cavitymagazine

[cavitymagazine]

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐋𝐚𝐬𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐢𝐭𝐬 𝐒𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐬

Because it was made in the USA my shirt weeps with pride. Maybe the last of its species. It would like to find another shirt with which to mate and produce more shirts, but that’s impractical. No one in this country knows how to birth shirts. Because it has been weeping it’s wet, so I take it off and wring it. It whimpers but accepts the rebuke. Anyway, supper is simpering on the stove, and I’m too busy to attend to my shirt. Supper applies to all present, whether their shirts were made in the USA or in some up and coming nation. Let’s eat. I look around at my guests, who represent every corner of the world. They attack my pork chops with vigor, even the self-proclaimed vegans, who’ve primed themselves with my best Argentinian wine. The mashed potatoes loft like thunderheads. The green beans look dainty as elfin flutes and will surely be as musical. Everyone’s eating with gusto and verve. All are cheerfully dressed in bold summer colors, but none of their shirts look American. They probably came from Thailand, Cambodia, China, Vietnam: the newest shirteries of the world. I’d like to return to that slice of the globe and visit Bangkok and Singapore. I’d like to wear my American shirt to the great shirt-shops and watch the sewers sew. One must reap what one sews, of course, but those workers are struggling to survive in deadly conditions, their families cringing with hunger. My shirt would like to improve the pay and working environment for all the shirt-makers of the world; but one shirt, possibly the last American-made, can’t solve all the planet’s problems. Supper is almost done. Perhaps over dessert and brandy my friends will advise me and my shirt how to proceed.

[Bio: William Doreski has published three critical studies and several collections of poetry. His work has appeared in many print and online journals. He has taught at Emerson College, Goddard College, Boston University, and Keene State College. His most recent books are Water Music and Train to Providence.  williamdoreski.blogspot.com]

[cavitymagazine]

𝐓𝐡𝐞 “𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐩 𝐀𝐜𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐏𝐚𝐜𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐜”

The government is redirecting us for our own good. For security reasons, we must go west, far west, well beyond the California coast. The “Leap Across the Pacific,” a bridge to nowhere, has been completed. It looks like an ordinary suspension bridge, but it ends between Hawaii and Guam. Yet this bridge to nowhere actually leads somewhere.  When we reach the end, we can step into a barge much like Cleopatra’s. It will carry us to the fabled Spice Islands, or maybe just to Hong Kong, where the Chinese police will introduce us to the latest in prison wear. Are you wearing your sturdy walking shoes? Have you packed water bottles? Remember, this bridge spans saltwater, so no dipping for a drink. Yes, it’s several thousand miles to wherever we’re going, but think of the distance you’ve walked in your lifetime. My digital pedometer assures me that I’ve taken several million steps in the last few years, so I’m confident we’ll get wherever. Let’s start walking now. We can easily make it to Hawaii, where we’ll rest and refresh ourselves. The rest of the way we’ll be traveling on trust.

[Bio: William Doreski has published three critical studies and several collections of poetry. His work has appeared in many print and online journals. He has taught at Emerson College, Goddard College, Boston University, and Keene State College. His most recent books are Water Music and Train to Providence.  williamdoreski.blogspot.com]

[cavitymagazine]

𝙒𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝘿𝙞𝙙 𝙔𝙊𝙐 𝘿𝙤 𝙞𝙣 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙒𝙖𝙧, 𝘿𝙖𝙙𝙙𝙮?

What Did YOU Do in the War, Daddy?

Oh, I… Diddleliddledis diddleliddledat diddleliddledem diddleliddledose then I came home and punched your mother. Once. Hard. But not hard enough to do any real damage, or so I thought at the time, and it certainly wasn't my intent, though I definitely had my reasons, from what my friends had been telling me when I was over there and I just wanted to get her attention, you know, make her shut the hell up for one minute. One lousy minute. I mean how hard could that be? for just one minute to stop talking and talking like some firestorm of bullets aimed right at your head only instead of running or shooting back you're supposed to just sit there and listen to her yapppity-yap-yap yap barking and snarling as if you had no weapons and couldn't do nothing so she could say whatever the hell she wanted when in fact you do have a weapon because in fact you are a weapon that can never be put down and never put away and now here we sit, separated by this funny little window and talking on these silly telephones and having just the best of times, ain't we, lil' buddy?

[Bio: Matt Dennison is the author of Kind Surgery, from Urtica Press (Fr.) His work has appeared in Rattle, Bayou Magazine, Redivider, Natural Bridge, The Spoon River Poetry Review and Cider Press Review, among others. He has also made short films with Michael Dickes, Swoon, Marie Craven and Jutta Pryor.]

[cavitymagazine]

Chiara had spent the hot day sending him racist memes and naked pictures of herself smoking weed with captions like “use me” and “punish me Daddy”, so when he finished work he walked through the evening heat to her apartment on Sussex Road. They had sex in the degrading style favoured by many of the fascist women he’s slept with. He spanked her and called her “my Italian slut” and she growled “hit me” with strands of hair stuck to her face from the heat and afterwards they slept until the fingers of late-evening chill reached in the open window and woke them up to the twilight sounds of eating and drinking in the outdoor seating of the restaurants on the street below her apartment. He put back on his work clothes. She pulled a Sea Shepherd t-shirt down over the nordic tattoos on her ribs. They went out into the last light to smoke weed.

They sat side by side on the fire escape, six floors up. She lit a joint and they passed it between them. They inhaled the weed and the smell of the spring evening and the promise of summer you get in April that’s always better than the summer that comes. Two Chinese lanterns drifted like UFOs across the sunset.

“These things kill birds.”, she said, stretching her t-shirt over her knees.

The smoke from the joint rose into the pre-night sky. He thought he could hear the sea from miles away where the scattered lights of the skyline stopped. A breeze ruffled through the trees in the car park below. The waving leaves fanned up the sounds of the city again—a car starting, a gate closing, a dog spooked by something in the almost-dark, the offbeat steps of someone walking with keys their pocket, a barge lapping down the canal, words drifting back and forth between a drawn out group of dawdling friends, the lonely drumming of another office block being built overnight.

