this aspect of the 2010s and 2020s the “Unworkable Equilibrium” — the feeling that we’re always on the edge of total collapse and abject horror, and yet never all the way over that edge (at least not in America and Western Europe), so the fear that we’re on this edge might itself be the root of the problem. Are we pretending things are worse than they are, or denying how bad they’ve become?When you reach the end of your rope with this question, you can admit that you just don’t know — which is in some ways more honorable — or you can latch on to just about any ideology, which can become the root of fanaticism.DE: And there is plenty of fanaticism to contend with in the book! But first I’d like to ask you a little bit about the Wall itself, the “Living Wall,” as its believers call it. Why the Berlin Wall, and what does it mean in this book when characters refer to it as “living” — or in fact literally embody it?DLR: As a central controversy or heresy in this version of 2020, I thought about what if the Berlin Wall had been a living entity and, when it was destroyed in ’89, the pieces wandered off and began to live their own lives on the margins of Europe? What might they be doing in 2020? This is the question that my dubiously omniscient narrator deals with at the start of the book.When I first heard about the Berlin Wall as a kid, I pictured it as an insane medieval monolith that was a thousand feet high — something you would be in awe of if you ever saw it. But that’s not true; the actual Wall was only something like 15 feet high in places. It’s therefore telling that its legend is still so grandiose, because it means that it stood for something beyond itself. How could it supposedly change the whole world when such a small wall was built, or when it fell? I wanted to transpose this disjunct between physical and narrative realities into a science fictional conceit, where an idea becomes a real thing, and then you take it from there.And I wanted this book to be about the present, where all the characters are in a specific moment. The idea was that the year 2020 would be a character in the novel too, asking what it means to be this far beyond the Millennium but still litigating the same things, still fighting between socialism, capitalism, and fascism, and dreaming of the end of history while arguing about whether it’s already come or could ever come. Why doesn’t 2020 feel newer? Is there something in the recent past that still has to be resolved before we can actually move to a new era, or have we reached a kind of temporal wall we can’t see beyond? This has been Germany’s question since the ’40s, right? Is there something in that culture that still has to be resolved, or do they have to admit that they can’t resolve it and find a way to move on anyhow? And if that’s true, are they always going to exist in a haunted state, overcompensating for something they can’t heal from?There’s the actual “Living Wall,” but the book is more about how people would respond if they thought something like that was possible. I like conceits that let you think about real life in a new way, rather than “genre” books that are more about the conceits themselves. I like the way my father put it when he read a draft: he said, “This is a book about people trying to put their lives back together.”DE: The book flirts with various notions of “genre”—sci-fi, horror, video games—but definitely isn’t a “genre” novel. Were you thinking about genre when you were putting it together?DLR: I never think about genre explicitly, and I even try not to think about it as I’m writing, though I’m certainly influenced by it and I let that influence come out however it wants to. I feel like if you’re aiming at a genre, you’re already losing the project — the genre is taking it from you, whereas if you’re trying to make a genre-inflected conceit feel as real as possible, that’s where exciting developments can occur, because you’re swimming against the current.From a marketing point of view, it could be useful to serve fans of a given genre, but I’ve always aspired to “be a genre.” I want people to read my books because they want to read my books, not because they want to read sci-fi or horror per se. When I’m writing, I try to see if I can peer into a nickelodeon or a microscope into a world where these events are what’s actually happened. Rather than trying to make the fantastical aspects seem real, I try to find a realm in my imagination where they already are.DE: “Peering in” feels right, especially in this book. The other novels of yours that I’ve read and that we’ve talked about typically are told or follow a single point of view, but there are a handful of characters we follow throughout The Berlin Wall. What prompted this change?DLR: The goal was to write something more distant from my own experience. There is the geographical distance from where I live in that this book takes place wholly outside America; then there’s the alternate history dimension, which is distant from the things that have actually happened; and then using multiple point of view characters meant that none of them could exactly be me. I felt more like a journalist reporting this story rather than an avatar experiencing it.Still, even though they’re motivated by their own needs, all the characters are dealing with the problem of how to reach terra firma in 2020. They’re all involved with the way that the Berlin Wall exemplifies both of the tendencies we were talking about earlier: On the one hand, the Wall was built as a concrete signal that times had changed — that WWII was over and the Cold War had begun — but on the other hand, a wall is a symbol of stasis. Walls are some of the most static things on earth, both immobile in their own right and designed to arrest the movement of others. So everyone in this book is torn between the past and the future, between racing to move on and fighting to stay put, and unsure if any tangible present exists in between.DE: And while all of what I’ll call the “point of view” characters respond in different ways, there’s one character, György, who responds with a violent, intense fanaticism, joining up with one of the major (horrific) social movements/undercurrents within the world of the novel.DLR: It’s probably strange to say, but György is kind of the moral center. Everyone in the book has to deal with the lack of grounding in the news they consume and the uncertainty they feel in the world around them, but he’s the one who has the greatest crisis about it. He’s the youngest and least established, and thus the one who, in theory, has the greatest stake in the future, though he can’t find any means of embracing this fact. He can’t deal with the condition of 2020 except by falling into fanaticism, white nationalism, and so on. Which of course doesn’t help him deal with it, but it does provide the illusion of unshakeable grounding in a mythic past that will become a mythic future after enough violence is unleashed upon the zombie present.As a corollary to his conundrum, I wanted the style and structure of the book to create this frustrated yearning for something definitely true in the reader. Almost to draw out the reader’s latent fascism, a desire to force a definite meaning onto the events that are occurring, no matter how much violence that requires. So the question becomes what’s good and what’s bad about this yearning?There’s something natural about wanting to know what’s real and where you stand, and wanting to stand for something that endures throughout time and context, whether that’s honor or community or your word or faith, just as there’s something natural about wanting to understand the book you’re reading, and trusting that all the pieces will fit together in a satisfying way. These things aren’t intrinsically bad, but I wanted to ask, How do they turn bad? Why, in the 2020s, do we fear these desires in ourselves and others?It’s something about the nature of this polarized time period, wherein one facet of society says that to want these certainties at all is evil and you should just be comfortable with pure relativism and fungibility and an infinitude of non-convergent opinions, while the other facet of society that continues to want these things starts to pursue them in a way that is evil. As in any polarized moment, each side eggs the other on to a more extreme and eventually more grotesque version of itself, until no one can act in their own best interest, let alone that of the larger society.And therefore the final question is if there is something in between, a third option whereby you could rehabilitate ideas of the definitely real and the transcendent, something larger than ourselves, and be honest about the fact that this is a legitimate human craving, maybe even a human necessity, while also saying that not every way of trying to reach this is acceptable.DE: For many of the other major characters — here I’m thinking specifically about the Chancellor and Anika, the academic who becomes a kind of propagandist for the status quo — part of the response seems to be a constant donning and