The Markmaker

I went to visit my friend the markmaker.

“Here,” he said. “Take a look at this.”

He showed me a page. It was covered in small black marks. Some split or connected with each other. Others turned at hard angles. They were arranged in neat, regular rows.

“That’s quite interesting,” I said.

“It’s something I’ve been working on. The marks are a kind of system.”

“I see. Like an alphabet.”

He looked at me, irritated. “No, not at all like an alphabet at all. This is something completely different.”

I changed the subject. We ordered dinner from the dumpling place we always used to order from, back in our student days. Later, we drank a few beers and I fell asleep on the soft bamboo floor of his study.

A few weeks passed. I happened to be in my friend’s neighborhood again, and I decided I would go visit him. When I called at his house, however, there was no answer. Going around back, I found him standing up to his knees in the grass. There was a large stone in front of him that he seemed to be studying. It was dark and angular.

“Here you are,” I said. “Didn’t you hear me calling?”

“I’m sorry. I was concentrating.”

“On the stone?”

“Yes. Don’t you notice how it’s a mark? A very specific mark? It’s a part of my system.”

“I see.”

“Except…” He trailed off. We stayed outside for a while, then went in. Over cups of green tea, he told me a story about watching his older brother die of tuberculosis when he was a child. He told me it took a long time. The sun set, and I said goodnight. On the way home, I thought about the hopelessness of our ambitions. Moths flitted beneath streetlights.

Read more

$100,000

$100,000
maybe that’s all
maybe that’s all it takes
i mean
we’ve all thought about it
right
for $100,000
it would be tempting
you know
it would be hard
haha
no really 
i’m serious
look at me
stop looking at the dancers
ignore the dancers
i’m trying
i’m trying to
be serious with you
here
look at me
you’ve thought about it
don’t lie to me
don’t act like
we’re not the same
like
we’re not born
out of the same shit
into this shit
like we’re not
a couple of real
motherfuckers
it would be hard to say no
is all
that’s all i’m saying
you know
for $100,000
be honest
be honest with me right now
you’ve thought about it
i know you have
and you know
it wasn’t always like this
i know that
seriously
but
i mean
$100,000
look at me
$100,000
that could just
that could be everything

Read more

A book that comes in a ring binder with the author and title scribbled in sharpie on the front. All the pages look like they’ve been scanned and xeroxed multiple times. Edition of 50.

A book of poems with each poem printed on a separate sheet of cardstock, all housed loose in a Mylar pouch. Author and title printed on a sticker stuck to the front. Edition of 100.

A book left submerged in a creek overnight. Edition of 25.

A book of short stories where the title of each story is a set of precise geographical coordinates, with one copy of the book left at each named location. Edition dependent on number of stories within.

A book which is only sold from the trunk of a Honda Civic parked on a specific street corner between the hours of 9:00pm and 5:00am. Edition of 500.

A book with a word count of 62,872 entitled 62,872 Words. Edition of 100.

A book which can only be purchased by sending a nude picture of yourself to the publisher. Edition of 30.

A book presented in the form of a dusty old shoebox full of postcards, telegrams, various baubles and knick-knacks, a leather wallet, a stack of canceled checks. At the bottom of the box is a death certificate issued by a fictional government. Edition of 10.

A book documenting attempts at convincingly forging the signatures of various Modernist poets. Alternately, a book documenting attempts at convincingly forging the signature of a single Modernist poet, until perfection. Edition of 25.

A book written entirely in lowercase, with no punctuation save periods, commas, and line breaks. Emphatically NOT a work of poetry. Edition of 300.

A book containing a single number which is totally unique, and has never been represented or even conceived of at any time anywhere in the world before. The number is, in itself, artistically compelling. Edition of 30.

A book of stories or poems where each story or poem is accompanied by a “Smell Card” that, when scratched, releases an odor. Each card’s odor is more unpleasant than the last. None of the odors have any direct connection to whatever the story or poem is about. Edition of 100.

A book without a purpose. Edition unlimited.

A book printed on a 3 1/8in x 230ft thermal paper receipt roll with a grammage of 55. Edition of 50.

A book of religious texts with a cinderblock on top of it. Unique.

A book with no title or credited author, bound in oil-stained burlap. Edition of 25.

A book of photographs of pages of other books. One photograph of one page per page. Edition equivalent to the number of unique books photographed.

A book printed on strips of scavenged birch bark, bound together with loops of fishing line. Edition of 5.

A book whose ostensible publication date is continually pushed back, each announcement of postponement accompanied by a press release which includes increasingly elaborate, spectacular claims about the text and its presentation. These press releases are eventually compiled and released in place of the book, which itself is never published, and may or may not exist. Edition of 888.

A book completely encased in red wax; stamped on the spine with the publisher’s seal, and on the block with the author’s seal. Edition of 30.

A book entitled Crime, printed and bound using stolen paper, glue, machinery, etc. Edition of 10.

A book of “seasonal poetry” available only through mail order, the text of which varies dependent on the date the order is postmarked. Edition of 366.

A book that falls apart like a rotten log upon being opened. Unique.

A book where each copy is written by hand on whatever scrap paper its author has lying around. Edition unlimited.

A book that takes legally-binding responsibility for the eventual, inevitable deaths of its readers, proactively absolving any others who, in the future, might otherwise be blamed for hastening their passing, or even directly causing it. Distributed for free on street corners, anonymously. Edition unlimited.

I felt sick. I fell onto my hands and knees and retched tarry bile thinly onto the floor of the train car. I heard a woman nearby inhale sharply.

“Just ignore him,” a man said to her. “He’s just some random junkie.”

“So that’s who I am,” I thought. I felt steadier now that I knew who I was.

I got off at the next stop. The air was hot and rubbery in the station but I pulled my coat tighter around me anyway. Where did that reflex come from? I tried to remember, but couldn’t. With my head down, I started towards the other end of the platform. I heard the train doors closing and the train pulling away. I didn’t look back, but I knew it was going into an underground tunnel that would be very dark. “It’s dark everywhere but here,” I thought. “This subway stop is the only oasis of light in a darkened world.”

After the train was gone, the air got a little cooler. Everything relaxed. I almost started to feel comfortable. It was very quiet. There was no one else on the platform. At this time of night, there probably wouldn’t be another train for twenty minutes or longer, I thought. I let the quiet drape itself over me like an extra layer on top of my coat, a doubled shroud.

When I got to the end of the platform, I realized I had gone the wrong way. There was no exit here, no stairs leading up to… what? I tried to remember, but couldn’t. “There must be something up there that’s worth returning to,” I thought. I looked up and saw a closed-circuit television displaying my own hunched, disordered form to me. I quickly looked back down. I was worried that if I kept looking, I might see myself stripped to the skin, the camera discovering how unshaven I was, and how beneath the dark swirls of hair, there were tattoos I didn’t remember receiving. Beyond the screen, I saw a metal walkway leading off into the darkness of the tunnel, the one the train had come from, not the one it had left into. There was a gate across the walkway, blocking access, but it would be easy to hop, even in the condition I was in. I knew, of course, that I could turn around, that surely there was an exit at the platform’s other end, but I knew also that I had reached a point in my life where I could no longer retrace my step. I had lived that way too long, I felt. Now, it would be unbearable. I would have to throw myself onto the train tracks and lie there until something happened. There was really nothing else to do. I hopped the gate.

Near the entrance in the tunnel the wall was covered with graffiti tags, but they became sparser as I went further in. There were alcoves every few feet, just large enough that I could imagine fitting myself into them. The light from the platform guided me at first, but then it faded, and became only something dimly behind me, in my past, and I had to grope forward in the dark. Here and there a little diode stuck out of the wall dully glowing, usually red, but sometimes yellow or green. As my eyes adjusted, these lights became enough to give certain edges of things some slight amount of definition in the darkness. Eventually, I reached a ladder bolted to the wall. I hesitated. It wasn’t something I had been expecting. I had imagined, rather, that I might come across a bonfire burning in some dusty amphitheater, and that I could follow the smoke upwards to a new and secret home. But, as I reflected on it, I realized that this was never going to happen. My path was downwards.

And so I went down, I climbed down the ladder through a narrow concrete shaft into a space of humid, low-ceilinged corridors. Here, there were more diodes, which mostly glowed dim red, and sometimes dim blue. The air was rank. I kept stepping on things that felt gentle and soft and very wet. I kept stepping on old newspapers, too, gossip magazines, greasy napkins, rotten cardboard, tissuey, sodden religious pamphlets. In my exploration, I found what felt like a door that had been boarded up very recently, and several more that were shut with sturdy padlocks. Finally, I found a particular door, which wasn’t locked, and opened when I tried it. It was in something like a corner, a place where the corridor turned. The floor wasn’t quite level, something had eroded and made it slope downwards towards this corner. It formed a depression where something with an alkaline smell has pooled. As I opened the door, I was standing in this pool. A light came on, shining at me, and it blinded me. I stepped back and let go of the doorknob. The door swung immediately shut and there was no more light. I blinked and waited for my eyes to recover, then tried to open the door again. It wouldn’t. My hand rattled uselessly. It was locked now.

Later, I was in a small stony room with water dripping into a bucket behind me. There was a chair I was sitting in. I was in front of a table with a lamp and a telephone on it. There were no windows. I was still underground, of course. I had shut the door. The phone rang, and I picked it up.

“The press gang comes and takes the boy away. The boy’s dog barks at the press gang, but they take him away anyway. The boy’s dog doesn’t know what to do,” said the voice on the other end.

“What should the dog do?” I said. It felt strange to speak.

“The dog can’t do anything,” said the voice.

A prefect dream. I’ve found it’s productive for me, as a matter of “craft”, to not really know what it is I am writing, and to know I do not know, and to remain attentive to the ways in which this self-knowledge cathects my unknowingness. In this way, a kind of feedback loop can be generated, where the object of the text is made subject to a process of continual revision, and in so doing is prevented from ever becoming entirely fixed, entirely definite, entirely known. Instead, it remains as it should be: a perfect dream which is always just out of reach.

