The narrator of Mark Richard’s new memoir House of Prayer No. 2 sees his past self in a fairly distant third person which has access to the interior life of the past self but which more often treats him as though we are looking at him as a clinical specimen:

“He won’t learn, he doesn’t learn, he can’t learn, the teachers tell the mother. He talks back to the teachers, tries to correct their speech. He was rude to kind Mr. Clary when he came to show the class some magic tricks. You better get him tested. He might be retarded. And he runs funny.” READ MORE >

Jacob Wren’s latest book, Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed, is pretty awesome and you should know about it. It came out last year from Pedlar Press and is a really fun read. He is also the author of Families Are Formed Through Copulation, a book that is supposed to convince you not to have children. I sent Jacob a 10 sentences assignment and he obliged. Remember 10 sentences? I don’t know, maybe you don’t since it has been a while. (After the jump there is a short interview with Jacob, also.) Enjoy.

1. A sentence that involves poison, an emdash and at least five prepositional phrases.

About to take poison, several pretentious thoughts lash through my mind: that life is a betrayal against which there is no remedy, like this cyanide I ordered on line, looking out the window then as I continue to do now, where little can be seen apart from a bird, a car, a dog – the dog is asleep on his bed (but of course the dog is not asleep on his bed, this is simply one of the examples I found when I googled ‘prepositional phrases’) and, realizing I am unsure whether or not I have reached five, I take the poison, still watching the bird and the car upon which no further grammatical games will be played.

2. A one-sentence answer to a question the speaker would rather not talk about but is tired and answers anyway.

No, I didn’t masturbate yesterday and am not masturbating right now as I type this.

3. A one-line ode to the last inanimate object that you touched that is not your computer.

I read too many books, they are the only objects that give me genuine pleasure, but it is a pleasure tinged with melancholy, the melancholy of being more than a little sick with life.

4.A sentence that someone might call ‘deranged’ which includes the word ‘omelet’ and ‘hallucination.’

Fucking an omelet is, technically, not a criminal act, I thought as I continued to pound away, also wondering if I should have let it cool first, howling in pain but, like so many things in life, unable to stop, just fucking and fucking and fucking, the pain surging through every molecule of my body to the point where I realized I might, at any moment, pass out, and began to wonder if me, the omelet, everything that surrounded us, was merely a hallucination. READ MORE >

First the room was black, and it had been black for a while. You and your date were busy with an app, or lowering approximate jumbled tiers of popcorn with five buttered tips and a kernel up in your molar’s business. Then there is light, a green neon swamp light, a swamp from which we crawled a long time ago. And it’s not me getting biblical on your ass, which might have been at the movies today. There were stories, bad stories to be told, told, told, told, told — keep looking at told until it looks told; it’s not a word really. Told. I told you you and your date are twenty dollars and two hours down. And this is all we were able to come up with for one another, t-telling b-bad s-stories like some s-studdering re: tard. Regarding tards, it’s spelt turds.

You and your date I know what you d-do. You watch a “Cannes” movie and grab a fallafel or burrito, some aluminum bomb ’bout to pregnate your belly with someone else’s economically collapsed culture. I know what y-you g-guys do. You g-go back to your mutual or respective apartment(s) — depending on who said or didn’t say I love you first or last — and you two act out this life in front of you. There’s the fridge, go grab a beer to wash down the sodium and sole eyelash. There’s the cat comin’ round getting all slutty with the edge of the chair leg, preferring it over yours. You love something that shits in a box with an asshole that is always saying hello. Now someone please slip on a three-week old issue of The Economist and break their ankle. No ER for you you freelancing fuck. Fall asleep tonight the dreams behind the black behind your eyes is a green screen holding its breath for the CGI of a better life, once the executive producer says okay.

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