shedding of selves, as if identity — ontological or otherwise — is almost a non sequitur.DLR: Maybe one of the central questions in everything I’ve done is to ask what it means to act now, in the world, today. The world that, as a writer, I’m trying to participate in too. For me, it’s too easy to just say, “Well, I can write” as my way of participating. I don’t want to only write about writers, so I’m trying to think about other, more direct forms of participation, even if I can only enact them from a remove.Thinking about characters who are trying to act in the world as it appears today unifies questions about character and about place, and the ontological instability of both. It’s the question of, What world? Where are you mounting your attack from, what are you defending, what are you trying to conquer? Or is that way of thinking about the world just hopelessly antiquated?This relates to my understanding of mysticism, in which individuals try to access eternity not by looking away from the specific times they live in, but by looking through them, hoping to catch a glimpse of Time itself within the messy present tense that happens to bound their lives. In terms of selfhood, the question becomes, How do you come into your own, or how do you find out who you really are, given that part of you is specific and temporal, and (you hope) another part is universal and eternal? And this is related to the question of heroism: What journey do you go on such that your disparate or latent selves get unified or hatched? Many of my characters yearn to become heroes, at least in their own eyes — as all mystics do, and as I do by completing the lifelong writing project that I’ve embarked upon — but they also doubt that heroism is possible and fear that it’s a childish yearning they need to overcome. Perhaps overcoming this yearning is the route to heroism.DE: And depending on which iteration of self the characters in the novel are in, the answers to these questions change dramatically. What was interesting though was that these iterations are not progressive, in the sense that the identity that comes next might not be as good, or as useful, or as stable as the identity that had been assumed before.DLR: Absolutely. Once you start asking the book, or the universe, to “swap you out,” all bets are off. You have to view change as a good, or a necessity, unto itself. You can’t hope for what the prior identity would have viewed as an improvement. I’m drawn to characters who reach the point of total necessity, where it’s not a matter of hoping for a good change, but rather a matter of needing any change at all in order to go on living. I made an animation in college that ends with a title card reading, “Then we reached the point where we could go no further as ourselves,” and I’ve kept that sentiment as a kind of mission statement ever since.There’s a lot of hatching imagery in The Berlin Wall, which goes back to Dodge City 2, where there was the question of how do you really get born? In that book, people are always being born but then aborted, or aborted but then born, and there’s an underlying question about whether you’re ever born for real, or if you’re always living in an on-deck situation where you’re waiting to be made real by forces you can’t call upon. How do you actually get deployed? This is a strange thought, but sometimes I feel that my characters aren’t really the characters they seem to be, like they’re waiting for the actual characters they’re supposed to play to get called onto the field of action, which the book may or may not allow to happen. In the meantime, as you say, there’s a constant donning and shedding of selves.So the question then is if not through violence — which would be the traditional meaning of the word “deployed” — then how? It can’t be just sifting through endless screens and feeling like you’re acting in the world from this peripheral, meta position. And so if it’s not that, and also not the fanatical response of killing a bunch of people on the orders of some figurehead, then what other way is there? Everyone in The Berlin Wall grapples with this question.We’ve talked before about the idea of a post-postmodernism, where postmodernism mocked the idea of heroism, because when everyone in the modernist era tried to be heroes they ended up destroying themselves. So the postmoderns sort of sat back and patted themselves on the back, showing why it was ridiculous to yearn for this kind of direct, unironic relation to reality.But irony was its own dead end. Maybe it’s a curse and a blessing, but I think there’s something good about the fact that we were born after this work in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s was already done. We don’t have to reveal what was ridiculous and dangerous about modernism anymore. Therefore the burden of writers today is the question of what else can we do, or what does a new kind of heroism look like that is not just a return to the ideas of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and such, which led to fascism, nor a debunking of those ideas? Speaking again of a third option, how can we accept the work that those generations did and evolve the conversation forward again?DE: And how might you come to any kind of conclusion when there’s no real stable ground or reality upon which to build up some kind of edifice, or a metaphysics of heroism?DLR: Part of what the post-postmodern means to me is that the grounding no longer matters. It’s no longer salient whether you can prove that everything is a simulation or prove that supernatural phenomena are genuinely occurring. Some characters in The Berlin Wall claim they’re acting within a gigantic video game, but I wanted the world of the book to function in a way that makes this claim irrelevant – it doesn’t matter whether it’s true. I think we’ve moved past the point where it feels productive to do something like point out in a novel that “this isn’t really a character, it’s just words on a page,” the same way the claim that “Twitter isn’t real life” is kind of moot as well. It may be true, but if Twitter functions like real life for enough people, then something about its reality has to be recognized. The 2020s feels like a time where disparate worlds have bled together into a mishmash, and the work of separating them back out is a recipe for madness.So when it came to this book, speaking of continuity of character, I didn’t want that to be an easy out. A character might say, “Oh, I’m just a part of some propaganda machine,” or “All of this is a simulation,” or “I’m not my real self yet,” but the operative theme is not whether any of that is true. It’s “You still have to live and act in the world, so what do you do?”To take an example from the slew of movies that came out right before the Millennium, which I’ll group under the heading of “The Matrix,” The Berlin Wall is considering something like, What if inside The Truman Show and outside the show are the same? There’s the “real world,” and there’s the “fake world,” but all those worlds have leaked into each other. It’s no longer cathartic to picture Jim Carrey going through a door between them.So how do people respond? Extreme neofascism is one way, and extreme neoliberalism is another, but what if you could just enjoy this fact as it is rather than trying to solve for what is true or suffer from being unable to? Maybe heroism for my characters comes from finding a way to play within the perverted realms they’re stuck in, rather than escaping or redeeming them. It’s not a means of finding stable ground, but rather of surfing the instability.DE: And the book itself, structurally, sort of refuses to try and solve for it. I laughed out loud when I realized that you’d stuck a 50-page epilogue on there. If that’s not taking pleasure in a kind of indeterminacy…DLR: Yeah, definitely! I wanted it to be so that you could read the book without the epilogue — the book really does end. And I was trying to have the most grandiose, lyrical, operatic moment be the end of that last main part. Then the epilogue is a return to a kind of banal reality, and I think that’s a large part of what the book is going for — this question of how do we normalize the most extreme events? What does it mean that everyone survived the apocalypse that the book seems to point to, and survived it so easily that many won’t believe it even occurred?If you think of this book as an outsider’s testament to contemporary Europe, and you think about the continuity of people and place that the epilogue lays out, that to me is the fundamental uncanniness and uneasiness about Europe: how could it have proven to be so resilient? How could WWII and the Holocaust, the worst thing that’s ever happened — at least as we’re taught it — have happened there, and happened recently, in living memory, and yet Europe has still turned into the most normal place in the world?It makes you think either that the things that happened there weren’t so bad, or today’s Europe is not as normal as it appears. And neither of those options are very comfortable to consider, right?

