And James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther King. And Coretta King shot Jacqueline Fisher. And Jacqueline Fisher shot Ernest Brennecke. And Ernest Brennecke shot Peggy Bomba. And Peggy Bomba shot Barry A. Erlich. And Barry A. Erlich shot James E. Huddleston. And James E. Huddleston shot Jerry Miller. And Jerry Miller shot Robert Nordvall. And Robert Nordvall shot William E. Harris. And William E. Harris shot Marguerite Sekots. And Marguerite Sekots shot Vernard Foley. And Vernard Foley shot Dale C. Kisteler. And Dale C. Kisteler shot Bruce Sperber. And Bruce Sperber shot Kay Flaherty. And Kay Flaherty shot Sol Babitz. And Sol Babitz shot Richard M. Clurman. And Richard M. Clurman shot Frederick Gruin. And Frederic Gruin shot Edward Jackson. And Edward Jackson shot Judson Gooding. And Judson Gooding shot Rosemarie Zadikov. And Rosemarie Zadikov shot Donald Neff. And Donald Neff shot Joseph J. Kane. And Joseph J. Kane shot Mark Sullivan. And Mark Sullivan shot Barry Hillenbrand. And Barry Hillenbrand shot Linda Young. And Linda Young shot Nina Wilson. And Nina Wilson shot Jack Meyes. And Jack Meyes shot Arlie W. Schardt. And Arlie W. Schardt shot Roger M. Williams. And Roger M. Williams shot Marcia Gauger. And Marcia Gauger shot Nancy Williams. And Nancy Williams shot Susanne W. Washburn. And Susanne W. Washburn shot Timothy Tyler. And Timothy Tyler shot David C. Lee. And David C. Lee shot James E. Broadhead. And James E. Broadhead shot Robert S. Anson. And Robert S. Anson shot Robert Parker. And Robert Parker shot Donald Birmingham. And Donald Birmingham shot John Steele. And John Steele shot Fortunata Vanderschmidt. And Fortunata Vanderschmidt shot Stephanie Trimble. And Stephanie Trimble shot Hugh Sidey. And Hugh Sidey shot Edwin W. Goodpaster. And Edwin W. Goodpaster shot Bonnie Angelo. And Bonnie Angelo shot Walter Bennett. And Walter Bennett shot Martha Reingold. And Martha Reingold shot Lane Fortinberry. And Lane Fortinberry shot Jess Cook. And Jess Cook shot Kenneth Danforth. And Kenneth Danforth shot Marshall Berges. And Marshall Berges shot Samuel R. Iker. And Samuel R. Iker shot John F. Stacks. And John F. Stacks shot Paul R. Hathaway. And Paul R. Hathaway shot Raissa Silverman. And Raissa Silverman shot Patricia Gordon. And Patricia Gordon shot Greta Davis. And Greta Davis shot Harriet Bachman. And Harriet Bachman shot Charles B. Wheat. And Charles B. Wheat shot William Bender. And William Bender shot Alan Washburn. And Alan Washburn shot Julie Adams. And Julie Adams shot Susan Saner. And Susan Saner shot Richard Burgheim. And Richard Burgheim shot Larry Still. And Larry Still shot Alten L. Clingen. And Alten L. Clingen shot Jerry Kirshenbaum.

And Lee Harvey Oswald shot John F. Kennedy. And Jacqueline Kennedy shot Mark S. Goodman. And Mark S. Goodman shot Beverley Davis. And Beverley Davis shot James Willwerth. And James Willwerth shot John J. Austin. And John J. Austin shot Nancy Jalet. And Nancy Jalet shot Leah Shanks. And Leah Shanks shot Christopher Porterfield. And Christopher Porterfield shot Edward Hughes. And Edward Hughes shot Madeleine Berry. And Madeleine Berry shot Hilary Newman. And Hilary Newman shot James A. Linen. And James A. Linen shot James Keogh. And James Keogh shot Putney Westerfield. And Putney Westerfield shot Oliver S. Moore. And Oliver S. Moore shot James Wilde. And James Wilde shot John T. Elson. And John T. Elson shot Rosemary Funger. And Rosemary Funger shot Piri Halasz. And Piri Halasz shot William Mader. And William Mader shot John Larsen. And John Larsen shot Joy Howden. And Joy Howden shot Andria Hourwich. And Andria Hourwich shot Betty Sukyer. And Betty Sukyer shot Ingrid Krosch. And Ingrid Krosch shot John Koffend. And John Koffend shot Rodney Sheppard. And Rodney Sheppard shot Ruth Brine. And Ruth Brine shot Judy Mitnick. And Judy Mitnick shot Paul Hathaway. And Paul Hathaway shot Manon Gaulin. And Manon Gaulin shot Katherine Prager. And Katherine Prager shot Marie Gibbons. And Marie Gibbons shot James E. Broadhead. And James E. Broadhead shot Philip Stacks. And Philip Stacks shot Peter Babcox. And Peter Babcox shot Christopher T. Cory. And Christopher T. Cory shot Erwin Edleman. And Erwin Edleman shot William Forbis. And William Forbis shot Ingrid Carroll.

