_____________
'Neurasthenia was the fashionable sickness of late 19th-century America. (Big Pharma, not yet so big, had yet to discover ADHD.) The disease—symptoms included fatigue, flatulence and headache—was thought to be a byproduct of "modern civilization": the stresses involved in urban living and getting ahead. For the upwardly mobile, neurasthenia was "a marker of class." William James, who suffered the condition, dubbed it Americanitis, the American Disease. Freud thought it was caused by excessive masturbation.
'These days, all the cool kids write about pharmaceuticals and cognitive science. In his first novel, The Gospel of Anarchy, Justin Taylor makes his attempt to diagnose the mal du siècle by grappling with matters of faith. His interest in religion is not widely shared by his contemporaries.
'Few of the characters in The Gospel of Anarchy are able to achieve meaningful, lasting human connections. Having first withdrawn from the world, the denizens of Fishgut are in the end also distant from each other. Despite their professed search for enlightenment, they show a limited capacity for empathy, the basis for genuine community and any serious moral arrangement. Retreating to their own personal realities, whether of messianic cults or the pieties of political purism, they are proved to be as jaded as their careerist counterparts, cynics to the end. These kids don't seek freedom; they seek perpetual adolescence. Ultimately, the decision to disengage is as much a moral stance as any other: "Refusal too is action. There is no way to be in the world without being a part of it."' -- Matthew Hunte, The New York Observer
Justin Taylor The Gospel of AnarchyHarper Perennial
'In landlocked Gainesville, Florida, in the hot, fraught summer of 1999, a college dropout named David sleepwalks through his life—a dull haze of office work and Internet porn—until a run-in with a lost friend jolts him from his torpor. He is drawn into the vibrant but grimy world of Fishgut, a rundown house where a loose collective of anarchists, burnouts, and libertines practice utopia outside society and the law. Some even see their lifestyle as a spiritual calling. They watch for the return of a mysterious hobo who will—they hope—transform their punk oasis into the Bethlehem of a zealous, strange new creed.
'In his dark and mesmerizing debut novel, Justin Taylor ("a master of the modern snapshot"—Los Angeles Times) explores the borders between religion and politics, faith and fanaticism, desire and need—and what happens when those borders are breached.' -- Harper Perennial
Excerpt
A girl with a perfect, pale ass like an upside down heart is standing in the doorway of a bedroom. Her own, it seems fair to assume. Her hair is tied back, appears wet. The picture is cockeyed, suggesting that the photographer was a little off-balance, maybe snagged the shot while in motion, snuck it on the fly. We can see into the girl’s room, somewhat, around her shape and through her legs. There’s a loud pink bedspread, mussed. All kinds of stuff on the floor.
Every single one of these images was a betrayal. Privacies violated, trusts broken. That was the real frame narrative, the superstructure, and this knowledge made them so much more powerful. They stank of aura.
Except that wasn’t always the case, was it? A woman sitting in a rolling chair in a home-office, a converted den, wearing a tank top only, tipping the chair back, legs spread wide, playing with herself with one hand and holding up a sign with the other: the name of some usenet group, the date of the picture, the words #1 Fan. Swingers. Exhibitionists. Baby you know how many people are gonna see this and get themselves off to it? No baby, tell me, tell me all about it. Okay, baby. Now tell me again.
So there were two narratives, actually, of equal but inverse and irreconcilable power. It was either, She never wanted this, or else it was, She got exactly what she wanted. You had to decide for yourself. You had to make it up as you went along.
Topless girls in front of sinks, their own or that of some hotel room, blowing their hair out, brushing teeth, looking away from the camera or sidelong into it with an expression like, seriously, Anthony, would you knock it off?
In bed, full nude, reclining, dark hair in a bun and a deep natural tan, legs crossed at the ankles, blanket scrunched down by her feet, weirdly demure, a single dollop of jism near her pierced navel like a pale moon orbiting a silver-ringed planet, one hand behind her head. In the other hand, a bulky gray cellular phone indicated that the image was from probably four or five years ago, at least. And where was this girl now? Still with the guy who’d snapped the photo, or had their breakup been the trigger for his sharing?
