MY FAVORITE FIVE BOOKS I READ IN 2015 - #1 & #2

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

I wrote a short review of Don Quixote that you can find here:

After alt lit & HTML Giant disappeared, I felt very depressed and betrayed and cynical about the literary world and humanity in general. I’d been working so hard for years to try and support young writers and boost and encourage people, and spread the reading. I felt like my years of work and time and attention had basically got flushed down the drain in a matter of weeks because of things that had nothing to do with me, and were out of my control. 

I’ll never stop loving books, but I felt like maybe I should just go back to the hermit life of my bedroom library...fuck everybody if all they want to do is argue about petty shit, and pontificate about identity politics, and compete for crumbs of internet attention. Before alt lit, I had been more or less completely alone in my obsession with literature. I want to reach readers just like anyone, but I don’t need anybody’s validation or attention to make myself happy and create things that excite me. I've been a literature-head on my own for a very long time. I have a good idea of who I am and what I want out of life. I like having friends and a literary community. But I can also deeply relate to what Emily Dickinson said: "The Soul selects her own Society — / Then — shuts the Door —" 

There are enough brilliant books in this world to last me 50 lifetimes.

At the same time, in my heart I’m a very idealistic person as well. I want to work for things that are bigger than my own wants. Living as a hermit seems like a very selfish and myopic way to go through this one life we have. I want to work for literature. I want to carry that torch to the next generation. I want to try (in whatever small way I can) to write something that will help and console and inspire and freak people out.

Don Quixote's relentlessly insane determination to become the world’s greatest errant knight is so contagious that rereading this book felt like getting saved again, to put it in religious terms. My cynicism didn't vanish, but my determination returned with a major force, as a counter-balance.

If you like Don Quixote, I suggest that you also check out a book of essays called ‘Our Lord Don Quixote’ by Miguel de Unamuno.’ (Although it might be out of print...you might have to buy a used copy or try and find it in a library.) The Unanmuno book compares Don Quixote to Jesus Christ and paints him as both a figure that is equally tragic and heroic. 

This is a quote from the Unamuno book:

"But Don Quixote was converted. Yes — and died, poor soul. But the other, the real Don Quixote, he who remained on earth and lives among us with his spirit — this Don Quixote was not converted, this Don Quixote continues to incite us to make ourselves ridiculous, this Don Quixote must never die."

Don Quixote is a very delusional, beautiful, inspiring hero to me. He never lost faith in his destiny to be a world famous knight, even though half of the time he’d end up getting beat up, laughed at, and run out of town.

Don Quixote makes me want to say fuck cynicism, especially justified cynicism. Fuck the reality of lowered expectations. Make your own reality. Wise men die the same as fools. The reality I want to make is a world where ordinary people still give a shit about what writers have to say, where they don't see writers as cliquey elitist assholes spewing academic jargon at an equally elitist audience. The reality I want is for everyone in the world to have a voice and be able to say whatever they want without some self-righteous PC patrolman telling you want you can and can't think.

Be insane, be wild, speak your heart, and do your best to change the world, especially if your attempt is hopeless to the point of ridicule. Get up on your old ass, broken down donkey, head toward the nearest city, and get to work.

Blake Butler - 300,000,000

I read this novel when it came out a year ago, but I reread it again this year. I loved the book that first time, but the second time was even better. The book becomes much easier to follow the second time around. Many things that get mentioned early in the book, that at first seem mostly like the insane rambling of a psychotic cult leader, become much clearer after reading later chapters. 

For me, this book is a masterpiece, easily one of the best books to come out in the last 10 years. It made me shift my attention to thinking about writing in terms of a career. Part of what has stifled me in a lot of my writing is that I feel a strong drive to write a first book that hits that baseball way out of the fucking park. A book that no one has seen before. It’s vain to think about things in this way, but I only want to put out a books that are like flawless diamonds. There are already so many genius books the world that I feel a responsibility to only put out books that attain that level. I’m definitely no Joyce or Shakespeare, but I do feel a confidence deep down that if I work hard enough, I can put something into the world that will genuinely be worth a reader’s time.