Peace be upon Allah
Peace be upon two rams gliding the sunset
Peace be upon music and peace
Peace be upon fires, may peace be upon him
Peace be upon brittle dark antelopes
Peace be upon the ranging palisade
Peace be upon calibration
Peace be upon whirring, and soft mantles
Let peace happen as a slander
Peace be upon cryptic vibrations, peace undulate through chunked hearts of mazes and flow through

Peace be upon hemorrhages and racked tall lands
Peace be upon fostering and the mental
Peace be upon stone harvest
Peace be upon magazine
Peace be upon mutation assiduity
Peace be upon fostering, and the stellar ovum climes
Peace be upon sepaled letters gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous Peace be upon clever little hearts and the king’s feast and his many supplicants
standing by like bright shields and the unbearable wilderness
Peace be upon the wooly mammouth, his stead and likeness
Peace be upon methamphetamine, storm and groat nape
Peace be upon the living chalk and the eternal turtle and the joining together of turtles in peace
Peace be upon the waist-high in wheat
Peace be upon sectioned unknown lavish tidings
Peace be upon Hercules, forgotten
Peace be upon the curtain hanging from the arch of the viaduct
Peace be upon the startling desirous buried foot, let peace
rain down upon him in great sludge rivers traveling under morning fresh mists
Peace be upon turtles, large and small
When I was young I kept small turtles,
I watched the turtles set themselves on rocks
I gave the turtles a lamp, and water, and small fragments of food
I cleaned the tank and stirred the water and fostered moisture
I watched over the turtles and by watching over them cared for them
There were two turtles that were sisters
Let peace rope out like a gooey schlong

Let peace be upon time, as it never happened and ineluctable equationing
Peace be upon calmness in the bodies’ dead faces
Peace be upon villages that surface and erode in
the ash hallway
Peace be upon fretted blood geysers
Peace be upon the shoulders menaced by the still and tedious mountains
Peace be upon sharpened up
peace be upon selections and selecting things and deselecting and the good warmth of laundry
The turtles were capable and I was capable
The turtles, free on the lawn humping across slivers of chalk
Thinking of the grass as world
Peace be upon the bell mint and the timeliness of the bell tone
That stupid, opulent selfish tone of the bell the struggle for pearls

2 15 12

Peace be upon pearls
Peace be upon the eternally sashed halves and deep blanks in the corrosion
Peace be upon crowded gifts of weapons, toil like a gilt shard
that is the others as strength crushed pills
One is here and the many are here in the environ of song
Peace be upon the lifting gradation
and being sorted in heights and being processed in heights and being
forgotten in a precocious native cinch Peace be upon none of us, it is so terrible and the oldest the oldest
sacred thought in the swaying sheen.
Peace be upon
Peace be upon reddish coiled open affirmation and the hills of man
Peace be upon emitting that never tangles, They are covered by coverings that might loosen
essentially. Peace upon though rising
The peace upon peace. Diaries. I don’t understand anything except Peace be upon the ingratiating riches that possessors delight in caressing
glad to lay out on blue tinted moss that is the gathering
and reform from a simple cell
Peace be upon a probe that wriggles
As with teachers when indeed they teach.
Peace be upon this dragged to death body
that we think might still live.
Peace be upon Peace be upon this tethers
Peace be upon this vial that open unshapes the world
Let violence have peace and that newer deterioration
Have also it a peace.
I totally.
Jagged and insidiously hued. Dark and just a few lifts.
Peace be upon household likening to shade
Peace be upon this sweet encasement
Peace be upon frontal dew
The bottoms are like a thriving vial
ocean and lashed and very real and
tumescent within Peace be upon
Upon peace
Upon peace
Upon peace
Upon peace
Upon peace
Upon peace

Hey Sampson, what’s the deal with chapbooks?
Funny, that’s how I start all my stand-up comedy gigs. It kills of course. So I wanted to start with a quote from James Haug’s Why I Like Chapbooks (Factory Hollow, 2011), who waxes lyrical “Chapbooks are stealth books./ They can slip under a door./ They don’t impose. They suggest./ They’re not one thing or another. They don’t take much time. They’re sly and easy to ignore. They imply, insinuate, inquire./ They don’t expect an answer./ They have a long history; they have no history.”

Chapbooks are the currency of underground poetry publishing, and tied to a sense of community and gift-ish economy, mostly run by poets who want to give something back and create a home for the work they believe in. Chapbooks are the new of the new, in the world of poetry most poets’ first publications come through chapbooks, so if you want to know the future (of poetry), read chapbooks. Chapbooks tend to be exciting and tied to a counter-culture because they provide a space for more experimental, esoteric or avant-garde work to be published that contests and university presses or bigger presses who may be more concerned with money wouldn’t take the risk on or didn’t think would sell…Chapbooks are like the opposite of money. Which is so money!

Chapbooks also have such a materiality and visceral physical life, because they are mostly handmade and handbound and come in all shapes, sizes (from Small Fires matchbooks to The Pines LP records) and textures imaginable (god I love texture!), made from old military uniforms, childhood blankets, prison cups, cardboard, vinyl, rubber, bolts, matchbooks, you name it. It is this handmade element and imagination and of course each chapbook’s limited nature that gives them such value, and ties them to history and an archival existence. Chapbooks are a link to the human that I think is more important than ever right now in the face of ever increasing digital media and publishing, Chapbooks are like Sarah Connor and her son (John Connor) facing the Terminators in Terminator 2: the hope of all mankind and the future of the human race lie in their hands. Also, they are perfect to read on the subway!