I copied and saved my favorites so I could look at them again later. One folder, holding all I’d culled from the sites and from the lists. A window on my own desktop. No interference. No connection at all required. I could unplug the broadband, if I wanted, and just cycle through the thousand favorites I already had. But of course I didn’t do that. I minimized the whole AOL window, but inside it, tucked away, the mailbox was open and the chat was still logged on. I changed my desktop background to pure white. I hid all the other icons, and the toolbar too. I opened the image browser. I pressed the little box that maximizes.
Here they were, surrounded with plain white pixels, pure radiance, mystic roses at the center of my heaven, burning bushes (I mean no pun). I stared until I saw clear through them and into their constitutive brightness. I aimed back at my own chest, and cleaned up with tissues which saturated and wept apart. As my frequency increased, so did my stamina, and my issuance came in watery, thin ropes. There were paper fibers spun up in the hair on my stomach.
(read more)
Justin Taylor reads
Justin Taylor on 'The Word Made Flesh'
____________
'Alissa Nutting’s Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls is a collection of eighteen short stories about women, animals, and objects existing in the underbelly. Perverted and beautiful, these stories deal with the shame of having bodies, and the ways in which we use them to corrupt each other. Characters live in impossible worlds made possible by everyday motion. Porn stars engage in anal sex on the moon; a woman goes to hell and falls in love with the devil; lobsters say goodbye to each other as they boil to death. The stories are boozy, unnerving, and funny. If Mary Gaitskill and Julio Cortázar together birthed a piglet, it could very well be this collection.
'What I find important about Nutting’s work is the abandonment of rules, of any boundaries placed on a text by genre. It isn’t about “magical realism” or “science fiction” so much as it is about bored bodies leaking in the afternoon. There is no need to cheeseball the bizarre when its effect is pure and familiar. Something happens every day but not everyone sees it; Nutting sees this Something and more. Her women are you, your mother, your sister, that same fat which can both soothe and destroy. The way a collection like this defeats categorization is in the refusal of a politic.
'This is not to say that these stories are without statement. Nutting recognizes gender for the fucked game it is, and violation via structure, via holding, is what Nutting intends to untangle, knot by knot. A shaky foundation for bodies to slip through, these stories give way to fantastic chaos in which we lose sense of meaning, moments, memory, and performance. Without boundaries, the body is capable.' -- Lorian Long, Bookslut
Alissa Nutting Unclean Jobs for Women and GirlsStarcherone Press
'Winner of the 6th Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, chosen by Ben Marcus. In this darkly hilarious debut collection, misfit women and girls in every strata of society are investigated through various ill-fated jobs. One is the main course of dinner, another the porn star contracted to copulate in space for a reality TV show. They become futuristic ant farms, get knocked up by the star high school quarterback and have secret abortions, use parakeets to reverse amputations, make love to garden gnomes, go into air conditioning ducts to confront their mother's ghost, and do so in settings that range from Hell to the local white-supremacist bowling alley.' -- Starcherone Press
'These fine stories, anthropologically thorough in their view of the contemporary person, illuminate how people hide behind their pursuits, concealing what matters most to them while striving, and usually failing, to be loved.' -- Ben Marcus
Excerpt
from Genpop Books
DANCING RAT
I don’t know if I’m able to have children myself. Because we haven’t been able to conceive, my boyfriend calls our sex “free sex.” I’m not sure if he’s referring to the cost we save on contraceptives, the funds it takes to raise a child, what. If I ask, “What do you mean, free sex?” he says, “You know. No consequences.”
Kyle and I have a lot of free sex. Working on a children’s show, I almost feel bad about how very much sex I have.
Whisker-Bop! is a musical dance program that’s big on counting, manners, and recycling. The primary characters are myself (a mouse), a raccoon, and a bat. Due to their extraordinary length, our whiskers often comically get in the way of our counting/singing/dancing/morality-teaching. My name is Sneezoid because I have bad allergies; why this isn’t a concern I’m not sure. Every episode requires that I atch-hoo in a high-pitched voice and giggle afterwards. This prompts everyone else to giggle. During the interview for the job, I was asked to do little more than showcase my fake sneezing ability. I had a whole speech planned: how much I love kids, my work in an inner-city children’s community theater. It didn’t come up.