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SPRINKLE WITH A BIT FANTASTICAL: An Interview with Shome Dasgupta

July 9, 2024 · Interviews & Reviews

The land holds its own weather for Shome Dasgupta’s collection, Atchafalaya Darling (Belle Point Press, 2024). The rhythms of Cajun country make themselves known in the richness of the waters, the sly grace of the fauna, and the down-to-earth sensuality of the cuisine. Ghosts step between the living, and memories breathe in the wind. Dasgupta addresses longing, grief and struggle, all the while infusing the stories with enchantment for the region. There is music to be heard for those who know how to listen. I spoke to Shome about the book.Rebecca Gransden: We begin at the end. The collection opens with “A Familiar Frottoir,” a story that addresses the end of life. There is talk of ghosts, and many of the leitmotifs that recur throughout the collection are introduced here. Did the idea for the collection start with a conceptual framework or did its assemblage occur in a more spontaneous manner?Shome Dasgupta: “A Familiar Frottoir” was the last story I had written for the collection—I had no clue where it was going to go or how the narrative would journey. It started off with an image of a character “shucking” pistachios—I was obsessed with that wording mainly because we live in a state where shucking oysters is a common way of dining. The ghost didn’t appear until she actually appeared—meaning, I didn’t know that this was the way the plot was heading. I don’t think I had a strong idea of any kind of thread that would travel through each of these stories other than that they all take place in the Cajun South. Other than that, it was just fun to see any commonalities or themes because I think they were all unintentional. The way the story collection started off—I had an idea of writing one story about small-town Louisiana, a musician, who goes through the obstacles of alcoholism, but one where the character was able to overcome it, or at least cope with it. It was a story I wanted to write with the utmost sincerity—although I’m no musician at all, not even close, I am now living in sobriety after having gone through some very dark times in my life. I wanted to write it for myself while at the same time, hopefully being able to share this experience with others who might find some light in the words. I love writing about Louisiana, particularly Cajun culture because it’s what I know most about, where I’ve been immersed all my life. So after writing “By The Pond Back Home,” I became really excited about writing another one about the region. I just wanted to have fun, and diving into this collection was very much that kind of experience.RG: The stories are in touch with the forces of nature, with the elements a constant presence. This manifests in a multiplicity of ways, but I was particularly struck by the repeated use of bodies of water. What draws you to these places and what is their significance when it comes to Atchafalaya Darling?SD: Symbolically and physically, water is both destructive and nurturing—it’s a push and pull, a constant search for harmony. The Gulf Coast is especially storm-ridden—hurricanes, flooding, thunderstorms so it’s hard not to write about this area without including those destructive forces. While at the same time, the peaceful and soothing characteristics of bodies of water are as much apparent—wildlife, all of it—there’s some kind of reconciliation taking place, I feel like, a constant rebirth. The Atchafalaya is vast—seemingly endless or romantically infinite, but by creating an experience or a story taking place on the basin, I wanted to make such a world small and intimate, covering both the rough and calm aspects of that particular environment.RG: Many of the stories evoke the character of the folktale. Have folktales and myths influenced your writing, and if so, in what way do you incorporate that influence into your work?SD: I would like to think so—such styles of writing certainly influenced my reading early on in my childhood. That, plus the concept of oral storytelling, whether fictional or otherwise, always magnetized my interest. I don’t know if it was intentional or not, going into these stories, to create such a tone, but I’m really happy to see that it was apparent, at least a bit, the way Cajun folklore and universal tales, regardless of language and culture, kind of seeped into these words. I love magical realism, and I think it would be a part of the same Venn Diagram—I think my first pieces of writing prose, I was seeking to emulate such a world, and I’m sure my love for such a style influences all that I write. Sometimes, I find myself trying hard not to go that route. Like literally, I could write a sentence like, “she sat down in the chair,” and almost always, my next line would want to be something like, “one that was born from rock, carved by rabbit teeth right as the horizon tilted and blended into the eyes of a mother who had fallen from the sky while fishing for stars.” It’s almost natural for me to go beyond realism so I like trying to ground my words—whether it’s poetry, nonfiction, or fiction, and if anything, sprinkle them with a bit of fantastical, perhaps, which hopefully created another depth or layering.RG: A defining characteristic of the stories is the embracement of the simple gestures of life. Foodstuffs feature prominently, mostly uncomplicated dishes or edibles that hold significance in some way. What part does food play in the collection? SD: Oh gosh—one of the hardest aspects of writing about the Deep South is to not include its cuisine. It really is difficult, at least for me, to capture this area without using food as a character in itself. Its presence is a way of life—a tradition stemming from homes to cities to regions. I told myself to go with it instead of going against it. It’s just more fun to do so—I love, love Cajun food, so why tuck it away when it can be a driving force to show what it’s like to live here in Louisiana. I’m obsessed with the color of crawfish, the spices, and while it’s not specific to this culture, but definitely prominent, bread pudding plays a role in “A Familiar Frottoir” in that even though the character’s house is burning down, he’s more concerned in baking his dessert. RG: A raccoon scurried over the fence as the sun came down—its twilight creating a frame of faded solace, one that neither of them knew the importance of in that moment together.The presence of animals dominates the stories in a subtle way. They appear unobtrusively, seemingly engaged in their doings away from the human world for the most part. These encounters can be fleeting, or from a distance, but seem somehow cosmically preordained. Your use of the owl and of frogs particularly stands out, but there are many more examples. In some instances the animal presences, for me, take on the quality of signs, of shepherds, perhaps guides, and evoke the symbolism of fable and folk myth. How did you decide upon your approach to the animal imagery included in the collection? Has your experience with animals influenced your rendering of them?SD: There was an owl in our garage, and my mother pointed and said, “Look, that’s your Dida.” My grandmother had passed away only a couple of weeks before this visitor arrived at