I loved all of Blake Butler’s book that I’ve read so--especially Insomnia and Scorch Atlas--but I feel strongly that 300,000,000 is his best so far, a completely unique book that I feel only he could write. Instead of pinning all my literary aspirations to the book directly in front of me, I want to have a longer view, a view of a literary career that will hopefully last decades, until I’m sitting in a rocking chair smoking blunts from early morning to night, churning out sentences. 

Many writers don’t write their best books until they’re three or four books in. It takes a long time and a lot of work to make something that could be called genuinely original, something that could only come from your own unique mind. That’s the goal that I want to achieve. I don’t really believe in creative competition--that idea doesn’t make much sense to me--but I definitely want to someday write a book that is of as good a quality as Blake Butler’s 300,000,000.

This is my understanding of the plot of the novel: 

BOOK ONE: A mysterious man named Gretch Garvey amasses a following of drugged-out, nihilistic young men that start breaking into homes, indiscriminately murdering strangers. Flood, a detective, is put on the case to try and put an end to this burgeoning death cult. After Garvey gets arrested, Detective Flood starts interview his young followers, and tries to make sense of the seemingly insane ramblings in Garvey’s notebook, in which he implies the end of the world is at hand. It also seems that Garvey is possibly some type of supernatural prophet or demi-god, or at least that how his followers view him.

BOOK TWO: 
Despite being arrested and put in jail, Gravey’s death cult continues to spread throughout America like a kind of virus. Ordinary people suddenly go insane, killing their family and neighbors and random strangers before killing themselves. Mass panic sets in as seemingly everyone in the United States begin to murder each other. There are long explicit descriptions of one murder after another. A death count starts to form, a death count that you know will eventually reach the novel’s title 300,000,000 aka every person in America.

BOOK THREE:
The police begin to investigate the house that Gravey and his boys have been living in. There is a mass grave underneath the house. It seems like Flood is starting to become infected with Gravey’s supernatural influence and plan to reduce all life in the US to one singular black hole of death. Flood falls head first into a hole in the basement, and seems to disappear from ordinary reality. 

BOOK FOUR:
By this point in the book, it appears that almost everyone in America is dead. Mirrors have been a recurrent theme in the story since the beginning. Gravey’s house is covered in mirrors. Flood enters some kind of other universe in which he can pass through mirrors into the empty houses of people who have died. Flood is alone, perhaps the last living person in the country. He has no clear idea about what has happened, or what he is doing. He spends a lot of time travelling around the empty houses and cities, which are covered in dead bodies. I’ve heard in an interview that Blake Butler was thinking a lot of his dad, who passed away recently and suffered from dementia. Maybe what Flood is going through is what it would feel like to experience dementia -- complete confusions -- forgetting everything you know, even yourself -- to have no capacity to understand what is happening from moment to moment.

BOOK FIVE:
Although Gravey has been referring to an entity named Darrell since the begginging of the book, the novel now focuses on who or what Darrell is, who in a strange way seems to be everyone absorbed into a single being. It seems like Gravey is a prophet, and Darrell is the true force behind all the murders. Maybe Darrell is death itself. I think of this chapter as kind of being like the psychedelic end of Space Odyssey 2001 when the astronaut travels to the end of universe. Flood encounters several strange geometric shapes. This section deserves close attention and a lot of parsing apart and studying and thinking about, but even without that it was definitely an emotional experience for me that was not easily brushed off or forgotten.

I loved this last chapter a lot--I heard that Butler originally wasn’t going to add it to the end, but I’m very glad that he did. It gave me a perspective on Death that I hadn’t really thought about before. In some places, it’s implied that Darrell is every reflection in the mirror. It’s implied that everyone who dies become a part of Darrell, until eventually there is nothing that exists but Darrell. Darrell is everything and everyone condensed into one. Of course Death is scary and horrible and represents ultimate separation from each other and from "reality," but in another way Death is the origin and the end of everything. Inside Darrell, we are all one being again.

There are so many things that I’m leaving out this synopsis, but I wanted to write it down for my own sake, to articulate how I view the novel. Butler might disagree with my interpretation, I’m not sure, but after reading it twice, this is how I view the book in an overarching way.