I think I took the job as a sadistic decision-making tool: do I want a child, really, and if so do I want one badly enough to leave Kyle if he won’t go along with the process? Kyle is low-key and has expressed no desire to drive a medical plaza and ejaculate in a cup.
But the longer I’m on Whisker-Bop!, the less I seem to worry about whether or not to have a child, because the young “actors” I work with are horrible. My costume includes a set of felt rodent teeth that are on my facial mask around my chin; I often wish these teeth were real so that I could gnaw the golden ponytail off my young costar Missy. She calls me Ratty, though I am obviously a mouse.
Like many lesser mammals, Missy can detect fear. She reminds me a lot of Pearl in The Scarlet Letter, asking questions that insist she already knows more than she should.
“When you have a daughter, you won’t make her do homework when she already has sooooooo many lines to memorize, will you Ratty?”
After our initial meeting (she asked me if I had any children and I said “Not yet”), Missy’s favorite game is asking questions about my hypothetical future child that relate to Missy’s own life.
“I don’t know,” I tell her. She then runs over to her mother yelling about how Ratty said it’s unfair to make her do homework on set, and her stage-tyrant parent shoots me a laser-glare.
I’m haunted by how physically perfect Missy is, her clear skin and her white white teeth. She just landed a detergent commercial, and because I want to punish myself I will not be able to resist switching to that brand. I am a zombie-slave under Missy’s control, I often think. I don’t have a child and I probably will never have a child: I hate this but trying any harder to have one seems like it would make the reality sink in even more. It is far easier to just do the bratty things Missy asks me to do, buy her endorsed products, and act like this agonizing relationship somehow brings me closer to motherhood.
The show’s writers have somehow sensed the obsessive link between Missy and I. At first I was free: a free mouse. But as the episodes progressed and the show got renewed for a second season, it was decided that Missy would adopt me so I would no longer “have to sleep in the cold, cold fields. Brrrrr!” That was Missy’s line, then the two of us had a song and dance number called “I’ve Found My Live-In Friend.”
The other children, two boys who are a bit sweeter than Missy but already vain at age seven, sometimes hear Missy call me Sneezy and try to use it as well. I snap at them, “I’m not one of the seven dwarves.”
“But Missy calls you…” they protest. And I just stare at them vacantly, as if to say, “Don’t you get it? I’m Missy’s grown-up zombie-slave.”
*
(read more)
Alissa Nutting reads 1
Alissa Nutting interviewed
Alissa Nutting reads 2
'Larry-bob Roberts disdains "astrology fanatics," suggests open mic events as an alternative to religion, knocks "self-righteous" meat-eaters, hates scooters on sidewalks, fears nothing more than "a cruise ship full of gay men," frets that rock and even more annoying forms of music aren't going away, is saddened at how little gay men know about dyke culture, believes the only thing stupider than a body tattoo is a facial tattoo, considers the Castro a strip mall - and relishes being an arrogant know-it-all. In short, he's a cantankerous crank. A raging contrarian. And a breath of fresh air in his views of both queer culture and the world at large. This book of mini-essays - 88 observations that range from candid to scathing, mixing off-the-wall satire with smart social observations - considers, among other topics, community and communication (he wants more of both), popular culture (much of which he dismisses) and homosexuality - the longest section, where Roberts reveals himself to be well out of the homo mainstream yet completely content with his own queer life." -- Richard Labonte, Book Marks
'Larry-bob Roberts is into sparking culture and politics, and creating fusions between the two. His book The International Homosexual Conspiracy is newly published by Manic D. Press. Since 1989, he has been publishing in print and now online the seminal queer zine of art and writing Holy Titclamps. Called "the Stephen Colbert of queer culture" by the SF Weekly, and a hero to intelligent outsiders for more than two decades, Roberts also maintains the SF Bay Area weekly queer cultural calendar, Queer Things To Do aka SFQueer.com. With Kirk Read, he co-hosts the monthly open mic Smack Dab at Magnet health center in San Francisco's Castro district."' -- collaged
Larry-bob Roberts The International Homosexual Conspiracy
Manic D Press
'In this series of cultural polemics on an unexpected array of contemporary topics—from mistaken first impressions ("Presumed Hetero Unless Proven Gay") to sustainable yet unaffordable pants ("Socially Responsible Pants") to critiques of bourgeois mindsets ("Middle Class Writer")—author Larry-bob Roberts offers hilarious insight into the absurdities of modern life and queer culture. His humorous observations are destined to jostle readers' complacency and confirm their worst suspicions.
