My old friend Owen Wyke from Gone Lawn has given me an interview in honor of Divine In Essence, and there are some good things to learn in there, I dare say. Many thanks to you, Owen! It was a sure pleasure to mull over these questions for as long as I did. Some of the answers surprised even me. That’s Gone Lawn, Number 60, by the way. Holy shit! How many online journals last for THAT many issues?

You know what, while I’m here, I might as well plug Joey Truman’s new book You Will Know, which I finished reading a few minutes ago. Joey is a fellow Whiskey Tit author, albeit this book is being published under another umbrella called Marine Press. I take it he will be releasing a series of nine books called Crisis Etc, “a series that chronicles the fragility of the human body and spirit as the elements do their work.” Judging by this first entry, I’m guessing the theme of the venture is that LIFE SUCKS, but you have to keep doing it anyway, so maybe MAKE SOME ART while you’re at it…or, failing that, get drunk and trash your hotel room. We’ll see, eight more books to go, after all!

You Will Know presents a fun, deceptively simple story with a great Shaggy Crow ending that I won’t spoil for you. It all takes place in a snowed-in mountain cabin, the writer’s retreat of an asshole novelist named Full Glue and his wife/groupie Pronto (“always fast upon him”). I pictured this guy as a mashup of Charles Bukowski and Captain Beefheart—a raging drunk, deranged, manic, depraved, and yet also unwaveringly disciplined in his work ethic, devoting himself relentlessly every single day to the manufacture of words on paper (like Bukowski tapping out his drunken ravings into poems every night while the Classical Music Station behind him whispered uncanny sweetnesses upon his suffering), but also essentially enslaving Pronto to the task of gussying up the gonzo inspiration in his manuscripts into a publishable condition (very much akin to Beefheart’s treatment of his Magic Band).

I won’t say more than that because I don’t want to ruin the experience for anyone, but this book definitely has some surprises in store for you, Brave Reader! Joey Truman is a special trip of an author, as those who know know, and he doesn’t disappoint with this one. I have a lot of thoughts about what I just read, and I’m tempted to launch into something here, but like I said, I don’t want to ruin the book, it just came out! Give peeps a chance!

A while back, deluded, I “rezoned” this site to include a “Film Ghetto,” a kind of sub-blog, in which I intended to corral my anticipated prolific film writing. Not long afterward, my eyes descaled, my ambitions staled, and the film writing…flailed. Shrugs ensued all around.

More recently, I finally wrote a little sumpin’ about some films I saw, and it occurred to me that I should re-rezone the site back to its initial state, in which all film reviews were situated within the flow of the blog. I have done so, and of course, whenever I do anything to the site, I always explain it in a post, for some reason or t’other. Does anyone give a fuck? Yes! One person gives a fuck! THE MOST IMPORTANT ONE!

I’ll mention here that I am gaining faith that the Second Edition of that classic Absurdist Tome I, No Other will soon be ALMOST upon us. It has an ISBN and everything! Watch this space, saplings! (I call you all saplings because I am such a mighty trunk, I must naturally presume all the rest of you inferior. It’s nothing personal.)

I should make a bumper sticker: “I survived Bobferatu!” For the dense among us (a club I belong to), “Bob” refers to A Complete Unknown, the Bob Dylan biopic, and “feratu” refers to Nosferatu: both movies were released today, Christmas Day, and I summoned the can-do spirit of America and self-assembled a double-feature for myself in the cineplex. Kind of thing I haven’t done in a LONG time. Would’ve been no sweat in my 20s! Nowadays? Whoa.

I wouldn’t have written anything about this experience—it was just for fun—but there’s a fascinating line of thought I need to pursue, and this is about the only way to do it. I don’t want to spend hours on it, though…I sometimes daydream about writing about every movie or book I finish, but I just don’t have the juice, let’s face it! Especially today…. So I’m not going to give this one the spit ’n’ polish I normally would. (I’m the kind of writer who agonizes over every fucking syllable. Even the “casual” ones. BUT NOT THIS TIME. I AIN’T GOT TIME FOR THAT! An hour tops, I’ll give it…maybe two?)

What intrigued me, what’s haunting me: both movies were about GAZE. 100%. It was so strange to recognize this! Maybe it’s simply because I’ve been thinking about Gaze lately? (Maybe Gaze is in EVERYTHING, and I just didn’t realize it…oh shit.) I was certainly aware of the fabled “Male Gaze” in pop culture, but I recently learned that it’s derived from a more general notion of Gaze developed by Jacques Lacan. As soon as I heard about Gaze, I realized I’ve been writing about it my entire life without knowing it. Which is why I’ve been very reluctant to look any further into the subject, ha ha! I’m afraid if I learn more about Lacan, it will inflect my writing in some way. Seems silly and superstitious, but I am, sadly, a very silly and superstitious person (not in a GOOD way). Thus, if you know something about Lacan, you’re some kind of expert or even a weekend Lacanian hobbyist, and you find yourself shaking your head disapprovingly at what’s to come—like I don’t know what I’m talking ’bout or sumpin’, which, quite frankly, you’re not wrong—maybe just move on, eh? There’s a lot of Internet out there yet to be explored…you can do it!

