My Asinine Life: The Non-Existent Machine

January 15, 2021 in Article, My Asinine Life, Series

Gabriel Boyer

How does the crisis come? What is the moment? Who owns the disaster? And where does it lead?

There is no one moment when the things we saw become things that are seeing us back. There is no time coming when my own hands will turn to birds and begin fluttering about the pages of my face. There will never be a day when I wake with a single yelp and hop skipping from my bed to go do the two-step down to what paradise lurks on the first floor. I am not draped in the lights of epiphany. I know no answers, but the questions continue to evolve into ever more exotic questions every year.

I am the kind of half-assed loser who categorizes different vistas of bathroom tile as to their degree of ominous and/or disease quotient. I am the one who hyperventilates over video conferencing as the clicks begin to invade our connection. I wake on my firm sheetless mattress wrapped in a single fuzzy blanket to protect from the incessant attacks of mosquitoes whirring about the vicinity of my earholes in an otherwise empty room in rural Vietnam, where I now live, as in I rent a four-story house with other foreigners and work in the rural city of Phủ Lý, and generally speaking am haunted by the more unpleasant sexual encounters of my younger days while also ensconced inside of what hungry ghosts latch onto the already dwindling days gone by, hopes to come, and passion spent—and the body begun its long dysfunction unto death.

Enter the disease.

Enter Mister Maurice (2 of 2)

January 15, 2021 in Article, Feature

William Levy

“Hello, Bill,” he croaked.

“Hello, Bill,” I echoed.

“Where did you get that manuscript of The Wild Boys?” he asked.

“From Gerrit Komrij.”

“Who’s that?” He cried out with exasperated incredulity.

“He’s Maurice Girodias’ agent in Holland.”

“You mean Maurice gave you permission to publish it?”

“Well, not exactly,” I sputtered. Even back then, Burroughs and I had known each other a long while, over a decade. We had first become acquainted in 1960 and in 1961 at the now famous, albeit then deeply shabby “Beat Hotel” on rue Git le Coeur in Paris, had seen each other in New York at his loft on Centre Street and also often in England, and he had generously given me manuscripts to publish in other magazines I edited, The Insect Trust Gazette(USA) and International Times (London).

“Your book came up at a dinner party. I asked to read the manuscript and Maurice gave his agent, this Komrij, permission to give it to me. I took it on my own to publish it,” I admitted. “Out of admiration for your work, Bill. I wasn’t trying to harm you.”

All the Unseen Things

January 15, 2021 in Article, Isstillcools**t, Feature

Gabriel Boyer

Among the doodlers, portraitists, conceptual artists, and illustrators, there are some who lurk in a kind of indistinct atmosphere. Their works do not so cleanly fit inside the confines of an ideology. Their ideas follow a more intuitive path. They may be stuck between epochs, like William Blake, or they may be describing a taboo world. I am interested in two such artists that form a kind of subgenre of this larger type and kind of marginalized scribbler. Both of my subjects are holy wreckers who annihilate the very thing they are tasked with presenting—who wrestle with the paradox of the seen world and the unseen spirit—the contemporary Kelly Reaves and Hyman Bloom, an until recently lost artist from the height of Modernism.

This is Not a Review: of Super Flat Times

January 14, 2021 in Article, This is not a Review, Feature

Gabriel Boyer

Full disclosure, there was a time when I tried to write exactly like Matthew Derby.

I first read Super Flat Times probably something like 15 years ago and at a time in my life when I was on the hunt for the gritty new thing in world of science fiction—the genre that gave the world Philip K Dick and William Gibson, Arthur C Clarke and Robert Heinlein—a genre I despised and adored in equal measure—that would come to dominate my life. And with Matthew Derby’s brilliant collection was part of that. Re-reading them for this essay, that initial electric feeling I had the first time around came rolling back. These stories are on fire!

Interview with Mike Sauve

January 14, 2021 in Article, Interview, Feature, Press

What I am struck with in your work is the macabre playfulness. Would you like to talk about the relationship between comedy and pain in your writing?

As I respond to your questions, it is Christmas morn, and I have messaged several friends asking, “Know of any local bukkakes I might partake in?” This is not going to go over at my in-laws breakfast table, but to me it unearths something very vital: the vertex of all that Christmas is meant to mean with not only the lurid nature of the bukkake, but the logical extrapolation that:

1) Bukkakes are known to exist.
2) Since bukkakes are known to exist there must be men ever on the prowl for one.