our home. I think about that moment often, and how it guided me to approach and look at the animals around us in a very different way. Whether on the physical level, metaphorical, or spiritual level, and to be constantly surrounded by wildlife or any animal of any sort, it not only nourishes me, personally, but also my writing. Especially in Louisiana–whether it’s roadkill or a soaring heron I feel connected to them, or I guess, I’m searching for a connection to them, and they become characters, whether intentionally or otherwise, to become distractions, symbols, friends, or to add to setting and scenery. Dead or alive, there’s so much power there, and history, too. I love birds, especially—I’m obsessed, though I don’t know much about them, but it’s to the point that I have three tattoos: an owl for my Dida, a peacock for India, and a pelican for Louisiana and my grandfather or Dadu, and I’m constantly thinking about what will be next. Perhaps, a future drafted story will help me to figure that out.RG: Turnip nodded at Margaret and pulled down his baseball cap, a ragged and torn faded blue hat, one that he had received as a gift while he was in high school from Margaret when they were first starting to date. Though Turnip had stopped wearing it for a long time, when his tours became larger and larger, Margaret kept it under his pillow for the nights, weeks, months he was away.Objects take on weight. Seemingly innocuous everyday items are imbued with significance, sometimes in light of the history they invoke, the memories they trigger, or by the manner in which they change hands, for instance inherited, gifted or stolen. When thinking about story, how do you make use of objects?SD: I think—I think that any object can become a character in a story, and because of that, it can provide context, significance, obstacles, and comfort through just its presence. Such is the instance with the baseball cap—symbolic, perhaps, of their love when they became more than just friends. A cap, perhaps, that represents Turnip before his faults and afflictions which makes Margaret give him a chance, an open door to come back to a time when their relationship was true and stable. I’m a hoarder myself—I keep everything and anything, however small or large, and however seemingly insignificant because somewhere inside of me, I will look at these objects to bring an emotion or a memory, one worth feeling or remembering. In one of my drawers, there’s a paperclip. It was used to hold together a letter sent to me, and I lost that letter much to my sadness, but that paperclip—that particular one, among millions upon millions upon millions, takes me to a state of mind that I don’t want to forget. It becomes a friend to me, something living—giving breath, and I think that’s the same with what I’m trying to do with including such objects in my stories.RG: Outside, the frogs were loud—almost as if they were generating energy for the rest of the world.Song, tone, rhythm and music flow through the collection. A frog chorus opens ways to memories, muddy banks sing the song of the waters, and chimes resonate like an evocation. Musicians appear as conduits for strong forces, from the creative to the addictive. What part does music play in the collection?SD: Thank you so much for such kind comments—for this question, and for all of these questions. They’re so thoughtful, and I’m truly humbled from such care and generosity, and I’m so happy to see that you were able to find some rhythm and tone in these stories. I think I’m controlled by language and sound more so than anything else, and I try my best to bring such volumes to my words, which have this power over me than the other way around—much like music. Growing up here in Lafayette, watching local bands play was a large part of sharing time with my friends, and many of my friends were musicians themselves—absolutely so talented, and it kind of gave me some insight into this really, really nuanced world within a world within a world. Also, particularly, in addition to indie rock or pop or hip hop, there’s a music born from heritage and tradition, such as zydeco or Cajun music—dancing, too. I was definitely trying to reveal the importance of such a culture here in the Deep South. Much like you mentioned, there’s also the naturality of music—through frogs or birds or the wind, a constant surrounding us, and it was nice to attempt to blend the different forms of music that can be heard, whether created intentionally or unintentionally. Likewise, I try to emulate such sounds in the writing itself, to emulate or mirror what’s actually taking place in a story—maybe it’s choppy, maybe it tends to produce a certain rhythm, and ideally, or hopefully, it can be heard even though there isn’t any music actually being played.RG: The neighbor looked up at the sky to see a flock of birds making their way past a lowered sun—he squinted his eyes and nodded his head, whispering words to himself as if he was having a conversation with a ghost.There is an elliptical quality to the collection, a sense the themes ebb and flow as the passing of seasons. The common ups and downs of life become infused with profundity, and seemingly inconsequential trivialities take their place as part of a play on the grandest scale. What is your approach to repetition?SD: Oh I so love, love repetition on every level of writing, whether it’s repeated words, sentences, characters, narratives, themes—however unintentional, I think I rely on it way too much. It’s more natural for me to write that way, which in turn, guides me to those kinds of rhythms I’m seeking. Narratively, I laugh at myself sometimes, thinking that I’ve only ever drafted just one story throughout my writing endeavors, conceptually—just told in different ways. On the word level, especially—I remember listening to Philip Glass’s “Einstein on the Beach: Knee Play 5,” and how it made me mesmerized or hypnotized, and it’s definitely an influence in my writing, whether it’s poetry or fiction or prose. I think, also, such a style relates to all that you’ve mentioned before—nature, environment, objects, symbols, animals, and they all relate to these circular or elliptical patterns of life replicated in these stories. I’m a huge fan of echoes.RG: What have these stories revealed to you?SD: I’m kind of laughing at myself because taking part in this interview has revealed so much more to me when it comes to these stories—aspects I haven’t really thought about before. Again, truly, thank you so much for such insightful questions and for taking the time to share such thoughts about both the subtle or larger elements of these stories. It was such a pleasure to think about these questions. I just wanted to write and have fun and not focus too much on all the usual components of a story—I didn’t think much about what’s at stake, but more so, setting and character and dialogue were my main areas of concentration, along with language and image. What that would create, I wasn’t sure, but I had such a great experience drafting this collection while not thinking about anything else other than just writing. I hope that makes sense, and I hope all of these responses make some kind of understandable meaning, and thanks again for your time and for reading Atchafalaya Darling. I’m so grateful for this opportunity.

