The Hunger-Ground

beginning of a short story

2011-10-21T10:37:00.001-07:00

That morning a frost grew over every surface as if recasting the city as an immobile singularity. It spread within the pavement’s interstices and then grew to fuzz the slick tongue of road that tripped around the guttural vowels of vehicular intercourse. Two cars with cataract windows sparkled at each other pleasantly while intimately embraced. The frost climbed stalks of grass (Wherever stalks of grass could be found) and then delicately monkey barred across their tops knitting loaves of fibrous ice that rose under a purely representational sun. It spread over the tramps that snored in the graveyards, eyelashes flaked and matted the chips of ice gnashed together in their suppressed dreams. These tramps were mineralised, stone lions, slumbering Churchless gargoyles titled with misnomers under tablets that declared loves lost and life’s shorthanded achievement.
The tramps slept atop the graves as if to proclaim against this demarcation of sorrow and remembrance or else they were its keepers. Their bearded mouths soaked and pulpy emitted a high whistling which signalled the intrusion of need and pain into their individual consciousness though they shared it collectively with coughs that opened tunnels between them.
During the night one of the chorus had left his post in this life leaving behind a history unconsummated by deed or love. The rest discovered Jarek’s death through the creation of a smaller, tighter circle, an ethics of subtraction operated through a missing bracket of shoulders and one less hand reaching out during the round of dregs from a bottle that was filled mostly with spit and dew.
Jarek lay in a rock shaped contour of ice parcelled within several jackets that gave his body a false impression of robustness. They unzipped each jacket in turn and by the end they lay around him like flanks of meat neatly severed from the bone and underneath them a gristly rotted through core, soft bones cold and bruised and vaguely sluggish with two remorseless eyes like a fish comprehending the sky for the first time. This was all that was left.
They began to shuffle him out of each jacket finding him as co-operative in death as ever.
They removed his boots and trousers, even his undershirt. Jarek lay in the white of the morning naked as a new born, vegetation for the grave.

***

Chris Stroud sat at his table, which was a mess of things both illegal and inadvisable in the quantities with which it had accumulated and dispersed during the course of the evening so that the grain of the table was thick with paste and dribbled on with dark rum. Histories of transport lay everywhere and it was better not to try and think of time or consequence.
Stroud lit a cigarette.
His life was, he supposed, a success. He was on television. He was rubble-double, a suited amorphous form syllabic with strategic nonsense. Rubble-double’s world was a primary coloured square in the midst of a woods that friends and strangers who would become friends (there was so little difference between them there) emerged from. Rubble-double
A wake of smoke came drifting up and was disturbed by a heavy breath that was part sigh, part congestive problem.
He was able at this hour to see in that crowded filth his entire life, to build his history out of the butts and soured alcohol.
He extracted the cigarette and hastened it. The woman on the sofa walked across the room and kissed him on the lips. She drew back with a look of distaste and touched her temples with finned fingers.
I thought you were someone else, she said. Stroud felt the urge to say something pithy but there was nothing in him or the situation that didn’t seem stale so he lit another cigarette and looked up at her.
We draft love through our lips from birth to death but rarely confer to another what we take. The woman was fetching her clothes. She moved around the room as if
Age seven the child wanted to be an astronaut. In all of his games the astronaut would be sent tumbling through space, his cord to the spaceship severed.
Later he would feel the horror implicit in this daydream and at its edges a vague sexual thrill as his, though not always his (sometimes the leotard wearing authoritarian voiced cat lady in his favourite cartoon), imagined body got ate up by the sun.
Able at ten years old to imagine the vague surge of himself in the sun.
At eleven searching for a comprehension of how miniscule the flame encased body would appear, how distant from another surface

LAWRENCE

2010-10-12T15:31:00.000-07:00

- What was all the more surprising is that I should have felt like this at all, given my own history. I know how it feels to compress your life into any one action, for that one action to needle through all other moments of action, and the moments around action, till a pin prick of light, at an unknowable distance, in all the darkness of your experiential time arrives and then, over the years, slowly dulls, imperceptibly at first, so that where it was once static and constant in the narrowness of it’s reach it fades into a vaguely misshapen patch, a weak cast of glow from a cataract light. And then, eventually, there is truly nothing there, a nothing you would never have been aware of had it not been for that tiny glimmer. There is nothing but you there within yourself, that is not yourself, that is coming apart perpetually in its nothingness. There is absolutely nothing unless you have money and then there is still nothing but more of it except the nothing is religiously encrypted within objects that do not change and which build up around you so that you might come to mean something in them.

1982

2010-08-30T02:55:00.001-07:00

The James Burke case has been officially closed due to departmental disinterest/lack of evidence. Richard Fort’s superiors are more interested in finding ways to scatter the pigeons collecting around the redevelopment site on the cliffs. “Pigeons” being the local police term for teenagers because they’re oft to leave their shit everywhere.
Richard Fort is not into scattering pigeons. Richard Fort is on emotional leave. Thinking of the phrase ‘emotional leave’ he begins to laugh. It is the drink laughing. The trunk of his car is filled with lamps, books, a pillow, clothes etc. All he could scoop from the pavement three days ago when he returned home to find his wife auditing him from her life.
He had wanted to tell her then that he couldn’t be written off so easily, had wanted to shout something inflammatory, to tell her what a bitch she was and always had been but no words had come, or could have come, through a throat long stemmed and rapidly closing. His throat then resembling a tight sourly perfumed bud hardened into a shine; clutched down the garden path.
He reached the meagre offering left on the front porch. His clothes alone ridged under the doorbell, easily visible from the car. The personal not-so-special effects of a life split in ways seemingly too menial to count, a life so many times removed he had come to doubt his relation to it
He had thought, predictably, of putting a match to it all, of walking away. Saw the house sealed up in smoke, great bipedal arms of black pan-handling the sky, dipping with the sun till the stars showed through. Then the smoke walking bow legged, cowboy style, fading into the morning. This after it’d reached down her throat, held her last breath. The thought had saddened him. He imagined this last breath kidney shaped, packed into her body, ready for heavenly transport.
He looked down again at the scalped little pile. His thoughts were horrible, no wonder. He had wanted to speak to her then, his eyes widening softly and deliberately as he spoke. He would have told her he’d noticed the lamp. The way it had cracked. How it evidently hadn’t been thrown in anger. How he didn’t know what to do with this impression, in fact had never known what to do with his impressions except in accusation; who, after all, in life really could? His eyes would have been huge, pleading. In this way he would have hoped to contain her. In them she would not even know how he held her. The dream had come out in a groan.
He’d lurched over the pile, tolled into the corner. The brick of the house exfoliating his forehead with a mother’s skull polishing touch. He was drunk. He had been driving. Even though he was drunk he was self conscious about this fact. He made garbled phone calls from the driver’s seat to friends explaining the situation he was in, the pickle of it. The air from their shaking heads swilled in the phone. They called him an idiot or worse and hung up. He remembers it had felt like excitement.
He examined the pile from this new angle. He wished he was Humphrey Bogart but it broke him.
On top of this hill of beans, the only evidence of intent: A photograph weighted down. This chosen; no doubt. Still something hurtful beyond the intended and unavoidable hurt of it: The band of her wedding ring sat there, telescoping his head, on a picture of them, kiss-feigned, on their wedding day. He had left quietly after several, stumbling, trips to the car.

HENRY'S MOTHER

2010-08-25T07:26:00.000-07:00

- Bye Bye Miss American Pie went to get some levy but the levy was why and I started singing why? Why? Miss American Pie….

That is not quite right.
Perhaps the tune is off or the words wronged.
It has been known for words to be off, melodies to wonk. It is something like prayer.

They might of course both be off and on simultaneously or even on and off at different points. These no doubt creating rare moments of synthesis, ones oddly enriched by accident but contextualised in their overall tendency towards fault ergo beautiful and wrong; a religious sentiment.

Or perhaps it is not the melody or the lyrics or the combination thereof but the manner in which I perceive them that is the problem. This thought not as specifying as I’d first hoped. I meant, perhaps, that I cannot give and receive at once, that there is something lost in my body’s insulation, in the technology of my added distance, soundproofed against the future as it is in so many ways already.
I have always meant to ask about the acoustics of my face. Wanted to know about, take meetings on, further modifications and discuss ramifications thereof etc.

I talk Lawrence when I’m nervous

My son is back for my daughter. Well, step daughter. Let’s not be dramatic.
I feel like a thermometers casing, an inner blush of blood rising to my bulbed head while the outside remains glassily pristine.

One son has returned. Not so much prodigally as retrogressively. I think he feels a sense of purpose. He might kill his step-father. Certainly he has mentioned it before.

I can’t stop telling myself this joke:
Two sons, a husband and god walk into a life. They walk back out again. Not in that order.

There’s a longer version that’s better.

Two sons, a husband and god walk into a life. They walk back out again. You walk after them. People come to where you are and expect you to be there. Another man comes and finds you. He doesn’t sell you for money but to it. The existence you thought gave up immortality becomes non-bio degradable.
Laugh? I nearly cried.

Boom, boom.

Telling jokes well has never run in our family. I would like to have reconstructive memory work done. A collective groan? And I had thought that a witticism.

Even as a child Henry always pulled punches.

I said to him, when I was her that ‘sometimes I am as I appear’. That was never true then. I was never myself till now. When I started living in the now by blasting myself inside out I was surprised how few people knew my shell. Being object, is that right do I mean abject? No object, certainly. Being object I belonged to the present that is to say out of time. I kept a portion of my mind like a memento.

Still you have to ask yourself, what point living in the now if you’re the only one there? The thing about the now is that it’s unsustainable; the thing about the now is that it is in ruins.

That night in the billiard room while mastering a tumbler in which my contact lens had fallen and was floating near invisible atop the brimming vodka’s near slopped surface, about which people later in the evening would make devastating witticisms about qua ‘could I see out of the bottom of the glass’ and later ‘what was it like seeing myself like that’, when the doctor surprised my rear end with the flat of his hand. I have never quite recovered, I think. I remember it clearly.
He held my bottom up, angled me towards the mirror, sliding his other cupped hand under a slat of breast. I turned to kiss him. He retreated sharply preferring to consider my pursed lips with a foreign intensity. At first, once opening my mouth and finding nothing in it, I supposed myself flattered. I moved towards him again.

He held my mouth with his hand.

He called my new husband, who will always be my new husband just as I am always new and all replacements are new and I believe must always remain so in relation to the original if true fidelity is ever to be anything but a dream, and this spanish doctor he never once took his eyes off of me. What I mean is around me, presuming the ‘me’ that I mean

-Look at this Lawrence.

He said as Lawrence entered through the door.

I tried to speak, excuse myself but his fingers squeezed my cheeks into my mouth and through my lips it felt. His other hand was still where it was.