Skipping stones. I’m always a little confused when writers talk about writing as something they greatly enjoy doing, and even more so when they characterize it as a chore, a great struggle. For me, it just feels like it’s “correct,” that it’s what I should be doing, that it’s good, worthwhile. The process doesn’t make me feel any particular way beyond that. It can be tiring, of course, as any activity requiring sustained concentration can be, and I have days where nothing feels like it’s working, just as I have days when it seems like everything is. And it can be rewarding, too, when I finally find the phrase, the word, the idea I had been groping towards, the one which seems to bring a text into itself, but these feelings have little to do with how I think about what I do, really, or why I keep doing it. It’s not an emotional thing for me, is what I’m saying, although it’s not strictly intellectual, either. It’s something more like the process of searching for a suitable stone on the lake shore, one that I can believe I might be able to skip all the way to the other side, although it never does.

An irony. The fundamental issue responsible for the truly feeble popular understanding of the gallery arts (painting, sculpture, etc.) today doesn’t really have anything to do with the work itself, but rather, quite simply, that one does have to actually go specific locations at specific times to experience it – image files and exhibition catalogues are wholly inadequate substitutes, no matter how many the pixels, no matter how sumptuous the printing. Literature, however, can be engaged with pretty much anywhere at any time; it could not be more accessible. The irony, of course, is that this leads to similar problems, but in the opposite direction – everyone imagines not that they are incapable of “getting it,” but that they surely must be incapable of not “getting it.”

The general contours. Usually (not always, but usually), when I first write something it isn’t very good, or at least I don’t think it is. There’s too many words, or not enough, and many of them are in the wrong order. In some fundamental way, I can tell, the whole thing is intolerably superficial. But I still write it out, I put down the superficialities on the page, I make them into something fixed and concrete, separate from myself, so that an hour, a day, a week, a year later I can come back to it, because only after having let it lie in this way, only after having given myself this distance from it, let it become something which I feel somehow detached, even alienated from, something which, on some level, I no longer recognize as an expression of my own thoughts, my own feelings, will I be able to see what it is I was grasping for with these inadequate words, what matters of substance, if any, were latent in them, matters which I had no hope, initially, of perceiving more than the dim outlines, the general contours of, and how it is that I can reshape these words, such that they might express what they were always meant to.

If you’ve ever met me in person, you might (or might not) have been surprised to discover I’m not nearly as confident or eloquent in direct conversation as I am when I’m “speaking” like this. I’m prone to answering questions in vague, generic ways, allowing things to lapse into awkward silence, generally behaving in ways that imply I would rather not be talking to you, that it’s something I’m enduring, not enjoying – which is not true, probably, I like most people I meet and appreciate it when they take an interest in me. It’s just that I can’t say something, reconsider it, and then replace it with something else in the flow of an actual face-to-face conversation. Whatever comes out of my mouth I’m stuck with, no take-backs, and this makes me cautious, because I don’t want to be misunderstood, and even less to say something I don’t mean. To be sure, there are times when I know exactly what I want to say, just as there are times when I know exactly what I want to write. In these instances, I don’t hesitate; when I know, really know, what I want to do, I do it. But this clarity is rare, at least in my life. More often, it’s a matter of making my way through a fog. That in writing I have the time to stop and retrace my steps, should I find myself wandering from the path I have determined to follow, is no doubt central to my investment in it, why I have always preferred to communicate textually, since long before I decided “being a writer” was what I was going to do with my life.

Violences. A question posed by the filmmaker Marcel Hanoun, from a selection of fragments and aphorisms I recently perused: “Is the violence of images stronger than the image of violence?” – the same question, I think, could be asked of language, and with just as much relevancy. Consider the word “terrorist,” the way it has been made into a label which, for the purposes of empire, renders those to whom it’s affixed legally killable, torturable, not really people in any way that counts. Importantly, the word possesses this power because it is legitimated not only by state fiat, but also enthusiastic buy-in from large swathes of so-called “ordinary people,” viciously resentful of those whose stubborn refusal to cease existing complicates their supremacist fantasies, and eager to be told it is right for them to dream of a great culling, of cities in ruin, children starving, rivers swollen with filth and blood. This, the word “terrorist” and the whole vast discursive framework which gives it its power, within which it is a word, a tool, of great importance, certainly, but far from the only one (cf. “radical,” “extremist,” “parental alienation syndrome”), I think, can be considered the “language of violence” – there is certainly, as well, a “violence of language” which operates quite differently, which has at its disposal a number of quite different tools, quite different strategies (Ahmad Almallah’s work is perhaps a good practical example of this; Bataille would probably be helpful in developing a general theoretical articulation of the concept, even though I’m not as into him as I was when I was 23), but as for which one is “stronger”… I hesitate to say the relation is even necessarily antagonistic; it seems just as often to be purely orthogonal. But then again, even this is antagonistic to that which cannot tolerate difference. It’s important to remember as well, of course, that questions like these have far different valiance for us today than for someone of the May ’68 generation, like Hanoun. He knew a time when the revolution seemed almost within grasp – today, history weighs on our language (and, equally, on our images) very differently.

On poetic traditions. To be a serious poet today, I’m convinced, requires having come to understand that each poem creates its own tradition, a totally unique, brand-new tradition, and that equally each poem belongs to a single tradition, one which is the confluences of a thousand lineages, a thousand and one nights, and which is as old as an infant’s cry, and as young as the wind in your hair. It is necessary to come to understand that these facts are not in contradiction, and that in fact the one depends upon the other for its mortal sustenance. It is necessary, further, to understand that this tradition, the true, old, living tradition, is of such a vastness that a single lifetime is enough to glimpse only a tiny fraction of it. – To be a serious poet, I’m convinced, requires only this, and the discipline to see it through. To be a great poet, however, requires something further, something which anyone can recognize but no one has the right to give a name.

In a part of the world that’s full of ravines there are three that are around a particular small village. From above, they make a shape resembling an old, broken triquetra with the village at its center. The people in the village don’t go into the ravines that lacerate the earth around them. In the village, the ravines are known to be wild places. They cut jagged and their sides are steep and rocky and moss clings to the rocks and hangs long off of them in ragged strands. At the bottom of the ravines to the southwest and the southeast of the village run small streams which in the spring are greatly engorged by snowmelt from the mountains. Their dull roaring, at this time of year, can be heard at night by every person lying in every bed in the village, asleep or awake, it makes no difference. These waters ultimately disappear underground into a vast cave system, known to be deep and labyrinthine but scarcely explored at all, as all streams and rivers do in this part of the world. What is or might be found at the bottom of the ravine to the north of the village is unknown; it is too deep, no one can fathom it. Someone once dropped a lit torch from its lip, but the light went out, extinguished as if capped all of a sudden by an enormous douter, clasped in an enormous fist, well before it could have reached the ground.

Read more

I dreamt that I was in what I understood was Las Vegas, even though it didn’t really look anything like Las Vegas. I was looking down at an enormous complex made up of dozens of identical luxury high-rise hotels, built in an “X” shape across a massive, otherwise empty square in the middle of the desert. Each hotel was physically linked to its immediate neighbors along the diagonal in an obscure way that I don’t really know how to explain, and although shuttle services existed which would pick tourists up at the perimeter of this square and ferry them across its blank emptiness to whichever particular hotel they wished to stay at, I understood that the only way to get the “real experience” was by checking in at a hotel at one of the corners and then slowly working your way inwards, one hotel at a time, never stepping foot outside, somehow gaining the right to book a room at each subsequent hotel in turn. How exactly this right was acquired was unclear to me (I experienced this dream mostly from a floating, birds-eye perspective far removed from the inner workings of things), but I understood it was mostly a matter of wealth and influence, which one was expected to either already possess or to acquire along the way against nearly impossible odds. At the center of the square, where the two diagonals crossed, there was a kind of ultra-luxury palace-hotel. It was much larger than the others, with numerous domes and balconies and jutting spires, and covered in all sorts of elaborate ornamentation. Only the most unimaginably wealthy and powerful could stay there, I understood. Despite its extreme exclusivity, such that it was hard to imagine who could even book one of its rooms, it was always bustling with life and activity, numerous people coming and going, puffs of smoke escaping from industrial smokestacks buried discreetly behind the splendor of its facade. And it was quite spectacular, really, kind of literally awesome in the sense it made me feel a little of that deep, pit-of-the-stomach nauseousness one feels in the presence of the immense and unfathomable. I wasn’t really interested in any of this, though. What I was interested in was the way the shuttle buses went here and there across the great empty flatness between all the hotels. There were no roads or traffic markings or anything, just a big sheet of blank, sandy brown pavement, and so the buses would wind their way through it randomly, like tiny black insects carrying people that were even tinier black insects. I liked the way the sun beat down on everything here, being out in the desert. It was high noon on a perfectly clear day and it made everything flat and hard and everywhere perfectly the same. I felt sad I couldn’t go inside the hotels, really experience any part of this myself, but I understood I could only perceive the bigger picture, and accepted this. Then I woke up.

