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!

I enjoyed writing that last post about David Leo Rice’s The Berlin Wall, and I thought why not extend the streak? Maybe I still have some energy left over for this lit-crit stuff, and David was NOT, after all, the ONLY writer I encountered at that reading. B. R. Yeager cohosted the event, or maybe he emceed? I’m not sure what the word is for his role. He officiated over things, engaged David in cogent, thoughtful conversation about his book, lent a shape and an order to the proceedings, and he also brought along his own book and read a few pages from a Work In Progress. I found him to be an affable and insightful presence, and so I was certainly intrigued to see what sort of stories he would have written in a collection entitled Burn You the Fuck Alive.

First of all, the book design! Not only is the cover gorgeous (with its pink flames gassing off a silhouetted humanesque figure), but the book is filled with mysterious, provocative images. They are mostly produced using a halftone effect (all those dots in a newspaper picture) with occasional TV scan lines or moiré patterns to amp up the spookiness. The book delivers a powerful visual punch, and it’s not overdone; the images are slipped between the stories, mints to renew the taste buds before the next course. They don’t convey literal illustration of the stories, but rather supply an emotional undercurrent that seeps into the fabric of the text, subliminally facilitating the reader’s absorption of the language. It’s a great idea, artfully implemented.

You’re wondering, of course, what sort of stories will the reader be absorbing here, anyway? I mean, duh—they’re meant to BURN YOU THE FUCK ALIVE! Get ready for some HEAT, is all I’m saying. When I asked what kind of fiction he wrote, he said it was “Transgressive Fiction.” I have a passing familiarity with this term from back in the day; it’s at least adjacent to Horror, but I’m no genre scholar, so a hazy Venn diagram in my head is about as far as I’m going to get.

I think the title expresses the sensation of the book rather eloquently, an imperative sentence: “Burn you the fuck alive.” We can ascertain readily that “you” is somebody who richly deserves burning, indeed whose burning the speaker will thoroughly relish: that expletive confirms it. We arrive at an ambiguity, however. We know the speaker is commanding the deed be done, but by whom? The grammar seems to be enlisting YOU to burn you the fuck alive. “My rage is such that you must obey my orders and engulf yourself in agony that never ends (you being alive).”

For all I know, that’s the word of God there. The 11th Commandment: “Thou shalt burn you the fuck alive.” That would certainly reduce the ambiguity. If that’s the case, then maybe the sentence functions less as an expression of rage and more as a statement of what life even IS in the first place. Life is a profane and continuous combustion, and it’s not that God set you alight, but that he issued the order that you had to obey… to burn you the fuck alive… which is what you’ve been doing since Day One. I could probably hover around this particular flame for the rest of the review… so I’ll move me the fuck on, perhaps.

Let’s get to the stories, shall we? The Table of Contents features 20 titles, ranging from prose poems to novellas, a variety of genres, but consistent both in the sense of being transgressive and in the grim authorial voice. A full, satisfying meal: novellas for main courses, short stories for side dishes, prose poems for garnishment, and those visual palate cleansers I already discussed. Along with a great deal of experimentation, playful fuckery, and, of course, gruesome imagery.

I’ll name a few that stuck out to me for various reasons:

• “The Young People” features a young couple who tie up their creepy boss (whom they have deemed, on flimsy evidence, a pedo) in the basement and torture him. A work-from-home Mickey and Mallory for the Pandemic Age.
• “Burn You the Fuck Alive,” the eponymous story, is Pure Revenge distilled into pithy fragments of threat. I thought it was pretty effective, and I was impressed at the author’s self-restraint; he kept it brief. If I’d been writing something like that, I would’ve gone on and ON. Piling them up! (Who knows, maybe he did—then pruned. Leonard Cohen supposedly wrote hundreds of verses for some of his songs, selecting only the best for the final cut.)
• “Highway Wars” is a road rage fantasy (bringing to mind the famous scene in Lost Highway when Mr. Eddy runs down a tailgater). A series of cartoonish assholes get their comeuppance at the hands of a dead-ender who has completely lost his shit. (Shades of Office Space and Falling Down, as well, come to think of it. Classic cinema!) The carnage in this story, by the way, is wreaked all over the specific roadways of Amherst and Hadley, just down the road from ME, ha ha!
• Even CLOSER to home (Northampton!), “Puppy Milk” unravels its characters in a bleak phantasmagoria of modern teen nihilism. Some stomach-turning images in here, in addition to an unnerving, incantatory style that pleased my ear.
• “Arcade,” told in the second person—essentially Grand Theft Auto as an Infocom game—brims with a cheerful sociopathic brutality. Imagine “The Most Dangerous Game” as an entertainment package for 1-percenters looking to slaughter dehumanized serfs in the ghetto for a little R&R. (You don’t even need to imagine it, actually, just watch some Gaza videos online.)

Plenty more stories along these lines. But the centerpiece of the book, “In the Shadow of Penis House,” is also my favorite piece, so naturally I’ve got a little more to say about it. It is the most experimental piece, a mixed-media presentation of graphic arts and text, alternating between a prose poem format in varying fonts and a catalog format, in which the denizens and rooms of Penis House are named and described beneath macabre, unsettling images and sometimes paired with cryptic icons. The text is elliptical and poetic, supplying an atmosphere to breathe, perhaps an ocean’s surface to float upon, but not so much an anchor in meaning. You’ll have to be content to float!

The atavistic center of this story tells you everything you need to know, not only about this story, but about the entire book: “There is always another staircase; another void-drenched catwalk. The monsters with your friends’ and fathers’ faces. Every window a mirror. Every other person a twin. A gorgeous tomb to run through. No need to see sky again. No need for suns or kisses.”

Solipsism. One of the downsides of consciousness is that we are trapped in it. It’s a skin tightly wrapping us that can’t be removed, sliced through, or dissolved, but can only be continuously worn, no matter how uncomfortable and miserable it makes us. Sleep is no escape, either, since we are made to dream. The only escape is roundabout: to create impregnable rooms within ourselves, store the discomfort and misery in them, then shut them off from ready access. That’s psychology in a nutshell.

So the Penis House may stand atop the ur-repression, the place the rest of the stories in this book are attempting to break out of. It’s the Prison Block housing all these characters whose material lives are so frustrating and whose spiritual lives are so depleted that they don’t even have the imagination for escape beyond spreading their own affliction to others, sharing in pain what they can’t find in love.

The daily grind of Civilization compels us to respect boundaries. We are all kept in check by the conditioning of childhood and the relentless punishment-reward cycle of biological, social, legal, and economic relationships. Especially at work or in public, you have to cultivate a persona that is in many ways false to your self-conception, by some measure betraying yourself for the sake of comity and order. This constant pressure on the psyche results in a kind of split personality: smiling on the outside, seething on the inside. Having to PRETEND on the daily costs energy, weakens the will, saps vitality…. The subject feels helpless, joins an incel forum on 4chan, and summons Pepe bodily into the White House.

Transgressive Fiction, possibly, presents an opportunity to reclaim some degree of autonomy without resorting to those kinds of, uh, unhealthy solutions. You may have suppressed that internal shark’s appetite for chum at the office when your boss flashed you that glib frowny face that pisses you off every time, but now, later, at home, in the timeless text, in your cozy reading nook, recollecting in tranquility, you can let it RIP. Chew his motherfucking face off! No harm done. Valve turned, pressure released, and you’re good to withstand the next bit of condescension from high-handed hierarchies. This is the power of language over life! Words can make a new, symbolic reality parallel to the real one, temporary and cathartic. Imaginary? Sure, but real as a heart attack to your FEELS. They can’t tell the difference: their demands appeased, they curl up and go to sleep in the corner. And the Penis House survives another day. Otherwise, you get the Fall of the House of Penis.

(To be clear, none of this is to psychoanalyse the author! I’m psychoanalysing Humanity. Mi Penis Casa es su Penis Casa.)