As a lapsed journalist, I see little value in simply making ledger entries regarding the world’s immeasurable darkness. We know human’s heads have been stomped against curbs. We know people boil dogs alive to release an adrenaline they find flavourful. I’ve largely outgrown horror fiction as both a reader and as a writer because there isn’t a single thing Jack Ketchum or Stephen King might conceive of that anyone couldn’t find in the news were they motivated to look. And yet for me to write any alternative to the boiled dog reality results in platitudes that are worse than banal, they are insulting to the boiled dogs! Regardless, I must abide these platitudes. I must direct my feet to the sunny side of the street. I must live, laugh, and love to the extent I am capable. (I have gone calendar years without laughing aloud.) In this need for capital-P positivity, I find myself at the same sacred and profane vertex as the Christmas morning bukkake: taking a deep breath, practicing gratitude for my daily bread and NBA basketball and the more wholesome pornographic categories such as “nude breasts,” all while knowing perfectly well that the world is full of rotten old ragamuffins who needed to boil a dog alive rather than dead just so it would taste 5% more adrenaline-y or whatever. In other words, you got to laugh to keep from cryin’.

Enter Mister Maurice (1 of 2)

January 14, 2021 in Article, Feature

William Levy

“Numberless are the world’s wonders,
but none more wonderful than man.”
– Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus

For over half-a-century whenever authors met talk would eventually come around to the maverick Maurice Girodias, and his Olympia Press. Did you or didn’t you? Did you or didn’t you hit him for money? Did you or didn’t you hear about what he had just published? Written. Done. Amazing really. Awesome. He seemed to internationally float about on some magic carpet surrounded by a suave fog both elegant and dangerous, ecstatic and ironic. For all the writers who claimed Maurice “ripped me off” there was an equal amount that used him. For every novelist like J. P. Donleavy—who had a justifiable vendettic rage against Maurice and spent an enormous amount of time and energy pursuing it, finally buying back the rights to The Ginger Man at public auction—there were versifiers like Christopher Logue. Plagiarist or premature post-modern deconstructionalist? According to a rare bookseller’s catalog, Count Palmiro Vicarion’s Book of Limericks was “in fact, almost entirely lifted by Logue from G. Legman’s then recent The Limerick, from a copy borrowed and not even bought.”

LA in the End Times

January 14, 2021 in Article, Letter from the Editor, Feature

Letter from the Editor

Fruit seeds sat in the fruit are like as pieces of wood set in the middle of a sweet veil of meat. When some sliver of wood comes free from the seed to sit in a jiggling yellow mango slice, for example, it Is like a solitary tooth sat in some otherwise free-floating gums. It is like witnessing a breach in the universe.

I moved to LA—which is also like a breach in the universe—or more as like a rift between the larger storytelling worlds of Hollywood and the everyday mundane walking around world of Target and Marshall’s. This is before any end of the world began, and back when Bladerunner had a quaint other-worldly quality to it, back when we were all content to live through scenes that have only been touched by the barest inkling of realism. There are still the same homes in the hillocks that are like slices of marble arranged decoratively upon the horizon, and it still seems people here can glide on through to the other side powered only by the brilliance of their bling, but—as we do indeed slide into the unacceptable end times, making the occasional detour through places of no clear definition—as our mouths veer out of themselves in our horror and our eyes become shrink-wrapped in tears—what apocalypse is being written? Here in this shifting miasma in the desert? Are the fires rising? Are the water lapping at our shoes? Do the bureaucrats hint at darker goings on in the pantries just outside the halls of justice? Are the piles of the dead truly alarming?

Places Outside of Place (2 of 2)

January 13, 2021 in Article, Feature

Luther Philips

3.
Imaginary Realm: History, Memory, & Self

“Answer my prayer, God, and tell me, pitiable as I am, be pitiful to me and tell me this: did I have another period of life, which died and was succeeded by my infancy? Was this the period which I spent inside my mother’s womb,” (Augustine, Confessions, p. 22)

Both Thomas More and his friend Desiderius Erasmus were humanists. Meaning specifically that they emphasized the dignity of Man and the power of Reason while remaining deeply committed to Christianity, and through all of his many successes—entering the service of King Henry VIII in 1518, becoming Chancellor in 1529—More remained a profoundly religious Catholic. Because he couldn’t escape his desire for a wife, More chose to become a “chaste husband rather than a licentious priest” but all the same longed for a Christian vita contemplativa from early youth, and throughout his life, More followed many of the ascetic practices of monks: rising early, fasting, engaging in prolonged prayer, and wearing a hair shirt. He also was famous for his immense poverty.

This is Not a Review: of Haints Stay

January 13, 2021 in Article, This is not a Review, Feature

Gabriel Boyer

Haints Stay is something like as if Cormac McCarthy’s bloody West were touched by the hand of Samuel Beckett, and something of the aesthetic spirit child of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, except for more honest. It breathes through its bloody teeth and sings in places you thought were immune to song. It has a power that is difficult for a reader to reconcile themselves with, but also difficult to turn away from, or something like rubbernecking a divine accident.