I think my neighbor Char Bear is going through some kind of traumatic life experience. I say this because after I woke up this morning, I heard her screaming in her apartment, which is next to mine. It was very jarring at first – I don’t like hearing a woman, or anyone else for that matter, scream. But then, when I heard her scream again, the same shrill, sharp sound after several minutes of silence, I understood this was just something she was doing, not a sign of any immediate threat or crisis, and I was able to relax and let myself get used to it. She kept it up all through the time I spent cooking and then eating my breakfast. Every few minutes, or sometimes even less than that, there would be another scream. It was always very loud, despite being muffled by the walls of our building. I felt surprised she hadn’t exhausted her vocal cords yet. Then, I went out. I was collected and taken to various places where I did and said various things and was given money, and was given a note the contents of which cannot be discussed. Later, when I asked Char Bear what was up, she said, “Oh, yeah, I’m really sorry about that, but I can’t promise you it won’t happen again, so don’t even ask. Basically, I’ve been going through a lot of fucked up shit in my life, and it’s been causing me to freak out and like, scream, and cut up sheets of paper. Like, I cut the sheet into a special shape, right, like, its own special shape, just its own, and then I cut that up, too. I cut the special shape up and it turns into like, a bunch of different shapes, and I cut those shapes up, too, until eventually it’s just a bunch of little scraps and fragments that basically aren’t even fucking anything except too small for the scissors to cut, they’re just nothing, garbage. Fucking, dust. And so yeah. I’ve been doing that sometimes lately, because of some stuff that’s going on with me lately. So you’re probably gonna hear me doing that sometimes. The screaming is a part of it, also, so don’t ask me not to scream. I have to scream, because I’m basically totally freaking out. Sorry.” I said I understood that. She said, “You really don’t, but it’s okay. It’s nice of you to pretend. You’re cool, you know that? Like, you’re chill. I’m glad you’re my neighbor, I’m glad you moved in here. The guy that lived here before you, he was crazy. Total douchebag. He was obsessed with his car. He once woke me up banging on my door at like, fucking six in the morning because he thought I’d scratched it. He found a scratch on the fender and just assumed I’d done it for some reason. Which I hadn’t, of course, I didn’t give a fuck about his stupid car, but that’s the kind of shit that’s always happening to me, you know? It wasn’t even like, a muscle car or anything. It was just a regular car. And his apartment smelled like ammonia. Like, you’d walk by it and you’d just get this super powerful ammonia smell in your nostrils, and then like, this really artificial floral undernote like from an air freshener or something, like he was trying to cover up the smell with Febreeze or whatever. Definitely something cheap, like that you’d get at Dollar Tree. I started holding my breath whenever I was on the landing there, just because I’d get these awful headaches otherwise. I’d feel like I was losing my mind, like my head was going to split open and a bunch of dirt and roots and mulch was going to come out. I guess it didn’t bother him, though, living there, even though the smell must’ve been so much stronger inside. Fuck. Anyway, I’m glad he doesn’t live there anymore. I’m glad you’re my neighbor now instead.” I thanked her. She rolled a blunt and we smoked it. “I like, need to go listen to something on my record player now but we can keep hanging out if you want. You like Kemialliset Ystävät?” I told her I appreciated the offer, but I was going to stay outside a while longer. Then I sat outside for a while longer. It was basically night but I could still see a little bit. I saw a guy crawl out of the bushes on the other side of the street, look around, make eye contact with me, and then run away. I felt disappointed about this. People run away from me too often, even when I don’t want them to.

The next day I stayed inside trying to build a house of cards. I thought about how stereotypical it was for someone like me to be doing something like this. It wasn’t really something you saw people doing, except in movies, but I recognized that in a movie I would be exactly the sort of person who would be doing it. Building a house of cards turned out to be very challenging, which made sense, but it was still more difficult than I had expected. It kept collapsing after I had built the first layer. Eventually, though, I started to get the hang of it. Many hours had passed, and I was starting to get very hungry. I felt like I was close to success, but I decided I would knock off for a while and get some lunch. I walked to 88th Dragon House, a family-owned restaurant in my neighborhood, and got lemongrass soup and vegetable dumplings. The menu above the counter had been there so long it had yellowed with age. Most of the pictures were so faded it wasn’t really possible to tell what you were looking at. They could have been pictures of anything sitting on a table somewhere. Involuntarily, I imagined my whole body chopped up into little pieces, each of them in its own small puddle of blood on its own petroleum byproduct tabletop. I put another steaming hot dumpling into my mouth and the thought went away. When I got back to my apartment I found the deck of cards I had been using scattered all over the floor of my living room, like a big wind had come through and picked them up and tossed them wherever it was they needed to go. In the mess, I could see the unformed potential of the greatest house of cards anyone had ever known.

I was walking along the side of the highway. This was later, sometime the following week, a Tuesday or a Thursday. I know which it was, but it’s not important. I was walking along the side of the highway and I heard something coming from behind me that sounded much larger than a car, but when it passed that’s all it was, just another car, except a piece came loose of it and bounced onto the shoulder, just up ahead. When I got to it I picked it up and turned it in my hands. It was a pocket lighter. There was a picture of Friedrich Nietzsche on it. It was warm in my hand. I was standing by a chainlink fence, and beyond that was a low rise covered in yellow grass, and beyond that was a large, white factory. An employee came up to the fence. “Hey, you have a light?” he said. I said I did. I stepped over to the fence. He held a cigarette through the links of the fence and I lit it. He exhaled. “Are you on your break, too?” I shook my head. “That’s cool. I hate being on break, but it’s mandated. I don’t have a choice. If I could, I’d just keep going and going and going and going. As long as I keep going, that’s all there is. I always feel like the ground is falling away behind me, like I look back and there’s going to be nothing there, nothing to stand on, no history. There’s just myself. But as long as I keep going, I can stay ahead of it. And I do, I am ahead of it, still. Definitely. But whenever I’m on my break I can feel myself losing ground, you know? So if it were up to me I just wouldn’t take it. But it’s not. I have to, so I do. I’m sure you’ve had to make some compromises in your life, too.” I told him I guessed I had. “Right. Anyway, I like to come down here by Route 3 on my break. I like it here because no one else does. Everyone else thinks it’s pointless to come to a place like this, so they leave me alone. Except people like you, of course. Which, I don’t mind the company of, even on my breaks. You get it, I can tell. You know, I read about this place in a book about the history of this region once. They said the natives avoided it because it smelled bad. Right here, this specific spot along the highway. I mean, there wasn’t a highway or anything here back then, but it’s this spot for sure. I cross-referenced a bunch of maps at the library. It’s not cursed or anything, just smelled awful, apparently. That’s what their traditions say. You never really know, though. There could be something restless buried here. It could have been buried here since before there was anyone alive to know about it.” The cars and trucks kept driving by behind me as he talked, and, as clouds gathered and rain began to fall, sometimes splashed my calves with arcs of brown, muddy water from the puddles forming in the depressions in the road.

Guy Fihman’s film Ultrarouge-lnfraviolet (1974) is a work that’s been lodged in my mind, not only as an object of thought in itself but as “something I should write about” more or less continuously since I watched it over a month ago. Not at the forefront or anything, you understand, but there, somewhere, in the background, like a dripping faucet. This is in part, no doubt, because it’s a film which I had been interested in for some time, but lacked the ability to see; it’s practically a given that such a film will leave a stronger impression on you, simply because of the way you will have built it up beforehand, and the closer attention you’ll consequently accord it when you do finally get the opportunity. More than that, though, I think it’s because it’s a particularly strong example of a type of work which I find myself drawn to writing about over and over again: that which is utterly straightforward (which is not to say simple), which is effortless to grasp in itself, as you experience it, but which aggressively resists the translation of this experience, this grasping, into critical language. It is not that it’s hard to describe – it is easy to describe: the film consists entirely of a single, static image, the Camille Pissarro painting Les Toits Rouges (1877), an autumnal pastoral scene depicting a small village and orchard in or around Pontoise, outside Paris, to which is subjected numerous “color operations,” that is, gradated transformations of the scene’s color values. A large number of these “operations” are applied to it, separated by black screens. That’s more or less it. It goes on like this for exactly 30 minutes and then stops. No credits or anything. As straightforward as can be. This description, though, tells one basically nothing about what it’s like to actually watch the film, about what it actually does. Therein lies the difficulty.

Read more

dog poem 1

“oh
look what you’ve done oh
you broke my favorite flowerpot
oh, oh
look at the mess you’ve made
all over the porch”

bark

“that’s right
bad dog, very bad dog
oh
alright
let’s pick the pieces up”

dog poem 2

“sit
sit
come on
sit
don’t you want a treat?
i know you want a treat
it’s got bacon in it
real bacon
you love bacon
i know you do
i’ll give it to you
if you’re a good dog
so be a good dog
and sit
sit
sit”

bark

“no, sit
sit
not speak
sit”

bark

“oh
for pete’s sake
you’re hopeless
please
sit
just sit”

dog poem 3

“hey
wanna go for a walk?”

bark

“yeah?
well then
show me where your leash is”

bark

“no no,
after you
i insist
you lead the way”

bark

“don’t give me
that
you know the way
you’re a smart dog
show me”

dog poem 4

bark

“what is it?”

bark
bark

“what’s the matter?
what’s got you all worked up?
you’re usually so good
so quiet
you know i don’t like it
when you make a lot of noise
can’t you please be quiet 
for me
right now?
i have a headache
i need to sleep”

bark

“i’m sorry
i really need to sleep
whatever it is
i’m sure it can wait...”

dog poem 5

bark
bark
bark
bark
bark

dog poem 6

bark
bark

“you see 
someone?”

bark

“well
go on
go get em
don’t let em
get away”

bark
bark
bark

“go on
get em
show em
they messed
with the wrong
motherfucking
dog”

Seventy

The tyrant sat in his office in his house on the hill. He pushed a button on his desk A manservant entered.

“Bring me some of my coins. My gold coins.” He paused for a moment, and looked up at the ceiling. “At least seventy.”

“Yes, Captain. Very good.” The manservant exited. Shortly, he returned carrying a drawstring pouch. The pouch clinked heavily as he walked. He brought the pouch to the tyrant. The tyrant took the pouch and dismissed the manservant. Alone again, the tyrant started taking gold coins out of the pouch and throwing them at a patch of sunlight on the floor. He took careful aim with each coin, trying to land it in the absolute center of the light. As the sun moved across the sky, so the light moved across the floor. He adjusted his aim accordingly, such that, as the day progressed, he slowly drew a trail of glinting discs leading into shadow.

At nightfall, the light was extinguished. He picked up the phone on his desk and committed the deed.