Oh, cool. Well, what year were they invented in?
I should probably just put in a link to Wikipedia here, but I actually learned a bit about the history of Chapbooks from Andrew Kenower of Trafficker Press at a panel he gave at last year’s Chapbook Festival. Basically back in the 1550s, and they were peddled by chapmen or “unruly people” and they formed “nearly the sole literature of the poor” and ranged from everything from collections of “bawdy verse” to religious ballads and political manifestos, and served as the only device of communication for the general public. So it seems we are culturally indebted to them, I’m thinking about the Dadaist manifestos, counter-culture publications of the 60s and underground punk era publications of the 70s, and more recently as I’ve been watching Occupy movements evolve, the way literature is passed around has that same feel–pamphlets, documents, manifestos, and poetry collections are everywhere, like unrecognized passports allowing each other access to our ideas and minds, and of course the People’s Library, which is a haven for these “chapbooks” and hopefully will live as an archive.

Is there anything that strikes you about the chapbook as a form that can’t be done in other forms (like regular books or say movies)?
From a reader’s perspective, I think the main thing is the chapbook form allows for a succinct singular and intimate reading experience in which the life of the poetry is tied to material form. The difference is with most books or full-length collections, one is not reading it in a single sitting, but with chapbooks you can read them fluidly from beginning to end without stopping, and like all great art forms, you are transformed after that process. Not that you can’t be with longer books, but mass produced books and longer collections tend to supersede and drown out the particular or local, also each time you stop and then pick those books up again to resume you are to some degrees a different person, so it is a different kind of experience.

From a writer’s perspective it also allows for the right measure or duration of an exploration of a subject, idea or theme which would often exhaust itself in a full-length collection or longer book. I mean just like poems can be long or short, why shouldn’t books of poetry, but we’ve got this limit in mainstream publishing like anything under 48 pages isn’t considered “book,” which is insane. Sometimes a sequence/series or collection just needs to be 9 or 15 or 34 pages, and that’s where the chapbook as a form and unit and means of publication is so crucial. George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker, Jack Spicer and the mimeograph world of the West Coast in the 50s and 60s all come to mind as poets who mastered the form or unit of what we call the chapbook.

From a publishing perspective there is also an obvious analogy with music, much like EP’s function in the music world, with chapbooks you get a taste of what a poet is doing, then see the same work re-contextualized or realigned when it appears in a full-length collection, which can create a new and dynamic life for the work functioning as part of a larger whole/idea/conversation/narrative.

How come Birds, LLC doesn’t do chapbooks?
We come from a chapbook background, Birds was born out of Kitchen Press (2005-2008), founded by Justin Marks, who published awesome chapbooks (with freakin’ spines) by exciting poets writing a new kind of poetry that was outside of the mainstream of what was being published, most of whom it was their first published collection: Mathias Svalina, Elisa Gabbert, Ana Bozicevic, Lilly Brown, Jon Leon, Joseph Massey, etc. Birds, LLC seemed like a natural progression of this, wanting to fill a similar gap we felt existed in publishing full-lengths books (which seemed to be mostly carbon copy contest books) for writers who we felt deserved full-length collections and a wider audience (especially women). However, we can only afford to publish 2 to 3 books a year and there are so many more poets we’d love to publish. So we will be doing chapbooks, starting with the re-release of Morgan Lucas Schuldt’s Kitchen Press chapbook Otherhow. Morgan was a fantastic poet, pushing the limits of form and language in an exciting and beautiful way while still remaining emotional and personal, who sadly passed away earlier this year from complications of cystic fibrosis at age 33. We hope the publication of the chapbook will expose Morgan’s work to a wider audience; it will be available for free online soon. I should also mention Flying Guillotine Press just put an exquisite new chapbook of Morgan’s that will be available at the Chapbook Festival.

Can there be fiction chapbooks?
O Yeah (Randy “Macho Man” Savage voice), and plays, art, criticism, and comics too (check out Bianca Stone’s ridiculously awesome comic “I WANT TO OPEN THE MOUTH GOD GAVE YOU BEAUTIFUL MUTANT” from Factory Hollow Press). Fiction and prose is growing in the chapbook world, which makes sense, because let’s face it, it’s not easy to get your first novel published. Rose Metal Press actually just had a collection of 5 prose/fiction chapbooks bound together. New Herring Press is another good example promoting prose publishing alternatives, focusing on fiction and criticism, publishing manifestos, stories collection, novel excerpts, stories in one long paragraph, etc. All of which will be at the 2012 Chapbook Festival.

Can chapbooks exist online?
Chapbooks can exist anywhere! Like a gift from heaven, UDP is unrolling or re-releasing their out-of-print chaps digitally as part of a growing chapbook archive, one could spend a lifetime here. Yes Yes Press is doing some dope work in this world, check out two of my favorite poetry aliens Ben Mirov and Eric Amling’s collaboration. Or check out this mind-blowing interactive collaboration between Ish Klien & Orra White Hitchcock in Triple Canopy. Some press called Pubishing Genius (I think you might like them), H_NGM_N has their portable document series which rocks. I’m sure there are a million others.

So what happens at the Chapbook Festival?
Murder. And a lot of literary duels and scores are settled. No, it’s really a family atmosphere, which centers around the 2-day bookfair with over 50 small presses (from as far away as Croatia) held in the CUNY Graduate Center, and provides (for free) the smallest of the small presses a chance to show their work to the public. Chapbooks rely on an underground means of distribution, you can’t just run out to Barnes & Noble and pick up the new John Coletti chapbook. The Chapbook Festival provides an opportunity for the public to interact with the publishers and the books (they are tactile and material after all and beg to be touched). Besides the bookfair there are also workshops, which kick off at The Center for Book Arts, on Binding/Print-making, followed by a panel discussion on Community & Publishing, then on Thursday & Friday we have marathon poetry readings “LUNCH POEMS” (with a killer line up) from noon to 3pm, curated by 6 local reading series, and at 3 and 5 we have free workshops (such as Digital Chapbooks) and panels (such as Why Chapbooks Saved My Life), and Thursday is capped off by one of our most exciting events to day, a panel with an all-star cast called The State of Translation Trends in Innovative Publishing, and Friday night the festival is capped off with the Poetry Society of America’s annual Chapbook fellow contest reading/celebration.