I would like to read this book again, maybe in another year or two. It’s the type of book that I can see myself returning to over and over. Even if there was no recognizable plot at all, I feel that the language is bizarre and inventive enough to keep me coming back. Butler excels at sayings things that I’ve never heard before. His sentences and paragraphs almost never fail to put new ideas into my head.

From my point of view, if there’s any justice in the world (there isn’t, of course) this book will still be enthusiastically read 20, 30, 50 years from now. It’s an extremely violent and disturbing book, but it left a deep impression on me, and I’m sure that will continue to haunt me for a very long time.

ALL AT NOTHING BY DC DEMARSE

One time I asked Dan how many full length books he'd written and he told me around fifteen. He seems to put out twenty or thirty new pages of writing every week, and he's been doing this pretty consistently for years now. I find DeMarse inspiring because it doesn't seem like anything could ever stop him from writing and doing creative things. I respect him because it's obvious that writing is something he needs to do, and need is everything that matters. I like him because he's a relentless weirdo, and because I feel that he pours all of his guts into whatever he's currently working on. His writing is frequently very abstract, but there's a deep feeling there that always comes through for me.

I chose to review All At Nothing because it's my favorite DeMarse book that I've read so far, but really this is a recommendation to check out everything DeMarse has written.

Download All At Nothing for free HERE.

FRIEND HIM ON FACEBOOK to catch his most recent work.

Buy his book Furthest Agent HERE.

Watch this video of him dancing in a parking lot:

If I could be God, I would replace all movies and tv channels with neverending loops of DC DeMarse videos. 

All At Nothing is 174 pages of prose. If you enjoy reading experimental writers like Sean Kilpatrick, Vanessa Place, Darby Larson, Dodie Bellamy, M Kitchell, or Blake Butler, then you will probably like DC DeMarse. These are some excerpts from All At Nothing:

***

The large and passive body of a cloud looses a rainy current like blood through the deep wound. The current muddies the tulips, and saturates the dry bark of the oaks with water. Much taller than the oaks are the buildings, and the buildings are dusty with exhaust. The rain sloshes heavy and thick across the streets, and sidewalks rose from the streets and they lay flat and bloated like sponges. The one cloud would still cover the town and surrounding valley, even after the shower had stopped; and he was under the cloud that made everything grey, so the building lay there in grey pallor.

***

once we detach from the need to perfectly explain, we lose a layer of self-consciousness, and the world around us becomes not so needful, and the perfection comes and goes throughout, us never knowing, perhaps the observer knowing. and we sully the joke of life, once we are aware, once we observe ourselves, and find something so serious in our forgetting to forget.

***

We fell together into a cloud of roses, our feet wrapped, our tongues wrapped, kissing together, a hot breath or two. A coo, a pinkest of sighs from the girl, as your pale white neck stretches, inviting me to kiss you there, too, and your limpid eyes roll backwards, blue, blue and wide.

***

I have felt something of chaos in the wind. But if I knew once if at all what possessed air to move I do not know now. This is an airless place. Compressed, damp. What I thought I understood is understood and yet it is so much blankness against more pale void. And yet nature is no poverty it is I who lack the words. If there were such a thing as life I would only too easily ascribe meaning to the air I breathe.

Wind changes direction though and so then I do not have much to say besides that I would rather be or you know exist in a vacuum if only for the sake of perspective. If only for the sake of knowing that I need air to move and change and need to feel this motion and its everaltering velocities.

To be hermetically sealed is to be safe indeed however I am become more obsessed in the chaos as of late and like to express such things in a mannered way so that I may at least see this contrast in airless language, if I cannot be robbed of wind.

***

There are many different things that language can do and one thing I like for language to do is fuck me up. When you smoke weed, you think of things you never thought before. That also happens to me when I read DeMarse's writing out loud to myself. He fits words into arrangements that I haven't seen before.