Read more

I couldn’t sleep. I picked up the mirror and tried to look over my shoulder. There wasn’t much to see, just the edge of the doorframe, the olive-colored wall. I angled the mirror a little farther and saw past the edge of the doorframe, through the open door, into the dark hallway. I thought I saw someone out there in the darkness, someone with dry, sunken pits where their eyes should be, but when I turned around, there was no one there. I put down the mirror. I waited to see if something would happen, but nothing did. It was all soft light around me. I put my hand down flat on the desk, I spread my fingers apart, I thought about watching G. sit for hours at the folding table in the tent at the site by the tomb and stab the knife down between his fingers spread out like this, do it over and over again, the knife driving into the surface of the table, digging little divots that became holes, became pits, he would do it with incredible speed, the knife a blur, no hesitation, too much for me to follow, too much for me to look at, sometimes, sometimes I had to turn away, lying on the cot, turned away, still hearing the sound, the steady ratatataratat, it drove me crazy, pretending not to hear the steady ratatataratat, just to prove a point, just to show I didn’t care, to show I didn’t care about the steady ratatataratat, it didn’t drive me crazy, to show he wasn’t anyone to me, which he wasn’t, of course, when it happened to him it didn’t mean anything more to me than if it had happened to anyone else, we never talked, not really, just what was necessary, nothing more than that, never any personal questions, anything beyond what our roles demanded, anything that might show the other something of ourselves, he always had a scowl on his face, a flat kind of scowl like it was burned in, that kind gets burned into some faces, you know, after long enough, it’s a problem, you see it more and more out in the world now, if you still go out in the world, I mean, if you still walk on the avenues and look into the windows and into the reflections on the water, people with burned-in faces, scowling, frowning, grimacing, never smiling, you never see someone with a smile burned into their face, only flatter, blunter emotions, apathy, negativity, and these burned-in faces like G. the one had don’t say anything, not really, they don’t tell you anything about what’s really going on underneath, they’re just there because something has to be there, there can’t be nothing, there can’t be no expression, no face, there has to be a face, we haven’t figured out how to get rid of that yet, no one has, it’s a problem, for some people it’s a problem, for G. it was a problem, you know, probably that’s how he would have wanted it, he would have rather he didn’t have to have an expression, if he didn’t need to have a face at all, he would have preferred that, he would have preferred for there to be nothing, but there had to be something, there has to be, he couldn’t change that, he couldn’t get rid of his face or his body, and so he just scowled instead, the scowl was a placeholder, it was there by default, it was almost funny, like a cartoon, I always thought his face was almost like a cartoon, everything about him, I thought, was almost like a cartoon, but it wasn’t like anything really, his scowl wasn’t like anything, and he carried himself in a particular way, as well, of course, you know, he carried himself in a way where you could never tell how long it had been since he slept, one hour or seventy-two hours it was always the same with him, the set of his shoulders was always the same, the length of his strides was always the same, the way he set his feet down like he was willing the ground to be there, commanding it, like the ground might not have really existed until just that moment he needed it to exist, like the sand had come into being just so his boot could leave its impression in it, like it was the ground’s purpose that it be beneath him, if it had been anyone but him there wouldn’t have been anything there, their foot would have slipped right through, they would have fallen and fallen and probably never stopped falling, but not him, he made everything solid beneath him, just where he needed it to be, and it didn’t even make a difference to him, it didn’t make a difference if the ground had been there before or not, it didn’t matter if it’s whole purpose was to be beneath him, he didn’t think about it, he didn’t care, it never crossed his mind that he should care, one way or the other it was completely the same to him, it was immaterial, yes, that was how he walked, every step was like that, every single one exactly like that, always perfect, no hesitation, I never saw him make a wrong step until the day that he did, of course, the day of the morning patrol where he put his foot down and heard something click beneath it, we both heard it, we heard the click, and he froze, and I froze, and he looked back at me and he made that gesture, he made that shooing motion, you know the one, like you would towards a stray dog that was following you, and that you needed to drive away because you didn’t have anything for it, not anymore, you had nothing for it, there was nothing you could do for him, you would only bring him trouble, and it was the right move to make, I suppose, because I reacted like a stray dog, which maybe I was back then, a little bit, which maybe he knew, maybe he could see, maybe he could always see that about me, I don’t know, but in any case I reacted the way I was supposed to, the gesture did what that gesture was supposed to do, I stepped back, I stepped back again, I fell back behind some rubble and took cover by the side of the trail, and the whole time he stayed perfectly still, he just stood there, his foot firmly pressed down where he had put it, where he had put it down as certain as any other step he ever took and we heard something click beneath it, he stood there shooing me, driving me off, same scowl on his face that was always there, until I fell behind the rubble, then there was the sound, then it happened, I didn’t see it, I only heard it, then it was over, I was there behind the rubble, I only had a few cuts and scrapes, superficial, just scratches, and he wasn’t standing there anymore, no, I didn’t really know him, he didn’t really mean anything to me, but he was always sitting at that table, it’s true, I remember it, I can’t help but remember it, late into the night sometimes, well after nightfall and still, ratatataratat, no lights of course, we never had lights at the site, not after nightfall, it wasn’t allowed, was against all the protocols, we did all our work by the sun, everything that was necessary had to be done by the sun, or if not by the sun by the moon, we got used to the moon, the nights were almost always clear there, it was almost always easy to find it, it was like a friend to us, when it wasn’t there we would feel lost, or at least I would, I would pray to it sometimes, I don’t think he ever did, he wasn’t religious, I don’t think, I think faith wasn’t something that was part of him, or it was something that took such a different shape in him that I couldn’t see it as such, couldn’t recognize it, but still, ratatataratat, still, ratatataratat, in the dark, all those nights in the tent at the site by the tomb in the dark, and somehow never stabbing himself, never cutting himself, not even a nick or a scratch, not even once, his hands always perfect, the knife always perfect, always perfect every time, for hours, all day, all night, ratatataratat, divots becoming holes becoming pits in the folding table, no hesitation. I looked at my hand. I took my hand off my desk. I was warm in soft light. It was all warm soft light around me. The mirror was on the table, I couldn’t sleep.

My husband died last year. He was an oak of a man. His friends would say he looked like an oil drum. In an emergency, you imagined you could roll him up into a ball and throw him at whatever the problem was – he would knock it down. On the other hand, I’ve always had a rather frail appearance… we looked like a cartoon together. I could slip behind him and be completely hidden from view. I could stand with my face pressed into his knotted back…

I’ve started doing Yoga for Active Seniors. I saw the tapes advertised in the back of a magazine. After my husband died I felt like my body was slowly disappearing. I would catch my reflection in mirrors and sometimes it would look like I was half-transparent. Beams of white light would shine straight through me. I thought that it might help if I tried to get in shape, so I called the number and placed an order. The tapes took three weeks to arrive, in a discreet cardboard box… my building’s security guard, Miguel, was kind enough to carry them up to the flat, and now I stand in front of the TV every morning in my exercise clothes (horrid neon colors, not my style at all – but I never wear them out) and follow the instructor’s directions. The instructor isn’t a young woman, but she’s not as old as I am… at least, I don’t see how she could be.

I don’t think the yoga is making much of a difference, but it’s become part of my routine. I’m glad for this. Having a routine gives me something to do. I’ve read that it’s important to stay busy in your later years, to not become complacent, and slip away into the twilight. Sometimes, though, I wake up hungover… I’ve always enjoyed a few glasses of wine with my dinner, but it makes my movements sluggish. I find myself falling behind the instructor, my body still moving in a downward arc when I’m supposed to be reaching for the stars. I keep going, though. I push through. Eventually the credits roll, and the tape shuts off. I have to remember to rewind it myself. There’s no one else minding that sort of thing anymore…

My husband worked for a chemical supply company. He coordinated shipments of precursor compounds in bulk quantities – mostly to commercial pharmaceutical manufacturers, but sometimes to research labs at very prestigious universities. It was very complicated work. There were an enormous amount of regulations involved. I was never able to understand too much of it, not that my husband ever really tried to make me. It wasn’t important to him like that. He didn’t see any reason to involve me. “It’s work, and work is work,” he would say. “I’m just another man keeping the wheels turning.” He made good money, and that was what mattered, for both of us. We were able to buy this flat after his second promotion, and that’s where we stayed. Now it’s just me, of course… the rooms feel much larger without him, except for the bedroom… I sleep with the curtains open, you know, to let some light in. It means I almost always wake up early, now, with the sunrise, or not much after. Even when my head is aching, I can’t seem to help it.

We never had any children… this wasn’t a good city for raising them, back when we might have. People disappeared all the time. There were packs of hungry street dogs roaming around, and sometimes you would read in the newspaper about a little boy or girl getting attacked and eaten, right there in the middle of the street. It made me so sad… sometimes, after I read one of those news stories, I wouldn’t be able to go outside. I would sit in our flat and measure the circumference of my ankles, put my hand around them, imagine how easily they could be snapped, broken up and mangled by a dog’s jaws or a man’s hands or some sort of dangerous, indifferent machine. I felt like I was made of twigs and cobwebs, that almost anything could easily disassemble me into all my tiny little parts. Would the police have even known what they were looking at, when they found what was left of me? Would they be able to believe what they were looking at was ever really alive and human, like them? My husband would come home from work and find all the lights off, and nothing on the table to eat… later, after the new government took over, and the Truth & Reconciliation committee released its report, the city became much safer. Shops took the bars off their windows. They conducted renovations on their storefronts. New developments were approved, and the people in our neighborhood started to look more chic. My husband and I talked about adopting, but we were both older by then. I think we both thought it was already too late – eventually, I guess it was.

Last month, my friend Eliza came over. I have a few friends, still, but I guess she’s the only one I’m really close to. We used to be coworkers, back before I met my husband, and after I left my job we kept in touch. She got married, too, and the four of us would go out on dinner dates sometimes. Her husband is still alive, but I haven’t seen him since the funeral. I don’t think he knows what to say to me, which is okay; we were never that close, I don’t expect anything… anyway, it was Eliza that told me I should get a plant. She looked around and said, “You know, you should get a houseplant. It would really brighten the room up.”
“I don’t think I want to bring any new life into this place,” I said. “Maybe that sounds silly to you, but I just don’t.”
“Okay, so get an artificial one. They make some very elegant plastic ferns now, you know.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“You wouldn’t even have to water it. And it would brighten up the room so much. You could put it right there.” She pointed to a spot near the TV that was empty except for a long, narrow mirror hanging on the wall. It was a mirror I would catch my reflection in, sometimes, when I did my exercises there. Sometimes, I had to admit, I had the thought it would be better if there was something in the way.