He was a journalist. He was investigating the investment funds who were taking over the Dublin property market—Blackstone, Cerberus, IRES Reit, Kennedy Wilson. He thought of them as an invasive, subspecies of money. He looked down from the fire escape at that crime scene of a city and imagined dark movements of money running along in the streets like eels along the bottom of a lake. He smoked and watched the dark sway as the funds moved more blocks of apartments onto their balance sheets. He watched as rent left silently from drowsy family kitchens and passed through walls and borders and oceans and into the bank accounts of corporate landlords. He imagined houses being repossessed by shadowy security firms. He thought of homes being turned into AirBnBs and of tourists appearing in them overnight like ghosts.

He could see money more clearly in the daytime when it took its human form, as accountants, property managers, bankers, surveyors, solicitors, former politicians. Or as men in balaclavas—sabotaging protests, infiltrating movements, breaking down desperately barricaded doors, putting families into the street with their lives in black bags on the ground beside them, and disappearing again into the white vans he thinks might be following him.

They finished the joint as the spring night fell over Dublin like the shade from a tree. A man stood alone in the car park below, staring up at them. They went back inside.

She changed into her pyjamas: a hoodie which had “don’t need sex because capitalism fucks me every day” written on it. She was on big money though. She worked for a cyber security company. She said she would rather be a housewife and be “paid by a man to lounge around in lingerie”. She rejected as “girl-boss feminism” and “peak neoliberalism” any attempt people made to praise her for being a Woman in STEM. She refused all invitations to speak at conferences with names like ‘The Women Disrupting Tech’, ‘Girls Who Code’, ‘Hacking the Patriarchy’ and ‘Queering the Algorithm’. Her Tinder bio read: “dominate me in the bedroom, not in the workplace”.

For a man like him, a Marxist-Leninist and occasional Maoist Third Worldist, there was something so appealing about a woman who so angrily rejected liberal feminism. She was a tech fascist who believed in the utopian vision of the early internet. She was a tech fascist who believed that Europe was diverse enough a hundred years ago. She had moved to Ireland because the tech industry here pays so much. She had moved to Ireland because it was the whitest place left in Western Europe. She had access to sensitive information and she was passing it on to him because she believed all information should be free. She had access to sensitive information and she was passing it on to him because it would hurt the “Jewish conspiracy of global finance”.

She took a USB from her weed box and handed it to him as he got ready to leave. She pulled the curtains across the open window and wrote on a post-it note:

“This is big”

“What is it?” He wrote back.

“Check on this when you get home.” She wrote.

The post-it notes fell around her feet. She put a new laptop into his bag.

“It hasn’t been contaminated by the internet, don’t connect it.” She wrote.

“Thanks.” He wrote.

“Imagine you’re being watched.” She wrote.

“Am I?” He said aloud.

She underlined ‘imagine’ with three lines.

He left her place. The night was so beautifully laundered by the spring air that he started walking back to Cabra under the smell of the new-born leaves. There are always a few nights like that in April, when the first heat intoxicates the city and the streets sway with that first drink feeling of a good thing beginning.

He turned onto a quiet, cooling street. A white van was driving behind him. He walked. He listened. Everything sounded pre-recorded on a soundstage like in a film noir from the fifties: a bike ticking by; a curtain beating against an open window; his footsteps; his breathing; his heartbeat. He was sure it was the same white van that had been following him for weeks. He watched it as it passed. He checked for alleyways or driveways he could disappear into. He turned around and walked back towards the busy safety of Mespil Road. The van went by again. His heart panicked as it passed. On Mespil Road he put his hand out for a taxi. He sat into the backseat and closed the door.

It’s interesting, psychologically speaking, the driver said eventually, the way you tried to open your door so soon after you got in.

Don’t you think?

I had a chap in the car last week. Drove him all the way and he never tried that door once.

Do you know why?

Control.

Control.

He didn’t want to admit to himself that he couldn’t get out. He could’ve tried the door. He could have been on his way. But he let me take him without even trying to escape. Just sat back there chatting. Playing it cool, you know.

Interesting isn’t it? Psychology.

I’m interested in that kind of thing. 

The mind.

Now you’ve got the opposite problem. You took one look at me in me sunglasses and thought to yourself fuck this I’m away. Sunglasses at night, you says to yourself, what’s with this fella?

But now.

You know the door is locked.

I know you know the door is locked.

You know I know you know the door is locked.

I know you know I know the door is locked.

Interesting isn’t it?

Psychology.

Hear that? Last train going over the river. Anyone on that train, coming into town Thursday midnight, they’ve a story to tell. More interesting than the stuff you’re writing now.

We’ve a few journalists with us. They do well. Decent money, a few stories when you need it.

Someone your age, in all seriousness, needs to start thinking about the future.

Planning.

Your rent is what…€700 a month?

Rent is money down the drain.

Down the drain.

Stoneybatter. Some lovely pubs around here.

Look at that lad. Not from Mayo is he.

I was over in Jamaica for a while but. Working for himself. Great country. Lovely beaches. Good weather. Great place to do business. That’s why he’s there of course. Lot easier to deal with people such as yourself out there. No messing around. You want something done—bang—you just pay the right man and it’s done.

Get in the way of progress and—bang.

No messing.

You know who runs this country? You know who you should be investigating?

The unions. The people who contribute nothing. The bloated public sector.

This thing you’re looking into. For example, classic example. The government sold the properties at such a low price because the fund had businessmen working for them, and they were negotiating, think about it, with who? With civil servants and politicians. That’s the whole story. Write it if you want. Public sector versus private sector. Private sector wins every time. There were no bribes or anything.

Just pure business acumen.

Free market. Winners and losers. Simple as that.

Roads are quiet out here.

Dark houses.

You’re probably hoping your roommates are home. Housemates I suppose, should be called.

You’re 36 yeah?

If you don’t mind me saying, you should be putting down roots. Should be saving.

You must spend, what, 50 quid a week on weed. Cut that out and you’d have what…52 weeks in a year…5x5 is 25 that’s…you’d have about €2,600 extra in your pocket. You’d be surprised how quickly it adds up.

Honestly.

There’s no one home tonight by the way.

The accountant is in Frankfurt.