I'm definitely not the first person to make this comparison, but reading experimental literature can be like taking drugs. Sometimes you take drugs because you want to get fucked up and change how you look at everything. You want to get at the edge of things. Taking drugs is a risk--you might have a good time or a bad time. You might take acid and come back with something very wise and insightful, or you might just drool and see a lot of colors you've never seen before. Reading experimental literature is better than doing drugs. Instead of doing acid, try reading something by DC DeMarse for an hour or two, that is my advice to you today.

This is something that Rimbaud said:

"The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses. All forms of love, suffering, and madness. He searches himself. He exhausts all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessences."

I think that describes DeMarse's work pretty well. His writing is extremely dense and it frequently doesn't 'make sense' in a conventional way. But I keep coming back to DeMarse's writing and drawing inspiration from it because I can feel so much emotion and energy in it. There are intense moments of pain and joy and revelation that come through many of his lines. 

Eileen Myles said that 'The material of poems is energy itself, not even language,' and DeMarse is bursting with energy. For me, he's easily as good as Sean Kilpatrick or M Kitchell or any number of contemporary experimental poets that are working today, and I recommend checking out some of DeMarse's writing as soon as possible.

Noah Cicero Interview

‘The Collected Works of Noah Cicero Vol. 1’ is a collection of short stories and novels that Noah Cicero wrote in his early twenties, from 2003 to 2006.  I picked some of my favorite excerpts from the book and asked Noah to comment on them, and tell me some stories about what his life was like while writing these stories. 

buy a copy of The Collected Works Vol 1 HERE 

I feel sick here standing in front of the mirror. My stomach hurts so much, so does my back, my breasts are too big and it causes my back to hurt. My skin hurts too. I wish Jesus would take my pain away. I really wish he would. Oh, my stomach hurts. It hurts so much.

Nobody believes me when I’m in pain. Everyone accuses me of faking. I don’t know why they accuse me of faking. Don’t they know somebody in pain can go to work and be laughing and smiling and still be very sick? I’m so sick, I want to go the doctor. But I can’t because I have no health insurance. Well, it only costs fifty dollars to go to the doctor, but I can’t afford pills. And I need so many pills, I’m in such great pain.

- pg. 6, ‘I Clean in Silence’

I wrote that in 2002. I was living with my ex-fiance in a trailer. She used to always say, “I clean in silence.” I liked when she said it, how it sounded. She used to live in Eugene, Oregon. We both did actually. I lived in Eugene for a summer, basically with her. It was amazing: drunk all the time, crazy hippies, sex, skinny dipping in hot springs. That is why the part about Oregon is there. We ended up living together in a small trailer, trying to be in love. We had loved each other since high school, 7 years had passed. All my first stories were about her, she caused me a lot of emotions. I did something bad and we didn’t see each other for 7 years. Then a mutual friend, someone that lived in Oregon with us, tricked us into coming to the bar to see her, and for us to magically see each other. We saw each other, the first instant, was pretty intense. But we talked, and things went smoothly. Now, sometimes we talk at Dairy Queen. (I feel like, saying, “We talk at Dairy Queen,” makes no sense. But I’m from a tiny town of 2,000 and meeting at Dairy Queen makes a lot of sense.) 

A guy on the radio is talking about the war. 

Speculating.

Speculating.

Speculating.

He says in less than two hours, we shall fight to preserve freedom.

Freedom.

America wants to give another country freedom. That doesn’t sound that bad, or does it.

I hope the terrorists don’t attack. I read in the paper a couple days ago that the terrorists would fuck up America if we attacked Iraq. I hope they were just trying to scare us.

They probably won’t attack Youngstown, Ohio. There is nothing here of any importance. It will probably be New York again. 

- pg. 11, ‘The Human War’

I lived in my parents house when I wrote The Human War. I was kicked out of the aforementioned trailer. I was broken up with my fiance. Breaking up with her was really bad, I had basically dated her for 7 years, I was convinced she was “It.” She wasn’t. I lived in my parents' house, super depressed, writing on a laptop my friend Nicky Chiarella gave me. He eventually left to Santa Fe, New Mexico to run art projects. The Iraq War started, I had no job, and I didn’t care about anything. I sat in my bedroom and wrote all day for a few weeks till it was done. The girl Kendra in the book is the fiance. She really haunted those first things. I think at that moment, I started to “feel loss.” Like that early 20s, “there are a lot of things I have no control over” feelings.  