Read more

One of the more jarring realities to adjust to when beginning to read poetry seriously, at least for someone like me, who was exposed to a great deal of fiction growing up, but very little verse, is that the standard for what constitutes a “full-length poetry collection” is far, far slighter than any form of prose. There are obvious reasons for this, of course: each word in a poem is of far greater consequence to the text as a whole than those of a novel, or a biography, or whatever. J. H. Prynne, rest in power, wrote whole monographs on individual sonnets by Shakespeare – this is close reading taken to an extreme, of course (both Prynne and Shakespeare, after all, were extreme outliers in the history of English letters), but that such an exercise is possible, even worthwhile, speaks to a more general principle, that being that poetry, generally speaking, quite simply does more than prose does, on a line by line, page by page basis. Compared to the novelist, it takes more time for the poet to produce less words, is how it tends to go. Thus we get “full-length” collections of well under a hundred pages, and thus this convention is entirely justifiable. But the book under consideration here, DOE by Conor Hultman, does not require these justifications. It is not well under a hundred pages. It’s not even close to being under a hundred pages, actually. It is, in fact, six hundred and twenty four pages long. Many of those pages, furthermore, feature more than one poem, all of which were all written specifically for this book-project, and had not been collected before. Hultman is certainly no Prynne or Shakespeare, although I do think he’s one of the more interesting young writers working in English today, but make no mistake: DOE is still an extreme outlier, in one sense of the term or another.

DOE is a monument constructed from the relics of human life. I had at first used the term “debris” here, but it felt wrong, too callous, dismissive. The book, it’s true, is full of refuse, full of things ripped, ruined, burst and broken, scattered, but no, not debris, not really: “relic,” a term with something of the sacred to it, and also something of the archaeological, I think is much more appropriate, because it is between these two poles, the sacred and the archaeological, which DOE oscillates, landing most often in something like the register of a police report addressed directly to God. The book’s core conceit, its “idea,” is so simple, and so obviously interesting, that it seems insane no one would have done it already; full disclosure, when I first clocked what was going on with the weird, elliptical little poems I’d seen finding placement in an increasing amount of litmags I respected (and some I didn’t, but that’s neither here nor there) in the lead-up to the book’s release, I was annoyed that I hadn’t thought to do it first. But while the idea is simple enough, to actually realize it properly, in a way that does justice to the material in question, to its overwhelming, empty totality, is another matter entirely, one requiring great patience and discipline. Even working procedurally, as Hultman is here, where many aspects of form and content are essentially predetermined by the basic nature of the project and his chosen approach to it, writing over six hundred pages of poetry is an enormous undertaking. Across its entirety, there are still thousands upon thousands of consequential compositional decisions being made – the procedure did not, could not do this work for him. To be honest, I suspect if I had had the idea first, I probably would have spent a few days on it, drafted a few pieces, gotten just deep enough in to begin to sense the true scope what I was committing to, and then thought to myself, “What the fuck am I doing?” and shelved the whole project. It makes sense to me that Hultman didn’t, though, that he was able to commit to it and see it through. I say this because I’ve read some of his other work, outside of DOE, in various publications. In terms of style and technique, it’s all very distinct, strikingly so, even, but the sensibility undergirding it is consistent and unmistakable. From what I’ve read, and I haven’t read a great deal, so don’t take this as a more authoritative reading than it is, Hultman seems remarkably skilled at striking upon conceptual poetic gambits which most would dismiss as too obvious to bother with, stupid or hackneyed, even, and then realizing them with a particular rigor and clarity which pushes them into being something beyond obvious, like Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip. This makes for a very cold, depersonalized kind of poetic voice. Even when the resulting work is emotionally moving, as it sometimes is, one gets the sense that Hultman himself isn’t really moved by it, at least not in the way you, the reader, are, that he stands at a distance from it, that there’s maybe something a bit sociopathic about him.1 I can understand being turned off by this, that it’s not what most people are looking for from poetry – but it works for me, because it’s actually interesting, is something more than competent and inoffensive, unlike, charitably, 97% of poetry being published today. What most people seem to want out of poetry, frankly, is far more alienating to me than Hultman’s tactics of self-negation. Anyway, in any case, I can’t imagine how you write something like DOE without being able to maintain a distance from it, without being a little sociopathic. At the core of the project is some very psychologically hazardous material. Protective equipment is necessary.

I’m aware that, for how long I’ve been going on about it, I haven’t actually made explicit what DOE or its project is. The reason for this is that it is the sort of thing which, once spoken, makes it sort of impossible to talk about things like page counts or conceptual gambits and have it seem meaningful, have it seem like anything other than evasion. I think those things are meaningful, and are worth talking about, but I’ve talked about them now, so there’s no reason for me not to speak it now: DOE is about America’s unidentified dead. It’s about murdered hitchhikers, lonely suicides, strangled infants, homeless drifters who drank themselves to sleep one night and didn’t wake up the next day. Each poem is about a single person, derived from their entry on the Doe Network, a web directory of missing person and unidentified body cases compiled over, at this point, nearly thirty years. All the entries on the site were written by volunteers. They’re not entirely stylistically consistent, or completely exhaustive. In some sense, though, they can be said to encompass what’s definitely, concretely known to the public about their subjects. Sometimes this is almost nothing, maybe a description of a necklace and rosary and the river they drowned in (“Laredo”, 416). Sometimes, in rare cases, such as the victims of known serial killers, the resulting piece in DOE can go on for pages. The median, though, is a poem probably around ten lines long, most of which simply list articles of clothing. Each one is titled with the place they were found (these titles stretching into high roman numerals for certain large cities), and the corpus divided up into fifty sections, one for each state. These sections aren’t organized alphabetically or according to any other logic I can discern. The ordering of poems within the sections seems equally arbitrary, save that if there’s more than one from a particular place, they’ll be grouped together in sequence. Reflecting dramatic disparities in the Doe Network’s directory, some sections go on for dozens of pages, while others consist only of a single short piece. Everything is a neatly catalogued, but the catalogue itself is a mess, a hodgepodge, impossible to make sense of, to really wrap your head around. This is what the book is. This is what DOE is.

Of course, DOE is also what it isn’t, is everything that’s missing from its catalogue: names, jobs, families, friends, lovers, accomplishments, aspirations – most everything, that is, which is generally thought of as making up a human life. Or maybe, more precisely, you could say DOE is an exhaustingly thorough study of what a human life actually is when it’s separated from this social context, what it is for the only proof of someone’s existence to be the body they’ve left behind, what they were carrying with them, maybe a few vague recollections of some strangers who saw them in passing, at a distance, and paid them no particular mind. In this sense, it is a materialist text of uncommon rigidity, fanatically strict in its refusal of anything beyond the information as recorded, up to and including the dutiful transcription of obvious typos and misspellings present in the source being worked from. There is no psychological interiority here, no real authorial voice, nothing of so many of the fundamental tools of poetry. It hardly ever rhymes, of course, and only then incidentally. One might fairly ask, why write this as “poetry” at all – but the thing is it has to be poetry, it couldn’t be anything else, everything about it depends on what it does retain of poesy, namely the line break and the stanza form. The work is inconceivable otherwise. Consider, for example, “Upland”, 484:

fragment of blue denim at scene

the victim was located in a rock quarry

This is an exceptionally spare, lonely example, obviously, but it reflects in miniature DOE’s general poetic structure: a telescoping movement, beginning at full “extension” with the most granularly forensic information available and pulling outwards into a broader and broader context, with each subsequent “level” of this movement being delineated by a blank line. The more that’s known, the more complicated this schema becomes, of course – in poems detailing murder cases in which the killer was identified, for example, there is, beyond the level of immediate circumstances of discovery which “Upland” stops at, a further “social” level which can generally be recognized in the poem, and sometimes even what could be termed a “judicial” one beyond that, both of which can involve multiple stanzas charting the unfolding of these complex processes. Basic formal decisions, like, say, the grouping of clothing and personal effects into a single stanza is consistent across virtually the entire book. Consider, now, another example, still short but much more representative of the average poem in DOE, “Atlanta (V)”, 59:

keloid scar on the left abdomen & left lower chest
keloid scar on the left shoulder
tattoos on both forearms

C A T diesel power cap & patterned orange shirt

the victim was located alive in an abandoned house
he later died at the hospital

Here, there are two important things to note. Firstly, in this three-stanza, three “level” poem, description of marks upon the skin itself (scars and tattoos, in this case; sometimes it is fresher wounds) precedes description of clothing and personal effects. This is, of course, consistent with the structure outlined above: beginning from that which, of the available information, is most intrinsic to the body as body, and moving outwards from there, widening the scope further and further, bringing in more and more which concerns the body as something in the world, until the point is reached where no more can be said, where the entry stops. This is also, I believe, why the physical marks are ordered the way they are within the stanza: a keloid scar is a raised scar formed from collagen – it’s unsightly and undesirable, and, more importantly, it is something the body does to itself. A tattoo on a body is evidence of consciousness, of this body really having once been a person who had the desire to look a certain way (or of having known someone else who desired them to look a certain way, as in the “slave & property” of “lady j” detailed in “Hudson”, 79), but a keloid scar is the body reacting not as a person but as an organism to something which has been done with it. Such scars are representative of something more essential, more fundamental about being a living body than a tattoo is – and thus they come first in the stanza, because it is from the closest point to the bare fact of corporeality which the poems in DOE most often begin. It is poetry which locates life as a matter of the body ahead of the mind; it is for this reason, above any other, that I insist on calling it materialist.