Tell me about your chapbook.
I believe all my chapbooks are out of print, but I can tell you they were all out from super rad presses, Greying Ghost Press, Horseless Press, Rope-a-Dope Press and Immaculate Disciples Press, actually there are a few copies of The Heart is Green from So Much Waiting but I’ll let Mike Young tell you about it.

Tell me about one of your favorite chapbooks?
ONE! That’s impossible, I can tell you about a few that changed the way I write or think about poetry. Elisa Gabbert’s Thanks for Sending the Engine from Kitchen Press is one of my all-time favorite chapbooks, and is the reason we did this amazing book, it was what I think of as a book of thinking, Matt Cook says “you write the way you talk, I just happen to talk real cool,” well I think we write the way we think, and Elisa Gabbert thinks real cool! Dana Ward’s Typing Wild Speech by Summer BF Press totally blew my mind and made me realize if you’re good at running downhill, well then run down hill as fast as fucking possible! You open it and freedom jumps out and slaps you in the face and then kisses you and tell you “Let’s go!” Chris Martin’s How To Write A Mistakest Poem by Brave Men Press is mindblowing, and I find myself like a spy mechanic trying to figure out how it works, how it ticks and how the hell I can steal from it. Shannon Burns’ Preserving The Old Way Of Life is just super cool and a chapbook I wish I had written, and makes me just wish I knew this awesome person who wrote it. Amy Lawless’s Elephants in Mourning by [Sic] out of Detroit just totally bowled me over emotionally, somehow she is able to take this form or seemingly conceptual technique of writing based on watching Youtube videos of elephants mourning their dead, and making it beautiful, funny, sad, and ultimately, utterly human. Guy Pettit’s Love me or Love me No 1 & Ben Kopel’s Because We Must made me write to them, which is to me, the highest praise for any poetry. Look what Corina Copp’s double chap from UDP did to Ron Silliman. And last but not least, the last chapbook I read had a huge impact on me and is the reason I wrote this interview, Lorine Niedecker’s Homeade Poems, which are an amazing facsimile of the actual handwritten book she assembled and sent to Cid Corman, which is beautifully designed and published the Lost & Found CUNY Poetics Document Imitative, and masterfully edited by John Harkey. It’s part of the upcoming Series III of Lost & Found which will be available soon, and a few individual copies will be at the Chapbook Festival so look for them!

How many chapbooks do you have? How do you organize them? What percentage of them have you read?
A couple hundred. Besides scattered all over the house, I organize them in this shelving unit, so you can scroll through. I’d say I’ve read about 92 percent.

What are some of your favorite types of binding chapbooks?
Japanese stab bound, besides just sounding bad ass they look beautiful.

If you were a chapbook, how would you be bound?
I’d probably just be stapled, like Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler.

Do you ever get chapbooks just because they look amazing, instead of because they might have amazing poems or whatever inside of them?
All the time. I’ll buy basically anything that’s produced out of Flying Object for example. But usually they turn out to be amazing inside as well, it’s sort of like magic.

Do you feel bad for chapbooks that came out in a limited edition of 75 copies 30 years ago and now no one knows they exist?
No, that’s part of their charm and genius, that esoteric, arcane nature of limited edition made objects, and just adds to their value and the thrill of discovering them. Besides, Nat Otting knows about all of them.

I have a chapbook of poems about Guided By Voices that I just wrote on the toilet, would Birds, LLC like to publish them?
If you could just send a video of you reading it on the toilet and post in the comments we’ll let you know …

I understand the necessity of addressing the issue of gender imbalance in the publishing industry–I understand that this is something that isn’t being talked about enough and needs to be talked about more, but part of me always wants to insist that the entire program that is feeding this dichotomy is where the real problem is. Positing the issue of statistical counts of biological Male vs. Female bodies in the publishing industry is excluding any outliers to this constructed binary, the opposition of Male to Female bodies inherently erasing any room for discussion of the gray area. That which lies between, or somewhere on a spectrum outside of this opposition, is completely eradicated.

Of course, statistical analysis of anything, where numbers reduce actualities and items must be rounded down or up because we as humans understand that .4 of a person doesn’t mean anything–this is a structural analysis that always seems to miss the forest for the trees. Even within the realm of women-bodied authored writing, there is (often) an insistent phallocentric pathos that leads the narrative, generally within the construct of heterosexual relationships (the penetrative function of the penis is ostensibly what we all actually mean when we use the term “patriarchy”). If we want this overwrought homogeneity of patriarchal rule to end we cannot simply count on the binary of female-bodied versus male-bodied authors divorced from their content to be the deciding factor that we focus on. This changes nothing. The function of phallocentrism immediately ignores any sort of feminist thought, immediately assuming the role of the prick as presence and the vagina as void/absence (though we must consider the fact that Kathy Acker is one of the few people I am aware of who was able to subvert the dominant paradigm while writing what is arguably phallocentric sex).

Of course just adjusting this in writing won’t actually affect publishing, shit needs to work from the inside out rather than the outside in–this is a larger problem, this is a core problem. The entire-fucking-world is phallocentric, and systematically this is oppressive–not just to women, either. If we focus less on the engendered binaries that serve as nothing but oppressive categories and more-so on how writing is functioning as a persuasive mode of discourse (which, let’s face it, it does), then perhaps progression can be made.

