On Some Books, On the Space of Narrative
To stand behind one's own work
As I have bemoaned in the past, when you no longer choose to actively and publicly identify yourself as a writer, and that decision involves an absence of “engagement” with the sort of…mediated simulacrum of community that surrounds this identity (which is to say; actively use Twitter, participate in national discussions about “indie lit” via some publicly visible forum, go to endless pointless “readings” where people neglect the reality that there are actually, theoretically, people present to hear work read out loud in an engaging way)... there seems to be a sort of inherent perhaps non-conscious exclusion of attention in consideration of the work itself. This is not fully surprising, humanity at large has a short attention span so if you’re not constantly being reminded that certain “products” exist, in the face of everything else constantly pummeling your brainspace via a screen, then you are likely to not think about and then purchase (or engage with) said “product” (media!).
My initial pulling away was a refusal to participate in the cult of personality that was (& likely still is) dominating the literary world; this act of resistance was made with in interest in drawing attention to the work itself rather than how popular the writer was on Twitter (or X or TikTok or whatever). In my absence I realized that a lot of my complaints about what I viewed as hypocritical about the “writing scene” were indeed founded in a reality, but part of that reality was that outside of the “writing scene” itself, virtually no one gave a shit whatsoever.
My persistently dumb ass never wants to be a part of any club that would have me as a member, so complaining about how hard it is to sell book when you never introduce yourself as a writer is a bit of a moot point, but with the obvious set aside, what I hope to do is talk about some books that I have made in the past year or so. These are books that I still have multiple copies of, and as such, am interested in selling you!
The contrast here is always something I find there’s a relative reticence with, but the reality is what’s the point of publishing work if you don’t believe in it enough that it’s worth people paying for? If I exclusively wanted the work to be read, I would just publish it for free online (like this substack, which is free but offers the option to take payments if the reader thusly desires!).
However, I work in the form of the book, and the form of the book is a material object that I want to be held in your hands because I truly believe the experience of the book changes the experience of a text. And material objects cost money to produce, and I believe that both my work and my time is worth it. As such, in reverse chronological order, here are the books I have published recently that I have copies of still available. All books can be purchased from my website, or for slightly cheaper if you just email me.
Variations on the Sun, August 2024
Originally Published by Love Symbol Press in 2012
My most recent publication has been a second edition of a text which has not seen the light of day since its initial publication in 2012. At the time of writing I was working as the Assistant Coordinator of the photocopy program in the library at Northern Illinois University, which meant I had an abundance of free time to scroll through blogs (which were still a very on-going concern) and then wander the stacks to find the books that the blogs I was reading were referring to.
While there is undoubtedly a further constellation of references, the two most pointed points of inspiration came via an engagement with Arte Povera artists (specifically Jannis Kounellis) and some of the American antecedents to the French écriture that has driven my investigations into language (specifically John Taggart’s The Pyramid is a Pure Crystal).
The book is absent of sex or the float or the impossible (for the most part), and instead presents tiny narrative fragments surrounding a group of sovereign children who wander through a landscape seemingly populated mostly by empty hotels, deserts, and urban decay. Intentionally placeless and refusing any sort of singular construction of character (insisting upon a third person plural “we”). These narrative fragments are accompanied by photographic work that is extremely indicative of what I was exploring through my Photography BFA; again, fragments, but mostly of interiors & structures, sometimes the all-over plane of a natural abstraction (the sun, water).
This book, in comparison to a lot of my work, approaches the themes I have yet to abandon while remaining more accessible and, perhaps, more surface level. I would still insist that it does something very interesting, but what it does is somewhat apart from what I currently pursue. I wanted to re-publish the book primarily in the interest of restoring the original sequence of color photographs, some of which were printed in black and white and some of which were replaced with photos that worked better in black and white when the book was first printed.
Institutional Scissiparity, December 2023
Part of my current engagement in fashion has been predicated upon an idea, perhaps, of narrative. As so much of what I’ve worn in the last eight years has been a direct result of the narrative of personal growth (i.e., I live in gyms and almost exclusively wear athleisure), in order to attach to a new aesthetic direction of dress (beyond just ideas of performative/costumed signification), has been to imagine a wardrobe based on a new narrative.
The work herein thus represents something of an attempt to meet the training modalities of the body with a new expressive capacity, though perhaps not in as direct of a fashion as one would think. The text was written after an intense initial engagement with the work of designer Carol Christian Poell, whom I continue to write about with regularity (as can be seen peppered throughout this SubStack).
The photographic elements pair an expressive (though hopefully not merely semantic) self-portraiture combining garments (a pair of fingerless kangaroo leather gloves) with gestures of the spine. The text that joins is a narrative that would not be out of place in my Experimental Men: ecstatic and impossible sexual experience, the aura of artifacts (in this case, leather garments), and an institute dedicated to research in human potential. The narrative “universe” is something I could easily see myself spending more time within because of how interesting I find it, but I didn’t want to go fully into self-indulgent mode, preferring (as usual) to fragment out into smaller parts that hopefully lead to a bigger whole. Most of my work from the last 6 years has been far less oriented in prose than this and the chapbook I’ll discuss next – it’s been nice to return to a more descriptive rather than merely evocative idea of narrative.
Sacrificial Object, April 2023
This slim in page-count but large is stature work was conceived of as an experiment in writing the gay leathersex version of Bataille’s Madame Edwarda. It was initially produced for the 2023 subscription-based “Expanded Book Club” that I offered, but I was so excited about this particular volume that I printed an edition of 40.
Perhaps formally the closest I’ve come to echoing what I did with In the Desert of Mute Squares, I wanted this to almost feel like a strange and haunted pornographic magazine with the use of found and collaged images. The text itself is pure impossible ghost sex as other, but rooted far more in the legitimate corporeality of a physical practice (elaborated, of course, out of my own physical practice of the last 8 years) with a push towards some thoughts on theatricality as I had been considering it.
One element of narrative that has always fascinated me, but grew to fruition with my engagement with the films of Jess Franco, is the idea of the nightclub. Jess Franco’s nightclubs are impossible spaces where anything can happen, where bourgeois heterosexual couples disinterestedly watch and politely applaud bizarre and abject performances of perversion generally aimed at the male gaze. This is almost a base-materialist transmutation of Robbe-Grillet & Resnais’s theatricality from Last Year at Marienbad. All of this, of course, brings to mind Bataille’s obsession with brothels (Robbe-Grillet’s own works take us there as well). But beyond mere tableau, this becomes a literal space of the night – in all of these works. The entire concern in this chapbook is with that sort of night-club as a vessel for the impossible.