Secondly, the last stanza, the one concerning the “level” of circumstance, is very instructive about the importance for DOE of that other basic tool of poesy, the line break. The first thing it’s important to note is that in terms of case specifics it’s very, very unusual; almost no one in this book is located alive. Despite this, in form it is very much typical. The second thing it’s important to note is that although it consists of two lines, it doesn’t have to – joined together they would still be far shorter than many of the lines in the book, which routinely run to twenty words or more, and in the prior two stanzas of “Atlanta (V)” itself, Hultman demonstrates no aversion to the strategic deployment of an ampersand. No, the line break is here because there’s a choice that’s been made to put it there, one of the thousands of compositional decisions alluded to above as present in the text, despite its schematic rigor. The question, then, of course, is why. I think it’s for two reasons: for the absence, and for that “he.” By “the absence” I mean, first of all, the literal emptiness of the page, the wordless expanse (I won’t call it “blank” because it’s not; DOE was put out by cloak.wtf, the imprint of Mike Corrao, in my opinion one of the most striking and distinctive designers currently working in American publishing, and every page is dusted with a coating of ultra-fine gray specks, like funeral ash) which stretches out to the edge of the page beyond where the line stops, and second of all the symbolic absence which the literal one indexes, the absence of everything which is not said, everything which cannot be said because no one wrote it down, and no one ever will. This is especially striking in this case, because what is absent here is part of someone’s actual life, not simply what happens after their death. Most often, absences of this particular sort are introduced into the text via the recollections of others, their descriptions of a person’s general character or behavior, of having seen them at such and such a place at such and such a time, with any details petering out somewhere well ahead their passing. It’s very uncommon, as we see here, for the time enclosed to be definitely that of their actual last hours. We are told where he was found (an “abandoned house” – not an address, you’ll note, although one is present in the Doe Network’s entry, but a type, a symbol, an implication, a very sad, desolate one), and where he later died. What came in between is, must be, passed over in silence. We can presume he was unconscious. And yes, the matter of that “he,” the other reason I think the stanza is structured the way it is. It is only at the start of the last line, you’ll notice, that there is a pronoun of any sort. If the two lines were joined together, there wouldn’t be any need for one at all. That there is one, and that its presence is a choice, a formal question which did not have to be resolved in this manner, demonstrates that, for all I’ve said about coldness and even sociopathy above, DOE is very clearly not a dehumanizing project. The “he” is there, I think, because Hultman wants us to know who this person was, as far as this is really possible, and no farther. It occurs only on the last line because it is, for this particular entry, the point farthest from the keloid scars, farthest from bare corporeality and closest to a fully realized human sociality: the point of gendered subjecthood. It is significant, of course, that he’s identified as “the victim” before he’s identified as a man.

The analysis above could have been conducted in essentially the same manner using almost any poem in DOE. I chose the examples I did more or less at random, simply on the basis of their brevity making a full block-quote reproduction easier to justify. There are many with far more idiosyncratic line breaks than seen here, although few, if any, that demonstrate comparable irregularity in their stanza structure. This is not to say the poems all the same, of course, far from it. Exceptional cases will sometimes result in exceptional poems, such as “Baltimore (XXII)”, 98, which is made up of an incredibly long list of clothing and personal effects, including multiple plastic bags, packs of cigarettes, pairs of socks, and scraps of paper with notes written on them, reproduced in full, followed by a second, single line stanza simply stating “the area is known to be frequented by homeless persons.” Or “Belle Chasse”, 239, which, not already being familiar with the case (it has a Wikipedia page), was one of the most shocking experiences I think I’ve ever had reading a poem. Mostly, though, what is found in DOE is more or less like that seen above. There is always something to discover in these poems, though, traces of the uniqueness of each life, suggestions of what they might have done, who they might have been, some evidence that, yes, they were someone – but, vitally, there’s never any “point” being made about this, never any pretense of an “argument” being put forward, of an “answer” which might be found. The poems never mean anything more than what’s right there in front of you. For this reason DOE, despite superficial appearances, is not a book for the true crime obsessive, who will be frustrated at its total refusal to make a “good story” out of all this, nor for the edgelord who just wants to jerk off to human misery, who will be frustrated by how much of the book is just lists of mundane clothing items. It is for someone who wants to think seriously about death in America, and about what it is that poetry can do today. That is, for someone like me.

Doe can be purchased from Asterism Books.

“Table for one,” he told the hostess.

“Right this way, sir,” she said.

“Thanks,” he said.

She took him to a small, square table in a quiet corner near the back of the restaurant. He took off his coat and hung it on the back of one of the chairs, then sat down in the other. He rested his hands carefully on the edge of the table. He took out his phone and opened his lock screen. He had one notification, an email from his bank. There was a credit card that he was pre-approved for. He put his phone away again.

The waitress came over with a menu and a glass of water. She set them both down on the table, then turned around and went away without saying anything. The glass of water was tall and slightly thinner than average. It had ice and a straw in it. The end of the paper wrapper was still on the straw. He took off it and sucked up some of the water. It tasted like water. It was very cold. When the cold touched his teeth, it made them ache a little. Five years ago, his dentist had told him his teeth were sensitive.

“Use this toothpaste,” the dentist had said, writing out a prescription. “It’s specially formulated for people with your issues.”

“Okay,” he had said. He had gotten the prescription filled the next day. It was more expensive than the toothpaste he had been using before, but he continued using it. He thought it was making a difference, although it was hard for him to be sure.

He turned his attention to the menu. It was a large menu, and the text was relatively small. The amount of options made him feel slightly overwhelmed. He was so focused on studying it he didn’t notice the waitress had come back until she was right there at his table, setting down another glass of water. He hadn’t asked for it; she had just brought it, seemingly of her own accord. It was indistinguishable from the first, except that its straw still had the end of its wrapper on it.

“Excuse me –” he started to say, but the waitress was already walking away. She seemed to not have heard him.

He felt confused. He looked at the two glasses of water sitting next to each other on the table. He found looking at them disconcerting in a way that he didn’t really understand. Something seemed wrong about them being there together like that, two glasses of water for just one person. He put his hands in his lap. He put his hands up on the table. He put his hands back in his lap, then at his sides. He saw the waitress passing by. He made a motion to get her attention, and she came over.

“Excuse me…” he said, gesturing towards the two glasses.

“Oh, I’m sorry about that,” said the waitress. “I’ll get you another one right away.”

“No –” but she had already gone away. A minute later, or even less than that, she came back with another glass of water, which she set on the table near the other two. The three glasses now created a triangular formation on its surface.

“Thank you, but…”

“I’ll just take that for you.” She reached over and retrieved the menu, which was lying on the table. He had been so preoccupied with the matter of the water glasses, he had forgotten all about it.

“Oh, yes, well –” but the waitress had gone away again.

He looked around. There were only a few other customers in the establishment. There was an elderly couple eating silently. A younger couple seated at the table beside them who were also eating silently. There were three businessmen in tan suits eating and talking quietly. He could hear the general sound of the conversation but nothing of what they were saying. There were two girls who looked like they could be sisters eating and looking at their phones. One of them would sometimes turn their screen around to show the other something on it, which would sometimes elicit a soft laugh or a comment like “That’s light years,” or “Freak me.” There didn’t seem to be any other staff, except for the hostess at the entrance, and, he assumed, some number of back of house workers. While he was observing these things, the waitress came back and brought him a fourth and fifth glass of water. She set them down far away from the other glasses and from him, on the other side of the table. He had the thought that, as far as he could tell, he was the only person in the restaurant who was eating alone. While he had this thought, the waitress disappeared again. He resolved that next time he saw the waitress, he would say something to her. He would tell her that he didn’t need any more glasses of water. He would tell her that, actually, he wanted to eat. It occurred to him that she hadn’t even taken his order yet. It occurred to him that he didn’t even know what his order actually was. He hadn’t had enough time to examine the menu. This made him feel anxious. He didn’t want to make himself look foolish by ordering something bizarre. He tried to think what a typical order at this restaurant would probably be. He put his hands on the table, then put them back in his lap.

The next time the waitress came around, bringing another glass of water, he tried to say something. He tried to speak up, louder than he was used to speaking, and, he thought, very clearly. Still, though, the waitress seemed not to hear him. That, or she was ignoring him intentionally, but he found this hard to believe. No one at the other tables seemed to have had any problems getting their food. He tried to say something again the next time she came by, and the time after that, but both times the waitress just set the glass of water down and left. It began to feel to him like he really was being singled out specifically, but he couldn’t think of a reason why. He didn’t recognize the waitress, or at least he didn’t think he did. The same went for the hostess. Could the owner of the restaurant have a grudge against him? He or she could have been watching when he’d come in and recognized him. He tried to think of a reason the owner of a restaurant might have a grudge against him, and couldn’t think of any. He couldn’t think of a reason why anyone at all would have a grudge against him, really. As far as he could remember, he had never mistreated anyone. He mostly kept to himself. In high school he was even voted “Most Inoffensive.”

He felt his phone vibrate. He took it out of his pocket and checked it. There was a new notification. It was from his phone and internet provider. He had points he could redeem for rewards. He put his phone back in his pocket. The waitress came back. This time, she was carrying a basket of breadsticks. She set them down on the table and left. He didn’t try to say anything to her. The mere fact that it wasn’t another glass of water, that it was, in fact, something he could actually eat, had surprised him so much he had been rendered temporarily unable to speak. The basket was red plastic and was lined with coated wax paper. There were six breadsticks inside. He took one and bit into it. It was warm. The crust was hard, and the inside was very dry. He tasted salt and not much else. It was decent enough, he thought, all things considered. He chewed slowly, and then drank some water to wash it down.

Time passed. The waitress kept coming back, at more or less regular intervals, always bringing another cool glass of water. Each time, he told himself he would say something, but he never quite managed to. He finished the breadsticks, and the waitress took the basket away. She never brought another. The table became crowded with glasses of water. The waitress had begun rearranging the glasses when she came around, forming them into neat rows that went right up the table’s edge, trying to make optimal use, he assumed, of the available surface area. There was barely any room left, and it was all on the opposite side of the table from him. The rows made him feel hemmed in. They reminded him of troops massed in formation. The straws with the ends of the wrappers still on them, he imagined, were like rifles with their attached bayonets. He checked his phone, and saw that he was almost out of battery. He didn’t have any new notifications.

He looked around, and became suddenly aware that there was no one else in the restaurant. At some point, the lights had all been turned off, and the workers had all gone home. As he became aware of this, the glasses of water ceased being discrete units and became instead a single great tide, one which surged over the edges of the table, onto the floor, and carried him swiftly away, still in his chair, which he clung to like a shipwrecked sailor to some buoyant piece of wreckage from his destroyed craft, and towards a waterfall which had emerged out of the mist, and which roared in a thousand voices, and fell blindly into a great, humid darkness.