Let’s temporarily eschew the obvious fact that liberalism is terrible and nowhere near far enough left to accomplish anything ever. Let’s ignore the fact that radicalism is the only way to make the world better because I don’t want to derail from the point here–as much as I might desire your dick, I don’t want to hear about it. This is inherently, perhaps, part of the problem I find with what has recently been claimed as “feminist” writing by younger women, this idea that to be progressive means to become transparent and gain control by documenting sexual exploits in a public realm. The problem with this is that most–if not all–of this writing is still privileging the phallus.

I’ve always found it ironic the way the words “heterosexual” and “homosexual” work. I understand that on a basic semantic level this is simply positing “male and female” as heterogeneous and “male and male” as homogeneous, because generally, from both a level of experience and a level of, I don’t know, objectivity, it’s heterosexuals who are closed off to a wide array of sexual experiences, whereas homosexuals, more specifically anyone who identifies as queer (I’ll avoid going into the separatist insistence of certain realms of “gayness” that is as limited as a stringent heterosexuality), are those whose sexual lives live in the world of the heterogeneous–binary denying worlds of desire.

As much as the world would be a better place if everyone were in some capacity queer (this would remove this terrible binary and open up the world to a heterogeneous zone of pleasure), I’ll concede to the assumption that not everyone is built that way (but really, it’s arguable that 1200 years of a patriarchy is enough to brainwash even at the most subconscious level), and provide an example of a text that is primarily ‘heterosexual’ in its construction, while maintaining an insistent theme of anti-phallocentricism: Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye. If you haven’t read it, here’s a link to a zipped PDF of it.

Ok, now that you’ve read that, here’s a key passage from Allen S. Weiss’s brilliant essay “Demented, Deoedipalized, Deconstructed,” a reading of the story that follows up on Barthes’s canonical essay on the novella and incorporates Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus:

Throughout the entire narrative, through many transgressive (in the Foucauldian sense) acts, the phallus is never privileged in relation to sex-act. Bataille understood as early as 1928 that that shit was played out.

This system of thought transcends theory though, it moves well into practice. I feel fortunate in the fact that I live, in terms of fluid sexuality, in what has to be the most heterogeneous zones of desire in America, if not the world. San Francisco is filled with trans- and hybridly identified sexualities, gender pronouns are never obvious and a male body dressing up in women’s clothes (and vice versa) cannot simply be labeled a fetishistic transvestism (though that’s not to say the Bay is perfect, there are still factions of fascistic homosexuality dominating more higher-income zones of living).

I met a beautiful goddess-diva ever-so briefly one night in San Francisco, a tumblr icon from Chicago, the future in the best way. Mark was fiercely ready for the future, she was ready, but something happened and now she’s no longer with us. I’d like to quote one of her tumblr posts:

LECTIO IX: Beyond Novelty, Into The Uncanny
LECTIO X: Shame and the Texture of the Flesh
LECTIO XI: Artaud as Arrogance Without Ego
LECTIO XII: When Nothing is Real

****

LECTIO IX: BEYOND NOVELTY, INTO THE UNCANNY

Between being unemployed and now, employed but still broke from being unemployed, I’ve found myself spending a large amount of time on the internet. This manifests in regularly browsing tumblr, having 30-50 articles and essays open in tabs at any given time, constantly posting to both facebook and twitter, and crawling through youtube. This is a similar to experience to my life before I moved to the west coast; at my old job I had little responsibility and could entertain my working hours doing basically the same thing I’m doing now; the difference being that before I was getting paid for it. The other primary difference is that when I was online constantly at work I couldn’t participate in the efforts of anything involving sound. Now that I can, I find myself watching videos on youtube with much more regularity than ever before.

Oddly enough, or possibly because my external hard-drive is not constantly plugged into my computer due to not having a desk, most of the youtube videos I end up watching are music videos. I don’t always watch them, I often just use youtube as a sort of poor-man’s Spotify and use it to listen to whatever song it is I want to be hearing while I read something. Sometimes I pay attention though, and sometimes I find something spectacular.

This video is incredible. The youtube comments, it should come as no surprise, are either harmoniously reverent (likely coming from those who identify with “furry culture” themselves) or frustratingly angry, dismissive, belittling, irreverent, condescending, etc. The latter is, it could be said, the official position that ‘the internet’ as a whole has taken towards the internet’s first self-perpetuated fetish, the furry.

In my rather unlimited pantheon of perversity, I don’t find the consideration of “furries” itself worth dismissing, but often the subculture associated with the fetish maintains a sort of naive wo/man-child perspective/response/presentation of their interests. Or, more often, a sort of fandom lifestyle associated with a million different things that I, quite frankly, couldn’t give a shit about (from videogames to terrible anime, etc). I find the general perspective of internet culture, as a whole, sorely disappointing and myopic.

This video, for instance, strikes a particular tone that is hardly matched in many youtube videos aiming for a sense of unease. The video is not perfect, and the brief scenes near the end that feature WinFoxi & two “out of costume” humans breaks the spell the diegesis holds, but ultimately I’m willing to dismiss perfection in favor of atmosphere. While it would, ultimately, be easy to dismiss the video, to laugh at it, to make fun of how “retarded” people are, I think really it’s best to take the video at face-value and ignore the “reality” that the creator of the original clips, harvested and set to a beautiful pop-song, lives within.