Midwife’s at her fella’s.

Now this is you isn’t it?

You make my job interesting I’ll give you that. Lot of overtime.

160...162…164…66…68, now.

Before you go.

I was watching ‘Narcos’ last night. On Netflix. It’s a series, not a film. Very interesting. It’s about Pablo Escobar. Colombian drug lord. He gives people a choice right. “Silver or lead” he says. In spanish. Worth a watch. On Netflix.

Now, 13.90 is the damage.

Thank you sir.

And 5 is 18.90 and one is 19.90 and 10 cent is 20 and that’s yours back.

The driver reset the meter, turned on the roof light and drove away past the night-coloured houses.

His house was silent. He opened the door. He stared into the hallway. He sniffed the air. A truck dipped into a pothole on the main road. The noise of it shocked him into slamming the front door behind him. The noise of that scared him too. He turned on the light in the hallway. He turned on the light in the narrow kitchen. He turned on the light in the dusty living room. With downstairs lit up it was like the dark outside was staring in the window at him. He took a knife from the draining board. He held it in front of him like a gun and walked upstairs. He stopped after every step on the carpeted stairs to let the creaking wood underneath his foot go silent.

He went into his room knife first. The window was open. The room had been brushed clean by the bristles of spring breeze which had been blowing in since he left that morning. He turned on his desk lamp. He rolled a joint in its light. He smoked out the window. In the time he was in the taxi dew had fallen like snow and like snow it had shocked the small gardens and the empty suburban streets around his house into silence. His neighbour’s gardens were abandoned and embalmed, full of toys, bikes, paddling pools, footballs, sun loungers and kitchen chairs; like the curtain had just gone down at the end of a play.

She texted him.

“I think we should stop doing this.”

He put the USB into the laptop she had given him.

“Ok.” He replied.

He typed in the password. She had copied all of the investment fund’s emails and their slack chats and their bank accounts and their internal payments system.

“Can I come over?” She texted him.

“Ok.” He replied.

He read some of the emails. They talked about bribing politicians and government officials so they could get all those apartment blocks and offices and housing estates cheap. All that property and debt the government bought after the banks collapsed. He made notes. He wrote on post it notes and attached them to the wall. His joint went out and ashed on his notes.

He was tired but didn’t want to sleep alone. Maybe it was the shock of the taxi, or the way she completely surrendered to him during sex, or the way she quoted Lacan when they lay together afterwards, maybe it was his receding hairline which he checked every night, watching it as if it was a clock ticking towards the end, or maybe it was the sounds on the stairs he searched his brain to explain away.

She opened his bedroom door.

“How did you get in?” He asked her.

“Hi to you also.” She said, sitting on the side of the bed, taking her leather boots off.

“Your housemate let me. He always wears sunglasses at night?”

“What did he say?”

“He said you were upstairs. And then he sat on the kitchen with a glass of water.”

“One second.”

He went downstairs and into the kitchen with the knife out in front of him. A glass was on its side on the table, rolling back and forth. Water dripped from the table onto the floor. It pooled by his feet. He waited. The sky lightened as he waited. The house fell into dawn. Morning heat rose in waves from the damp garden. The joint wore off. He checked all the doors. He went back upstairs.

She was asleep. She had written ‘slut’ in lipstick across her chest. He smoked out the window. The good weather stirred outside. He heard a van parking and wondered if it was white. She woke up.

“Rape me.” She whispered, sleepily.

The sound of birds singing came in the open window. Like every haunted man, the singing reminded him of sleep.

[The Man in the Black Pyjamas is an Irish writer based in Bogotá. He has been previously published in ‘The Irish Times’, ‘The Moth Magazine’, ‘Cassandra Voices’, ‘Number Eleven Magazine’, ‘Deep Water Literary Journal’, ‘Increature Magazine’, ‘Cold Coffee Stand’ and ‘Headstuff Magazine’. He won second place in the Fish International Short Story Competition in 2016. He tweets at @pyjamas_black.]

[cavitymagazine]

𝖘𝖐𝖊𝖑𝖊𝖙𝖔𝖓 / 𝖘𝖊𝖝

definition: something decided on by majority or power, i.e., not me, the hidden skeleton I am, the name I made imbuing meaning in a life not theirs but mine, the sexual organs I treasure for my sexuality not for their sexualization of monotone ad nauseam  monochrome  ad nauseam  monodic ad nauseam  monologue ad nauseam of monoecious-monoecious-monoecious- monoecimonoecious-monomonoecious-monomonomonomomonoecious ad nauseam ad nauseam  ad ad ad nauseam  ad nauseam  nauseam  nauseam, personal/institutional discriminatory m o  n   o    l     i      t       h        growing grows monopolizing life on terms I want and can and can't and must and will and can't and am now rejecting Rejecting REJecting REJECting REJECTing REJECTINg *breath* gently now *breath* (I don't like to yell but I'm running out of options to kill/di- a (mono)logue of me I don't get to participate in given the monosemy of my name which oppresses me with its falsehood.); I am much more than my skeleton and name and sexual organs and I know you aren't listening but I still am who I am and I reject anything not by me of me.

Written by James Michaels -

[cavitymagazine]

𝕻𝖔𝖑𝖎𝖙𝖊 𝖗𝖊𝖙𝖗𝖎𝖇𝖚𝖙𝖎𝖔𝖓

Truth resembles certainties we lapped of a parent who culled.

We accept it as such

and realize his rule flourished of a delinquency shelved.

True to us all along,

each his fierce judgements still linger as our memory defends him

deep in adulthood.

[Author: Andrew Cyril Macdonald

Andrew Cyril Macdonald scrutinizes the particulars of relationship and relishes the vocabularies at play therein.  He admits appreciation for the role of memory in poetic experience and its capacity to shape thought.  He is published in such places as Annex Echo, A Long Story Short, Down in the Dirt, BlazeVOX and forthcoming in Mineral Lit Mag and Thorn Literary Magazine.  When not writing he is ardently teaching a future generation of poets.]

[cavitymagazine]

09.06.2020

I feel the corners of my mouth rise,

but watch as my mirrored image lays flat.