One of the difficulties in writing about noise, especially wall noise, is the temptation to use the thematics implied by the (at times elaborate) packaging of a given release as the basis for interpretation of the work. To a certain extent it’s necessary, as a matter of critical diligence, to consider such things: an album is not just sound, but a physical object packaged and presented in a particular way; this presentation is part of the release, the two are not separable, each, on some level, informs the other. I bring this up as a roundabout way of saying that there is an easy way to write about Sea Wolf Leviathan by The Rita, which is one of the great masterpieces of wall noise. Here is the easy way: the album is called Sea Wolf Leviathan. It has a grainy, black-and-white picture of a submarine on the cover (or, more precisely, the original, 2004 Solipsism CD-R release does; I actually own the 2023 Cruel Symphonies cassette reissue, which uses conceptually similar but aesthetically distinct naval imagery). This image and this title together suggests certain thematics clearly enough to develop a workable reading of the actual sounds within – this album is about deep ocean, screeching iron, rushing water, constant, crushing pressure, “diving”, torpedoes, etc. etc. Insert here a few hundred words vaguely alluding to drowning, World War II, claustrophobia, man and nature, whatever. You get the idea. Review complete. And in a sense this is a fine enough way to write about the album: Sea Wolf Leviathan really does kind of sound like these things. It’s supposed to sound kind of like these things – that’s what the picture is telling you, that’s what the title means. Sea Wolf Leviathan is, consciously, intentionally, about fucking drowning, and it’s hardly being coy about it. But if it were a different picture on the cover, a different title, is it not possible that one might find it equally easy to say it sounds like whatever that picture and that title suggests? The original release also includes a semi-pornographic image from a kitschy Satanic ritual – a woman, nude, sitting on a cloth-draped table before a goat’s head in a pentagram, knees up, legs spread, eyes closed, a robed figure pushing an ornate goblet towards her. Another nude woman stands by, watching, holding an unlit candelabra. Is Sea Wolf Leviathan actually about Satanism, then? Perhaps what we are hearing is actually meant to be the howling of demons, the cries of the damned… you see what I’m getting at?

This is the thing: generally speaking, noise walls sound like noise walls. They can also sound like other things (wind, static, rainfall or snowfall, etc.), but those things are all ultimately secondary to the fact of the thing itself, in the same way a cloud’s resemblance to a mountain or a human head is secondary to its fundamental cloud-ness. If we are going to write about Sea Wolf Leviathan seriously – and I believe we should, I believe this is serious art worthy of serious engagement – it is necessary to affirm this primacy, even though it makes the task of writing, of criticism, of interpretation, exponentially more difficult. No shortcuts: if we are writing about sound, we must engage with sound, not just the frame that has been placed around it. That the noise wall is an especially abstract form of sound, especially resistant to enclosure within language, makes it all the more necessary to stubbornly insist upon this point. To do otherwise is to refuse, if not to really hear the work, then, at least, to put any of that hearing into writing – to claim to be writing about sound when really you are writing about images, words, people. And there’s nothing wrong with writing about such things, of course. They are worthwhile subjects. The frame matters, the frame tells us something about what’s inside it. But an image is not a sound. A word is not a noise. If you become confused on this point, you’ll never manage to say anything of substance.

Sea Wolf Leviathan, then, is a wall – or, actually, two walls, each a half hour in length. These walls are the same and not the same at all, in the way two large, unpolished slabs of stone cut from the same quarry will be the same and not the same at all – the same material, the same dimensions, but run your hands along their surfaces, and you will discover innumerable minute differences, discover each is a pocket galaxy of tiny bumps and ridges utterly distinct from any other. What is remarkable about Sea Wolf Leviathan, among wall noise releases, is the rich complexity of this surface – there are dozens of layers of noise worked into these walls, low rumbles, mid-range hisses, high-pitched squeals and scrapes, none quite the same as any other, all constantly rising from and falling back beneath the baseline roar (the particular texture of this roar is the main distinguishing feature between the two tracks; it’s a bit crunchier on the first). It is a masterpiece of mixing, always in the red but never muddy, never monotonous, always teeming with activity. The density of incident is dizzying; if you actually tried to listen to it, as one would, say, a classical composition, tried to track how the sound moves, how elements are introduced and discarded, the interplay between its frenetic micro-level and glacial macro-level, you would be completely overwhelmed. There is too much happening, and nothing happening at all. Both tracks begin and end without ceremony, blocks of sound that are immediately exactly what they will be for their entire runtime, even as they constantly shift and transform. There is a moment around nineteen minutes into “Blechholler”, the second track on the disc, where most of the upper layers are stripped away, and for a few moments there is just a clicking, stumbling bass rumble. Then all that weight, all that din of scraping and screeching and scouring comes back in again, feeling somehow even louder, even more punishing. After it’s over, the silence feels unnatural.

I suppose it’s a little perverse to want to write about work like this in this way. You’re supposed to simply be overtaken by this sort of thing, to submit to it, to let its weight crush you, excoriate you, purge you of your thoughts. You are not meant to try to make it legible, to make it an object of study. Everything about it resists the procedure. The words all feel so hopelessly inadequate, they have nothing to grab onto. There is no arc to trace, no development to chart. It just happens until it stops. That’s it. But Sea Wolf Leviathan is important to me, and writing is important to me, and so I persist. I want what I do to be capable of speaking to what this album does. I want to make it work, I want to find the language which is adequate – I want to bridge the gap. This is, I suppose, just a particular manifestation of a much larger preoccupation of mine: how to address in language that which is not experienced through language, that which belongs to an entirely different register. I am preoccupied with this not only because so much of what is important to me, in art and in life, belongs to this category, but also because I believe language can do so much more than is generally permitted to it, and I am stubborn about trying to prove this to myself. There is always a risk of failure in these efforts. I recognize I’m drifting increasingly far from my subject here, out into open water, far away from the gray solidity of the shore. But I’m not afraid of drowning. I must not be. I have a purpose here.

There was still ice on the ground and it had hardened into bumpy streaks like trails of mucus that had been scraped over the sidewalk. I was walking home from work around ten. My route passed by a gas station, and there was a car pulled up to one of the pumps. There was a big pile of snow on the sidewalk, which forced me to cut into the lot. I could have cut into the road, but that would have been dangerous, with it being night, and me wearing dark clothes. This meant I had to walk right past the car. It was a red car, compact, dent in the hood. The manufacturer was foreign. The headlights were on. It was just parked there, not even connected to the pump. As I approached, I saw there was a guy in the front seat, not doing anything. He had his seatbelt buckled. His hoodie was zipped up. It was a dark-colored hoodie, like mine. The dashboard lights were turned off. On a whim, as I was passing the car, I pulled open the passenger door and slipped inside. Before the guy could react, I had pressed my knife against him, his torso, near his kidneys.

“I want you to drive,” I said. “I’m done with walking. All my life, I’ve been walking places. I’m sick and exhausted of it. I never want to walk anywhere ever again. Do you understand?” I wasn’t really sure what I was saying. It was just the first thing that came into my head.

“Sure.”

“Are you listening?”

“I’m listening.”

“I want you to drive.”

“I can’t. There’s no gas. The tank is empty.”

“Well, get out and fill it up.”

“You don’t understand. There’s no gas.”

“Just do it.”

“Okay, okay. But it won’t do any good.”

He got out of the car. I heard him fitting the nozzle in. Nothing happened. I heard the nozzle being removed. He got back into the car. I returned the knife to where it had been.

“You see? There’s no gas. The station is completely out. Their own tanks are empty. They’ve run dry. There’s no more until the refill truck comes. I talked to the guy inside. He said it would be coming soon, but it’s not here yet. We have to wait.”

“Turn the car on.”

“I’m telling you it won’t turn on. There’s no gas. I ran out. We’re plain and simply grounded until the truck gets here.”

“Just turn it on.” I pressed the knife against him a little harder.

“Alright, alright, but it won’t work.”

He turned the key in the ignition. The engine turned over once and then came to life. It thrummed heavily.

“Now, drive.”

“I have to admit, I don’t understand it. There’s no gas in the tank. There’s not even fumes. I made very sure of it. For certain reasons, I didn’t want there to be anything left at all. The engine is running on nothing.”

“Drive.”

“How can I drive a car with no gas?”

“You will.” I pressed so the knife seemed on the verge of cutting through the thick cloth of his hoodie. I had the thought that it felt very intimate, what we were doing.

“Okay, I guess I will,” he said. He released the brake and put the car into gear. Soon, we were driving.

Read more

Uncommon measurements. Writing as the art of the distance between “someone was there” and “someone is there.” Usually, we see this distance expressed in an attempt to build a bridge from the one to the other, and we judge the text by the quality of its engineering – that is, by how convinced we are that we can cross this bridge, that it will hold our weight, that it will take us to the other side. Sometimes, however, in texts which are less usual, less ordinary, this distance is expressed quite differently: the void, the gap itself is engaged directly; its span is measured; its emptiness fathomed; it is demonstrated that, really, when we believe we are crossing over it, we are walking on nothing but air, which will only support us so long as we don’t look down, and the other side is only getting farther away.

Aspirations. There were certain artists I encountered as a child whose lives and practices served a kind of tautological function, making me aware, by their example, not only that it was possible to be a certain kind of person, to value certain things, to not value certain other things, but that I was myself already this kind of person, albeit in a still juvenile form, and could not really be any other – even though I had not previously known such a kind of person could exist. In general, it’s my hope that my work might perform the same function in the future, for some of those yet-unborn who will be as badly in need of demonstration-by-example as I once was, to see that there is precedent for their sensibilities, to see that there are many ways their lives can go, that there are more options than they might have guessed. But when I write, my aims are much more straightforward: I hope, simply, that someone will get what I’m driving at.