The video is a brilliant example of the power of combinatory affect. On its own, the remix of W.I.T.’s “Hold Me, Touch Me” is a pretty great down-tempo, sexy pop song. It carries the tone that make bands like The Knife so striking; electro-dance that’s not inherently optimistic, a willingness to allow both space and minor chords to permeate the track. The footage chosen by youtube user Dennie88 seems to (perhaps unwittingly) complement this; WinFoxi is awkward in her fursuit, her movements are slightly off; we know she is human but she is not quite operating, physically, in the way we are accustomed to seeing humans move. Around a minute and a half into the video, when WinFoxi sits on the couch and the flower pot falls, there is more than a beat that’s skipped before she slowly, uncomfortably, turns her head and sees what has happened. She pulls the flowers out of the vase, holds them in her paw, and stares into the camera before a quick cut finds us, as viewers, seeing WinFoxi in the same position, this time without flower pots behind her.

The architecture of the house itself that the footage was shot in is rootedly spare; somewhat antiquated wallpapers, a remarkable absence of any evidence that the rooms are rooms that anyone lives in, anonymous looking prints of anonymous landscape paintings on a few of the walls. WinFoxi jumping up and down on the bed almost robotically, the soulless expression of the bear-mask staring, without wavering, into the camera.

The aesthetics of fetishism are fascinating to me because what turns some people on ends up making other people fully uncomfortable, even divorced from a sexual context. There is a power in this, because it considers the fetish in terms of a zone of affect instead of a particular sexual fascination. This is zone ripe for exploration: the universe of the fetish decontextualized.

****

LECTIO X: SHAME AND THE TEXTURE OF THE FLESH

Critics are, apparently, raving about the new Steve McQueen film, Shame. It would be a farce to consider my initial interest in seeing the film as anything beyond the fragment “Michael Fassbender naked.” Upon seeing it tonight I will concede that it’s an interesting film; I’d be hard pressed to agree that it’s “provocative” or “compelling,” as the critics that are using those adjectives seem hung-up on its human drama element. Artistic desperation within the guise of sexual decadence is always something those with a relatively present, yet not “popular,” voice like to insist is inherently powerful.

However, for me at least, the narrative of the film is almost a moot point, and I wonder if director McQueen doesn’t agree with this himself. Coming from a more video-art based background, his film seems to be more of an aesthetic feast, paying lip service to the idea that cinema is not inherently a narrative form, but rather one of sight, of movement.

I was reminded, while watching the film, of a quote from Martine Beugnet’s book Cinema and Sensation:

It’s not perfect, and it seems like McQueen is still holding on to antiquated story-devices like “psychology” and cliché narrative turns to continue to Oscar-bait his audience, but there are moments where what matters more are the haptic images on the screen. There is very little dialog in the movie, a move that I always find beautiful, and there are long scenes with relatively banal action, punctuated by Brandon’s (Fassbender’s) explosively entropic sexuality.

It was refreshing, one could say, to see a relatively acclaimed and noted film willing to go at least as far in this direction as Shame does. It’s certainly not as beautifully prescient as Dieutre’s Leçons de ténèbres, and absolutely not as next-level as any of Grandrieux’s masterworks, but there are signs that maybe cinema is finally pushing itself towards Artaud’s third cinema.

****

LECTIO XI: ARTAUD AS ARROGANCE WITHOUT EGO

As I find myself once again re-reading Antonin Artaud’s letters to and from Jacques Rivière, I can’t help but want to consider the implications of a spurned submitter sending the type of letters to a potential editor in our current literary zeitgeist. Artaud spurns Rivière’s rejection, ostensibly tells him that his rejection is ridiculous. Often editors of small presses & literary mags will lament the angry responses they get from authors whose work they have decided not to publish, considering it an arrogant move, a futile sense of entitlement.

Had Rivière taken that stance, who knows what would have happened to the entire body of work that Artaud produced in his tortured life. Artaud’s insistence, his detailed explanations of his unstable mental state, are what end up leading to his first notable publications; of his first introduction to a larger world of letters. Artaud’s stubbornness, his belief in his own work, is why we now know him as the genius he was.

As an editor, I guess I’ve been lucky in that I’ve never received an embittered response from a rejected writer. I’m not sure how I would deal with it if I did. It’s unlikely that I would take the Rivière route of actually dialoging and engaging in the angry person’s words; realistically I’d probably just ignore it and never respond. No skin off my ass. But, because, perhaps, I can’t help but invent dramatic parallels between the culture I’m obsessed with and the reality of the future, I do wonder if someone who was Artaud in a past life is suffering this same challenge, writing brilliance and then getting his work regularly rejected, writing letters to editors who refuse to humor him or her. Is this the dream of the insisted brilliance every writer thinks they have? Are we too saturated at this point to consider this? The outsider artist, in a traditional sense, cannot exist while alive. Henry Darger is brilliant precisely within the enigma of his life; his absolute disinterest in his work existing for anyone other than his self. Artaud wanted his voice in the world, but he understood that it wasn’t for himself. This is wherein the difference can be found.

****

LECTIO XII: WHEN NOTHING IS REAL

Reality hovers. I don’t mean that reality is absent, rather, there can be a presence of nothing. I can walk down a dark industrial street at night while Drake plays on my headphones and not realize I’ve already walked the four blocks to where I need to turn. Sit on the front porch and chain-smoke until you’re so chilled by a dry air that you’re violently shaking.

The people all around you, signifiers of relationships, parts of a whole, how can you exist unfragmented in the 21st century, why would you even want to. Compartmentalize your life so it can start to make sense. But it doesn’t. Does it matter how many people you and your significant other take home to get naked with? In the morning everyone else is gone. Nobody came so there was no emotional connection. Is come a true sign of passion?