- I see, Lawrence said.

- But do you? The doctor said, releasing me. Gravity resumed its drone, vibrating inconsiderably in plain view along the proposed axis of my arse.

The doctor thrust his tan hand down his tan trousers and pulled out a permanent marker. He made several passes at my body with it. The face here included qua the body.
Rapier passes these but barely sexual, one would have to be highly specialised.
The dark slashes showed where I might get put up. I turned to see an awful Victorian clown crying in the mirror. The markings of age blacked out like a victim or criminal. A little of both in my eyes.

- I can’t quite see it, Lawrence said frowning

Other people, high society people, wandered back in.
They were all drunk too. The doctor began circling his hands around the various targeted areas of my superfluity like a leotard girl displaying prizes in one of my game-shows. Did I mention my mouth was still open, shocked. Perhaps it proved inspirational to the doctor in later years. Certainly he did well to recreate it.

- I see it now. I see it all,

Lawrence saying this at first with a suggestion of thought in his voice then repeating it hysterically as high society continued crowding in.

High Society began falutin in my general direction as high society is wont to do. Of course I was squinting at their faces, which didn’t help, trying to explain about my contact lens and shivering intensely though I was fully dressed and dry.
That night in the billiard room… I never quite recovered, I think. It had been a slippery slope nonetheless. I’d never quite appreciated God’s reticence so before. Still it was too late for all that. I had thought myself well prepared for suffering but I did not want to be left alone. I shirked it, let it shuck me. It was a shock I rendered all too real. My face, of course is now constantly surprised and surprising, I believe my eyes can qualify how exhausting that is.
The laughter, I had not heard it again since tonight when the ice cold water hit the poor inn keeper in the crotch. No doubt I appeared as ever.

Forgive me barkeep if I didn’t attempt even a saddened smile, doubtless you’ve heard the rumours. I started them after all.

You get taught ‘be yourself’. I can’t be myself with all these people everywhere. I can’t even think the same things if there’s someone else around. I vacate. This voice is a squatter repossessing me when I am alone. In public it chains around me in hopeless protest. Let it be bulldozed, I am tired of the empty shoves of interiority. Whatever the sea contains it’s still mostly empty or rather so full and plain-sighted that it is transparently itself. Except only its shallow fringes are ever clear sighted.

Is that why this happened?

Those boys, that book, I gave them my son. They said that it said he had to go with them. I didn’t know what to say as usual. Jude went to them. They were ‘old’ friends it would appear. One said they’d bring him back, the other didn’t say anything at all.
They both said
- Henry will be coming back soon. I wouldn’t tell him about this. How would it look for you?

This accurately paraphrased. Three days in my memory. I was still seated, still holding a magazine, crumbs of biscuit trowelled onto wetted forefinger, when they closed the door. I had barely moved. I remember the laminate of the pages and grit of garibaldi dimming with the sun when they left. That day I finally lost all feeling. The room was quiet with hushed shock. I flipped the glossy pages a little to feel less alone. They fanned an arm, cooled the tears splashing my wrists and made me realise that they, the tears, were there, that this was happening.
Where are my sons? Where is my child?
I see the house before me and my son dragging my stepdaughter up the gravel driveway. He rummages her body for keys. I stop. Lawrence won’t be home. He is rarely home now. The lights go on. I turn around, walk towards the beach. A gust of wind, is that the rain flowing against me?

2010-07-14T13:45:00.000-07:00

(1982)

Richard Fort has landed on the Lighthouse’s island. Helene is in James Burke’s ‘room’.
Helene is smoothing the creases out of James Burke’s bed absently with the back of her hand, a blind sadness drawing her up through its syringe. These movements of hand the flopped after of its pull.
Richard Fort vomits into the surf. His face stretched white and lashed red, his stomach a trampoline bombarded with clowns. A lone noodle affixes itself to a rock, strands into a question mark. A second later and it’s lashed apart. He continues to extinguish himself in the sea.
Helene stands, leaves an egg shaped imprint of buttock on the duvet. This she fails to smooth. Helene standing, not knowing what to do. She wonders is this liquid body of feeling akin to sleep walking? And, might she not be sleepwalking now? The rain began as she rowed. Her arms levered the oars against the water and the heavens opened. She could barely make out the lighthouse’s base. In the end the rays of police tape guided the way.
He vomits into the surf again. Richard Fort is considering going home, well, not home as such, that’s impossible, well not impossible, but unreasonable. It is raining hard, the kind of rain that pins down the air’s muck, returns the belted waste to the disturbant earth and shapes the figurant remainder. Richard Fort draws up, cleaned out, sculpted by rain. He is trying to control his breathing. He drops his torch. The light whirls around his feet. His torchlight flickers. His trousers are sodden. He turns from the sea to shield the torch. He picks it up; that proves difficult. He bangs the back of the torch with his hand. It sustains then lives out a peaceful death. Still turned, he holds the torch up to his eye. It is meant to be F.B.I issue, magazine ordered. He shakes the torch, shunts its rear into his ribcage. Light bursts out around chest height in front of him. The channel of light strikes the lighthouse door or, rather, elbows just past the doors hollow. Richard Fort follows the light which spreads and enlarges like a complex looking stain. He thinks
- The door is open?

Helene notices the telephone upended between the planks of floor. She picks it up, holds it around her knees and starts to dial. She will ask someone if she is sleepwalking. She dials the last number and holds the receiver to her ear. It goes straight to answer phone, Lawrence and her voice awkwardly harmonising at the other end. A tardy beep followed by a thin silence. Helene listens to the silence. It cuts her off, a deeper silence resumes. Helene places the telephone on the bed. She is remembering the last time she slept with James Burke. She touched his privations. He was really there, almost whole seeming. They laid back, the blasted world settling around them. They would have, she remembers, roughly fifteen minutes before it resumed its grip. What do you think is at the bottom of the sea? Helene says. Helene lays on the bed in a movement that quickly toppled past sitting.

James Burke had said there was a flat creature at the bottom of the ocean exactly the size of the ocean’s floor, that this prehistoric creature covered the ocean floor like its shadow. Nothing ever touched the bottom of the seam things only fell or were pulled into this unspeakable creature. He said that the creature gestates its successor from inception and gives birth on its one hundredth birthday. The progeny feeds out from the creature’s centre, gradually and continually replacing it from within. If the creature were ever to die or fail to reproduce itself through this cannibalizing the sea level would catastrophically rise, killing us all.
The creature was the invisible shadow of the sea floor and we need our shadows, he said. Then:
- Imagine being face to face with your shadow
Helene:
- Isn’t that just the night?

Helene rolls away from him. He rolled after her. Night came on after with its putting on of clothes, the chill in the room infringing their outlines. They had been right here. The lights in the room fritz on and off then on and off again, this eternal fritzing of things Helene thinks.
Helene, standing again but barely remembering how. Her present mind the last fired inch of time, a racy disappearance.
She walks to the stairs, looks up towards the lantern room, climbs the stairs. Why not?

Richard Fort is walking up the metal staircase. He can see the trim of light above him. He doesn’t call out. He takes care that his footsteps don’t resound. His breath does though, so heavily, the large pill of his heart plating under his tongue, pushing out his bottom lip. He’s so drunk still that everything comes in frames like a comic. He reaches the end of one and stumbles into the next rolled over cube.

Helene is in the lantern room. The dust has resettled and she can just about make up the half-erased words in it, it’s part apology, part reference, part evidence of his being nuts. A description of her he once made; she never could work out what he meant by it. It had either meant, she reckoned, that she was jagged and illuminated, the hole itself, or illuminating and whatever the verb for jagged could be. Jarring?
These words surrounded by the workings out and stick figures inched in dust.

REDRAFT

2010-06-21T15:30:00.000-07:00

(1982)

Helene wakes to her reflection. She is sat at the dressing table. The mirrors stationed around the dressing table show a woman open gowned, chewing her lip. Helene identifies at last. There is something in her hand in the mirror. Helene looks down. A pen stands upright in her hand. She feels it. The pen falls from Helene’s hand. Helene’s other hand lies palm down on the dressing table. The pen rolls against it. The hand is shielding a piece of paper. She adjusts it slightly. Helene can feel the slide of it underneath her, can feel the weak seal of her palm sweat losing adhesion. Helene lifts her hand slowly. The paper lip curls, hanging erotically summoned, then drops. Helene’s hand follows quickly slamming down on the paper and ostensibly securing it under the hand, the hand in truth shielding the piece of paper. Helen draws the hand partially away, peers underneath. There is a stick figure and a lighthouse scratched on the paper. The stick figure is a child. Helene knows it. The child has a black circle for a mouth. Helene isn’t sure what this means. She understands it can’t be positive. Helene slides her hand from the paper until the hand rests limply in her lap. Through the gap of her robe, a thatch of pubic hair smooth around her knuckles. There are a group of crudely drawn lines stabbed underneath the drawing. The lines are traumatised, matchstick piled, splintered against each other. Helene examines her face in the mirror. Her hands sweep back her hair, stroke otherwise immaculate eyebrows into place. The paper is reflected in the mirror. Helene watches it. The lines underneath the drawing seem to make more sense there, a raw calligraphy emerging. She leans into the mirror, hands around her spooned face. Helene draws back with a start, blinks, grabbing the pen, scribbling out the name there before it processes. The glass scratches under the nib. The name won’t stay still. She closes her eyes. The name appears behind them. A breeze travels over Helene’s body. Her hands make a chapel around her temples. Helene is cold underneath a coating of sweat. The sweat, now colder than her skin and subject to air, is full of information that has passed through her skin. Helene’s mind has mostly followed the sweat leaving her emotions left to weakly say themselves. She feels more outside herself, sieved. Something essential within Helene has just been realised/released, a kind of loss she feels. Her hand is once again clamped over the piece of paper. The hand looks more and more like a foreign object, not of her body, partly crustacean even. Her hand cramps the paper. Using her free hand she bunches her dressing gown around her body. She unclenches. The thought strikes. Helene clenches her hand again. The nails on Helene’s hands are irregularly brokered, some bitten to the quick. Their impression made up by the sink of flesh. Her palm looks like a sunset. The nails paint birds of blood, flown into this sunset. The paper and drawing is turreted with mountains. The silence of the room becomes apparent. Helene turns slowly around. The room is as it was before though Helene, of course, cannot remember how the room was before.
Lawrence Muir is asleep on the bed. She cannot hear him breathe. The birds in her palm fading away over the paper-mountains. Lawrence’s chest rises and falls in silence. Helene has never found this a particularly comforting trait in Lawrence, has had to, at various points in their relationship check, for the sake of her sanity that Lawrence Muir was in fact sleeping. Eyes closed and everything, definitely not feigning. This, at times, requiring certain feats; Helene, on occasion, stooped for hours, interrogating a man no longer there.
There had been a time when he suspiciously awoke under her gaze. Lawrence, half lidded and smiling, moved his mouth babyishly around a vowel or two, gurgled a question up at her. Helene said, this a good half hour into her watch,
- I am watching you ‘sleep’.
He had replied softly that this was nice, nice of mother, and turned away to sleep, his face no longer observable in this new position. Helene regarding the ‘mother’ line as being a particularly audacious move, at the time this is. An urge freckles Helene’s body. Helene wants to check Lawrence’s face. She realises this is merely an attempt to distract herself. It resounds with an obviousness inside her like the percussive gong of the day. She goes with it, whispers his name. It is not a good test. Helene stands up. The pen is daggered in her hand again. The paper is balled in her other hand. She stands over Lawrence Muir. His eyes are closed. Lawrence Muir smiles in his sleep. The origin of the smile seems repulsive; both in how it has been stirred into the face and the stirred face itself. The smiles presence inflates in Helene’s mind. It quickly takes on absurd dimensions. The scene reflects back to her. She thinks ‘when did this pen get here?’ Helene lets go of the spiky ball of paper. It rolls into the dip between Lawrence Muir’s legs. It bobs there. Helene looks at the ball of paper moving on the fabric’s waves, the low moon of it. She turns around. She goes downstairs and opens the door. She walks to the end of the garden. The lighthouse is fuzzy and under developed. The pen is still in her hand. Evelyn climbs over the hastily erected fence. She hops and skids down the hill. Her feet are bleeding. Sand pixels in the cut. Helene’s toe nails are smithereens, eggy shells on the surface, clinging to some parboiled and filmy skin. She doesn’t notice till the sea air breezes through her gown. The pen drops from her hand with the sting of it. It, the pen, lands upright in the sand. Helene stumbles towards the shore. She allows the salt water to ride up over her feet. She walks into the lick towards a paddle boat, loosely moored. Her feet are numb all the way through. She only knows this because of their surface. How their surface seems both extended and dissipated, how her body’s borders seem impossible to locate. How there is nothing but this surface and its impossible location.