'Straight people need this book to find out what one of those freaky queers thinks. Mainstream gays need this book to learn that there are other ways of expressing homosexuality culturally. Non-mainstream queers need this book to see that someone is finally putting down in writing ideas that reflect their own points of view. Readers with short attention spans need this book because the chapters are easily digested, bite-sized pieces. Fans of satire need this book for a good laugh. Fundamentalist Christians need this book as evidence of the decadence of modern society. In a humorously confrontational way, Roberts entertains with a viewpoint that's not only raging, but also engaging.' -- Manic D Press
Excerpt
from sfbg.com
Having to constantly suffer the company of the ignorant, it's difficult to suppress my condescension. After all, I know about obscure music and books that few others know of and this makes me superior.
For that matter, I must also tolerate the naive with regard to politics and current events. It is a constant struggle to maintain a civil façade, to avoid an outburst. After all, the polite response to the uninformed is not to point out their glaring faults but to gently correct their errors in a subtle, guiding way. Maintaining patience is not easy.
I was talking the other day to an acquaintance (it's hard for people to actually be friends with one as superior as me) and I was shocked to find he'd never heard of Sainkho Namtchylak. Come on, what rock do you have to be living under to not know of the Tuvan throat-singing virtuoso — a singer who makes Diamanda Galas sound like Whitney Houston — who collaborates with free-jazzers like saxophonist Evan Parker? I tried not to be too disdainful as I informed him of her numerous releases on the British record label, Leo. It's just so difficult not to get sarcastic when faced with that sort of colossal ignorance and cultural complacency.
Do these people just take whatever is offered them on MTV, instead of digging deeper? I have to laugh at the people who think they're hip just because they listen to something they consider obscure, like Borbetomagus. Come on, they've been around forever. Even some grunge-listening moron who hasn't picked up a magazine since Forced Exposure turned into a mail-order company knows that.
How did I become as I am: namely, one of the most hip people on the planet, endowed with a broad cultural knowledge? Obscurantists are made, not born. To tell the wounding truth, my strength came from weakness. In high school, I was a geek, woefully ignorant of popular culture and rock music in particular. My reading was predominantly in the genre of science fiction. I listened to the folk and classical music my parents preferred and, for exoticism's sake, enjoyed the synthesizer stylings of Wendy Carlos and Tomita. Children have no taste. We're shaped (or should I say twisted?) by our environment.
Once I discovered punk rock, I shot up like a late bloomer whose delayed pubescence doesn't preclude his growth to a height greater than six feet. I devoured the Trouser Press Record Guide, listened to lots of music from the collections of friends. I started reading obscure magazines that reviewed music none of my friends listened to and I was an early adopter of the Internet: I had email in college in 1984 and my Usenet newsgroup posts archived on Google Groups date back that far, before the 1987 Great Renaming, which reorganized online discussion forums. I was an invited member of a secret e-mail music list called "Music-flamers" in 1986.
Let's face it, it's too easy to put someone down for being a fan of Korn or Britney Spears (what's the difference, really?). I prefer to insult people for being so obvious as to be fans of virtually mainstream 1970s British psyche-folk group Caravan instead of Everyone Involved or fill-in-the-blank with your favorite ultra-obscure, private pressing, un-reissued psyche-folk LP of the early '70s.
Why should music be something that we have in common, something that might bring us together, when it can be a soapbox to stand on to put us above other people? Why settle for the pleasure of turning on someone to good music when you can use it to put them down? If you can tell me, I'll let you listen to my copy of Jim French and Galas' If Looks Could Kill or Orchid Spangiafora's Flee Past's Ape Elf.
Larry-bob plays 'Goodnight Irene'
Larry-bob reads the mail
Larry-bob and Tommy: 'It gets better'
I think I took the job as a sadistic decision-making tool: do I want a child, really, and if so do I want one badly enough to leave Kyle if he won’t go along with the process? Kyle is low-key and has expressed no desire to drive a medical plaza and ejaculate in a cup.