Gaze is seeing somebody, obviously. You know that when someone is looking at you, they SEE you. Meanwhile, you KNOW they see you…you know that an image of yourself is appearing in that person’s consciousness. You know that your image, which you thought was YOURS, now belongs to THEM. What the FUCK? It’s out of your control! All they have to do is LOOK at you, and now they POSSESS you! You can’t help it: you’re sitting there wondering what they’re seeing exactly…hoping it measures up…and maybe you start to crave that Gaze, that possession, because it’s the only way to vindicate your actual presence in the Universe. I mean, if no one is looking at you, if no one has laid claim to your value, then do you even exist? You’d have to look in a mirror to verify it, but even then, you’re looking at yourself AS IF you were someone else, from a certain distance. And when you’re not looking in the mirror, you can still see an image of yourself in your mind that you sense is being seen by someone somewhere…someone somewhere COULD be looking at you….

I’m sure Lacan puts it better than that, I’ve got nuttin’ but simplistic gibberish atm, AND I’ve given myself a time limit, so rather than spend another hour fussing over it to make it marginally more intelligible, let’s relate it to the movies I just saw. Both are simple stories [SPOILERS!]:

In Nosferatu, a young girl is ignored, belittled, and demeaned by her flaccid husband, her priggish social clique, and her puritanical society—even to the degree of etherising, corseting, and tying her down to prevent “somnambulism,” a.k.a. personal autonomy—so she conjures up from the wrath of her repressed libido a literal demon to give her what she craves: GAZE. (She just wants SOMEONE to LOOK at HER, to see and esteem her as the Sex Goddess she KNOWS she is writhing around underneath it all.) Indeed, Nosferatu is PURE GAZE, an infinite and lusting Gaze that extends to her all the way from Transylvania, traveling the entire WORLD to SEE and possess her. Every little girl’s dream! She is the Master, he the Servant; he exists ONLY to look at her. And of course, a Gaze can’t consummate its desire—once it finally possesses the object of its obsession, it is destroyed. (Nosferatu literally bleeds from the EYES in his death scene!) In the process of attracting Nosferatu’s Gaze, almost incidentally, the entire city is beset with plague and all her friends die. Oh well! Even SHE dies, sure, but with a smile of contentment, her own pet creature Nosferatu gripped firmly in her carnal embrace. It’s a Triumph of the Feminine Will. (I loved that! I need to watch the original, I’ve never seen it, but now I’m extremely interested! I mean, that was before feminism, wasn’t it? How’d they DO that?)

In A Complete Unknown, a young boy (Bob Dylan), a vagabond magician of sorts, is literally MADE OF GAZE. Everyone looks at him and sees what they want him to be, which is the object of their Gaze, but no one ever sees who he actually is. (So what are they even looking at? Their own desire? Naked, unfulfilled desire projected onto a boyish substrate? A circular Gaze that passes through its object and returns back into the self?) Throughout the film, whenever he plays a song, we witness its effect on the GAZE of the other characters. It’s almost fetishistic… There’s always a Close-Up-Reaction-Shot™ of someone LOOKING at him with sudden desire and being transformed by what they SEE. And that’s ALL HE IS—a papier-mâché doll of all those Gazes layered over each other. The film is structured, essentially, as a litany of the Gazes that bestow themselves ’pon our ’nointed one, starting with Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie (who’s ALL Gaze since he can’t talk—his eyes just get bigger and buggier, the more he sees), kind of a grudging squint of a Gaze from Dave Van Ronk, then Suze Rotolo, Joan Baez, Al Grossman, Johnny Cash, endless fans of course, and who-the-fuck-ever! There is no character in this film who interacts with Bob Dylan in a mundane way. Every single person contributes the reaction shot of their Gaze to constructing this towering figure of legend. And any energy toward revealing the soul that might reside behind this image is always preemptively diverted: Dylan MUST—to preserve the myth—remain an enigma, a Mystery Tramp, you name it.

I don’t have the brainpower to follow this thread any further, and I’m not going to work it over; I just wanted to get the basic idea down before it fades away. Maybe I’ll return to it someday because there were some tangents I could’ve pursued if I had any mental acuity. Or maybe not!

The long drought is over. The flood cometh. The Divine In Essence preorders, according to sources, are on the way.

My olive branch to all you righteously impatient and justifiably indignant peeps is Mendicant City. Yes, that‘s right! You will find in your package, along with Divine In Essence, a complementary copy of my first chapbook (from 2016) with cover art by a certain Logan Zander Smith.

I’m close! Methinks? Divine In Essence has been struggling out of the birth canal for quite some time, but I daresay… any WEEK now? It’s all out of my hands, folks, and speculation is runnin’ rampant on the ramparts, but my new story collection Divine In Essence is almost upon us. (You can preorder all you want at that link, of course, no need to wait for anything in particular.)

I have created a marketing page for it, linked up top in the Menu. For now, it features the cover image and the description and the lovely blurbs, but it won’t be long before I start posting REVIEWS there. I found a few lovely folks who agreed to take a look, and for good measure I ordered up some paid reviews (I’m talking editorial reviews, from sites like Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Literary Titan, Reader’s Favorite, etc.). We’ll see how THAT goes….

The pros of paid reviews: you can make them quietly go away if they don’t like your book! The cons of paid reviews: elitist stigma. In the words of our Greatest President Evah (FDR), “I welcome your stigma!” I didn’t do enough for I, No Other, sadly, back in the day, because I’m a marketing imbecile, but this time, at least, I’ll have some fucking reviews! Paid AND unpaid! Covering all the bases!