2010-06-12T07:29:00.000-07:00

That mute kid is just walking, still in crowds view, fished in ghostly light, between packs. The pub becomes yet another hole in capital O-Our already barely framed lives. Flames moult into the night, gunned with rain. Smoke rises, star-graved. The air is hissing and bold and carried towards our faces. I like it when shit becomes apparent, physically. It’s completely worth watching and angelic, I mean mentally and physically. I get goose pimples.

1982

2010-04-18T13:21:00.000-07:00

Helene wakes to her reflection. She is sat at the dressing table. The mirrors stationed around the dressing table show a woman open gowned, biting her lip. Helene identifies at last. There is something in her hand. Helene looks down. The object is a pen. She feels it. The pen falls from Helene’s hand. Helene’s hand is palm down on the dressing table. The hand is shielding a piece of paper. Helene can feel the slide of it underneath her, feels the weak seal of her palm sweat losing adhesion. Helene lifts her hand slowly. The paper lip curls, hangs erotically summoned then drops. Helene’s hand follows, slamming down on the paper, ostensibly securing it. The hand is shielding the piece of paper. Helen lifts the hand partially away, peers underneath it. She has drawn a stick figure and a lighthouse. The stick figure is a child, Helene knows it. The stick figure child has a black circle for a mouth. She is sure this means child is screaming. Helene slides her hand from the rest of the paper until her hand resting limply in her lap. There are a group of crudely drawn letters written or stabbed underneath the drawing. They don’t spell anything. Helene examines her face in the mirror. Her hands sweep back her hair, smooth down an otherwise immaculate eyebrow. The paper is reflected in the mirror. Helene notices. She leans into the mirror, hands around her face. The letters underneath the drawing seem to make more sense there. Helene draws back, blinks grabs the pen and scribbles out a name before she can process it. The glass scratches under the nib. A breeze travels over Helene’s body. Helene is sitting cold underneath a coating of sweat as if in that sweat something inside her had been turned inside out, exposed. Her hand is once again clamped over the piece of paper. The hand looks more and more part of something else, even crustacean like. She contracts it.

2010-04-01T04:25:00.000-07:00

The funeral is short and to the point. Henry has been crying hard throughout. There has not been a single defined thought in his head. The sight of the coffin fitting the hole, the refrain of its descent echoing into the earth, all this is affecting Henry. He is too short to see the coffin coming to rest on the bottom layer of dirt so the image seems infinitely repeatable. The snugness of the fit and the smooth motion of the ropes are all contributing to some internal seizing that seems to leave his internal voice in a light strangled pocket in the uppermost level of his mind. Single words, distances, form and collapse unsupported up there. Sounds and gestures from Henry’s mother come out irregularly stopped and released, the grief evacuating from a seemingly inexhaustible source, a battered outpouring of sorrow in which her very body seems to constitute its obstruction.
This is the entwining stream of our oneness.

The man taking the service says

-Amen

The crowd says

-Amen.

Henry thinks

-What have we just agreed to?

There is a golf ball of phlegm strung around Henry’s tonsils and what is this birthed membranic fluid bubbling out of his boggy nostrils? The service has ended, seats rustle, tissues bloom like puppeteered flowers around them. Two members of the congregation walk up to Henry and his mother.
Their heads are grey and how their skin is smooth. The contrast is unsettling. The man and woman address Henry at first, their heads gently declining towards him. Bibles cover their hearts. They are telling him that he must be a good strong boy for his Mother and a kind and gentle brother. His mother stands there as they say this to him, shaking with grief, her hand fiddling unconsciously with Henry’s nape. Having addressed the ‘little man’ they lift their heads and look into his mother’s eyes, tell her

- In paradise you will see your Father again. In paradise your son will be restored. All his faculties will be brought forth. This you know. The word of God is without fault. Stay strong sister.

- And, and my husband?

- We will pray that he realises the error of his path.

- Mum?

- My husband has gone, my father has gone and my youngest son is… what do I do now?

- Why sister, you pray.

- Mum?

- Yes, yoke yourself to god with your prayers

2010-03-26T09:11:00.000-07:00

(1980)

- I’m pregnant.
- What?
- There’s currently a small bean spooning my insides. It’s going to grow larger. I’ll give birth. It’ll be spooned by the universe.
- Am I the father? What is all this about being spooned. Are you drunk?
- Lawrence, I… Yes.
- Where have you been?
- What was the question?
- Are you drunk?
- No; I’m not.
- I’m a father.
- Yes.
- Helene, don’t lie to me. Tell me the truth.
- That is the truth. No, listen, you don’t have to do that.
- I want to.
- Don’t do that. Please. I was lying before. I am drunk. I was lying.
- Helene, will you do me the honour of being your husband and Father to our child?
- Ok.
- Perhaps you should sober up before you say yes.
- I’m not drunk.

If you never wake up does that make you dead?

2010-03-09T13:51:00.000-08:00

Waking up fully clothed it’s like morning has told you 6 lies and swilled you out onto the sofa where your teeth like castle turrets crumble. Your body’s become a novelty arrow bent around the meaning it’s missing and the day will wear it tragically and without laughter. This morning your lips are closed but for a soft burr of regret trundling through yesterdays wine and cigarettes, kicking up slow moving waves that pool onto the armchair.
You are: a half rotated foot, shin bones like chipped arrow heads, thighs pressed into a fault-line and knocking against stomach, knees hugged against tumbling breasts, your chest and shoulders sifting through steeped registers of catarrh, a gentle shimmering subsidence occurring with each dug out breath departing. Neck to leashed head you loll around the armchair trying to disconnect from whatever dream your mind has pulled you towards. Resist it further there are other dreams, lighter ones I hope to come.

We’ll change keys into something brighter.

You are still again.

Light is starting to caramelize on the deep chocolate coloured curtains. The surface colour changes. The room lifts then stabilizes. A cloud passes. The room caves then resurfaces.
The differences are subtle enough to affect my mood before I can pinpoint their cause.

Like everything else I guess, mornings are a matter of timing and taste. I don’t think I’ve woken up refreshed since I was nine years old.

If you never wake up does that make you dead?

The first few times you can’t sleep the morning seems like an immense open bathrobe.
If you can’t sleep after that the mornings are just a lighting cue for your more HD reflections on mortality. Time loses something, inertia mineralises the light. Improbably gallstones stud your brain matter. After that and with a lot of luck you arrive at a point of choice that can’t effect what is happening. That’s called perspective.

That’s where the choice comes back in.
I’m seriously digressing but what I’m saying is that freedom has a lot to do with choices that are essentially nothing to do with the exterior world.
Please try and change me.
Do you remember when I said that to you?

The light is angling in over the top of the sagging curtain, a horizontal flattened line of sun slowly scanning the length of the sofa. I try to imagine the sun is digitizing you. How much time is passing between my thoughts?

Restless under their covers your eyes wriggle out like scraps of burst balloons.

I am here. I am here and I do not know if you are glad to see me or not.

1982

2010-03-08T17:11:00.000-08:00

When Jim’s face falters, when it becomes a bridge over which a desire wants to meet you, it is heart rending. As in here is something so open and narrowed into you that on every side the scenery fractures. Helene holds his gaze as it falls apart. She feels that she is within something that is falling away until only its transmission, this charged airy tunnel between her and him, this promise which is itself the connection between two isolated bodies is a leap of faith that she is sick of having to take again and again and again.

Ending to a short story I wasn't good enough to write.

2010-02-12T07:16:00.000-08:00

It had been two months when the land began to spin and transform into glass. Our sanded skin melted. It was agonizing and saintly. A couple found each other to kiss. They blew into one another slowly. Their cheeks became molten bubbles, honey combed chrysalides. We cooled. For a while we were totally transparent. Our organs were grotesque until rainbows fell on them. A meeting was held. Mass suicide was opted for. A pit was dug. We climbed down. It rained forever. It rained so hard our skin broke. We just lay there.

2010-01-26T07:44:00.001-08:00

Everyone in the room was mind-hopping with such frequency that a loss of agency had been incurred. They had grown sinister like the moon with a stocking of clouds pulled over it.

2010-01-19T12:48:00.000-08:00

Shop windows light our way like tv screens sat too close to as children.

One or two or do they both suck?

2010-01-18T18:04:00.000-08:00

(1) The door handle resembles a dead body covered in finger prints. The long body clouded over with touch, your own barely remembered heat rashed over it. The thickness of the arm is seemingly malleable but meets you with a cold resistance and a dull weight, one that is lighter but more awkward than you imagined. You press the body towards the ground, into a waiting trap as if it might spring out further into the sky above us.
Finally you leave, the grave having swung forward or back, the shutter falling over the keyhole which remains hollow behind it's brass veneer.