But the longer I’m on Whisker-Bop!, the less I seem to worry about whether or not to have a child, because the young “actors” I work with are horrible. My costume includes a set of felt rodent teeth that are on my facial mask around my chin; I often wish these teeth were real so that I could gnaw the golden ponytail off my young costar Missy. She calls me Ratty, though I am obviously a mouse.
Like many lesser mammals, Missy can detect fear. She reminds me a lot of Pearl in The Scarlet Letter, asking questions that insist she already knows more than she should.
“When you have a daughter, you won’t make her do homework when she already has sooooooo many lines to memorize, will you Ratty?”
After our initial meeting (she asked me if I had any children and I said “Not yet”), Missy’s favorite game is asking questions about my hypothetical future child that relate to Missy’s own life.
“I don’t know,” I tell her. She then runs over to her mother yelling about how Ratty said it’s unfair to make her do homework on set, and her stage-tyrant parent shoots me a laser-glare.
I’m haunted by how physically perfect Missy is, her clear skin and her white white teeth. She just landed a detergent commercial, and because I want to punish myself I will not be able to resist switching to that brand. I am a zombie-slave under Missy’s control, I often think. I don’t have a child and I probably will never have a child: I hate this but trying any harder to have one seems like it would make the reality sink in even more. It is far easier to just do the bratty things Missy asks me to do, buy her endorsed products, and act like this agonizing relationship somehow brings me closer to motherhood.
The show’s writers have somehow sensed the obsessive link between Missy and I. At first I was free: a free mouse. But as the episodes progressed and the show got renewed for a second season, it was decided that Missy would adopt me so I would no longer “have to sleep in the cold, cold fields. Brrrrr!” That was Missy’s line, then the two of us had a song and dance number called “I’ve Found My Live-In Friend.”
The other children, two boys who are a bit sweeter than Missy but already vain at age seven, sometimes hear Missy call me Sneezy and try to use it as well. I snap at them, “I’m not one of the seven dwarves.”
“But Missy calls you…” they protest. And I just stare at them vacantly, as if to say, “Don’t you get it? I’m Missy’s grown-up zombie-slave.”
*
(read more)
Alissa Nutting reads 1
Alissa Nutting interviewed
Alissa Nutting reads 2
____________
'Larry-bob Roberts disdains "astrology fanatics," suggests open mic events as an alternative to religion, knocks "self-righteous" meat-eaters, hates scooters on sidewalks, fears nothing more than "a cruise ship full of gay men," frets that rock and even more annoying forms of music aren't going away, is saddened at how little gay men know about dyke culture, believes the only thing stupider than a body tattoo is a facial tattoo, considers the Castro a strip mall - and relishes being an arrogant know-it-all. In short, he's a cantankerous crank. A raging contrarian. And a breath of fresh air in his views of both queer culture and the world at large. This book of mini-essays - 88 observations that range from candid to scathing, mixing off-the-wall satire with smart social observations - considers, among other topics, community and communication (he wants more of both), popular culture (much of which he dismisses) and homosexuality - the longest section, where Roberts reveals himself to be well out of the homo mainstream yet completely content with his own queer life." -- Richard Labonte, Book Marks
'Larry-bob Roberts is into sparking culture and politics, and creating fusions between the two. His book The International Homosexual Conspiracy is newly published by Manic D. Press. Since 1989, he has been publishing in print and now online the seminal queer zine of art and writing Holy Titclamps. Called "the Stephen Colbert of queer culture" by the SF Weekly, and a hero to intelligent outsiders for more than two decades, Roberts also maintains the SF Bay Area weekly queer cultural calendar, Queer Things To Do aka SFQueer.com. With Kirk Read, he co-hosts the monthly open mic Smack Dab at Magnet health center in San Francisco's Castro district."' -- collaged
Larry-bob Roberts The International Homosexual ConspiracyManic D Press
'In this series of cultural polemics on an unexpected array of contemporary topics—from mistaken first impressions ("Presumed Hetero Unless Proven Gay") to sustainable yet unaffordable pants ("Socially Responsible Pants") to critiques of bourgeois mindsets ("Middle Class Writer")—author Larry-bob Roberts offers hilarious insight into the absurdities of modern life and queer culture. His humorous observations are destined to jostle readers' complacency and confirm their worst suspicions.