Kinds of smallness. I’m hardly the first person to notice this, but there is a strange bifurcation occurring in the literary ecosystem today. On the one hand, in the more prestigious zones, the ones inhabited by people who are, generally speaking, finding ways of scraping by without a day job outside the culture industry, doorstopper tomes are clearly “having a moment” – the longer, the more imposing, the more “difficult” a book is, the more it seems to dominate the conversation (at least until enough time has passed that it becomes reasonable to expect one to have actually read it before commenting on it). On the other hand, in those zones inhabited mostly by those who are not making a living off their writing, maybe because they’re not established yet, or maybe because they’re too weird and dysfunctional, or they live in the middle of nowhere, or they’re not interested in playing the game, or, yes, maybe because they’re simply not good enough, they’re just hobbyists, whatever, there is an unmistakable trend towards smallness – towards the microfiction, the aphorism, the poem of just a few lines, the line of just a few words. Certainly, I’m not immune to the allure of such forms, would even say I feel some degree of partisanship towards them – it is, after all, the “fragment” which I’ve made my chosen vehicle for these thoughts. Further, the artists I’m interested in, the ones I draw the most inspiration from, are much more often the sort who work constantly, obsessively, producing dozens or hundreds of minor works along which will sometimes turn out to be major ones, than those who slave for years or decades over a magnum opus, a Great American Novel, et cetera. I am a believer in the body of work, the cumulative effect of an oeuvre, not the singular masterpiece. On these grounds, I would love to welcome this proliferation of smallness. But I can’t. I can’t, because the smallness which much of this writing possesses seems to me borne out of a desire to make literature into something which can fit more easily into the present attention economy, something which can be read and metabolized in a few minutes, if that, which asks no more of your time than an Instagram Reel – in a word, it is unobtrusive; it is writing which seeks reconciliation with an illiterate culture. I hope I do not need to tell you that this is not something writing should try to do. It is cowardly, it is futile, and furthermore, it is a total waste of the actual powers of literary smallness, powers ably demonstrated by Kafka, of course, but also Lydia Davis, Yasunari Kawabata, Emily Dickinson, Richard Brautigan, Li Bai or any number of the great Classical Chinese poets, of course many others besides, whose small works, at their best, produce an effect akin to seeing, by chance, a small beetle or ladybug crawl onto the open page of the book you are reading: a sudden shock, a sense of a change in the air, a heightened awareness of all things around you, which will linger for days in the back of your mind, working a slow, subtle change in your being. It is this effect which one should strive for, if one is going to work in this way; literature should be obtrusive, and there is no reason why a jeuju, say, will be any less so than an epic of a thousand pages, if it does not compromise itself, if it is not the work of someone who is embarrassed to be something as old-fashioned as a writer, who is embarrassed to be taking up your time – in short, if it is the work of someone who is not afraid.

The general thrust. If you’ve ever turned the subtitles on while watching a movie (or a TV show, or whatever) in a language you can speak, you might have noticed something: they do not always directly correspond with the spoken dialogue. Not only are speech disfluencies (“uh,” “um,” etc.) or quirks of cadence usually not transcribed, the substantive language is itself sometimes modified – usually, this takes the form of simple compression, the jettisoning of relatively unimportant nuances to make the general thrust of the line more immediately apprehensible, but sometimes the alteration is more severe; if you watch enough material this way, and you’re paying attention to it, you will sooner or later come across a subtitle which you feel outright misrepresents the line it corresponds to, omitting a crucial detail, say, or compressing an extended monologue to the point of fundamentally changing its meaning. I don’t mean this as a criticism, really, or at least not of the individuals doing the subtitling; I understand these are industry-standardized practices, and that they’re just trying to maintain what I’m sure is a difficult balance between accuracy and fluidity. There is certainly some “social commentary” one could indulge in over what studios, broadcasters, and subtitling companies consider “too much” for their audiences to follow, but what I find more interesting is how becoming aware of these modifications affects one’s perceptions of subtitles for media in a language one doesn’t speak.

Everyone understands, of course, that no translation is absolutely “literal” – no word means exactly the same thing as its “equivalent” in another language (the German “Apfel,” say, does not have exactly the same resonance as the English “apple,” if for no other reason than that the presence of that “f” changes how we experience saying it and reading it, and therefore how we relate it to what it signifies) – but when we read a work of literature in translation, we presume in good faith that the translator has sincerely attempted to represent as fully as possible, by one rubric or another, what the source text is, all its complexities and nuances, even if this is ultimately not really possible, or requires straying rather far from a “literal” translation of the original words. Unless something gives us cause to question the translator’s judgement or ability, we read the text they have produced trusting it can serve as a reasonable basis for drawing conclusions about the original. But this is not the case for subtitles, properly understood: with subtitles, one must assume compromises have been made, that you’re getting the general thrust of the line, its basic meaning, but not necessarily its full significance, its poetry, its gracefulness or awkwardness. I find this interesting because it results in a very peculiar sort of reading – aware that the words I’m seeing do not correspond exactly to the speech I’m hearing, but not able to understand the speech itself, the subtitles become a kind of “middle text,” a general approximation whose omissions and elisions I have try to read “through” to build up a fuller sense of the original text in my head (using, if possible, what I can understand of the speech itself to refine my interpretation). This is, I think, a significant part of why foreign films so often seem more “cultured” or “refined” than ones in a language we do speak: not only does a language barrier help to mask deficiencies in an actor’s performance, it also helps to mask deficiencies in the writing of the film itself, because, when we watch something with subtitles, we judge it not on the basis of the actual text itself, nor, really, the simplified translation the subtitles deliver to us, but rather an “ideal text” which exists only in our heads, produced by our attempt to fill in the gaps between what we can understand and what we imagine is really being said, a text which, because it is one we produce ourselves, informed by our own particular sensibilities, and because it remains amorphous and superpositional in the way all unvoiced thoughts are, will always seem better to us, at least a little bit, than that which actually exists, in translation or otherwise.

exercises | 72 pages | Paperback | Perfect bound | April 2026

I’ve written another book. If you’re a new subscriber, or, since it’s been longer than I planned since I last released something like this, you’ve just forgotten how this works, here’s the deal: these are short, experimental texts published as both physical, print-on-demand books, available to anyone who wishes to purchase them (see link above), and as downloadable PDFs exclusively for paid Garden Scenery subscribers (see paywall below). Probably I don’t need to spell this out, but the idea is to incentivize said subscriptions, while also providing those of you who are burned out on that sort of patronage model an alternative means of supporting my work, one which still gets you something tangible in return. Here, for reference, are the last two books I published this way:

exercises is distinct from these in that it’s significantly longer, but similar in that it’s more or less entirely focused around the development of a single formal/conceptual conceit – in this case, that of a repeating sequence of written instructions for physical actions, or an “exercise.” I wouldn’t call these sequences poems, exactly, but I would say they are something adjacent to it. While some of them describe essentially ordinary, mundane activities, some are much stranger, more disquieting, drifting into fraught psychological territory or intimations of surreal violence. The language, furthermore, has been pared back to a minimal level of bare functionality, equally cold and mechanistic regardless of what it seems to describe. Not to insist too strongly on the relevancy of a work of experimental literature, but I feel it’s become routine, in these ever-darkening times, when it seems no one can agree on what constitutes an apocalypse, and whether or not you’ll still have to go to work during it, for many people to spend large portions of their lives in a state of low-level dissociation, “running on autopilot” is one way you’ll often hear it described, and I think these sequences speak to this condition quite pointedly.

These are my thoughts about the book, anyways – they’re as preliminary as an author’s always are about his own work. I would, of course, love to hear yours. Below you’ll find some pictures of exercises, interior and exterior. Beneath this can be found the paywall, and behind it the link to the full PDF. If you’d like to read it, and you haven’t subscribed yet, just type your email into the box below, or buy a physical copy here. Thank you very much for your support. Godspeed.

Read more

There’s some fruit on the table. Apples, pears, a bushel of grapes, maybe an orange, maybe a peach or apricot, maybe a ripening plum. Some of the fruit is piled up in a bowl, and some of it, two or three of the fruits, maybe, or maybe four or five of them, are strewn out across the tablecloth, which is white, or maybe pale yellow, or dark blue. The bowl is earthenware, ceramic, maybe glazed, a muted color, an ordinary size, or maybe larger or smaller than ordinary, but not by very much. Its shape is more or less circular. The fruits piled inside come up above the rim, just a little bit, in a lumpy jumble that breaks up the clean lines and solid forms of the bowl and the table. The fruits strewn on the tablecloth, meanwhile, are spread out enough that each one is distinct from the others, but not so much so that they’re no longer in conversation with each other; they are not isolated on the expanse of the tablecloth like castaways adrift on the open sea. There is a wall directly behind the table, which is pitted and weathered and pockmarked, like a wall in an old country farmhouse, and is painted pale yellow or beige or bright red. It is not painted white. Perhaps, in fact, there is not a wall behind the table at all, but instead a large curtain, or a type of drop-cloth, one which is dyed an autumnal color, dark green or rust brown, perhaps, even though it’s late spring, or maybe early summer. There is not nothing behind the table, though. There is not only darkness or emptiness or a distant horizon. The weather is warm, or maybe slightly crisp, slightly cooler than usual for this time of year. Certainly it is not humid, in any case, and the air has that particular freshness commonly associated with the arrival of spring. At this time of year, the windows can still be safely left open without fear of harassment from flies or mosquitoes, and so they have been left open, letting in the whispering breeze and the trills of songbirds outside, which are maybe perched on tree branches, or maybe electrical cables, or maybe the roof of a barn or a shed. There are other animals outside, as well, snakes and rabbits and mice, maybe large, brown dog asleep on a porch, or a black cat curled up on a pile of straw. These animals, however, cannot be heard through the window, although they are out there, looking, breathing, smelling, moving, thinking. A wide yellow rectangle of sunlight, however, does come in through the window, and throughout the day this rectangle will creep imperceptibly from the stone floor, which is very dusty, or maybe covered in bootprints, or maybe just recently swept clean, up the side of the table, over the fruit strewn about and the fruit in the bowl, onto the wall, or maybe the curtain, and, finally, onto the low, unadorned ceiling, where, already elongated, it will slowly stretch itself out further and further, until it fades into night. Right now, though, it’s late morning, or maybe just past noon, or maybe just a bit later, and the light is just now shining on the fruit on the tabletop, and throwing their shadows onto the wall, or maybe the curtain, behind it. The fruit, recently washed, still glistens with moisture. You can hear the dripping of the tap in the kitchen, which is old, like the rest of the house, and can never quite be fully shut off, coming from somewhere behind you, or maybe ahead of you, a steady drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, a sound like you might hear at the beginning or end of your life. Right now, though, that is not where you are. You are here. You are nowhere else. There’s some fruit on the table. Apples, pears, a bushel of grapes, maybe an orange, maybe a peach or apricot, maybe an overripe plum.