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An Interview With Rick Claypool

July 2, 2024 · Interviews & Reviews

Anarchic weirdism triumphs in Skull Slime Tentacle Witch War (Anxiety Press, 2024). Rick Claypool’s wild novel unveils new visions of absurd abandon, wrapped up in a hyperreal rush of cartoonish wonder. As a whirlpool of body horror kitsch drenched in neon trash nightmares, Claypool’s demented sensibility evokes creature feature mayhem and B-movie unruliness. Never did slime glow so good. I spoke to Rick about the book.Rebecca Gransden: When did the idea for the book first appear to you? I’m curious about the genesis of the characters and the origin of the world they inhabit. What came first, a character? an image? a concept?Rick Claypool: The idea for the characters Skullface and Tentaclehead came to me about five years ago, in 2019. They’re sort of a doomed comic duo, like Vladimir and Estragon or Ren and Stimpy. Skullface is the angry one, whose reaction to life’s frustrations is this uncontrollable destructive rage that manifests as killer puke. Tentaclehead is the depressed one, whose reaction to life’s frustrations manifests as self-loathing and suicide attempts, except he can’t really die. I thought it would be funny to have them be spurred into this adventure through their shitty, upsetting world after discovering this weird baby in a two-liter bottle of soda, an idea that’s a little bit inspired by people in the ’90s supposedly finding objects contaminating their cans of soda that should not have been possible to find in a can of soda. RG: His neighbor is enjoying himself. Actually enjoying himself. His neighbor who just a few hours earlier was so overcome with despair he cut off his own head is having a lovely time. Early on, we are introduced to the characters of Skullface and Tentaclehead as uneasy neighbors. Any weird experiences with neighbors?RC: The guy who lived next door to us when I was in high school killed himself. I remember my mom bringing me home from a guitar lesson and there were all these cops everywhere. But also like, in general for me there’s always a weird tension with neighbors. Like, as a person who believes in existing in solidarity and friendship with the people around me, especially the people physically closest to me in my community, I think it’s important to try to have the best relationship with my neighbors that I can. But as an awkward introvert who is always carrying a lowkey fear of other humans, neighbors can be kind of terrifying. RG: The world you’ve created is one that is hyperreal and colorful, filled with trashy neon and fluorescent slime. What is the pinkish glow in Skullface’s eye holes?RC: I love that meme with the skull-faced chair with the glowing eyes – it has this look that says “I’m powerful and deranged and overwhelmed.” You know the one? My therapist once told me human vision narrows when we become so upset we’re suddenly in fight or flight mode. (And paying attention to your peripheral vision is a strategy for calming down.) So it makes sense to have the glow appear as a precursor to when Skullface gets so upset he pukes killer pink foam, which of course creates many embarrassing situations for him.RG: Tentaclehead takes his place in the grand tradition of depressive yet endearingly maudlin inventions such as Eeyore and Marvin the Paranoid Android. How does your earlier novella Tentacle Head (2022) relate to the Tentaclehead of Skull Slime Tentacle Witch War?RC: Tentaclehead is such a fun character to write. I’m someone who is inclined occasionally to fall into these depressive doom spirals, and so Tentaclehead is sort of a ridiculous personification of that. My 2022 not-for-children children’s book Tentacle Head came out from Bear Creek Press a few months before its infamous collapse. That book is basically the backstory for a somewhat less developed version of the Tentaclehead character. Like, this was before I understood he should puke knives. Also I have to say Tentacle Head’s illustrator, Piper Bly, is an absolute genius. RG: “WHERE’S THE MANNEQUIN?” Tentaclehead repeatedly inwardly screams. “WHERE’S THE MANNEQUIN? WHERE’S THE MANNEQUIN?” Tentaclehead possesses an unhealthy obsession with a mannequin. What’s with that?RC: Any desire can become an unhealthy obsession, can warp our view of the world and influence our decisions in unexpected ways, especially when the object of desire is just out of reach. It's the object petit a of Lacanian psychoanalysis – the acorn the proto-squirrel in the Ice Age movies is always after. In Tentaclehead’s case, I guess I’m a sucker for a tragic romance. What could be more tragic than falling in love with something incapable of loving you back? And which, despite being completely inert, remains somehow always just out of reach?RG: Absurdist humor is central to the story, with parts of the book taking on the quality of a deadpan domestic farce, the characters a type of dysfunctional pseudo-family in a surrealist soap opera, before the narrative moves to hijinks on a more epic scale. What led you to this approach? If you have comedy influences, who are they?RC: I’m always trying to balance horror and humor. Growing up, my mother worked in a hospital, and over dinner she would often share stories about awful, tragic things she witnessed – body parts on a lab table, that kind of thing – and somehow, her stories were always funny. So I’ve always been drawn to stories like that. As a writer, the bleak hilarity of Samuel Beckett, wild absurdity of Daniil Kharms and merciless deadpan humor of Joy Williams have all been hugely influential. I’m constantly being inspired by writers like Zac Smith and Ivy Grimes and Sam Pink and Claire Hopple. Also, if I’m being honest, I’ve been more than a little influenced by Adult Swim cartoons like Aqua Teen Hunger Force and cult films, like early John Waters movies and Troma stuff and Peter Jackson’s weird old gloopy pre-Lord of the Rings movies.RG: Who is the hero of Skull Slime Tentacle Witch War?, and who is the villain? Is it ever that simple?RC: It’s never that simple. I think maybe just about all the characters are heroes but they all suck at being heroes? Like they’re constantly being overcome by their desires and their emotions and the material limits of their world. Which to me is a lot like what life over the past several years has felt like, where you can always be trying your best to make smart, good, ethical choices, but the forces you’re up against – pandemic, genocidal war, catastrophic climate change, rising fascism, and so on – are just too much to deal with, especially on top of personal mental health struggles, y’know? It feels like there is no dealing with any of these overwhelming forces without completely losing your fucking mind. RG: Eat them all! Eat them all! Eat them all! At one point there is discussion among factions on who should be eaten. Of the three mutants under debate—Skullface, Tentaclehead, and the infant named Abomination!—which would you choose to consume? A general theme of the book is that characters ingest, or are ingested, in a variety of ways. Is a metaphor happening here, or are mutants natural eaters?RC: Skullface would be too spicy and Tentaclehead would be the most sustainable choice. I’m sorry, but Abomination! would for sure be the most delicious of the three. Which is horrible, right? You’re not supposed to eat the baby, even the mutant soda-dispensing baby. But like if there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, what’s stopping you from eating the baby? And if you choose not to eat the baby, well, yay for you, but who’s to say the baby won’t grow up and choose to eat you? Eating is the purest form not only of consumption, but exploitation. You can be thankful for what you eat all you want, you are still literally taking another living thing and using its body as fuel for your own body. RG: One day Skullface reminisces aloud about different meatballs he’s been served during his time in the facility tasting somewhat differently. “They used to be sweeter and tangier,” he says, “but before they moved me from my old room into this room with you they became less tangy and more salty. Yesterday’s meatball was hardly tangy at all. Do you remember yesterday’s meatball?” What is it with mutants and meatballs?RC: Just one meatball contains all the vitamins and minerals a mutant needs for a whole day.RG: FUCK THAT, Skullface thinks. He tries to say it too. He realizes his jaw being all dangly is making it impossible for him to speak. He tries to grab it to lift it back up to his face but his arms don’t work the way they should and his jaw keeps swinging around on those slime threads in a way that makes it hard to catch. He just keeps getting slime stuck to his fingers. Oh fuck oh fuck.Mutant life can be challenging. Are there mutants you created that didn’t make the final book?RC: A few of the mutants went through different versions before I settled on their final forms. Like there was a version of Oogus Boogus where she had a stone for a head and a whole bunch of crystal eyes, and a version of Pegasus where they were more like a giant locust. I took a lot of inspiration from toys from my childhood when creating these mutants, like those little M.U.S.C.L.E. Man guys. And there are artists still designing amazing little weird toy creatures. Like there’s one guy who goes by Basement Puke. His stuff is amazing and fun as hell. RG: Did you listen to music when writing Skull Slime Tentacle Witch War? While reading, I kept soundtracking scenes with a particularly demented fantasy variety of psychobilly. How do you imagine the score?RC: The score, based on what I was listening to while writing, would include a lot of noisy, synthy stuff like Fire-Toolz and Black Moth Super Rainbow and Magic Sword. RG: Moontown’s lore suggests a rich history. Are there plans for future works to further explore Moontown, or Moontown adjacent locations, and the inhabitants? Prequels, alternate timelines? Any thoughts on how the world could translate to comic book, animation or live action form?RC: Yeah, there’s a lot there that might seem random to some readers, but there is an underlying system to things, which I will not be explaining. I don’t have any immediate plans to revisit the world, which came out of a particularly difficult time for me in terms of my mental health. I don’t want to say I’d never go back to it though. Honestly, collaborating on an adaptation would be a dream come true. I also have zero idea how to make that happen. I’m guessing I’d probably need an agent. So I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for Adult Swim to call me up, but like if some underground animator wants to talk about it, I’d probably fall all over myself trying to make it happen. RG: You’ve chosen to publish Skull Slime Tentacle Witch War with Anxiety Press. What attracted you to work with them and how have you found the process?RC: It’s been great working with Cody Sexton at Anxiety Press. He wrote a review of Tentacle Head in 2022 and loved it, so that was an early indication he might love Skull Slime Tentacle Witch War too. And he did. Also, Anxiety Press is keeping some of the weird vibe that went down with Bear Creek alive, publishing talented folks from that scene like Tyler Dempsey, Scott Mitchel May, and Jack Moody. But yeah I also had a particular vision for how I wanted the book to look and I wanted to include my goofy illustrations and to maintain a particular tone throughout. Cody was cool with letting me pretty much get away with whatever I wanted, which I know not every publisher will do, even in this offbeat little indie corner.RG: What’s next for Rick Claypool?RC: I’m a little bit addicted to writing short stories right now. So the immediate next things from me are stories that will be published in anthologies later this year – one in Monsters in the Mills (an anthology of Rhode Island horror writers), one in Dark Spores (a fungal horror anthology coming out from Crone Girls Press), and one I don’t think I’m supposed to talk about yet. I don’t know, maybe I’ll start thinking about compiling them into a collection. Once things settle down I want to get back to the next longer form thing, which is a sort of minimalist sword and sorcery-flavored novella I’m writing entirely in second person. I’m a slow writer – once I settle into working on that, that’ll probably be enough for me for a while.