A day about the British Museum

January 12, 2021 in Article, Feature

James Mansfield

I remember visiting the British Museum as a child, when I must have been around five or six, with my father. I say this, but actually can remember nothing from the visit apart from my insistence that we make the return journey by taxi, as I was bored of not seeing anything on the underground. I have since then been to the Museum countless times, and now having founded my own Museum of Imaginative Knowledge, had a strong desire to try and spend some time there for the purpose of what I call pure research, or simply just hanging out. What would it be like to spend an entire day in the British Museum?

Places Outside of Place (1 of 2)

January 12, 2021 in Article, Feature

Luther Philips

1.
Places and People: Adam, Eve, & Prometheus

“And I wish that I were not any part / of that fifth generation / of men, but had died before it came, / or been born afterward,” (Hesiod. Trans. Richard Lattimore. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969; p. 39).

Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge. The true and honest experience of their former idyllic lives was now sullied by a pervasive internal vision. They knew that they were and they became conscious.

There’s that old adage that people are gods that shit. We can envision this as the story of an Adam and an Eve happily shitting away in Eden day in day out until that moment they discovered the God in them (i.e. the moment they ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil), and never again would they be able to so blissfully vacate their bowels in the bosom of nature as once they had done. This is the quintessential tale of the noble savage—in which humanity is pure, ignorant and blissful—but there is a snake in this garden.

Toward an Apocalyptic Literature

January 12, 2021 in Article, Letter from the Editor, Feature

Letter from the Editor

We have officially entered the Apocalyptic Age.

And as we sit in our rooms writing our precious notes—our lists of what we’ll miss most and how we want our survivors to dress the corpses we leave behind—scrawling these thoughts on bits of paper and the odd receipt—as we wait for the door to be knocked in by the stormtroopers of the future—we must not look away from this dark rising. Rather than censoring ourselves, we must take this opportunity to speak the most terrifying of truths, for this may be the last moment we get to say anything at all before the duct tape is slathered across our snot-slick lips and we are bound to the particular vision of reality the cruel and heartless among us want to seer upon our skulls. Which is not to say that we should stare into the coming darkness with the timid paralysis of deer, but to stand with a pathetic confidence that we can withstand this blow of history even if it means everything we thought to be true turned false, and everything we hold dear crushed to dust by the oppressors among us. This is the literature for the end times.

Kafka and Credibility in the Age of Trump

January 12, 2021 in Article, Feature

Matt Rowan

Franz Kafka had a pretty good read on people. He recognized, among other things, the strange but vital interpersonal rules that enhanced one’s credibility or diminished it, depending on the circumstances and the individuals concerned. If you’re at all familiar with Black Mirror, the Channel Four and Netflix sci-fi / horror series, you might have caught the premiere episode of the third season. It concerns people living in a society where social media popularity translates to real societal value, and affects things as mundane as how people respond to you in passing to those as significant as where you’re allowed to live and work. The human dynamic of this scenario, abandoning the technological component, is quintessential Kafka terrain. One wonders what a depiction of social media would look like in his methodical and capable hands.

No more is Kafka’s talent for descrying nuance in just this sort of human behavior, the concept of what makes one a credible source, on display than in the story, “The Village Schoolmaster [The Giant Mole].” In it, readers are offered information regarding the piquant discovery of an abnormally large mole in the unnamed region’s countryside — hence the bracketed auxiliary title. But the brackets are a much better touch than one might first be given to assume. They hint at the kind of compartmentalization into which the mole is relegated throughout the story’s telling. At first blush it’s a story centering on a peculiar and inexplicable phenomenon not unlike other Kafka stories, such as “The Metamorphosis” and “Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor.” Instead, though, it is crafted to speak of issues very different, far less surreal than a giant mole, and much more characteristically human.

Accordingly, the story’s title does not bury the lede. It is, indeed, about the village schoolmaster who discovers the giant mole’s existence, first and foremost. Even more awkwardly it’s told through the first-person narration of a “Mr. So-and-So,” as designated by the village schoolmaster but this is according to the narrator, an individual also referred to as a businessman, and therefore of a rank suggesting he’s held in some esteem by society, esteem it’s safe to presume a lowly schoolmaster is beneath. And so the story begins to show its true nature, describing the contrivances of credibility and those possessing the means to adequately and convincingly argue their case, with all the superfluity accompanying any and every overture or public gesture. The truth can be manufactured, and it often is.

My Asinine Life: The Metaphysics of Snot

January 12, 2021 in Article, My Asinine Life, Series

Gabriel Boyer

You know it might seem kind of trite considering how everything’s being exploded all over the place by the authoritarians among us, but—I woke up one day without a brain. The other morning I woke up and thought, Gee. Where’d my brain go, only to then have realized that—gosh. Someone’s going to be so upset with me. I should be out parading in front of the fascists and screaming in their faces in a tight-fisted squadron—but I got no brain.