The moon eclipsed. A tarot reading that insists your hermitage is necessary, a required contingency of your life’s trajectory. The cards don’t lie, they always say. Sitting on the green cloth while you all sit on the bed. You feel comfortable and warm. Everything makes sense.

Write a note in your diary in jest and find out a month later that you’ve accurately written your future. Understand that this is a hard talent to hold, that it’s been happening for over a year and you still haven’t mastered it. Stare into space, come into a paper tissue, never fall asleep before three am. Sleep until noon. Always keep Notepad open on your desktop because otherwise you forget everything.

Balance isolation with couplehood with the society life. Find yourself, remember that.

(Text taken from I’m Full of Byars: James Lee Byars – A Homage, p. 144)

So I would like to offer up the term gulogulo. It’s a clunky word, I know, but so is the greasy sect it describes. It can easily be modified to wield as an adjective, e.g., “I just saw some gulogulous assclown punch a flower child in the face.” Gulogulo evokes the tyranny of the Gulag, the brutality of a masculinized Caligula, the monstrosity of the half-man, half-snake G.I. Joe villain Globulus (who gets his name from globule, a particle, often of fat, or, in astronomy, “a small dark cloud of gas and dust seen against a brighter background”); but most importantly it is a compound version of gulo gulo, a fun way to say wolverine. Gulo is latin for glutton, and in many parts of Europe wolverines are commonly known as gluttons — like fierce-ass war pigs.

What-a-dick

There is even a German board game called “Gulo Gulo,” wherein:

Each player is a Gulo, or wolverine, trying to rescue a baby Gulo who got caught by the swamp vulture whose eggs it was trying to steal. Unfortunately for the baby Gulo, all the adult Gulos are distracted by all the delicious swamp vulture eggs, and it has to wait very, very patiently as the adults constantly trip the very, very sensitive “egg alarm” rigged by the vulture to scare off the pesky Gulos.

In this game you are apparently playing as the villainous nature of corporate greed, gulogulocity. And the vulture, whom we can think of as the 99%, is doing its job to protect the eggs. For me this game is symbolic of the media’s basic view of the situation: they see as clearly as anyone what is going on, but they are placed in a position that forces them to see gulogulodom as an unfortunate but necessary function of the world. From their view, if the gulo doesn’t win, where will they get their eggs?

The essential mechanic of the game is to try to pull an egg of a particular color and move to a tile of that color on the linear path toward the bowl, and the little stack of tiles hiding the baby Gulo tile. If you set off the alarm, or knock any eggs out of the bowl, your Gulo is sent back to the previous tile of the attempted color. If there’s no such tile, then back to the start he goes!

I don’t think we will ever see the end of gulogulocity (as in G.I. Joe, Cobra always comes back for more), nor can we go back to the way things were before these gulogulous individuals gained power. The gulogulo is really nothing new; it has always been around. But it took way too long for the egg alarm to go off. And now we have to deal with a ferocious bunch of gulogulos, the claws of which manifest as the long arm of the law. No, I’m sorry to say, gulogulo is here to stay. But at least now we know more about it, at least now we are aware that it exists, because you can’t skim off the fat you can’t see.

I DECLARE WAR ON REALISM, I DECLARE WAR ON A WORN-OUT JOY, I DECLARE WAR ON EVERYTHING.

SOMETIMES YOU GET DRUNK EVERY NIGHT FOR TWO WEEKS, SOMETIMES YOU MAKE OUT WITH A DUDE IN A CAB AND THEN YOU END UP DOING DRUGS AND PULLING YOUR DICK OUT IN A BAR YOU’VE NEVER BEEN TO BEFORE, SOMETIMES YOU BUY MORE WHISKEY AND GO BACK TO YOUR PLACE WHERE YOU FUCK AROUND WITH THE DUDE IN YOUR LOFT WHILE YOUR ROOMMATE’S FRIEND SNORES ON THE COUCH BENEATH YOU, SOMETIMES YOU DON’T GO HOME FOR 36 HOURS, SOMETIMES YOU FORGET THAT YOU HAVE THINGS TO DO OTHER THAN GOING TO WORK AND GETTING DRUNK & LAID, SOMETIMES YOU REALIZE YOU HAVE THE CAPACITY TO MANIFEST THE FUTURE SIMPLY BY MAKING THE DECLARATION, SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO REALIZE THAT POP MUSICK IS A FUTURE THAT WE’RE ALL AFRAID OF, AND THE POP MUSIC THE LITERATI ARE NOT AFRAID OF IS ONLY FALSE, SOMETIMES WE ALL KNOW THAT THE WORLD IS ALREADY OVER AND FEEL GREAT ABOUT IT, HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT THIS THING CALLED CAPITALISM? IT’S STUPID. THERE’S A BUNCH OF PEOPLE WHO WANT TO TELL YOU WHY IT’S STUPID, MAYBE YOU SHOULD LISTEN, SOMETIMES YOU KNOW THERE’S FINALLY A CLASS WAR GOING ON AND LIFE STARTS TO MAKE SENSE FOR THE FIRST TIME, SOMETIMES YOU WAKE UP NEXT TO SOMEBODY AND YOU DON’T REMEMBER THEIR NAME, SOMETIMES YOUR BEST FRIENDS SEND YOU THE BEST TEXT MESSAGES YOU’VE EVER READ IN YOUR LIFE, EVERYTHING IS SURPRISING, SOMETIMES WHAT LIFE AMOUNTS TO IS NOTHING BEYOND WHAT YOU CAN REMEMBER, SOMETIMES WHAT LIFE AMOUNTS TO IS NOTHING BEYOND WHAT YOU’VE FORGOTTEN AND YOU FEEL GREAT ABOUT IT.