If you’re a Horror fan with solid Lit chops and a penis or two buried in the back yard, I fully recommend this book. Burn You the Fuck Alive by B. R. Yeager provides excellent reading, provocative prose, beautiful artwork, and thought-provoking ideas… but whatever you do, “don’t let Grandma find out!”

David Leo Rice splashed through town recently promoting his latest Whiskey Tit novel The Berlin Wall and delivered a very intriguing presentation. I was pleased to relieve him of a copy of the novel, which has turned out to be incredibly fertile with ideas, or maybe febrile’s a better word? To the degree that I feel like I need to sort them out! And maybe this place (Internet Heaven) is a good place for that sort of thing. To be clear, this post, as per usual from my lame brain, shall constitute a jumble of thoughts, not a coherent “review” or whatever. I thought the book was TERRIFIC, that’s my review. Buy it right away! Now for my mental mishmash:

First of all, I hope I’m correct in thinking of this novel as an “allegory”: I’m terrible with all these fucking literary terms, but I’ve read several of David’s books at this point, and it seems to me that his entire oeuvre is an allegory of Eternal Recurrence overwhelming the deluded linear intentions of all we wistful daydreamers of humanity. We’re constantly forgetting (then remembering, then forgetting, etc.) that it’s all happened before, and it’s all going to happen again, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Indeed, it’s a RELIEF. If the future is only a replay of the past, then I know exactly what’s coming next. No surprises, thank you very much. On the other hand, it’s also a TRAGEDY because everything that happens is horrific and painful, the only sane response to which is REGRET. So you have to alternate infinitely between RELIEF that it’s out of your hands and DESPAIR that there’s nothing you can do about it. (That’s my take, anyway.)

Birth is life’s first abuse. The heart of a reactionary is an abandoned child longing to return to the paradise of the womb, in which the world was Love and every need was met before it was even known. This desire to go back, impossible to fulfill, of course, is the inexhaustible fuel for fascism. A charismatic father figure shows up promising an amniotic restoration, and homey’s like SIGN ME UP. In this case, we have the character of György, a Hungarian youth studying in Germany, but losing focus as he is drawn to online rhetoric around “the Living Wall,” a doctrine that the Berlin Wall was alive and that when it was torn down, its still-living pieces dispersed into a revenant diaspora seeking to reunite into a new and better Wall in a new and better future. (And right on cue, we are soon introduced to one of those Wall fragments, Ute, who indeed wanders Europe searching for her lost wholeness. She seems to be a woman of human flesh, yet also composed of stone and grout and barbed wire. There’s a very Cronenbergian cast to this novel—a lot of creepy conceptual hybrids of “flesh”—which makes sense because the first time I saw David Leo Rice, he was promoting a book of essays on Cronenberg. What goes around comes around!)

Early in the novel, György salutes a poster in his room of Yukio Mishima’s severed head on a plate, “its lips frozen halfway between agony and exaltation” (p 27), a fantasy of masculine apotheosis and the triumph of the will. Late in the novel, György approaches that apotheosis from another angle, encountering a headless sculpture entitled ARCHAIC TORSO OF MISHIMA, which tells him, “You must change your life.” Rilke famously heard these words from a torso of Apollo because every star in the universe was watching him expectantly, which made him feel kinda special, you know; for György, the words are only a seduction, a cheap and cynical pickup line intended to entice a weak-minded incel into sacrificing his precious life essence to the appetite of an avaricious demiurge—in this case, Anders Breivik, the neo-Nazi who shot up that Norwegian summer camp back in 2011. Having escaped from prison by mystical means, this ghoul has emerged to invigorate a right-wing insurgency in Germany. György resists Breivik’s influence by summoning his own Hungarian avatar of a romanticized past, Arizstid Huszár, but this resistance is truly only a recapitulation of Breivik’s extremism. EVERYTHING is Eternal Recurrence, after all. (There’s a bunch of complicated stuff in which György is impregnated by Breivik with the perfect future race that will populate a risen Atlantis, that I’m not going to begin to tease out here and that I’m sure I never fully grokked, but I hope that’s at least some of the gist! Read the book!)