What I mean by this is—wow. I actually just said that. I can say anything and act like it’s actually true. Wow.

Not Available (2 of 2)

January 12, 2021 in Article, Feature

D Howland Abbott

There are several long-standing theories regarding the identities of the Residents. One of the earliest (and most amusing) is that the Residents are in fact the Beatles. This was an appealing notion to listeners in the early 1970s, who were still reeling from the sudden self-destruction of the collaborative effort between those strange, beautiful boys. It didn’t help that the Residents’ first full-length record, Meet the Residents, boasted artwork lifted directly from the Beatles’ album Meet the Beatles, with the faces of John, Paul, George and Ringo having been altered with a marker so that they had crossed eyes, nose rings and devil horns. Some fans held onto this belief for many years, but most eventually abandoned it when they were forced to acknowledge that the Residents’ output simply didn’t sound like it could have possibly been made the same group of people.

Not Available (1 of 2)

January 12, 2021 in Article, Feature

D Howland Abbott

One night in the summer of 2000, I found myself standing in the corner of a tiny room which served as the broadcast booth for the college radio station at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah. I had been dragged there by my girlfriend at the time, a woman named Bethany, who had developed a crush on the night-time DJ. It was 11:00pm, and as far as I could tell the three of us were the only people on campus.

“This is B.C. Sterret, and you are listening to Oddity Rock Radio on Weber State Eighty-Eight.” The DJ was speaking into the microphone, and partially obscured behind a wall of tape racks and soundboards. “Welcome once again to the single oasis in the vast cultural wasteland that we call the Beehive State.” I flinched. I had used those precise words in the moments before he went on the air, and he had stolen them.

The Hyperobject & the Artifice of Me

January 12, 2021 in Article, Letter from the Editor, Feature

Letter from the Editor

In this age of cultural criticism, punditry, general micro-blogging and endless gaffes, shock, and outrage on the Internet and beyond—although mostly on the internet, perhaps in part because it’s a place that exists nowhere, like the Na-koja-abad of muslim mysticism, the Persian term for utopia, which literally means, “the place that exists nowhere”—but also because it is currently the primary means through which we interact with our society and is furthermore the average American’s primary means for self-expression in general. This bodiless heaven, where we can instantly and immediately be gratified of any unbodily need we have while our actual bodies fester in the increasing hell of our actual room, is an interiority exposed and the internal uploaded into the closest our technology has come to mind, with servers as stand-ins for the more mundane ganglia of people and people as stand-ins for the more mundane mind of the masses.

My Asinine Life: Fake is the New Real. Watch as it Eats You!

January 12, 2021 in Article, My Asinine Life, Series

Gabriel Boyer

As abyss has come calling on your doorsteps this holiday, and your openings are twisting into the most convoluted of holiday shapes in their efforts to disguise themselves as the non-sacred things that have replaced their authentic originals—as what we thought was a thing is now transforming into a much older more disgusting thing—as there is no more time left—as time is always running out—as we move without clarity of vision into places without clear contours where the weak among us can be feasted on by bodiless persons as if these bureaucracies could sing in the spirit of the stars, when these are paper card constructions, built of paper so as to maintain their fully paper empires.

The Incorrigible Michael Lewy

January 12, 2021 in Article, Isstillcools**t, Feature

In the Mutableye

Michael Lewy’s art exists in spaces that are often bare of even desolation, and utilizes common usually office-related objects to then re-interpret or re-examine them in an abstractified way. There is something very etherealized and conceptualizing about his CGI interpretations of office environments and other equally meaningless spaces, and something appealing too, but my favorite of Lewy’s works always have some sort of story to them—a simple image that suggests some larger story we are missing or a video project that is much about the back-story of his trapped minuscule double for example. (I am thinking of the video projection piece in the City of Work series, that gives us a glimpse of a minuscule Lewy in a CGI workplace dealing with his solitude poorly.)

My Asinine Life: Tongues are for Drinking

January 12, 2021 in Article, My Asinine Life, Series

Gabriel Boyer

So here’s a person without cares within the larger care-riddled world, and this person then takes on certain responsibilities. This person is known to have a very irresponsible outlook on life, and this person readily accepts a situation in which being careful and watchful are necessary requirements. This person moves a person they care most about in the world from her familiar environment and off to another less familiar environment. This person has the best of intentions, and we know how those can be paved to build roads that lead to places far from heaven. This is where we are now. It’s called Boston.

William Levy

Luther Philips

Matt Rowan

D Howland Abbott

D Howland Abbott

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