I love reading.
It’s the only thing that keeps me together.

I need books.

I need those dead man’s lines.

I need their truth.

I like writers who write out of necessity.

Writers who write because they have to.

Who are compelled to express.

They are driven by one thing only, and that is the written word.

I see books as the purest representations of an era.

When anthropologists a thousand years from now need to understand the psychology of the people of a time, they will look at their books. Not their bridges, computers, and skyscrapers.

- pg. 29, 'The Human War'

I think I wrote this in relation to Nietzsche’s blood writing thing. I remember taking a train from Youngstown to Las Vegas a little during that winter. My brother was moving from Las Vegas to Michigan and he needed his whole house transported, and he wanted me to drive his wife’s car. My dad bought me train tickets. I asked him why. He said: “Because you’ve never been on a train.” I took the train, that is where the last story in The Human War comes from. I read Spoke Zarathustra on the train. The line: “A Cold Wind Blows over the Lonely One," is from Thus Spoke too. I think if someone read Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Waiting for Godot and Nausea and the Collected Works in the same month, it would be a fun puzzle for them.

“I told the doctor I wanted to be free, so he gave me more medication,” Jimmy said.

“Is it helping?” Melissa said.

“I don’t want to be free anymore,” Jimmy said.

“What do you want to be now?” Melissa asked.

“Drunk.”

“I was drunk when they brought me here. I drank a bottle of whisky, then I went to Denny’s, and picked up everybody’s cups in the smoking section and threw them at this picture on the wall of this one man walking alone in the desert. Then I got up on the counter and took off all my clothes. Then I think the cops took me here.” Melissa said.

“What were you thinking about when you did it?” Jimmy said.

“I was thinking about the time my dad threw me into the wall for spilling a cup of Kool-Aid,” Melissa said.

“Why’d you take off your clothes?” Jimmy asked.

“I was going back to the primitive,” Melissa said.

“One time I stayed out in the woods for three days, until my parents found me and sent me here,” Jimmy said.

“One time when I saw my mother at the store she said hi to me. I went home and cut off my pinky toe. Look, I have no pinky toe,” George said.

- pg. 72, ‘The Doomed’

Melissa and the character from Bedroom Scene are based off the same person. She killed herself 3 years ago. She used to say crazy shit, get naked at parties, throw horrible tantrums, she was just out of control. She was manic depressive and sometimes, she would be normal and calm. But then you would see screaming, fucking everyone, blasted on coke, then a week later she would be fine again. I went to see her in the mental ward once, her hair was in a buzzcut. I remember petting her head while she lied on the hospital bed. One time we went together to my brother’s grave, she sat there and talked with me, the sun was nice that day. She hung herself with a bungee cord. Her toes were touching the floor of the basement. She used to call me and ask me to get a beer with her, we would sit and talk, but she doesn’t call anymore.

Jack took a cigarette from the pack on the floor. He put the cigarette in his mouth but didn’t light it.   

Angela stared at him. She let the covers fall, exposing her breasts, and she stared.

“Are you going to light that?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, tight-lipped so the cigarette did not fall from his mouth.

“What if I said I loved you?”

Jack found a lighter and lit the cigarette, slow and deliberate, as if to postpone answering the question for as long as possible. Finally, he said, “You still have a chance to stop.” 

- pg 81, 'Bedroom Scene'

This story was from the dark winter of Ohio. This is the same girl who was Melissa in The Doomed and killed herself with a bungee cord. She lived in an apartment in an old house in Girard by where I lived. I would drive over and sit in the bedroom with her. I would show her some plays I had written. She liked to read my plays, she was always very supportive of my writing. She was always smoking weed. It was freezing outside, must have been 10 degrees, snow covering everything. I would listen to her talk and talk, I never knew why I went to see her, we were both lonely. We would have sex and then I would leave. Sex meant nothing to us, just a passing dot dot dot of nothingness. Sex, a dot in the nothingness.

Kathy sets her twenties out on the counter.