....

(2) The door handle resembles a dead body, one covered in fingerprints. The thin arm is clouded over with touch, your own barely remembered heat rashed over it. The greasy residues left by you, and others no doubt, contribute to an indistinct haze when light hits the surface. Perhaps this is the source of your sensation that it will be soft, malleable as you move to hold it. Of course you are met with a cold resistance and a dull weight, one that is lighter but more awkward than you imagined. You press the body towards the loaded ground, into a waiting trap, your pillowy hand holding it there as if it might spring out into the sky above us.
Finally you leave, the grave having swung forward or back, the shutter falling over the keyhole which remains hollow behind it's brass veneer.

...

hmmmm.

Henry At Nine Years Old

2010-01-16T08:07:00.000-08:00

I HAVE TO TRY SO HARD NOT TO BE SAD

Helene prays to the god of 'love'

2010-01-15T12:03:00.000-08:00

Helene is on her knees in front of the sofa. She is praying. The cleaner’s hoover roars above her. It could sound like a waterfall if her drugs were working.

Helene is speaking over the din:

-Dear God if you open up any more things in me I am going to cease to exist or is that what you want?

Lawrence Muir is smoking a cigar alone in the backseat of his company car. He is sat in a ‘squat’ position in the back of the car. He is bouncing slightly on his knees. Lawrence Muir is grinning to himself and pushing the cigar around the corners of his mouth, right then left, left then right. Lawrence Muir is laughing hysterically. He has a temperature. He has just shat his pants. His manager took Lawrence Muir to the office, gave him the promotion and then he, Lawrence Muir, shat himself. The cigar is helping to mask the odour but that is not its sole function. Lawrence Muir is celebrating his promotion here, in the back of his car. He has just been promoted after all. Lawrence Muir shifts around a little. The squat position becomes a ‘ready’ position as Lawrence Muir extends his legs. His back is nearly touching the roof of the car. It is custom to smoke the cigar with your manager after being promoted, something appealingly atavistic about it; standing there like a fertility god with a displaced sense of himself. Also to share in a way that respects the system.

The manager had handed the cigar to Lawrence Muir in the immediate aftermath of Lawrence Muir having shat himself with a complex expression on his face which suggested nothing directly but which definitely meant that they would not be sharing this custom today. Lawrence Muir took the cigar from the automated hand that rose quivering like a question in his direction. Lawrence Muir backed away from the manager, thanking him graciously as the palm of his hand slipped around the brass doorknob.

another draft.

2010-01-08T03:48:00.000-08:00

In lamentation Evelyn prostrates her barely there and sorrow subsidized body over her mother’s grave in the Muir’s private burial plot while her subconscious in a necessarily subliminal mode unfairly hums ‘poor little rich girl’ in an act of maddening self-laceration

The graveyard is now a traffic island roughly sellotaped by roads forming a botched and cack-handed bowtie of grey laterally fixed and spaghetti hooped four miles above the town centre. From our house, and my window specifically, the graveyard is just a dourly tied novelty sized present of green and brown at the end of a fussily kept, hastily edited garden. Except this present steams, contributing to an already omnipresent mist which belts us in, further cordoning off the town below. All this would be unbearably sad and depressing if it wasn’t for the thick fence of trees acting as a buffer between the outer rim of the traffic island and the inner sanctum of the worked around graves. It is of course still sad and depressing mother. The trees function to keep the graveyard secret from the prying eyes of the townspeople and the Sunday drivers whose perplexed expressions I have caught behind their windshields as they drive in a figure eight down a one way road running apropos to nothing.

The road has come to represent a symbol of determinism to many in the town below, mother, the name of it entering into common parlance as meaning useless but inevitable, also meaning to become a spectator, a passenger in ones own misfortune. It is here where you’re buried.

I brought Henry here once, into what father once drunkenly referred to at a dinner party he was holding as ‘death’s little spotlight on ambition’. This during one of his ill-timed stabs at sincerity, these usually occurring around the fourth or fifth brandy and leaving everyone else in the room feeling uncomfortable at the fundamental wrongness of his very real sentiment. A few people even began to scratch themselves, innocuously on the hand at first lightly strumming the stretch of skin between thumb and forefinger, but as the scratching started to spread through the room so it did through the body. A woman clawed her cheek with a fixed and not wholly unpleasant expression on her face, a man placed his fingers between the buttons of his shirt and dug trenches into his slippery belly as someone worked a bald spot into the area just above their ear. The party would have dispersed had it not been for some comically distracting piano music my nurse, and later my stepmother, began to play in the corner of the room as I laughed from the stairwell and waited for Henry and Fiasco to come and take me into town.

Henry said most graveyards he’d seen tended to be pitifully stuffed, certain areas of these graveyards being lain with militaristic precision while in others it was like dead bodies had barged into the earth, coloured over the lines, boxes overlapping each other, riding angularly up so that the appearance of the graveyard seemed bulged and lopsided like when you shove the cornflakes back into the box; but that this one seemed really cool cause it was so obvious yet private and everything was already neatly arranged in and around it. He liked that it had become a traffic island, it delighted him, I think he even used the word ‘integrated’. We were stoned. I didn’t tell him you were there though mother, getting under our feet, I should get to forget too. It is only fair. The cars from the roadside made a sound like when you’re a kid and you hold a shell to your ear and it sounds like the ocean but it’s really only the distorted roar of your blood. That’s what Henry and I are to each other.

2010-01-06T07:44:00.001-08:00

The roads came a few years later to prove that death was non-refundable.

Theoretical Chair (Evelyn in the Graveyard pt 1)

2010-01-06T06:31:00.000-08:00

There will be a bed and we will lie down on it. We’ll make a chair there. My left hip will be a hinge his arm can be adjusted in. The space left by my knees will be reinforced by his knees. His back will remain solid and interlocked, against the past, while the material of our chests will billow and flap in our heart's coiled breeze. We will lie like that and we will try to become holy until our failure to develop an exo-skeleton becomes apparent. We will grow bored enough to be interested in the world again. This is all necessary.
The chair we make there might be theoretical but it’s sturdier than either of our hands around a glass and alone.

Like when you're a kid holding a shell up to your ear and it sounds like the ocean but really it’s only the distorted roar of your blood

2009-12-31T12:51:00.000-08:00

New Years Resolutions (This post may be wholly/partially deleted tomorrow* due to transgressive embarrassment...sic?)

(1) Develop a work ethic on top of the near mind numbing, minimum wage 45+ hours a week and, most probably, shift rota'd work that you will no doubt be LUCKY enough to find so that you can live and remain in your newly moved into flat and have fun occasionally but also be able to complete the first draft of your novel by working on it in a real and disciplined manner in the time people mistakenly refer to as 'free'. There is nothing less free than time (someone should put this as one of those tube station quotes.) **

(2) Finish the first draft of your novel.

(3) Be less of a dick externally and internally (i.e the hoary chestnut of 'being a better person'***). Work out how.

(4) Answer your phone if family and friends call.

*spending new years by myself as im feeling a little poorly + poverty stricken + i have to work tomorrow + Im an occasionally grumpy bastard BUT am attempting a party of one that is in no way maudlin and designed to celebrate (albeit semi-privately) what has actually been an AMAZING YEAR
AND i am kinda wasted/on the way to getting wasted and being alone and wasted often makes me schmaltzy and given to regrettable and indecent emotional bombs that disregard context in the most embarrassing terroristic manner imaginable so if i look at this tomorrow and think that i am a twat this will no longer exist. Evidence of some kind will be left though.

** This paragraph is meant to read as sarcasm free if anyone read any element of sarcasm in it. I just read it back and thought 'what a prick, his sarcasm is so misplaced...whiny motherfucker'. I might try to rewrite it in a minute but i'll keep this footnote as protection. paranoia is setting in (eleven past nine... pm)

*** Am i even more of a prick if i point that i have just this moment realised how ridiculous it is that this is at no 3. Am i even MORE of a prick if i quickly say that pointing this out maintains what i think is funny while also demonstrating my selfawareness and concurrent self reflexivity. I AM A PRICK. The other explanation is that this list will naturally get more and more uncomfortably sentimental ( as i get wasted by myself) while believing itself to be beautifully sincere. BTW *update* Unfortunately it will likely be sincere but it is very unlikely to be beautiful....more like a droning mew.

***** Bored at this point. Will make myself read through it again in an attempt to avoid embarrassing myself. hmmm. Anyway. Still some time before 2010. Lets make the most of it,

* has been partially deleted. More to be deleted soon.

ghost world

2009-12-30T16:05:00.001-08:00

essay i wrote for my masters (we had to discuss a writer whose work we admired in relation to our own project)

2009-12-29T09:41:00.000-08:00

Discuss the roles and effect of meta-fiction with specific reference to Dennis Cooper’s Guide

Meta-fiction often functions in modern literature as intellect without object/subject. It
seems to designate literature as a static form albeit one that the writer is free to play with and dissect at will. However these ‘games’ or this play is often tiring and uninspired lacking as it does the risk required to move the reader emotionally. This may exhibit a cultural synecdoche and be valid as a description/product of our times but I think this type of text’s failure to resonate beyond its own impotence, its failure to admit its own weakness limits it, makes of it’s language a dead end. Cooper’s work in the George Mile’s cycle and especially in the novel Guide does much to rescue Meta-fiction conceptually as well as reinvesting the process of fiction with a power which, however compromised, is nonetheless incorruptible. It holds a slim impenetrable truth that pierces the heart of the matter and Cooper’s prose, no matter how coldly it may at times penetrate, is nothing less than a beautiful realisation of this truth. Guide’s complex structure which is nonetheless allied to a deeply engaged sense of feeling works effectively through a series of integrations, filmic cuts, complex time signatures and most importantly in an appeal to the unknown world. The book itself functions as a manifestation of that appeal as we will see. In
order to appreciate Cooper’s achievement in creating a structure which appears deceptively simplistic on the surface but in fact leads down to a labyrinth of meta- textual strategies (at the centre of which is a yearning desire for love) and that have practical application it is important, I think, to discuss meta-fiction in relation to the difficulties and opportunities it presents for a potential writer. In doing so the focus on Coopers work will be further personalised by my own aims as a fiction writer and the pitfalls that I hope to avoid in my writing.