'Straight people need this book to find out what one of those freaky queers thinks. Mainstream gays need this book to learn that there are other ways of expressing homosexuality culturally. Non-mainstream queers need this book to see that someone is finally putting down in writing ideas that reflect their own points of view. Readers with short attention spans need this book because the chapters are easily digested, bite-sized pieces. Fans of satire need this book for a good laugh. Fundamentalist Christians need this book as evidence of the decadence of modern society. In a humorously confrontational way, Roberts entertains with a viewpoint that's not only raging, but also engaging.' -- Manic D Press
Excerpt
from sfbg.com
Having to constantly suffer the company of the ignorant, it's difficult to suppress my condescension. After all, I know about obscure music and books that few others know of and this makes me superior.
For that matter, I must also tolerate the naive with regard to politics and current events. It is a constant struggle to maintain a civil façade, to avoid an outburst. After all, the polite response to the uninformed is not to point out their glaring faults but to gently correct their errors in a subtle, guiding way. Maintaining patience is not easy.
I was talking the other day to an acquaintance (it's hard for people to actually be friends with one as superior as me) and I was shocked to find he'd never heard of Sainkho Namtchylak. Come on, what rock do you have to be living under to not know of the Tuvan throat-singing virtuoso — a singer who makes Diamanda Galas sound like Whitney Houston — who collaborates with free-jazzers like saxophonist Evan Parker? I tried not to be too disdainful as I informed him of her numerous releases on the British record label, Leo. It's just so difficult not to get sarcastic when faced with that sort of colossal ignorance and cultural complacency.
Do these people just take whatever is offered them on MTV, instead of digging deeper? I have to laugh at the people who think they're hip just because they listen to something they consider obscure, like Borbetomagus. Come on, they've been around forever. Even some grunge-listening moron who hasn't picked up a magazine since Forced Exposure turned into a mail-order company knows that.
How did I become as I am: namely, one of the most hip people on the planet, endowed with a broad cultural knowledge? Obscurantists are made, not born. To tell the wounding truth, my strength came from weakness. In high school, I was a geek, woefully ignorant of popular culture and rock music in particular. My reading was predominantly in the genre of science fiction. I listened to the folk and classical music my parents preferred and, for exoticism's sake, enjoyed the synthesizer stylings of Wendy Carlos and Tomita. Children have no taste. We're shaped (or should I say twisted?) by our environment.
Once I discovered punk rock, I shot up like a late bloomer whose delayed pubescence doesn't preclude his growth to a height greater than six feet. I devoured the Trouser Press Record Guide, listened to lots of music from the collections of friends. I started reading obscure magazines that reviewed music none of my friends listened to and I was an early adopter of the Internet: I had email in college in 1984 and my Usenet newsgroup posts archived on Google Groups date back that far, before the 1987 Great Renaming, which reorganized online discussion forums. I was an invited member of a secret e-mail music list called "Music-flamers" in 1986.
Let's face it, it's too easy to put someone down for being a fan of Korn or Britney Spears (what's the difference, really?). I prefer to insult people for being so obvious as to be fans of virtually mainstream 1970s British psyche-folk group Caravan instead of Everyone Involved or fill-in-the-blank with your favorite ultra-obscure, private pressing, un-reissued psyche-folk LP of the early '70s.
Why should music be something that we have in common, something that might bring us together, when it can be a soapbox to stand on to put us above other people? Why settle for the pleasure of turning on someone to good music when you can use it to put them down? If you can tell me, I'll let you listen to my copy of Jim French and Galas' If Looks Could Kill or Orchid Spangiafora's Flee Past's Ape Elf.
Larry-bob plays 'Goodnight Irene'
Larry-bob reads the mail
Larry-bob and Tommy: 'It gets better'
*
p.s. Hey. So, I'm either in or on my way to Oslo as you read this. Hence, this minimal p.s. I'll catch up with your comments from yesterday and today from the snowy north tomorrow as best I can. I guess the post doesn't need an introduction, does it? No. Books recently read and loved says it all. Okay, have a good day, y'all, and I'll see you again when tomorrow becomes today.
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