Signing in to see the familiar 2-D smiles on screen. A cellophane like wall removes us.

Days have passed.

I’ve witnessed the tree in the garden blossom into something that’s good enough to eat.

Yet I am stuck,

awaiting the day I can reach out and squeeze you so tightly

time begins again.

[Author Bio]

Lucy Thompson works and lives in London and enjoys painting and writing poetry in her spare time. You can find her on Instagram @lucyjanethompson_art

[cavitymagazine]

ugly sad boy The bathroom light is harsh. You feel ugly. You notice ugly things. Deformity upon deformity. Rock on rock. Bird poop on bird poop. You decide to fix your eyebrows. You comb them with a large lady's hairbrush. You like how it feels and looks. The oversized brush covers most of your face. Deciding you want the brush to stay in front of your face you look for some kind of adhesive. You find that stuff that keeps dentures in place and start applying it liberally from your chin to your hair line. walk-in In the woods you see some of last year’s fallen acorns. You start eating them. You eat them because you saw a post on reddit highlighting how they can kill your soul. You want your soul to die. You want a new soul. You want to be a better person. You keep eating acorns. sad art boy Your exhibition wasn’t going well at all. It had been open all week. Only two people came into the gallery. One wanted to use the toilet - you lied and said there was no toilet. The other was lost - you said nothing to them. You hung your head to hide your shame and waited for them to leave. It took them fifteen seconds to leave. You counted. You count good. it is late at night, again Someone drives past. They are going fast. You are sure someone shouts your name from the speeding vehicle. You try to shout your name back at them. But you fumble over the second syllable. You feel foolish and go home alone again. summer moths That summer you decided to take two months off. Most of the day you sat around reading the books, one of two things, your father left in his will. In the evenings, an hour before twilight, you took a walk along the river Moy. The river wound around fields and was shaded by large willows. These trees provided a perfect habitat for the surrounding wildlife. There was an abundance of wildlife there from birds to insects. And with the insects the second thing your father left you came in. He had left a moth trap. At first you thought about selling it online but even though you weren't that close it seemed cruel. So that summer you read a few reddit posts on how to use it and started a new twilight hobby. Most people recommend that you set the trap before dusk and check it in the morning. You've never done mornings so you checked the trap in the evening. The moths were beautiful in the fading light. You never bothered learning their names or identifying them. You just took them out of the trap and let them sit on your hand admiring their beauty before they took off into the abounding night sky. Author bio Michael O’Brien is the author of numerous collections, the most recent being Silent Age (Alien Buddha Press). His work has been published widely in print and on the internet and has been translated into other languages. An extensive list of these publications can be found here. You can follow him on twitter @mobrien222

[cavitymagazine]

𝒱𝐼𝒩𝐸  𝒮𝒯𝑅𝐸𝐸𝒯

We walk with wet hair, waning

Under the umbrage of sycamores, ash,

Birch eyes, and close enough.

The midwestern lawn the corpse

Of St. Michael’s Dragon

For you to plant feet and sockets water.

Never will I ask of your gaze for water.

Stand on the carrion and bark laughter.

We wilt when western winds ask

To make this side of town their own.

Near the parked trailer homes you talk

Of university, how the family is the smallest

Unit of fascism, smartly,

Your face smiles.

We’d’ve expected what was wrong to center

It’s wide berth in the waves of yard-speak.

The children burst like tear drops laughter parachutes,

Tangled up in birch limbs which do

Not pretend a difference between authority and Mystery.

[Author: Kai Edward Warmoth isn’t quite 30 years old but he is very jaded. He welcomes your judgement.]

[cavitymagazine]

“ᴛᴏᴡᴇʀ ᴏꜰ ꜱɴᴀᴋᴇꜱ” // ᴡᴀᴛᴄʜɪɴɢ ʏᴏᴜ ᴅɪᴇ

“Tower of Snakes”

A callous joke by an ex-bandmate

attached to a photo shared on Twitter.

Pictured:

Me, collapsing into a swarming mass

of people that I once called friends

as they devour my carcass;

personal failure pouring out

from countless self-inflicted wounds.

[Ouroboros...]

Four years later, the hunger remains.

And as yet another digital frenzy flares up

I watch on, wondering

whether my old adversary still feels so fucking smug

running away as the others now turn to feast on him

and the whole bloody cycle repeats?

Watching You Die

Chased with pitchforks into Hades

or A Serene Moment of Obscurity.

My hatred dissipates as you burn out.

I pity you.

[James Stelzer (@ABadIdeaMachine) considers us even.]

[cavitymagazine]

Like a Leech

Like a leech, you latch on, catch on 

The skin. 

Slithering, sneaking, sucking thing. 

This fucking thing. 

Ugly thing. 

 Like a parasite, that in the night 

Gnaws and claws 

And bites and fights, 

You're a cowardly thing. 

Ugly thing. 

Like a tapeworm, you squirm, 

You feed, you steal. 

We question what is real 

As life drip, drip, 

Drips 

Away. 

 And still you stay. 

And it's not enough that 

Vitality and vision fades. 

And it's not enough that 

 Trauma remains. 

And it's not enough that 

You leave indelible stains. 

Because you must take 

Everything.

[written by Laura McCarthy]

[cavitymagazine]

“I AM ALL OF WHAT I COULD EVER CONTAIN” - Review of Mike Corrao’s “GUT TEXT,” by Evan Isoline

11:11 Press

Paperback | $15.00 U.S.