The inherent danger of meta-fictive practices is that the work may appear weakly ironic; either apologizing for itself at several removes or positing itself in an ironic relationship to its reader. However, the conceit of meta-fiction can I think be used to explore our fear of solipsism, the difficulty and need of seeking out new means of communication and may be a useful tactic in which to deflect/genuflect back to the real. I’m personally interested in the way meta-fiction may be used to question the process of representation and also how it functions in an epistemological sense. The act or will to create, its function born out of a crisis of disconnection with other people and the world, as an attempt to escape the very strictures of which the necessitation of it’s (the fiction) appearance is a symptom. I think the right kind of meta-fictional approach could explore this theme which I believe is heavily to do with how consciousness and language function and interface. I’m interested in creating characters in which a schism is both linguistic and physical and who use and appropriate art or different text’s or media in order to construct their selves. In a hyper aware world of multiplying fictions the self is exhausted and starved of myth. In the overload of information and endless co-modification of choice, history and enforced nostalgia the endlessly self referential culture becomes internalized. The one language I recognize myself and my closest friends as being most invested in is the language of appropriation. I want to be able to represent this at both a conceptual and emotional level. In other words I’m looking for a trace; combing the dirt and ruins for an arrowhead. Something from a lost world that’s been missed and whose meaning I’m forced into guessing at.

I’m hoping the conceit of meta-fiction could function thematically and emotionally if it successfully dramatized a sincere desire for communication through whatever collapsible means the characters could invent themselves in. Both contemporary and deeply formal, the fiction in the text; the need of fiction and the act of writing would be acts of a faith at once mitigated and transcendent. This is again something that I am interested in exploring: How the urge to know someone else, how re-imagining relationships is an essential part of being human and how we must necessarily believe that our fictions hold a portion, however small, of that person within them.

The first means of achieving this effect seems to me to be to construct a meta-fictional framework that does not compromise emotional affect since the form itself is so loaded with potential pitfalls. Guide does this by inverting the primacy of meta-fiction so that the structure of the novel allows for a meta-fictional conceit. It does not dominate the novel, it’s not a twist or a dénouement or even a privileged announcement and in the very casualness of it’s insertion it creates the subterranean ebb and flow of the meaning working underneath its exterior structure. The use of meta-fiction often posits a real (I.E the author behind the work, the work as an object rather than an operational system, engagement with which would constitute a
constantly shifting set of meanings and relations etc) above the text. Cooper’s work levels that hierarchy so that the creation of fiction while causally dependent on the outside world does not exist hermetically. It denies simple categorization and instead opts to create permeable and multiplying borders that allow the reader to move through the membrane of the writing into a space where fiction and ‘reality’ break upon one-another. In doing so Cooper hits on something that is both highly contemporary and emotionally affective. As Ballard says in his introduction to Crash ‘The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to
assume that it is a complete fiction’[1] and that in light of this world of proliferating fictions the definition of a writers function his role has changed:

The writer knows nothing any longer. He has no moral stance. He offers the reader the contents of his own head, a set of opinions and imaginative alternatives. His role is that of a scientist…All he can do is devise various hypotheses and test them against the facts.[2]

In a world surrounded by fictions, it is important I believe to reveal the crisis point of
representation and attempt at least to move beyond this crisis and into faith; a faith which we or the writer must have the strength of will to continually test. Guide by delivering the meta-fiction conceit back to being, in essence, a fictional construct while still playing with our received notions of faction and meta literature creates an effect where everything is simultaneously laid bare and completely obscured and centre-less. The novel begins and ends with a series of terse statements:

‘Luke’s at Scott’s. Mason’s at home jerking off to a picture of Smears bassist, Alex…Pam’s directing a porn film. Goof is the star. He’s twelve and a half. I’m home playing records and writing a novel about the aforementioned people, especially
Luke. This is it.’[3]

In this section the apparently simple set of sentences already illustrates a certain tone of minimalist brevity allied to a quick stylistic rhythm. This is an opening paragraph that has been designed to make an impact. What is interesting about this impact is that it’s rhythm is purposefully obscuring the conceptual inversion at play. The ‘This is it’ in relation to the rest of the paragraph reads like a natural statement that the preceding sentences rhythm had demanded due to the impossibility of sustaining their rapid fire effect. However that ‘This is it’ forces a revision, creates in fact a loop, in which the text and its relationship to its referents feed into each other creating a level of distortion. The ‘This is it’ throws significant doubt about the reality of each of the characters. They are both ‘there’ and not ‘there’ linear time is disrupted and the novel’s relationship to their presupposed real existence is problematized . This is
further evidenced when the ‘real’ start of the novel is revealed on page sixty five after Dennis has taken acid:

Then magically or whatever, I start writing a novel. I start by describing exactly what’s happened to me since I snapped myself out of the heaviest part of my LSD trip. In other words, I start here – or, rather, a dozen or so pages back. That’s where everything begins. (pg.65)

The fictional act of construction is revealed but the retrogressive affect of this revelation does nothing to diminish what has preceded it. The real and the fictional merge naturally each containing a portion of the other. Almost like a chemical composition being arranged into a different structure. Fiction and truth and reality are inseparable co-dependent structures in Guide. This is opposed to what I would describe as traditional meta-fiction wherein a dualism occurs and proceeds in a dialectic. Guide instead situates itself between those two poles and refuses value judgements in favour of a naturalized postmodernism, one in which the diminished
delineation between truth and falsehood is not treated dramatically. When Dennis does interrupt the narrative to give a piece of non-novel information such as:

‘They tried to get Luke on heroin, basically to hurt me…when I heard what they’d done I chopped them out of my life. And now I’ve removed them from Luke’s-in this novel at least’ (pg.90)

It serves not to denude the fiction of its power but rather to heighten the readers emotional involvement in the fictional aspect of the characters. It creates a sense of purpose behind their construction, a sense of the real within or underneath their construction. This again is not one sided, does not merely travel from the exterior (what is posited as outside the novel) to the interior (the representation of the outside within the novel) but also from the representation to what is ‘real’. The two are not separate entities but exist in mutual transferring relations. This can be seen in Dennis’ attempt to use the novel to try and inoculate certain desires within himself/character.

The idea of art as an inoculation is represented on various levels within Guide. It is present both in the ‘fiction’ and also presented as being outside of the fiction and thus within the process of imagining/creating. The character of Chris is a twenty two year old heroin addict who wishes to ‘become dead as gradually and with as much intricacy as is humanly possible’ (pg.9) because ‘There’d be a point. he imagines, where he’d be simultaneously dead and alive. For that moment, however tiny, he’d know everything there is to know about human existence’ (pg.9). There is an inherent romanticising at work here that the novel dissects and explores at different operating
levels. Within the novel Dennis conceives of creating a narrative that would allow Chris to ‘watch…(himself) die for the rest of (his) life’ (pg43). The project is a ‘a kind of pseudo snuff kiddie porn film to be scripted by me (Dennis).’ This film never occurs in the text but Chris does re-enact the story line with a dwarf who castrates and murders him. This in turn, because the novel is of course fictional, functions to create a situation where Chris (the real Chris in whatever form he may exist in) would be able to view it forever. What is particularly interesting though is the authorial interruptions that disrupt this scene. In two distinctive paragraphs Cooper succeeds in maintaining the continual transference between the inner of the novel and the outer of it’s referent.
The first takes the form of an admittance:

‘I know the… Chris story line is preposterous. But I’m in this dilemma. I’m still fascinated by Kiddie porn, snuff, and so on, but I want to diminish their presence in my thoughts and consequently, in my work. And the only way I can think to remove them is through a kind of gentrification, since I guess they still have to be here, as long as I can’t keep them out, which I can’t. I’ve tried.’ (pg 72)

A whole part of the novel is here not only revealed to be wholly fictional but also ridiculous and denigrated. However, the section is disingenuous because as much as it seeks to purport a confessional mode the rupture that this creates is far too interesting to dismiss. What takes place in the novel, the ‘preposterous’ nature of this story line is being used for a purpose beyond its fictional manifestation.

The second invests the fictional with the concerns of the real and suggests a heavy engagement by the author with the emotional process of writing:

‘This part’s almost over. It has to be gross, a touch abstract, and relatively implausible. Otherwise I’ll get too emotionally involved. If it’s any consolation Chris is in pain. Period….People romanticise these kind of moments. I certainly have. But this is just an incomprehensible, private, interpersonal trip’ (pg.87)

The emphasis here on ‘incomprehensible’ and ‘private’ excludes the possibility for communication and thus for knowledge. The involvement with the action of writing reverses the inner to outer affect occasioning a point where-in the recognition of being unable to mentally make Chris death plausible due to a relation outside the text make necessity of his death all more emotionally affective.

In this section Cooper also asserts that ‘without the imaginations elaborate input, dying’s no different than breaking your leg’ (pg.87). Chris’ position as consenting victim is thus stripped of its romance. The compulsion that had been fantasized in Chris’ character and never wholly critiqued becomes through the experiment of fiction mixed with a personalized perspective: ‘Otherwise I’ll get too emotionally involved’.

Here we see that Cooper is purposefully deploying the meta-fiction conceit that he has constructed in its fluid, looped form. The idea of Chris being ‘real’ of his having a referent in the world forces the author to analyse the legitimacy of his desires. The interchangeable ‘sign’ of the character becomes invested with something outside the discourse, outside what is able to be represented I.E the real relations between people. The real is decanted into fiction which in the form of a novel is injected into and merges with the real. Cooper’s decision to base his character on someone he evidently has feelings thus uses a fictional sign (‘Chris’) which he has invested with a personal referent to dismantle and highlight compulsions which have physical affects
I,E transgressive, sexual desires. Concurrently a scene that has already been flagged as explicitly fictional retains its emotional impact. The death of a fictional Chris in a ‘preposterous’ scenario is moving because of the sadness inherent in Cooper’s compulsions. Chris still needs to die because his fictional death may hold just enough, a fraction of the virus, to help Cooper diminish those compulsions in his ‘thoughts and consequently…work’. Also as Chris’ character is so lovingly detailed, so fully rounded by the authors relationship to him in the text the death still means something, still resonates.

At the level of consent we can thus see that the text has inoculated itself from romanticising the notion and freed itself from being able to justify doing harm through a thought experiment. The desire however is still there. It is part of the process/gentrification. There is a third section in the text where this process into understanding the desire itself is explored. It is when Dennis writes of the explicitly fictional dwarf in relation to Chris’ dying, mutilated body:

‘It was a whole , unique, miniaturized world complete with roads, towns, mountains ,
lakes, national parks. It was so beautiful. And best of all, the dwarf felt huge and all powerful by comparison. Not that he knew what to do with his new super-powers. Other than to destroy what he’d been given to play with of course’ (pg.94)

This acts as a demystification of destructive urges that simultaneously reveals the compulsion. Previously in the novel Cooper had asserted, in relation to the transformation that overcomes ‘cute fashion plate’ boys that ‘lose their cool’ prior to sex, that it can seem like ‘the greatest magic trick in the world…Or should I say, it makes me feel all-powerful, which is hot.’ (Pg.84).

Here two elements are at play.