She has seven twenties.

She lives for those twenties.

She has no bank account.

No savings or checking account.

No Visa or Mastercard.

Just those seven twenties.

She counts them.

Holds them in her hand.

And laughs about those stupid bitches who work in restaurants and retail who don’t make shit.

She makes seven twenties barely working at all.

There is no time in Kathy’s world.

No future, just a timeless present.

Her life only stretches as far as her twenties, and how she can spend those twenties.

Kathy stares at those seven twenties.

She adds up how many twenties it will take to feed her and her son.

How many twenties she can devote to bills.

Then she will know how much she can spend on coke for the evening.

Clocks and calendars, long term goals, mean nothing to Kathy.

Only that she has enough twenties to get her to the next time she can get more twenties.

- pg. 105, ‘The Condemned’

This is based off a dancer I still know. We don’t see each other as much as we used to, but we used to see each other all the time. I didn’t have any money myself at that point, I worked as a pizza boy and had no bank account. I would put all my extra money in a cup. I would just have 20s, only 20s. Sometimes I would sit with the Kathy character and she would have like 2000 in 20s. And she would hold them up and be so proud, like having 2000 dollars in 20s meant something. There is a whole world of people, where time doesn’t mean anything. Time only really means something if you have the money to plan for the future. Kathy had no money to plan for the future. Someone said to me the other day, “What is your dream, what do you want to do with your life.” He was from the middle-class, his parents are college educated, he is going to a private school. He is nice, he meant it sincerely. I replied: “You can only have a dream if your parents can buy it. Your parents buy your private education, then they buy your internships, and basically in the end they bought you a job. Most people don’t have someone that can buy them a job, so they try their best and call it their life."

Billy Jean said, “Pain is like a drug. It takes you away. It reminds you that you’re human, but at the same time makes you an object. No one can tell when you’re in pain either, you might be the one hitting me, and I’m making noise. But you don’t know if I’m in pain. Physical pain in a secret. You can only take someone else’s word for it. You can’t graph or do surveys on physical pain. It is the only thing that is left immeasurable. Physical pain also forces you to recognize that you exist. That you are on a rock, in an indifferent scary universe. And there is nothing metaphysical about that. It is real. When a person screams in pain, the actual pain is only half the noise they make. The other half is the terror of being forced to accept that they exist. All physical pain reminds a person of their own death also, they know even when they get a paper cut that someday some other part of their body is going to get hurt or give out like carburetors or axles do and their body and existence will come to a halting nothingness.” 

- pg. 145, ‘The Condemned’

I was having a sexual relationship with someone, and it was based off of sado masochism and all such things, and I was reading Wittgenstein and Sartre at the same time. Wittgenstein always talks about how you can’t describe pain and Sartre always talks about how people try to make themselves into objects (in-itselfs) because they are rejecting their freedom. I have never really enjoyed physical punishment inflicted upon me during sex, a girl scratched me once and I hated it. I feel like choking and slapping makes me happy. It makes the sexual act come alive. I keep thinking the word, “flourishes.” I feel like physical pain does remind us of our deaths. It objectifies us, it reminds us that we are objects.  We have this little conscious thing in the head, but overall we are meat objects condemned to die. Dying is not funny.

Let’s get personal.

I am one human among six and a half billion.

Like if you had six and half billion pieces of Pez, and you took out one piece and sat it next to the giant pile.

I would be that one piece.

I am one piece of Pez.

Yes I am.I live on Earth, in America. Red, white, and blue MO FO!

Inside the state of Ohio.

In a city named Youngstown.

I live in a house.

Remember this all comes from my heart.

You know?

The other day my shit was so hard and big, I had to cut it in half with a coat hanger to get it down the toilet. 