As a kind of foil to Breivik, we have the Chancellor of Germany, with whom the novel opens, delivering a speech that declares the “end” of the 20th Century while promising an eternal Golden Age to come, bog-standard, self-congratulatory, neoliberal schtick: “Germany faced its worst self and, alone among nations, triumphed” (p 19). There is one direction, and that direction is PROGRESS. Gotta love those politicians! Where Breivik looks to a romanticized past, the Chancellor looks to a romanticized future. No one lives in the actual goddamned present, ha ha! Actually… maybe it’s Ute, our very confused and roving avatar of the Living Wall? Makes sense structurally… the Wall might be the membrane between Breivik and the Chancellor, who hold each other across it in a sort of yin-yang embrace bound within a sac made of the dead skin of old Europe that seems to be wrapped around everything in this novel. (There’s that mischievous Cronenberg again!)

György’s liberal foil in the novel is Anika, a professor who has written scholarly work debunking “The Persistent Myth of the Living Wall,” and now at the behest of the Chancellor is writing a new work on “Normal Life in Southern Germany,” which is a propaganda piece justifying the Chancellor’s claim on power by reifying into an official narrative some alternative, more pastoral, mythos—what amounts to Breivik’s formula from the Establishment side, academic, institutional, acceptable. Anika, installed in the Chancellor’s cottage in the Black Forest, immediately dissipates into an inchoate depression, unable to work on the project as she herself lives out a perverse, dimly perceived version of that myth when György gravitates into her orbit to form a family unit of surrogate mother and son, soon enough joined by Ute as grandmother. They enact together a false idyll, which they understand to be fraudulent, but from which there is no escape, in which their roles are mandated and eternal: “[…] the possibility that they’ve entered an airless, lunatic loop, a smothering string of Sundays linking the world’s outset to its culmination, plays through all of their heads, freighting the question of cherry strudel or apple with a weight it can hardly bear” (p 249). The unbearable HEAVINESS of being, contra Kundera! (I’m proud of myself for picking that up, by the way, which is why I clipped it. The Rilke thing, too. I mean, this guy knows his shit! He references a million billion authors and thinkers throughout ALL his novels, half of whom I have NO IDEA. Maybe someday… I’m like the Chancellor, wrapped in the dead skin of the past, dreaming of the disembodied radiant future when I’ll have read all the books in the universe….)

What else? Well, a TON. I’ve only scratched the surface here, and I don’t have the wherewithal to dig further, but I already spent a few hours on this…. I’m sure I’ve made it seem confusing, but it’s all conveyed in clear and beautiful prose in the book. You’ll have no trouble following along where David Leo Rice leads. (Trust me, it’s not nearly as disorienting as The Obscene Bird of Night, through which I am STILL struggling, after many months… Of course, the more you struggle with a text, the more hopelessly entangled and immobilized you become. The trick is, you just have to LAY BACK AND ENJOY IT, as so many Old-World mothers have advised their nubile but reluctant daughters down through the generations of Man. It’s the story of Western Civilization in a nutshell, really. Would we even BE here otherwise? I’m thinking of you… my Obscene Bird… lurking so feral, so ferocious over there on the coffee table…)

The upshot of this post that shall not be construed as a review, is that The Berlin Wall is a humdinger of a dream novel, endlessly stimulating, and FUN—read it, damn you! If you’re someone who enjoys following literary breadcrumbs and descrying allusions to other texts, by the way, then you’ll LOVE this book. They’re everywhere—and oftentimes DOUBLED. You’ll see Joyce’s “nightmare of history” TWICE, Yeats’ “slouching” TWICE… the TWO Mishimas, obviously, head and torso, very clever…. That Kundera bit does rhyme back again later in a subtler way, but no spoilers HERE. I wasn’t even on the lookout, frankly, so who knows what I missed. Probably DOZENS of allusions I skated right past. You’ll have to read it yourself to find them, asshole! Like I said, this isn’t a review!