Like much of Mike Corrao’s printed work, GUT TEXT (produced by Minneapolis-based 11:11 Press) does not operate as a book in the traditional sense. Stylistically, one encounters a hybridized form of fiction with formal echoes of Beckett, Borges, and Bolaño jigsawed epigenetically with the reality-melting theory-scapes of Artaud, Deleuze, and Derrida, and composed post-modernly (or posthumanly) in an art-minded manner à la Dada, Gysin/Burroughs or John Cage. There is also room here to accommodate contemporary philosophical strains of accelerationism or nihilism. Corrao’s hybrid form has been referred to "Avant-Theory-Fiction" in underground literary communities in the fellowship of Spanish writer and neuroscientist Germán Sierra and Inside the Castle’s mythic biblio-morphologist John Trefry. The general idea being that new mutations of fiction may approach a resemblance to conceptual art, philosophy, architecture and even science. A moment where reality and fiction bleed toward an ever-disinhibiting, non-dualistic event horizon. In GUT-TEXT, what we obtain as reader is not necessarily a story, moral or even a narrative. Again, this is in the normative sense of what it means to "write a book"—the limitations of which mainstream lit still clings myopically to. What Corrao transmits is the genealogical potential of text. The microbial residues of alien geographies and mitochondrial pantheons. Theatrical formulas of character. Potentially not even Corrao’s. We are permeated with a living germ to which our body now plays host. Throughout the book (which feels entirely sublimated as an object, to the point of becoming an analogous kind of carrier or infected "body") the text on each page seems to exist miasmatically apart in a parallel plane; a liminal or limbo-like space associated with the blank page.

I repeat again, the text seems to exist. This is not the voice of a man but perhaps the voice of the innumerable micro-organisms that mysteriously animate him. Their names are two-letter spells. Their nature is virus. The word made flesh. As the text grows it also disintegrates, molts, and what reads as an uncanny waltz of organic and entropic gestures seems to mimic human life cycles. Like a single, large egg cell that subdivides by repetitive mitosis, these organismal thespians effervesce and congeal into autonomous entities that exhibit the desires and dreads inherent in the construction of human persona. In literature, there is a difference between the use of language and the use of text. This is similar in painting when a painter wishes their work to be seen free of technical device in a decidedly materialistic way. Not the illusion of a landscape, figure or still-life, but just paint. Pigmented medium on substrate. Throughout GUT-TEXT I am disconcertingly reminded of the agenthood and parasitic medium of the text. The text does not affect the part of the brain that processes literature in the linear custom of interpreting experience through illustrative oral narration.  It affects the part of the brain that engages when trying to understand patterns within abstract systems, initiating an instinct similar to that of decyphering, code-breaking, map-reading or star-gazing. It’s an understanding of equilibrium within the duality of the cosms. An echolocation inside the labyrinth. As players on a stage, these little entities, these glyphic, typographic orphans of a larger ancestral body, crawl and gurgle through their amnesia in a sentient quest for coherence; for a reason to exist. Once the brain is properly inoculated with the text-organism, once its spore is contracted, ingested, incorporated, consumed, subsumed, embodied, encarnalized, fertilized, engulfed, corporealized, germinated, inseminated, generated, promulgated, sexualized, metabolized, atomized, excoriated, engendered, digested, reduced, condensed, fermented, curdled, coagulated, extrapolated, dispersed, dispatched, diffused, dissolved, dissected, deflected, coalesced, evanesced, perspirated, vaporized, nebulized, secreted, exsanguinated, urinated, micterated, fecalized, defecated, alienated, excavated, transformed, transduced, transmorphed, transmogrified, evacuated, ejaculated, eliminated, dislodged, disgorged, dissociated, putrefied, petrified, calcified, lapidified, fossilized, cadaverized, exhumed, expelled, exited, exerted, exuded, exhausted, exalted, exonerated, exiled, ejected, exorcised...

... Once the peristaltic vibration of matter is fully pantomimed at such a scale via Corrao’s biotic, textual gut-culture, the reader may begin to question the ontological limitations of its own plastic, viral identity, and of the haptic and mythological nature of the book sitting in its my hand. At such a paradoxical scale, Corrao’s literary "non-language" finds a curious meaning, mostly because it asks essential questions. Beyond the temporal veneers of one’s assumed identity, what subconscious or otherworldly forms does desire take on? How many ghosts are inside each one of our bodies?  Near the end of the book, which through insinuation may never really end, just before the pages go black, one of Corrao’s inner bacterium proclaims, “I am all of what I could ever contain.”

[*Evan Isoline is a writer and artist living on the Oregon coast. He is the founder and editor of a conceptual publishing project called SELFFUCK. His full-length debut is forthcoming from 11:11 Press.]

[cavitymagazine]

SIGNING OFF NOW

‏‏those intervals, uncabled from the rest of time, when you can’t bear to hear your own voice, dislodged yet friendly, as it dredges its words from the clotted embankments of your ‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‎throat.

you can feel the little specks of demise, curled and resting inside you; embryonic and bite-sized, they radiate a cool, dulled touch throughout the reddened forests and the too-blued veins, meatful and caustic to the ‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎eyes.

go watch the soul gulp and wriggle in this burning swamp; it’s as pretty as the imaginary and connects us to nothing save through cruelty; we can’t be blamed, though— how were we supposed to know the flowers that we watered had ‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎lungs?

[Peter Gutierrez is an artist and writer from New Jersey. 2020 publications include Gone Lawn, Ligeia, Misery Tourism, The Dark, Rejection Letters, Grody Mag, and Expat Press. You can find him on Twitter @suddenlyquiet.] 

[cavitymagazine]

𝕪𝕠𝕦 𝕕𝕠𝕟'𝕥 𝕙𝕒𝕧𝕖 𝕥𝕠 𝕒𝕤𝕜

brown bag

ripened remarks

passed through

their ether

fingers drew

imaginary maps

with heavy

breath borders

wrinkled halves

were lost

translating through

automatic tongues

gravity forgot

to apply

itself for

their position

before there

was luster

they made

nature again

[Matthew Daley is a NY-based writer. Find him on twitter @matthewjdaley]

[cavitymagazine]

[D]: I like the idea of an amorphous text, a shifting mass of words, like the depiction of the scramble suits in the film version of A Scanner Darkly. Perceptions and understanding rippling/undulating through the mind of the reader. Regarding the structure of Torus, initially I did try to mimic the chemical composition of the crystal very literally – like, for instance, hemimorphite has four zinc atoms, two silicon atoms, etc. I would try and mimic that with the lines of prose. However, it was quite difficult and also a little too rigid for the shoegaze dream element I was exploring. I then decided to take the inspiration more generally and started thinking in terms of veins, sheen, iridescence – in respect to how the collection was structured.