- pg. 159, ‘The Condemned’

This comes from a strange place. I was at a cabin with a relative who is a Christian-Republican, and he said evolution wasn’t true. And I said, “But we are 99% like apes.” He replied, “But that 1% is so big.” I thought, but did not say, “If we had 99 pieces of Pez and one piece of Pez nearby the large amount of Pez, that one piece would look small.” I did not say that out loud.  But I like Pez, and like the word Pez even more than the taste and texture of actual Pez. I don’t know why I said Mo Fo, maybe Mo Fo was popular then. I like that I wrote, “I live in a house.” That comes from my brother who killed himself. He was suffering from schizophrenia. He was on the porch at my parents’ house. I said something like, “Where do you live?” And he said, “I live in houses.” He was obviously nuts. And concerning my shit, one morning it was really hard and I had to actually cut it in half. I think I put that in to debase myself. See, I’m really Catholic, I wasn’t raised Catholic, but Christianity has corrupted me in many ways, debasing oneself is very important to me. The Collected Works is about the public debasement of oneself, the tearing away of temporary pop culture and leaving nothing but the raw human. I really wanted to achieve this raw human feeling, to go to levels of honesty that people have never gone to before. That was always my goal.

I stood in front of the stage.

Some has-been preppy was singing an Elton John song. 

I think it was “Tiny Dancer.”

I like “Tiny Dancer” so I listened.

The guy was singing his heart out up there.

He was a good singer too.

He hit the notes and didn’t fuck up at all.

I started to sing along with it.

A lot of people were.

There were like eight people by the stage singing and dancing a little.

As I stared at him, I realized why there are karaoke and open mic nights.

It’s because during school people are given all these chances to play sports, sing, act in plays, be in the band, all kinds of shit. But then they graduate it’s all over, so many chances are taken away when a person graduates. A lot of fun is just cut off.

I started to cry a little when the guy started singing the chorus.

I knew at that moment there wasn’t much difference between that has-been preppy’s singing and my writing.

He just wanted to take a break from the shit of the world and express himself, have fun, and share his talents with other people, even if only eight other people cared.

- pg. 190, ‘Burning Babies’

This story is totally true. I saw a guy sing Tiny Dancer. I was in my mid 20s when I wrote that, and I felt like, the whole high school thing was finally over. There is such a lag of talking about and thinking about high school with Americans. I remember when I first started dating my girlfriend, she was 22 and I was 28, and her and her friends talked about high school all the time. Because strangely high school is great, you go to this building, you know everyone, there are sports to play, high school newspapers, singing and music classes, there is theater, you have friends, homecoming and prom. You can wear really stupid clothes and everything just writes it off as being young. Then it slowly fades, if you don’t go to college, it ends pretty quickly. But if you go to college and especially a local one, there is more of a lag, because there are ways you can prove yourself in college, but not as many. Adult life offers very little in terms of fun group activities, it is really sad. As each year passes after high school, you slowly realize that adult life is really boring, unless you are super proactive about your life and willing to take risks. High school doesn't require that you are proactive or take risks, it is all proved for you, your parents pay a small fee or you throw a bake sale. But if an adult wants to make their life not boring, it requires a lot of effort. Personally I sang several times in Korea at the Norea Bang. Usually when I sing, I sing Elvis.

For the month I worked there, I worked with about seven different people because the Grand Canyon fired people constantly.

When I first got there, the head of the dish tank was this deranged old wastoid named Chuck.

He was about fifty years old.

He had a handlebar mustache.

Had worked at over five national parks.

He once said this to me: “I remember one of my past lives. I was a slave master in the Old South. I remember being in charge of a huge plantation.”

I looked at him and said nothing.

He would talk like everything he had said would be life-altering and earth-shattering, which is common among people who don’t know shit about anything.

The guy wasn’t miserable though.

He loved living in beautiful places and having new experiences.

Which isn’t bad.

I knew a lot of people way more intelligent than him back in Youngstown, but they never had the balls to be happy.

Even though Chuck was dumb as shit, he always found a way to live in beautiful places.

Then after a shitty day of work he could walk to the edge of the Grand Canyon or to the hot springs of Yellowstone and smile.