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TRANSMISSIONS: PaperBird

June 25, 2024 · Interviews & Reviews

Welcome to Transmissions, an interview feature in which X-R-A-Y profiles podcasts and book youtubers.PaperBird can be found on YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/PaperBirdCOURTING THE MUSE: PaperBird talks about obsession, recognition, and those damn teenage years.Meeting PaperBird was harder than I expected. It's not that he's reclusive or antisocial or anything like that; no. It's just that his house is damn near impossible to find. He warned me about this beforehand, on the phone, saying that it takes "a car with all-wheel drive, a mountain bike, and a pair of hiking boots," just to get there. I got directions to his house anyway -- pretty detailed, I must say -- and made about three miles into the forest before my car broke down. Then it started raining. I didn't have the requisite mountain bike or hiking shoes, just a few sticks of chewing gum for food. I didn't see another human for days, maybe even weeks: I'm still a little fuzzy on this. All I know for sure is that I woke up one morning in a hospital bed, with Mr. PaperBird right there beside me, looking concerned.Author of three novels (Bored and Aroused in Boston, Lonely and Anxious in London, and Puking Towards Paris), an autobiography (Baby Penis), and a self-help manual (Introvert's Guide to Being a Power Asshole), PaperBird has been getting a lot of attention. Not because of his books, which remain unpublished, but because of his YouTube channel. His blend of humor and absurd surrealism (or what he calls "absurrealism") has excited, frightened, and tickled mainstream audiences and academics alike. Looking at Mr. PaperBird in his loose-fitting clothes in a way reminded me of the under-nourished cats you find lying on the side of the road. The man can't be more than 120 pounds, if I had to guess. There's a mysterious scar on his nose. His eyes are so brown they're black. One eye is lazy.-Terri Bradshaw

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: First things first. I'd like to personally thank you for saving my life.

PaperBird: (laughs) No problem. I have to do that once in a while. It's gotten to where no one comes to visit.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: I was kind of anxious to see where you lived.

PaperBird: It's just a cottage, really. I built it a couple years ago with my brother. He's an architect, you know (not officially licensed). I think that was like his first real project.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: But why out in a forest? Why so far away from society?

PaperBird: At first I thought it would be interesting, to pull a Thoreau or something, stay unplugged, but then I checked my finances and realized I had no other choice. Did I mention I have a Patreon? Just kidding. (It's a "Ko-fi" - https://ko-fi.com/paperbird)

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: Speaking of platforms, you're mostly known for your YouTube videos. Those wacky book reviews. How would you describe the channel to someone who is unfamiliar with what you do?

PaperBird: I guess you could say I make videos that dive deep into books but miss the mark completely and end up getting shattered a few feet away where the book and the author (if still alive) glance over, shake their head, sip their margarita, and nudge the sunglasses back up onto their face.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: How long have you been at it -- "diving deep and getting shattered"?