[D]: What I’ve read of Cenotaph from yourself and James, is very much in line with the “meta-sci-fi” idea I was riffing on earlier in the interview. I think Cenotaph takes this concept as far as I have seen so far, and I am excited to see more works pushing this envelope of experimentation with sci-fi tropes and syntax without devolving into sincere world-building. I think the saturation of visual media imparting forked levels of reality is seemingly just the norm now, but it does indeed feel sci-fi. “Vigorous” reading is non-existent presently. I would equally prefer to spend the time watching anime or listening to music while scrolling through obscure message-boards or inputting words into search engines to find random advertisements to create glitch art from. It’s interesting, because previously I have scolded myself for not spending this virus-quarantined time doing something “productive” such as writing or reading in these moments, but now I have come to terms with the fact that this is all part of the work. This time will yield creative results, and more inspired results, at a later date when the words are uncaged.

[D]: For me, consumerism is far more complex than something to be satirized as a purely negative force in society. That’s not to say that I’m not cognizant or interested in the obvious negatives of a world riddled by overconsumption; however, it is far more multi-faceted than a destruction of values and relationships due to our ever-increasing obsession with products. That wonder and awe you speak of that consumerism evokes is a major focus in my work. This exploration first truly coalesced while I was in Japan, riding escalators in upmarket malls and thinking how miraculous it was to be able to do this – to just be in spaces like this, with warmth and light and shelter, without necessarily having to buy anything or commit to anything. To just act as a flaneur, to view consumerism in more of the sense of a theorist like John Fiske, opposed to outrightly denouncing it for waging hypnotic slavery on the masses. I agree with James [Krendel-Clark] in his piece on Voss water via his online zine Critical Orifice – a training in critical theory almost makes you appreciate the wonders of consumerism even more opposed to the other way round.

[D]: Fuck, I love how we both stan vending machines. I think our mall collab is the thing I am most excited by out of my upcoming projects. My progress at present has stagnated due to all the promo for my books coming out, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I imagine the mall project will consume most of my creative time in the remainder of 2020 along with another solo project I am working on revolving around the Chinese post-club performance-art world.

[W]: We both have a lot of work to do.

... ... .. .

EXCERPT FROM FACELESS IN NIPPON BY DALE BRETT:

EXCERPT FROM ULTRAVIOLET TORUS BY DALE BRETT:

NASCENT EXCERPT FROM CLOUD MALL BY DALE BRETT:

Will Bernardara Jr. is a former reporter for the Dearborn Times-Herald. He is the founder of the Tender Wolves Society and the author of the novella America from voidfront press.

[cavitymagazine]

Haptic Narratives: The Absurdly R EA L Artifacts of Dale Brett / / / [part 2]

[D]: Lately though, most of my influence has come from other forms of media opposed to writing. I have found the more I write, the less I read – at least long form. Music, animated series/films - both Japanese anime and stuff like Adult Swim and internet culture - all of these things come through in my work.

[W]: Music.

[D]: Definitely music. I often try to write with a type of musical style I enjoy in mind. This is, believe it or not, one of the reasons I decided to re-commence writing fiction. I was sick and tired of googling combinations of "vaporwave + fiction + dream" or "shoegaze + literature + drugs" to try and find works that fit a certain aesthetic that did not exist. So why not create them myself? For instance, ambient and to a lesser extent dreampunk, would be the genres I was trying to build on in Faceless in Nippon. With Ultraviolet Torus it is no secret that it is my shoegaze project. As you know with our mall collaboration [cloud mall and maze/mall], this will be vaporwave-heavy in aesthetic and theme. I think these musical styles also take me right back to the original interests that I have garnered from literature: how to feel and express oneself in light of the consumerist dream, how to find meaning in the face of a constant blurring reality. I want to produce words that create a sensory experience. Words to touch your skin, words to make you see refracted colours, words to make you realise life sucks but it's all okay.

[W]: Aesthetics are important to me as well. The depth of the surface. The synthetic, simulacra. I suspect any "honest" portrayal of our day-to-day life, even a so-called "realist" presentation, would be sci-fi, at least in part. The kitchen-sink realism of today would include game realities and all sorts of "tropes" – or what one used to call tropes – of sci-fi. DeLillo’s White Noise is a big work for me, related to some of the consumerist themes. The three layers you refer to are impressive – you've put a lot of thought into where your work comes from, what it's shaped by. I've never thought in those terms really. Although "Pessoan cyberpunk nihilism" as a blurb would have me buying whatever that book is. Abe's The Box Man - I read that in I think 2015 or so. I see Abe's tone in some of your prose. That is a hard tone to tap. It's soft and dislocated. Requires a gentle hand, and a kind of amorphous thought process. In recent years I've taken influence more from video games and commercials and music than anything textual. I assumed your influences now were primarily visual. Graphic novels, anime, bad TV movies - I cull more from kitsch than I do from literature now. Would you tell me a bit about your time in Japan? And how would you describe Faceless in Nippon to a reader who knows literally nothing about it?

[W]: I relate very hard to your not being able to google, say, "vaporwave + dream + fiction" and get a hit. You had to create your hits. I feel the same way. It's like I want "Borges + USA Up All Night" or something similarly niche and not-quite-available-elsewhere. The established subgenres you mention, like dreampunk, are still these largely unexplored parks of the mind. There aren't a whole lot of titles. Do you view Faceless in Nippon as your first book and Ultraviolet Torus as a sophomore effort?

[W]: One aspect of your work that struck me right away is its sensory nature, and its desire to make complex emotions like melancholy or lostness more tangible or tactile.

[Ed.:  racetams with caffeine are ingested.]