The emphasis on ‘trick’ illustrates the illusory nature while the feeling of being ‘all powerful’ is directly related to sexual urges. This passage dovetails nicely with the Dwarf sections of the novel and asserts the relationship between sex and power. Guide is here deconstructing the authors relationship to his text, a relationship of power, the ability or right to destroy the ‘miniaturized world’ is called into question or at least it’s motives are. The phrase a ‘miniaturized world’ could stand as a meme for all individualized consciousness. Guide is a highly analytical novel disguised by it’s stylistic flair and subject matter which uses the meta-fiction conceit in order to invest more humanity in the characters. It is an epistemological exploration into the power and potential of fiction.

Since Guide is, I think, a novel precisely concerned with deconstructing notions of authority or power in order to examine, question or neutralise them I think the undermining of the dwarf’s sensation is here represented as being the dead end of a power so total and complete over the suppressed object (Chris’ body) that it is no longer able to communicate itself except through the destruction of it’s creation/source (a creation that is necessarily made out of the world despite whatever has been made out of it) and that this functions as an exploration into the nature of all
power. In this manner the text stays true to its author’s anarchistic beliefs[4] by systematically revealing power’s appearance. So much of Cooper’s work is concerned with the interplay of transgressive impulses and the necessity of exploring them honestly. This honesty therefore must also extend into questions of what is legitimate and of the nature of abuse and consent. Transgressive desires are subjected to thought experiments. In this manner and reading it in light of Ballard’s comments on the role of modern fiction basing a character on someone you love functions as adding a control element to the experiment.

Thematically Guide is a novel heavily interested in communication and to what extent we can know or presume to know one another. There is a constant flow from the effect of the world on the novel to the novels effect on the world. This is in fact a major theme of Guide and is conceptually heightened by the Novel’s sigil like structure. Within the novel Guide Dennis comes into contact with Luke who is interested in performing magical rituals that change reality. While Dennis feels ‘cowed by the biblical tone’ (pg.64) of much of the literature he finds in Luke’s rucksack one particular ritual piques his interest, that of the sigil:
‘a sigil, is an emblem of made up letters drawn one on top of another, then enclosed within a circle, so that all one sees is a pattern that looks like an extremely busy logo…..Once you’ve devised an acceptable logo…the wish enters reality virus like’ (pg.65)

‘within a few seconds I have this idea, which, if it’s not obvious involves writing a novel/sigil that has a wish neatly embedded in it’ (pg.65)

The novel in fact uses these rules. The majority of paragraphs in the novel jump around, switch scenes and tense, cross hatching time and space in a manner that belies the careful construction at work. In a casual reading of the piece one can be swept away by this seemingly conversational tangential style, the ‘busy logo’ of the writing. Within Guide stories that once collated perhaps stretch to a page or two last the entirety of the novel being told as they are in short paragraphs that are collaged next to others throughout. The novel closes with a paragraph that is virtually identical to the opening in terms of sentence style and rhythm:

‘Luke is thinking of me…Across town Drew’s sleeping. Mason is watching him breathe. It’s nice. Scott just came…I’m in toilet stall kissing that club kid. I’m thinking sex. He’s thinking… God only knows. It’ll all come to nothing. I’m sure. You can basically forget us’

In doing this Cooper creates the circuitous structure required for the book to function as a sigil. It also hints that there is a secret embedded in the text, one that is not explicitly told, one in fact that cannot even be to do with his love for Luke. In the novel as sigil Cooper collapses the distance between creator and creation and between the art and life while at the same time insisting on fiction’s power to engage with the world, that it is already in fact part of the world. He succeeds in making the novel both a personalized object (the sigil) and a vast engaging matrix of logos and signs that interact disabling or affirming one another. There is a line in the novel which I think could stand as an emblem for my relation to the text:

‘the shock was so dense and complex that it collided with the worlds very different complexity, sort of what happens when a very strong light hits a very big jewel’ (pg.87)

To me this serves as a perfect example of what fiction at its best can do. Entering the carefully constructed matrix of the text, constructed so carefully that one does not at first notice it’ rigorous construction, the motion of our thought through the writing creates new prisms of light. We encounter the writing, it changes us and we illuminate its possibilities. Meta fiction shouldn’t function as a writer’s display of empty incommunicable power but instead should be a piece of work through which the reader can pass. Cooper’s book like the very big jewel that it is can be seen from multiple perspectives at once while still maintaining a near formal perfection. Cooper in his own distinctly personalized way is reinvesting language with a modulated power of affect. One that occurs in the communication a reader feels through the medium of the text. In this way the decision to structure the novel as a sigil has I think added pathos because a book or story isn’t just a collection of symbols it’s a spell…an illusion yes but one that continually tests reality and which affect reality the same way any of our thoughts may get portioned into action. By
disempowering the author/god scenario through his casual admittances and sincerely represented emotions Cooper is also making that power available. He puts the author among us, confused and lonely and desiring love; the same as any potential reader.

The idea of burying a truth so deep in a form that it essentially flavours what surrounds it, is built anachronistically out of, has an allegorical function in Cooper’s text. Guide is the fourth novel in a cycle. Each text in Dennis Cooper’s ‘George Miles Cycle’ regurgitates some of the material, while destroying other aspects, of the novel preceding it. Each of the five books posits itself in a different relationship to Cooper’s twin themes of sexual desire and bodily violence and each book is designed as a monument to his relationship with his muse George Miles. As Cooper has written on his website about the cycle:

‘the central contradiction in the work, and in my own psyche, is of unqualified love and support for George Miles and unqualified fascination with the sexual fantasy of possessing, exploring, and destroying young men like him. George would be the central character of the cycle, but, because of the effect of the mirroring structure, he would mutate, subdivide, and shift from one identity to another to suit each novel's central purpose, then gradually reformulate into George by the final novel of the cycle, while always retaining his general appearance and emotional/ psychological make up. …. I'd decided that each of the middle three books would concentrate on
one of the ways in which I viewed my subjects. The second novel (Frisk) would prioritize the libidinal, sexual, erotic appeal. The third novel (Try) would prioritize my emotional response. The fourth novel (Guide) would prioritize the cerebral, intellectual, and analytical.’[5]

Guide as in the other novels within the cycle is an experiment which uses real interpersonal relations in order to test the boundaries of fiction and thus life. Guide is analytical but paradoxically leads to the heart. What is affirmed ultimately in its final analysis is love; not the erotic sex and death investigations that Cooper is famed for but rather an affection which seeks to protect it’s unknowable source :

‘I’m making this narrative safe for Luke’s character, whatever that takes. I don’t care whom I destroy along the way. I only wish I could do the same thing in the less malleable life we’re beginning to share’
(pg.82)

The end point of all analysis is that which it is impossible to represent. This is obviously qualitatively different from what may exist. Luke is identified in the text as embodying the extreme of one of Dennis’ two archetypal relationships with people he may love. These relationships have ‘almost always involved an unspoken, fierce sexual tension and/or an attachment I couldn’t explain except in vague, spiritual terms…Luke must be the ultimate example of the latter’ (p.74). Here the polarisation between Cooper’s relationship not just with Luke but also with ‘George Miles’ and his textual clones is laid out systematically. That this aspect survives Guide’s analysis in a manner that the sexual urge to destroy them does not is precisely because it cannot be formulated/represented. The decision to keep Luke ‘safe’ in the narrative is justified precisely because there is no rationality to it. Guide leads to an affirmation of love because there is no power to disperse in this attachment between people. It cannot be articulated because it has not been constructed by the uses of power. While not wholly altruistic the feeling is genuine and whole. It has at its heart a faith that is the motivation for Cooper to create a novel, one of the stated aims of which, is to free himself of certain life-long obsessions, to Guide him.

If this essay has become increasingly a close reading of Guide and strayed into academism it has been necessitated by a point that I feel feeds not only into my meta-fictive interests but also the very reasons for my wanting to write. Guide is clearly written from a series of beliefs attempting to work themselves out. What is evident is a series of meanings in transit that invest themselves in systems without privileging any one of them. It is written in good faith and does not spare the raw detail. I, like most people of any age or modern generation, am confused, lost and searching for meaning. I cannot presume myself to be above the subjects I am writing about. I need to represent this confusion and representing this confusion is perhaps the first step to resolving it. My work is increasingly concerned with its own processes and structure because I feel that I have not inherited forms which can hold my beliefs in the world. Those beliefs themselves are not yet fully formed, hopefully never will be ‘completed’ (I.E dead) but in the act of expression I hope to discover, explore and critique my own beliefs while still communicating with whoever may read my work. This for me is the challenge of being an artist. I don’t want my writing to be closed or separate, there’s no communication in that. I want to write something that moves. At
the moment I’m interested in meta-fictional structures because I feel that in using the disorientating mirror like structures which can be built from that conceit that it might be possible, in light of their multiplication, to create a sense of overwhelming distortion under which the lives of the characters, their buried melodies, may still be faintly recognizable. If I can write something that is architecturally complex and thus in some small way illustrates the deafening environment we now live in but which still manages, underneath the proliferation of both the text’s and the worlds artifice and however obliquely, to affirm a real human emotion then I will feel like I have succeeded (from my current perspective) as an artist. Dennis Cooper’s work provides a model that is at once wholly contemporary and yet beautifully and resonantly
emotional.

[1] Ballard, Crash , (Vintage 1995) pg.5
[2] Ballard, Crash , (Vintage 1995) pg.5-6
[3] Cooper, Guide (Serpent tail 1998) pg. 3 All further references to this text to be included in the body of the essay
[4]Dennis Cooper in conversation with Robert Gluck: ‘As soon as you get power, disperse it. For me, that simple idea reverberates out through instinct into a way of thinking about everything. I think my novels are entirely informed by anarchism on the levels of form, style, approach, and philosophy’ (http://www.sfsu.edu/~poetry/narrativity/issue_three/gluck.html)
[5]Cooper, http://www.denniscooper.net/georgemiles.htm

I would recommend buying this book to improve the interior quality of your life: (1) 'The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis' - Mark Gluth

2009-12-28T02:11:00.000-08:00

Mark Gluth's writing is a spider's web in the rain, hidden under a bush and holding up beads of water like a strongman.

Mark Gluth's writing reminds me that thought and dream are types of membrane we pass weighted through.

Mark Gluth's writing is supple and drenched, he opens up fertile spaces in the imagination.

I have been looking forward to this book for a long, long time. When I get my grubby, sweat laminated mits upon it's beautiful cover, inevitably to read it in one go, i'll attempt a review.

Still, i think you should (if there is anyone out there reading this) order 'The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis' right now, right this second. Everything I have been lucky enough to read of Mark Gluth's work has left me open mouthed, spinning and suspended ... like being literally re-placed in the world.