- pg. 204, ‘American Sketches’

Chuck is still here, I see him everyday. He works the transportation desk at one of the hotels. He still has a mustache. He has put on some weight. He doesn’t recognize me. There is only one person that has recognized me, and that was my old roommate. I went to the Grand Canyon  two days after I graduated high school. I went because my dad told me it was a good idea. I worked as a dishwasher and would drink on the Victor Hall porch every night. Victor Hall is this 80 year old dorm made of stones. I was so excited about life, I was 19 from a small town of 2000 white people, and there I was surrounded by Costa Ricans, French Kids and Kiwis. I was so excited, so energetic about life. I wanted to talk about everything, I wanted to feel everything. After only a month I got fired from the Grand Canyon, and then I went to San Diego and lived for two months in a small room with a Kiwi. It was completely insane, and I spent all my money, and the behavior was horrible. And I had so much hope about my life, I really thought at that moment and for the first 3 books that I could have been a writer, as in a person that writes books for money. I was convinced that if I was really original and hyper intense, I would succeed. I didn’t succeed.

ZAC'S HAUNTED HOUSE BY DENNIS COOPER

Zac's Haunted House by Dennis Cooper

There are very few things in literature that don't have a creative lineage of precedents...no matter how weird or different a book is, if you read widely enough you will almost always encounter someone else who did something similar. 

One of the things I find most exciting about being a writer/reader in this period of history, as we slowly transition from paper texts to digital ones, is the opportunity to create things that the world has genuinely never seen before. As far as I know, this is the first and only gif novel.

One of my favorite descriptions of the novel comes from Dennis Cooper's blog: 

"I'm coming off feeling like I've found, through creating a novel out of animated gifs, a whole new world or secret level, in the video game sense, within narrative that makes me wonder anew about what it is and what it can be. I feel like the gif form/material allowed me to do something with fiction that language-based fiction hasn't ever allowed me to do -- that is, absolutely and deeply submerge the story, plot, characters and their development until they become a background."

Besides that introduction, the best way to experience the novel is to just click through and look at it, give it some of your attention. 

Reading the novel was such an interesting experience for me because after awhile I realized that, even though it's a novel with hardly any words, I felt that I really was 'reading' it. The sequence of how the gifs are ordered and separated into groups and chapters creates a nebulous but discernible meaning. You start to notice deliberate patterns and structures, and you begin to piece together meaning in a way similar to how you discern and interpret meaning in a sequence of words or sentences. The gif novel is an extremely unique and trippy kind of reading experience, but to me it's still a reading experience. Zac's Haunted House feels like the invention of a new language to me, and I'm excited to see what this new language can say.

JULIUS CAESAR BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

My favorite line from Julius Caesar is 'death for his ambition.' That sums up the play perfectly for me. 

Caesar was arguably one of the most successful generals and politicians in human history. Caesar was so well loved and so successful that his popularity threatened to tear the Republic apart, by crowning Caesar king of the entire Roman Empire. There was a great fear that he would become a tyrant. For his ambition, Caesar was stabbed to death by his closest colleagues and friends.

Similarly, Bruno became involved in Caesar's assassination for the good of Rome, to save the Republican form of government from being replaced with a dictatorship. For his ambition, Bruno was murdered during the ensuing civil war and everyone thinks of him as one of history's most notorious traitors. 

All of the main characters in this play are powerful men, flawed politicians with personal agendas. The main characters frequently voice disdain for the general public, who are fickle and easily manipulated by lofty speeches. The public are described like this:

(reacting to a speech) "the rabblement hooted, and clapped their chopped hands, and threw up their sweaty night-caps, and uttered such a deal of stinking breath..."

"You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!"

Shakespeare lived in a highly political time full of constant King of Thrones type coups and spies and civil wars, and I see this play as his condemnation of that type of world. Power corrupts. People have different takes on this play, but that's mine.  You can interpret Shakespeare's plays in about a million different ways, which is a big reason why they keep getting read all these hundreds of years later. 

My favorite parts of the play are the ones where supernatural power is invoked, aka 'beware the Ides of March' etc:

"And there were drawn upon a heap a hundred ghastly women, transformed with their fear, who swore they saw men all in fire walk up and down the streets. And yesterday, the bird of night did sit even at noon-day upon the market-place, hooting and shrieking."

No matter how high your ambition soars or how much you achieve, death is always the final result. The power of mankind is nothing compared to the power of the universe. The great wheel turns.