[D]: I really like your description – “the depth of the surface.” This really fits what I’m trying to achieve with writing. I try to attain a certain sensory experience with abstract imagery, but endeavor to maintain a somewhat conventional narrative or “everyday” story underneath. For instance, Faceless in Nippon was always meant to mimic the feeling of floating in/on water, gently bobbing through society’s ambient capitalist waters attempting to find a purpose. This incorporeal imagery juxtaposed with the more straightforward vignette format and story arc of a young western male living abroad. With Ultraviolet Torus, the prose and format are more unconventional – it was designed to mimic gemstone/mineral structure and shoegaze music, with the narrative underpinning the imagery taking the form of the rise and fall of a standard relationship. I agree that even a “realist” presentation is somewhat sci-fi these days – it is unavoidable. Our friend, contemporary, and collaborator James Krendel-Clark and I have often spoken about how the only thing left for sci-fi is this almost meta-sci-fi angle, where all the tropes have become so cliché and ingrained that really any attempt at sincere “world building” is futile. It’s better to experiment in syntax and delve into what another contemporary of ours, Nick Greer, likes to call “hyper-genre”. Use the tropes, but explore them linguistically, see what they do for the reader sensorily, opposed to using them as the building blocks to create another mundane genre narrative. I have certainly done that in shorter form through the Concentric Circuits: CODA stuff on Surfaces. I think my sci-fi influence comes through in both Faceless in Nippon and Ultraviolet Torus, certainly in the way that I frame the setting or landscape as a character almost, similar to how Ballard and Gibson craft their prose. I have had a lot of time to think about the aforementioned literary influences. I am slightly OCD too, so I often create these massive lists and Venn diagrams and shit of artists/works with certain styles and aesthetics that overlap. I do like to think of myself as a modern-day Walter Benjamin in the way I compile notes and lists and memories that form the basis of my artistic and existential exploration. I think Benjamin would have had a hell of a time with the notes app of a smart phone.

[D]: Regarding Kobo Abe, you are correct, certainly not an easy tone to master, and one that I definitely have not. My writing is not as sound as a master like Abe, which I think is why I subconsciously fall back on the sci-fi landscape syntax/prose mentioned above and the more colloquial twenty-first century alt-lit style to strive forward in my work. I am still developing though, and hopefully, opposed to just replicating Abe’s tone, one day I will be in a position where people are speaking about a tone entirely of my own that others will use as an influence. Abe is also a good segue into other forms of media that influence written work, as he has often been an inspiration to artist’s in the visual field such as filmmakers and video game creators. It is no secret that he is Hideo Kojima’s favorite author.

[D]: Since re-commencing my fiction-writing, which was at the beginning of 2019, you are accurate in your inference that I have primarily relied on other forms of media to influence my work. I have barely read any novels at all in the last couple of years comparative to the previous decade of reading. I garner much more from music, anime, and internet culture these days. I am glad you brought up the influence of commercials – I think we certainly share an avid interest in exploring the consumerist sphere and its effects on art and society. There are a number of important moments in Faceless in Nippon dealing with commercials, products, stores and their underrated aura. Hell, I even created fictional beverages and advertisements for the book.

[D]: My time in Japan was an incredibly formative experience for me. I really only returned to my home country, Australia, when my wife became pregnant. Otherwise I would probably still be there, cruising around upper-class malls, lower-class malls, drinking massive cans of Asahi on the train, staring at LED signs from concrete overpasses at night interminably. I certainly still yearn for my time there. I did go back to visit friends recently and it was a strange experience, like I could not re-create the feelings of my time there in the past no matter how hard I strived. It became apparent that my yearnings were purely for a time in my life while stationed there, opposed to the setting itself.

[D]: I would describe Faceless in Nippon as a meditative, aqueous travelogue on what it means to exist as a middle-class person in the twenty first century, the entirety of which is set in urban Japan.

[D]: I really admire artists that have an unmistakable aesthetic stamp on their work. Auteurship, if you will. For what it’s worth, I think you are one of the few that has a singular, univocal voice in the online “outsider” lit community or whatever you want to call it. I would like to think mine is the same. That people will read it and go, “Oh fuck, that’s Dale alright.” I have been told before that my work reads like MDMA. I am exceedingly happy with that comparison. I would be pleased if that was how I was known as an artist after my “career” or whatever you want to call it is over. Basically, I want to create things that are uniquely my own, things that have not been attempted before. Another reason I think that you and I gel well together as creatives is that despite our many differences in aesthetics, we are enamored by the depth of so-called low culture and continually mash it together with the supposed “high culture” of literature. 

The "Borges + USA Up All Night" example illustrates this perfectly.

[D]: Both Faceless in Nippon and Ultraviolet Torus will be available at similar times. However, there is no doubt that Faceless is my first book. It is the first thing I started working on when I didn’t know it was going to be what it became. Torus was a more experimental foray into the literary field. I compiled Torus, an exploration of gemstone and dream imagery, between drafts of Faceless. I was particularly taken by crystals, shoegaze, and giddiness over my interactions with some beautiful people on the internet at the time. It proved to be a fruitful break from Faceless rewrites, as not only did I let the novel marinate and become better before publishing it, I also gave birth to another creative treasure.

[D]: Making emotive words tactile, rendering the textually intangible tangible. This is something I want to see extended even further as we continue collaborating on our mall project. I want to delicately wrench the phaser knob on these effects and really see where we can go with our adventures in the literary sensorium.