PaperBird: The channel’s been around since 2014… woah, almost 10 years now! That's really sad. Masochistic, even.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: We do get some whiffs of that, yes, but we'll get to your fetishes in a bit. At first you posted these very lofi rambling videos filmed in your car during what appeared to be your lunch break at work. I bet it was hot AF in the summer but figured after filming you’d come back in all hot and happy, high on your own supply.

PaperBird: (laughs) Exactly!

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: Are there any channels that influenced or encouraged you to start the project?

PaperBird: Not really, I started posting videos as an excuse to not continue writing in a traditional sense but still stay connected to books. Being on YouTube though I got hooked into watching knife review videos, especially ones made by Nick Shabazz. On his videos, he never shows his face, it’s just his hands holding the knife as he’s reviewing it. That inspired me to move out of the steamy in-car POV and adopt the same top down / table top style, except with books instead of knives, kind of as a joke.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: Which of your videos would you recommend to someone who is new to what you do?

PaperBird: Here's a good sampler pack: Gary Lutz, Gerald Murnane, Jon Fosse, Pierre Michon, Claude Simon.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: How do you go about selecting what to feature on each video?

PaperBird: It used to be as easy as grabbing the next book on the pile. I would read it a couple times, take some notes, talk about it on camera, then rinse and repeat. But over time I got tired of that, in fact now really dislike talking about books straight-on. It’s the same with the books I like to read -- the less hand-holding, the less information the better -- although in a “review” you kind of have to do that a little, give out information.

Now it’s more about building a container to dump in whatever's going on in my life, and somewhere along the way, an author or a book gets sucked in and spread out as the foundation. After a few months, if the structure holds, that load-bearing book (pun intended) becomes what is featured.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: You used to publish short stories, poetry, and book reviews in more traditional places, maybe 15 years ago, under a different name, and if I had to guess, you still scribble in your notebook every day, though it's more a stream that feeds into whatever video is bubbling up, like background processing, am I right?

PaperBird: Yes, well… when things are flowing, creating the video feels similar to writing, actually it’s more rewarding because things can happen quickly, moving things around, sometimes you get this euphoric mix of imagery, music, and voice that couldn't possibly have been planned. I remember this review I did on Wilson Harris which I gave up on midway and instead turned it into a meditation on death. Maybe the method is more like abstract painting or DJ'ing.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: Or like that show Iron Chef? Where the grandmaster would announce the theme ingredient and the contestants would use it to make their own original dish? The ingredient in your case being the book under "review."

PaperBird: Something like that, literature as seasoning on the larger animal inside that you want to serve up and knock people out with. Hit them with your own spices and herbs. That’s the beauty of this medium, it’s like a blob of hot dough that stays gooey for longer and you have a bigger sweetspot in which you can shape it, even randomly sometimes, it’s that forgiving. And the synchronicities happen more often and more quickly. It's the best feeling in the world when everything clicks.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: You mention somewhere in Baby Penis, your autobiography, that your creative tendencies really took off when you were in high school?

PaperBird: That's right. I'd say around the time I was a sophomore. And I had the strangest motivation for writing. I wanted to impress a woman. I'm not going to say who… Let's just say she's a celebrity. (I reveal who she is in my Esther Kinsky video.) But yeah, I was very lonely and thought that if I wrote a novel -- I was fifteen at the time -- I thought that if I wrote a quality literary novel, at the age of fifteen, I would get recognized and become a celebrity, too, and that way She would know who I was. That's all I wanted in life then: to be recognized by this person whom I was obsessed with. We're talking Taxi Driver here.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: Good thing you didn't kill anyone.

PaperBird: Yeah, it was only a teenage daydream, but a really strong one. Writing this novel was all that I thought about. And Her, of course. She became a muse or mother goddess, the "female personage" that Gerald Murnane writes about. I began to see Her in others. The girl who sat next to me in math class (Lauren). The girl who also liked to write, whose house I rode past on my bike almost every day (Kathleen). The girl I once slow-danced with whose perfume I would recognize even now (Angela). They all had brown hair and blue eyes. But can you see what else they had in common? It's all in the letters in their names, the colors of those letters… I still sometimes… I still search…

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: Hello? Hello… Earth to PaperBird… (snaps fingers) OK, let's pivot from that for a bit. For the techheads and aspiring booktubers out there, which single item of kit do you consider essential for the production of your channel?

PaperBird: You mean other than a knife?

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: Ah yes! I was hoping you'd get into that! For those of our readers who may not know, you have this penchant for cutting up your books with a knife on camera. Before we get into exactly why, let me just say, I've noticed that your knife handling skills have really improved over time. I remember early on, maybe it was the video on John Yau or Samuel Beckett, where it looked like you almost cut off your thumb. But then you're starting to hold the knife better, dare I say with more confidence, as you slice through your books. Are you trying to turn them into chapbooks or something?

PaperBird: It's a way of getting the weight down. Some of my compatriots on booktube -- Leaf by Leaf, Travel Through Stories, W.A.S.T.E. Mailing List -- they gravitate toward the chunkers. I like chunky shapes too. But after years of typing, cooking, crocheting, saxophone playing, whatever, my wrists blew out. Can't hold up anything weighs more than a Kindle now.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: I ask because I think it was in the Sally Rooney video, where you go off on this 20 minute tangent just "deconstructing" one of her books, and I must say, the knife handling in that video was superb. You said you cooked? It was almost like you had worked in a butcher shop for years. And in the Gordon Lish video, where you chop off what appears to be your penis with a meat cleaver, just incredible, the way you handle both heavy and lightweight cutlery.

PaperBird: Thank you.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: There's this one digression in the Fernanda Melchor video that I haven't been able to get out of my head. It's the part where the twins are starving and Fernanda has to get them food somehow, and so she goes on this long hunt through the forest...

PaperBird: Yeah, she's chasing some kind of unidentified animal. A boar, actually.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: Right. And so she slaughters the thing and drags it all the way home, where she has to dice it up before dawn comes and the twins awake. And through the magic of editing, you show Fernanda Melchor skinning and chopping up and preparing this animal for over thirty minutes, and the overall accruing effect of the passage is just mind-numbing. It's like nothing I've seen before.

PaperBird: That's one of those digressions that demand a lot from the viewer but ultimately pay off in the end, I hope.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: It was particularly exciting for me, all the details you worked in there about, for example, the sound of the animal's hide ripping, and the texture of the animal's striated muscles, and the way the tendons and ligaments would stretch on the bone and then snap off. I think the sound they made was "tCHew!"