SOMETIMES YOU JUST DON’T DO ANYTHING, SOMETIMES YOU TRY TO MAKE PANCAKES AND YOU USE BAKING SODA INSTEAD OF BAKING POWDER AND THEY TASTE LIKE POISON, SOMETIMES YOU READ NICK LAND ESSAYS ON THE BUS AND YOU ACTUALLY LAUGH OUT LOUD, SOMETIMES YOU KEEP FORGETTING TO DOWNLOAD A PDF OF NIETSZCHE’S BIRTH OF TRAGEDY SO YOU CAN PUT IT ON YOUR PHONE TO READ WHILE YOU DRINK ALONE AT THE BAR, SOMETIMES YOU FORGET ABOUT LITERATURE COMPLETELY BECAUSE YOU’RE TOO BUSY FUCKING WITH SOME CONCEPTUAL EXPERIMENT THAT ASSUAGES YOU OF ALL MORALITY OR GUILT, SOMETIMES THIS MAKES MORE SENSE THAN ANYTHING YOU’VE WRITTEN OR READ, EVER.

LADY GAGA IS A FACADE.

LIFE IS ONLY FLOATING. FAME IS IRRELEVANT. STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING. MOMENTUM AS CONTRAST TO REALITY. WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? WE CAN GO ANYWHERE WE WANT TO. THE WHOLE WORLD NEEDS TO DIE BEFORE WE CAN REST.

Darrell’s talk was fantastic, of course, a personal narrative lauding his relationship with books, with art, how these things are working, with people. The distance between D-L’s performative aura and his mode-of-everyday-being always catches me off guard, but it’s good, it’s professional. Darrell’s story was lovely, of course. Stories I had heard part of before, stories that featured the artist Jennifer Locke who I was sitting next to, who hugs me every time she sees me, stories about Raymond Carver, stories about Stockton, CA. Well, one story, really, with all of these.

Colter was second, and there was a sort of beautiful disorientation to it. There was no performative aspect here, there was basically only stuttering and a power-point presentation of some of his own work. However there was a winding sense of thought that, due perhaps to how much more space was left open, found me thinking more about ideas that are, perhaps, tangential to the work. The space also left my wanting the talk to be a discussion, but I kept my mouth shut.

At one point a work was presented that was a drawing of a cell-phone photo that Colter’s boyfriend had sent him of a snapshot from Bas Jan Ader’s “I’m Searchin’,” part of Ader’s In Search of the Miraculous. At the specific revelatory moment of sentimentality, I fell completely in love and fugued into the daydream of a conceptual artist boyfriend who couldn’t watch I’m Too Sad To Tell You without crying himself. How it would be a perfect combination of his praxis to my theory. A fit. My day dream ended, of course, and I remembered how mostly I actually think relationships are terrible and how nothing in the world can ever fit into my headland. But, then, just as I was returning to earth, Felix Gonzales-Torres’s words arrived:

Again and again I can’t help but find myself thrust into this theory of a constructed reality: beyond theory, an active construction of reality. This is what everything I ever think about leads to: if you’re unhappy in the world, make a new world. This is what I mean when I say I don’t understand depression, even if I could say that I’ve found myself depressed: I have to remove the stasis and thrust myself into confusion until I find myself making something new. Destroy the world, it’s not worth it, then make a new one.

I mean this literally of course. I’m not speaking in the abstract here.

“It’s exactly the same thing but it’s better because it’s right now.” This sentiment is the answer, this is how reality metes with a constructed reality: It’s exactly the same thing but it’s better because it’s right now. I ended the world by quitting my job and moving across the country with absolutely no plan. I currently inhabit the reality I constructed. This destroyed my ego and gave me a new one. I no longer fear the first-person pronoun when I write about thought. I love my body, I love its presence, and it will always be here. I can’t imagine removing the self.

But the self is not the point. I mentioned an insistent egotism in my last post, an idea that I can only write for myself. That anyone can only write for themself. This is true. Of course it is. But this truth is not a scapegoat. It’s not an excuse. I am my art but I am not my art but I am my art but I am not a person I am an event. Fuck this word subjectivity I’m too busy doing what God could never both finishing. You know, I’m making reality here.

After the artist talk I went to the bar with the artists and the curators and some friends. I drank two whiskey-sodas, half of the beer D-L had no desire to finish, and then, out of curiosity of novelty, I drank two “Sofias,” the Sofia Coppola “champagne in a can.” The first one that came was delivered to me already poured in a glass. The can was absent, I was crushed. But the drink was good, so I ordered another, this time insisting that I needed the drink to come in the can.

I live in a world where champagne in a can exists and that makes life great.

Because life is great I ended up not having to pay for my drinks, life won again, and I stumbled back to the house where I’m currently crashing on the couch to find my roommates preparing (i.e. putting their costumes together) to go out. Their energy gave me a second wind, despite the fact that I had woken up at 6am to go to my shitty seasonal retail job. I put on a costume and drank some vodka mixed with Redbull & Orangina and was ready to go. I hopped on a bike and we screamed and laughed on the way to a lesbian bar where I knew I had no chance of getting laid. Drank more because it’s Halloween and life is exciting. Stopped to get nachos on the way home, fell asleep on my couch and woke up 8 hours later to sunlight streaming through the window.

All excerpted text from Interview with Felix Gonzalez-Torres by Robert Storr