[W]: I remember you saying you wanted Faceless in Nippon to "feel like floating in water." It made me think of a novel as a kind of sensory deprivation tank, the floating and the effects. Did you think of Ultraviolet Torus as a gem, in the abstract, or was the structuring of it more precisely gemlike? James [Krendel-Clark] and I wrote the rough draft of this Blanchot-bodyhorror, broken-videogame-reality novel called Cenotaph, and much of it deals with irrational spaces and Phildickian pulp. As far as sci-fi goes, the more subjective my take, the more "sci-fi" it seems to become. Just last night I drifted between three realities - one in which I was an unemployed writer living under Covid-19, one in which I destroyed an organic ship/braincraft with a cyber-tank, and another where I trained as a druid mage in a treacherous cursed desert. Of course these last two were games and that doesn't even entail any other branching realities that came about as well with regard to books, narratives, televisual influences, lies we tell ourselves, 5G brain-attacking waves, et al. It's late and I'm stoned and tired but yeah. Nick Greer is a fascinating individual. I didn't know you knew him. We spoke about set theory once. Gödel. I read very little, yeah. Or I should say I don't sit and read a physical book as often as I used to. I read rigorously for a good 20 years. If I'm awake enough to read, I usually would want to spend that time writing, or perhaps gaming. Or dreaming. All of these beats - the fictional beverages and ads and playing metafictionally with products and whatnot - I kind of live for that shit. I do that more and more. And it's not even a critique or any kind of satire of it for me - like the low-rez haze of 1-900 commercials was a fuzzy heaven in a box for me as a kid. The K-Mart cafeteria did possess a unique and strange power. I think we're kind of on the same page here as far as we share a kind of reverence for the artificial, the things rendered meaningless through mass production, and other similar slippery intangibles. There is a wonder here that sets it apart from, say, a satirical/scathing view of consumerist life. God, yeah, your experience in Japan. I think I've experienced similar stuff. I remember a time in 2000 when Boca Raton, Florida, was kind of magical for me. I went there a few years back; it's just any place now. Such a strange thing. And sad too. This is the only kind of interview I'd conduct, one with a writer whose work I think truly good. You might've remarked upon the melancholic allure of vending machines coding out at night. Or something similar. It's that sort of sentiment I recognized straightaway as what I consider tuned-in to a cryptic aesthetic I love. I was relieved to discover your wordcraft was honed – that's usually the big problem for me liking someone's work. One of the big draws for me about your work is the stuff you're able to do that I really dig but am not really suited to pull off myself, such as the MDMA vibe, or the ennui mixed with light, hope, etc. There are a dozen or so singular voices around in the online outsider-lit community/whatever, voices I'd consider distinctive: you, Clark, Elytron Frass, Durban Moffer – a few others.

[W]: Your themes I would say demand nuance and control. We've talked about how our mall project is slow-going because it seems very painstaking, almost like etching or surgery or something. Introspective, in any case. Although I just sort of dismissed reading a second ago, I do believe that a unique body of work is made unique by a dizzying variety of blendered influences. I had that 15-year stretch in the suffering cubes to read pretty much constantly, and haphazardly, as far as selection, in a lot of ways, so my influence map is like really fucking bizarre and extensive, which I think makes my stuff appear unique, when all that is unique about it probably is my little perspective or whatever subjectivity is injected into this array of eclectic influences.

[cavitymagazine]

Haptic Narratives: The Absurdly R EA L Artifacts of Dale Brett / / / [part 1]

Tuesday, 12 May / Night time

I found Dale’s work online before I ever spoke to him, drawn instinctively to the idiosyncratic images that often accompany his work – cloudpunk, vaporwave-inflected frames of dejected neon... lit-up, melancholic vending machines in the eye of a lifeless urban space... . ..  

What I’d imagine a Ballardian supermarket designed by William Gibson and a nootropic-dosed ad exec might look like. I read a few pieces; Dale’s themes were as compelling to me as his visual aesthetic: consumer nostalgia, technological ennui, cybernetic malaise. And, like the best of the e-lit underground, Dale’s prose glowed with a piercing subjective hyperrealism. What is the world around us if not morose ATM machines and memories of a food court?

We went cyborg a while ago: look in front of you past this text at the fractured future you didn’t even realize had happened... . ..

Or simply read Dale Brett.  [Ed.: Excerpts from both of Brett’s forthcoming novels are at the end of the interview.]

I won’t go into more detail about Dale’s work. Suffice to say it’s complicated, empathic, and brilliant, and sculptured as well as anything I’ve read. You should read some of his transmissions now. Here are the links: https://neutralspaces.co/dalebrett/

[W]ILL: What are some of your biggest influences as far as writers go? We talked about William Gibson before. His collection Burning Chrome had a substantive impact on me.

[D]ALE: The way I like to look at my heritage is in schools or layers. There are a few levels of this to consider. Firstly, I would say the haunting melancholic vignettes, sonnets, convolutes, etc., on consumerism and being by Walter Benjamin and Fernando Pessoa have considerably stirred my soul when it comes to putting words worth saying down. I feel they probably inhabit the most similar place to where I am trying to go in my work, where I am trying to take the reader in my experimental quests. On the precipice of dream and the sociological query of what it means to be meaningless in the modern world. I often look at my work through the lens of trying to create the internet age's Book of Disquiet or Arcades Project. I want to evoke the same feeling. I want to conspire with like-minded bodies to unlock the essence of this digital flotsam we are engulfed in.

[D]: Secondly, contemporary sci-fi has had a huge impact on me and my work. I don't think I would be here writing and reading and exploring the oddities of inner space without JG Ballard, Philip K. Dick, and William Gibson. I would say those three have had the most influence on my themes and style, particularly their exploration of consumerist tendencies and the vivid imagery expressed in their prose. Ballard in particular is a “landscape” writer, his characters are largely devoid of development and are often the same middle-aged dude, but the way he could depict a landscape, both inner and outer, and mesh the two together – those kinds of passages have had a major bearing on the way I construct narrative and scenes in my work. Aesthetics are highly important to me.

[D]: Probably thirdly, and what I would say is a catalyst in how Faceless in Nippon reads, is my “education” in alt lit, which stemmed from a love of Bret Easton Ellis I developed in university doing a creative writing minor. This was back in '07 I think? Tao Lin's Eeeee Eee Eeee and Shoplifting from American Apparel just came out after I got into BEE. Think there was a blurb from BEE or comparing Tao to BEE on one of those books. And so I got into that stuff heavily back then, which really did fit the university scene. And from there went into Sam Pink, Noah Cicero – those were about the only ones I considered decent to be honest. But, to me, it felt like these guys were adding to the excavation of what it meant to be and feel in a life governed by products and 9-5 shitshow jobs that meant nothing, just like the Benjamin's and Pessoa's of years gone by. Albeit they were doing it in a much more colloquial and contemporary way. Really, I feel, that my style has subconsciously morphed from the three “layers” outlined above - Pessoa/Benjamin, New Wave sci-fi/early cyberpunk, and disaffected nihilists like the early works of BEE and the alt- lit crowd that followed some time later.

[D]: I would be remiss to not mention the Japanese writer Kobo Abe, often touted as the "Japanese Kafka", his more psychological early works and convention-challenging latter works cannot be understated. He is my favorite writer. I also should mention my intrigue for Japanese culture in general has been very formative as anyone who follows me on twitter would know. I can honestly say Faceless in Nippon would not exist if I didn't live the experience in Japan to write it.