Order it here:

http://www.akashicbooks.com/latework.htm

or here

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/book/9781933354941/The-Late-Work-of-Margaret-Kroftis

For an interview with Mark Gluth go here: http://akashicbooks.blogspot.com/2009/11/late-work-of-margaret-kroftismark-gluth.html

would like to emphasize

2009-12-10T10:48:00.000-08:00

that the section below is still in transition. Whacked it on here cause i hadn't posted in a long time. DONT J?UDGE ME

Novel section im trying to work out

2009-12-09T11:05:00.000-08:00

In Which You Know Who’s Ghost Either Politely Or Insidiously Sidesteps the Historical Tradition of Supposed Unreliability In Order to Tell Evelyn Some Serious-Darth-Vader-Shit and to Commensurately Ask If She Will Act in Accordance with Each Revelation and Perform Certain Cosmically Necessary Tasks To Assure her Dearly Departed Becomes Clearly Departed.

You meet a ghost who tells you some serious Darth Vader shit. I’m saying don’t worry, Henry definitely isn’t my brother. He says addiction runs in the family. The ghost brushes your cheek with his blue fringed hand. It feels clear and refreshing but undrinkable and far, like a landscape of visible emptiness. The ghost is the colour of a melancholy judgement. I always think of death as the washed out policeman. This policeman will lead me out of my various locked cells into a heatless I.E heartless I.E bloodless light from a sun that is not just a heart breaking with excruciating slowness.
The rabbits are yelling. Their elastic banded skeletons elongate then snap together with a speed so urgent it dramatizes time into slow-mo, knits to their lacework of bone in expansion and contraction as these bunnies disappear into our clearly departed. One squeezes into a hole by my mother’s grave. I look at the hole and try to follow my thoughts down it. My hands are in my bag. I just noticed that. They clasp a bottle. The bottle is saying ‘drink me’. I look at the ghost, I look at the hole and then I machine gun some roughly poured vodka shots down my trachea. Still looking at the hole and thinking I’m late, I’m late, I’m late for a very important…then imagine my pupils stretching in the holes dark now. Not good. Feel sick right now. Can’t stop imagining shit right now. Imagine my pupil spreading out from my eye and over my body till there’s no light left anywhere right now. Shudder right now.
This feels shit and really I’m very cool so I turn towards the ghost, fill his pale form with smoke that rises like a loaf and blandishes out till he’s wearing this grey tuxedo and I say to this god damned be-suited spook

-Why the fuck did you start the conversation like that? It was mean. You can really tell you’re nothing. You been dead a while pa?

But this fails to establish any meaningful bond between us. He just stands there as blue as a trumpet.

The turfed up ground around my mother’s grave is flecked with clover green like her gone hazel eyes. I’ve seen photographs. These photos were amazing even before photo-shop and computer games got good. She was so beautiful My glancing is giving me away maybe. I focus back on the ghost who’s turned a shade thicker. Nothing is less ethereal than embarrassment. Since I’m English I’ll say that’s what makes us human, meaning, I’m warming to this ghost Mother.

-Your Mother isn’t dead. She’s not even in the ground there.

I look at the ghost, light up. I’m smoking another just to breathe into his face cause I’m totally p.o.’d again. My emotions can go nought to sixty in less than three sentences it seems.

- That doesn’t even begin to answer my questions

As I say this I channel a long stream of smoke into his face. I’m ‘acting out’ I guess. Classic child/parent stuff.

- I can’t feel that by the way. Also it doesn’t really affect me, seeing as for all intents and purposes “I’m” not really here.
- If that’s the case why are you waving your immaterial arm around your face?
- The peacefulness of death is a joke that I haven’t got yet. I’m still in the habit of life, I can’t relax you know? That’s the problem with this dimension and my predicament. I’m always somewhere.
- Tell me about it. I got the same damn problem.
- Think of me as being beamed in by satellite, projected, and the satellite is just a thing set in a huge heap of nowhere orbiting something it is not equipped to understand in any meaningful way. This is all so much data.
- I didn’t know you were so religious dad. In fact I didn’t know shit like, for instance, that you’re my dad. All these years thinking Lawrence was my dad. To be fair he is, up to now, the only one I’ve got to meet. A little proof of paternity wouldn’t go amiss.
- That picture of your Mother, the one in your bag. The one you carry around and which Lawrence doesn’t know about. I took that.
- I’ve done a lot of drugs
- Don’t do drugs?

pain

2009-11-10T13:27:00.001-08:00

pain

2009-11-10T13:21:00.000-08:00

pain

2009-11-10T13:19:00.000-08:00

pain

2009-11-10T13:16:00.000-08:00

pain

2009-11-10T13:13:00.001-08:00

pain

2009-11-10T12:40:00.000-08:00

Ive not seen any Michael Haneke films but am looking forward to seeing this tonight

2009-11-05T05:40:00.000-08:00

http://www.bfi.org.uk/whatson/bfi_southbank/film_programme/november_seasons/europe_since_1989/code_unknown

This isn't that interesting a blog post is it? I will have to try harder. In my defence i think i have a cold and also im still kinda wondering what this blog is or what i want it to be. Ive been worrying about it. ...maybe i just don't have that many interests, oh..boo.

I'm just knocking on your door today offering you the/ really my good news!*

2009-11-03T03:49:00.001-08:00

My M.A Portfolio has been shortlisted for the new £500 Pat Kavanagh prize!

I might have a job!

Halloween was good!

I saw blue velvet in the cinema!

I watched the original star wars movies all in a row with nachos, beer and my girlfriend!

It is cold and rainy enough outside to justify doing next to nothing inside!

This post is gloriously self involved!

* my opening gambit as a child when offering religious literature door to door

Novel excerpt * fairly new (updated) and including the paragraph in progress. Everything here is 'in progress, i guess'

2009-10-28T09:36:00.001-07:00

(1982)

-Are you aware that James Burke kept a journal?
-James never kept a journal.

Richard Fort is looking at Helen with an expression that is not an expression at all but instead a glass placed over a spider. He bobs his head like a popular TV detective just before an unlikely dénouement. Helene is sat leg up on the sofa in her dressing gown, her bandaged ankle resting on the sofa’s arm. The wave of the arm curls away and downward into a snail shell pattern. The darkly varnished pattern in the wood looks fossilized. Helene has bags under her eyes. The bags are not as soft as sand dunes but more malleable. Gelatinous tissue appears chewed and wadded under the skin as if stemming the internal flow of subcutaneous intrusion. It is as if two coins have been surgically inserted to create the impression of pocketed skin, the raised lettering smeared by the slacked surface, the indented ridges of the coins a buried pinch lining the deducted tension of that given up skin like the strain of fake tits.

Richard Fort is reaching into his pocket. A sweet wrapper solos on the tide of air provided by the prime mover of Richard Fort’s hand. Richard Fort is pulling James Burke’s notebook from his pocket.

Richard Fort’s head continues to disingenuously bob as he pulls the notebook free from the other objects cluttering his pocket. Richard Fort bottom lip is stuck out like a plate proffered by a sarcastic Oliver Twist. The protruded lip leaves a fleshy envelope of space. In a continuation of this same movement the top lip slides itself into the space like a letter.
All this with the false bobbing of the head.

Richard Fort holds the notebook vertically like a tract, it leans limply forward in his hand. He offers it to Helene. She does not take the notebook. She instead takes a cigarette from the elegant table with the walnut finish and lights it. Helene feels suddenly superior to Richard Fort. She feels that Richard Fort is a bug, a bug that feeds on infection.
Helene smiles falsely. Her superiority registers this situation as exhausting.

- That’s not his journal if that’s what you’re trying to say. I told you he wouldn’t write a journal. That’s the information I’m trying to give you here.
- This isn’t his journal?

The false smile has caused the coins to rise up into Helene’s eyes, for them to try and turn over and inwards. Helene’s smile trembles momentarily. It is for all conscious purposes imperceptible. Richard Fort thinks that perhaps Helene has smiled, acted patronisingly, consciously and perhaps she has, she could not tell you herself. If so the lie has overwhelmed her. This overwhelming is a perverse sort of protection.

- If it isn’t his journal what do you suppose it is?

Helene has taken the notebook in her hands. She has looked at the front of it and idly skimmed some pages without reading any of the text.

- By the looks of it I’d say it’s either a plan for his supposed novel or one of the several beginning, middle or ends of his supposed novel or random notes for some tone that his supposed novel might one day want to have. He was way too self conscious to keep a diary and even if it basically was a diary he’d never
Helene is leaning forward, the book is in her foremost hand which is palm up. She is signalling that she wishes to return this book, this book that she does not understand, that does not register at any point within her.
Richard Fort looks at Helene without taking the book.

-It mentions you by name you know

Helene’s face is quantitatively the same except time has passed so now it is completely different. Helene is exhausted.

- This is so misguided, I am tired of all this.

The book is still in her hand, it has returned unconsciously to her lap. Richard Fort is continuing to look at Helene. The spider has reared up against the glass. The sound, inaudible to our ears but not to our imagination, is of a slow deliberate tap; one leg settling on the glass after another. Helene crushes the half smoked cigarette into the ash tray. She leans back, her body evacuated of desire.

- Listen, James always wanted to be a writer. He used people he knew as the basis of his characters. He had a big problem with names. He used to find that really difficult. If he thought of a name it usually sounded wrong. His imagination wasn’t really that great if truth be told. There might be notes or ideas or things about me in that thing but it’s all geared towards fiction. He’d use his friend’s names or nicknames and think it was great because then he could make them all do stuff they wouldn’t dream of even wanting to do in real life. No one is denying we used to know each other but James was harassing us, he was obsessed. Is it surprising he’d make stuff up about us?

Richard Fort answering with the vocal equivalent of boxes being steadily ticked:

- There’s dates, times, places…things that I suppose could be verified if someone were to take the time or trouble.

- Are you listening to me at all? By all means waste your time like this. Do you even know where James is?

They continue to look at each other for a second, maybe two. The spider runs from one side of the glass to the other. It stills in the centre of the glass, its body gradually narrowing into Richard Fort’s pupil.

-Could you characterize your relationship to James Burke, before, when you knew him please?
- More than friends.
- Lovers?
- I suppose you could say that.
- What would you say?
- Probably what everyone else said; in hindsight.
- People talked about your relationship? It’s a small town I guess that’s to be expected
- It’s funny isn’t it? When someone says you have to expect it, they mostly mean you are to be inspected. One thing I can tell you about James is for better or worse he never really expected anything.

Helene is flicking through the notebook and occasionally moving her head in several non-committal gestures. This is not disingenuous.