PaperBird: Um, actually it was "tCHaw!"

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: Watching that video repeatedly and its attention to detail made me wonder if you've ever had any actual hands-on experience slaughtering animals. I mean, the scene with the blood caking on Fernanda's hands and all that, the shimmer of the freshly-killed animal's intestines -- it doesn't seem like you could whip that up from scratch.

PaperBird: Well, there was some research involved. I read a book on general swine anatomy, and then visited a meat market where the butcher was kind enough to let me observe. But the rest I pretty much made up, although I did dissect a cat in the eighth grade.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: How big was it?

PaperBird: The cat? I'd say about a foot and a half.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: The reason I'm wondering is because I happen to work with animals. Mostly dogs and cats, but sometimes deer, possums, and armadillos. They're usually dead by the time I get them, or rapidly reaching that state, so I'd say I know more than your average joe about the death of animals. And let me be the first to attest to the accuracy of your scene concerning the boar's death and dissection in the Fernanda Melchor.

PaperBird: Thanks. (laughs) What is it you do exactly? Aside from working for X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine?

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: I guess you could say I'm a type of artist, or what some would call a "roadkill artist." Basically, I drive around interstates and highways and look for animals that've been run over or knocked dead by cars. I take the animals home and hack off as much meat as I can without damaging their skeletons, and then boil the rest off their bones.

PaperBird: Not for eating purposes, I hope.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: (laughs) No, no. I'd say it's fairly dangerous to eat roadkill. What I'm interested in are their bones -- the ones that haven't been shattered or splintered by the impact. Sometimes the cars do so much damage I can only extract about 20% of their bones intact. Usually they're the small ones, like the carpals or patellas, but every once in a while I'll be able to get a whole femur or pelvis. Complete skulls are hard to come by, and always require that I drain the brain out through the nostrils.

PaperBird: No kidding.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: The key to working with dead animals is to get to them before rigor mortis sets in. That way you'll cut your flaying time in half. And it's always important to know where the bone is in relation to the muscle, so you won't accidentally cut in too deep and make abrasions on the bone's surface. Usually I just feel for the bone and leave about a centimeter of meat on and throw the whole thing into a vat of boiling water. I have these vats at home for this purpose. They loosen up the muscles and tendons and kill off any bacteria. Then you just slide the meat off and you're left with clean bone. In my younger days, I used to just snap it off, like Fernanda did in the video, but I found that doing that'll strip away some of the outer layer, or what's called the periosteum. The ligaments did make a sort of tCHaw! sound when I ripped them off, though. Actually it was more of a tCHwee!

PaperBird: tCHwee?

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: Right. I guess the exact sound would depend on what ligament you're dealing with, but I think it was a tCHwee!

PaperBird: Hunh.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: Anyway, getting back to what I was saying. Once you get all the muscle and connective tissue off the bone, you'll want to paint a coating of enamel over the surface in order to preserve it, keep it from deteriorating. Maybe also add a layer of glossy white paint to give it that clean look. I've heard of some roadkill artists working in ceramics. It's up to the individual. Myself, I like having a clean and durable bone because I work with furniture. That is, I make furniture out of bones. I've made tables, chairs, dressers, beds, and footstools. Once, I built a staircase for a friend of mine. That one took a couple years and an insane amount of roadkill. I practically had to drive cross-country for that one. And you can see why it's important, when building furniture, to want a bone that isn't splintered or damaged in any way. Especially for something like a staircase.

PaperBird: I see.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: But there're probably limits to how much roadkill you can find in a given year. Sometimes driving around I'll get as many as two or three a day, freshly-killed. Then it might take weeks before I find another roadkill, and it might just be a bird or a squirrel. Which makes things hard for me because lately I've been getting lots of offers from clients. They want maybe a throne of bone by the end of the month, or some sort of man-sized bird-cage or what have you. They can get really specific, and that's totally appropriate because everything I make is custom-designed. Hand-crafted. I think the price is fair, and I always give a one-year service warranty. But lately I've just gotten too many offers. I only have so many resources stock-piled in my vault. Can you see my predicament? It doesn't help asking my friends and neighbors if I could have dibs on their pets after they die. Their pets, that is. But right now, I'm in the process of cutting a deal with a veterinarian who happens to like what I do, so there's some hope for me yet. And the other day I got contacted by a record-company who wants me to build an elaborate canopy-style bed that can be used to promote this death-metal band's next album. Have you heard of Sarcophagi? I think that's their name.

PaperBird: Not a fan.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: But you know the name? I'm hoping this'll give artists like me the kind of exposure we need. Not that roadkill artists have an alliance or anything. I think we just need some credibility and recognition because things're really hard for us. I live out on a farm in Minnesota with a few of my carpenter friends. We built the place ourselves. They're all sort of marginal artists like me: Sherry makes Egyptian-style caskets out of papier-maché, Trent works with rubber, Steven's an engineer in roller-coaster design but so far no amusement park will contract his work because they think his stuff's "unethical." But what can you do? You just plug away at it and hope that something good'll eventually come out. That's my advice to young artists: never take the easy road and never give up. As long as you remain true to your work, keep your work genuine, you'll be all right. There will always be times when you really doubt yourself, like when you're not eating as well as you should be because you can't afford anything besides microwave dinners and corndogs, and you're working at the IRS or for some low-circulation magazine or newspaper writing soft journalism and counting down the days to your next paycheck, and you have no love- or sex-life because you don't have the time or energy for that kind of thing, although you really do want one, it's all you think about, having an understandable and caring person be there for you, to buffer the pain and constantly tell you that you're not alone in this world, and you wonder to yourself, Are these sacrifices I'm making truly worth it? Am I putting out anything into the world that will make it a better place -- or that will help me be remembered after I die? Will I ever achieve the sort of recognition I honestly think I deserve in this lifetime, or at all? Or am I just going to have to fantasize about it in very strange and elaborate ways? Is it worth it to even go on with my life? Sometimes you'll think that the world doesn't need another someone like you, another dreamer, another hopeful who for some reason couldn't make it and is relegated to a life of mediocrity, who doesn't make an iota of a dent along the passage of time, and passes easily through the anus of history as if they never existed. But you just have to keep at it. Even if your spiritual back is broken, even if you're down to your last can of Spam, even if you've wasted away to 120 pounds when you really should be 160, even if you truly are all alone in this world, you just have to pick yourself up and reach for the next bone.

PaperBird can be found on YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/PaperBird

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