-What did people say?
Helene looks up from the notebook. She has just come across the photo. She closes the notebook. Richard Fort gestures for her to return it. She does.
- Why are you asking?
- I’m trying to understand why James Burke might shine a however many kilowatt bulb into your house and then disappear without a trace. You’re right by the way we don’t have a clue where he’s gone, that’s one of the main reasons I’m here.

Richard Fort has leant back fully into the chair. This is the most casual he has appeared since he entered the house. He is communicating sincerity, interest, an overall engagement with the truth. He is trying to say that the spider is asleep inside his pupil and not just pretending. Further more that the spider is not itself the pupil. Helene takes another cigarette from the elegant table with the walnut finish. She looks at Richard Fort. She feels like crying but the drugs make it hard. Instead she lights her cigarette. Is this a case of giving trust or having been ground down?

Helene’s chin semi circles around her neck until she is looking out the French windows. The French windows that yesterday were flooded with light. The white light fills Helene’s mind for a second. No, it doesn’t, she is instead trying to imagine it filling her mind. She is forcing the memory into something separate. She cannot remember the sensation of the light only it’s image. She takes a long desperate drag on her cigarette. Ash falls down her robe, comes apart, rolls down the seam, ends above her breast like the street gritted head of a melting snowman. Helene charges a finger against her thumb. The finger flicks the ash away. The ash explodes into seedlings; the finger stays outstretched, between it and the thumb a span of used up air. She turns back towards Richard Fort.

-Just that he was no good, not bad or anything…just kind of useless. I remember my father pointing at this watercolour stroke he’d just made, this barely there light blue slash, practically all water, and saying ‘look it’s James’. I mean James was beautiful but he never got anything done. Insubstantial, you know? When we were together we used to joke that his ambition was to become a stained glass window. He was always moving away, or trying to, and then having to come back. He had all these ideas about being an artist but he was just completely impractical. I mean the guy didn’t even know how to make his bed until he was twenty four. So people just said, you know, ‘James will never come to anything, what are you doing with him?’
-What did you say to them?
-I said I loved him.
-Some of the dates in that notebook referring to you appear quite recent.
-What is this about Richard?
-Where’s James Burke?
- I don’t know.

Richard Fort turns the book in his hands.

- I think you have some idea.

Embarrassed by this slew of posts.

2009-10-27T17:18:00.001-07:00

But im not going to delete them. Think i must be pretty commited to this blog now. Still drunk. Just considered deleting all of this at some unspecified moment in the near future. One hour? Two hours? When i wake up?

Anatomy of a paragraph in progress, complete with instructive notes to help with the 'process'. Drunk btw.

2009-10-27T17:08:00.000-07:00

There are ridges underneath her eyes; they are not as soft as sand dunes, there is vaguely gelatinous tissue underneath the outer layer but above the ....(think of something awesome here) It is like two coins have been surgically inserted underneath the soft pockets of skin, the raised lettering smeared by... (think of something awesome here). Helene lifts her eyes... ( think of something awesome here to do with the shadow of coins under the skin).

MAKE THIS AWESOME BY THIS TIME TOMORROW.

What is this is inherently not awesome, can't be made awesome? Doesn't even know awesome to say hello?

DONT FUCK WITH ME. JUST MAKE IT AWESOME.

I don't think you're listening.

YOURE FIRED.

Due to an underwhelming performance on my part at a job interview i got drunk and bought these and a double cheeseburger from mcdonalds

2009-10-27T16:30:00.000-07:00

Ive read 3o pages of each. 'Erasers' already seems like how i want my novel to seem. I can see it becoming a really pivotal 'model'. The William Gass book has already had so many outstanding sentences in it that im already hooked; seriously the hit rate is unbelievable.

The mcdonalds? well the mcdonalds was every mcdonalds, it is all in me.

I feel ethically and culturally bad about the mcdonalds. This is making me want to lash out at you and say 'fuck you i like the taste alright and it's comforting proximity to my childhood sense of excitement and joy (often at getting to actually go to a Mcdonalds) is not the kind of conditioning that im in a position to resent and i will take that right now ok?'

It's true what they say about insecurity no?

In other words i think i fucked up my job interview. Listening to the mountain goats and drinking stella of all things

Tao Lin is the kind of brother that would smother your mother and make your sister think he loved her

2009-10-26T06:23:00.000-07:00

(Tao Lin with the criminal behaviour)

I am blogging about 'Shoplifting from American Apparel' (a) because i planned to include it in my forthcoming 'books I am planning to buy once i stop being on the dole and finally have a job/place to live' post (B) because doing this means i have a chance to 'win' a free copy (c) I am happy to promote Tao Lin's writing and anyone elses work that i like.

I am glad to be part of this campaign.

I like Tao Lin's work a lot, it has excited me. Reading Tao Lin's work and reading interviews with him has lead me to the work of Anne Beattie, Joy Williams and Donald Barthelme. All three of these writers are amazing. Tao Lin also sent me a free copy of 'You are a little bit happier than i am' because i needed it to complete my collection. That was very nice of him.
I am now going to write about each of his books

'Cognitive Behavioural Therapy' - This is probably my favourite Tao Lin book. I carry this round regularly. It is at times comforting, beautiful and always ethically sound. I think an overlooked aspect of Lin's writing is his engagement with trying to find a way to live in the world that is coherent with his philosophical beliefs. This book, more than the rest of his work i believe, is an exploration of those beliefs.
There are also poems here that are incredibly funny and sad at once. I could quote from this book all day. Instead i am going to link to some excerpts from it
http://cognitive-behavioraltherapy.blogspot.com/

Bed - I liked this short story collection so much that i forced someone to have my copy and then bought myself another one that I promptly lost on a train. The friend i gave my original copy to would not lend me 'his' copy because he knew i would probably steal it. I would have stolen it. Here is a story from bed: http://eeeee-eee-eeee-bed.blogspot.com/
It is not my favourite story but it is still very very good. My favourite story is about a guy in the library who ends up throwing toilet paper around someones house. That is an inadequate synopsis.

eeeee eee eeee: This book is pretty awesome. You only need to read the blurb on the back about dolphins killing elijah wood to know that. Also if you've ever read 'Chilly Scenes of Winter' this book will give you a similar feeling. I have read it maybe three-four times.

You are a little bit happier than i am: Also awesome. I only read it once though and since i am currently sleeping at a friends house (having no fixed abode....ominous I don't have it to hand.

Tao lin on Youtube. I pissed myself when I first saw this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3RjO0DHF1A

Tao lin is an ultra modern, very accessible writer.

Dennis Cooper named Shoplifting as one of four books he has read and recently enjoyed.
http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/2009/10/four-books-i-read-recently-and-loved.html

Dennis Cooper has great taste.

IS this 1,500 words yet? Don't see a word count function on blogger. What s'up with that? 1,500 words seems like undergraduate essay long. My brain is dead. I should be looking for work.

Will i be disqualified from the draw if i stop here?!? It would be fair if i was, i guess.

I tried to read what other people had written but my computer crashed. well i am giving up here i think.

I think Shoplifting from American Apparel is worth spending money on anyway.

Not the male gaze. For sibs.

2009-10-25T14:16:00.000-07:00

Theseus' Ship: blog idea post.

2009-10-25T13:30:00.000-07:00

So i had an idea of taking a story and over a series of blogs replacing each word in that story with one equivalent in meaning/sound/ emphasis. One word in each blog. The rules would be that i couldn't add any new words or subtract any either. Also i would have to change each word
I want to see how many words have to change before the story is something completely new. Could i change every word once and have the story still resemble in any way the original? How many times would i have to change

I DO NOT KNOW IF THIS IS A RETARDED IDEA CONSEQUENTLY I DONT KNOW IF I WILL DO IT OR NOT. ALSO I WONDERED IF I SHOULD USE AN OLD CLASSIC STORY OR ONE OF MY OWN. IF I USE AN OLD STORY THEN I CAN CREATE A NEW STORY OF MY OWN HMMMMM

WHY AM I USING CAPITOLS? BECAUSE I HAVE A HANGOVER AND TRYING TO THINK IS MAKING A DIN IN MY BRAIN CREASE.

LOOOOONNNNGGGG WEEKEND. Interview on tuesday, maybe i'll have a job by the end of the week!

First Sentence of my novel, boy is it long. Like, dislike?

2009-10-22T03:48:00.000-07:00

A town unpacked like a Russian doll artlessly arranged around and sort of braiding this giant sloping hill with property that falls brazenly fiscally through the landscape in unpicked stitches of wealth that skitter down from cliff top mansions through densely crowded trees into pooled judders of houses shops and these wild closeting fields that sad homeward-called children pock with abandoned toys that teenagers stake along fences so these doll-heads grow concave in the rain and lend their glassy eyes up to the moon which shines back into their branching fractured sockets and passing down shreds through old bike wheels making those bike wheels look like they’re maybe turning in this wholly self-determined fashion when they’re actually definitely not.

This is how i wake up when i wake up alone and without a job

2009-10-21T05:20:00.000-07:00

Two awesome stories (very likely an ongoing series wherein i link to sites/writers/pieces that are making me glad to live right NOW)

2009-10-21T05:11:00.000-07:00

Trinie Dalton:

http://www.thefanzine.com/articles/fiction/159/gardeners_anonymous

I love Trinie Dalton's writing and this story is so, so good. Just read that opening line. You'll be hooked.

Jimmy Chen:

http://www.titular-journal.com/ (go click on 'the Simpsons' under the television heading)

Probably know all this already right? well i only just discovered it and it kicks ass

This paragraph is giving me jip.

2009-10-20T09:52:00.000-07:00

She touches his privations. He makes his hand into the root of a tree. She says depth is a hollowed thing, he says freedom is an imaginary space you can literally occupy. She looks down the length of her body. It's a runway strip from there. At the end of the tarmac is his hand. He sits up on the edge of the bed. Are you taking off? He looks down at something. My cock and balls look like a retarded version of stone henge he says, like they were the first draft of something that was promising.

The hand that wasn't a tree touches his temple.

For once my head isn’t a bomb shelter he says. He lies down again, puts his arm around her.

What do you think is at the bottom of the sea? She says.

He says there is a flat creature that is exactly the size of the ocean’s floor, that this prehistoric creature covers the ocean floor like its shadow. Imagine being face to face with your shadow he says. She rolls away from him. His arm goes dead. I would pull my guts out like a magician’s handkerchief if I could find the start of loneliness she says.

Inaugural post bitches!! Celebrate before I harrass you with gobs of indigestible prose!

2009-10-20T09:01:00.001-07:00

This blog is extant. The man in the photograph is having a better time than i can imagine. I am the man in the photograph. Needless to say this evening is nonextant in my memory. This blog exists to make me write and gibber.

Rambling. Today i almost vomited in the shower. I thought 'If I don't start my blog today i am going to feel bad about myself.'

Voila.

I still feel a little bad about myself