“Not only are these people crazy, but they look fucking crazy—because they have big fucking beards, full lush beards, that they’re growing out for the county’s bicentennial. There’s a pageant this summer, and all the county’s men want to play bit parts as pioneers, so they’re growing out their crazy.”
In the Conversation for Bottom Feeder, I was asked “If the carp is king then who is queen?” And I get around to saying: “[I]f we move to Kingdom Fungi—we can access cordyceps—the cordycep is queen even has a sly ring to it, non? They are also eerily beautiful, I’ve seen a photo series of them, too, recently—gorgeous brain-sucking, central-nervous-plucking parasites, growing out of the skulls of insects.”
My sister-in-law Tayler made the above four colorful photos (ripped with her permission from her Facebook, so the image quality is not as pristine as it might be) a couple of years ago for an art project. They’re the cordyceps. Usually they are inhabiting insects, illustrated in the rather gothic picture accompanying them below.
Conceptually, I appreciate these photo collages for their efforts to disguise the great zest by which cordyceps infect hosts and parasitize and reproduce. Tayler manipulated her photos to make the fungi look like they are gracefully intertwined, perhaps symbiotic, as optimistic and waving as sea corals, when the aggression and cunning of these creatures cannot be overstated. This is a much retold story about a certain species, but the Ophiocordyceps unilateralis hacks into an ant’s central nervous system, then gets its ant to drop from its tree house to a place of greater safety humidity and temperature-wise, closer to the ground—a Jedi-mind trick cordyceps are believed to have perfected 48 millions years ago. I also enjoy the sultry, flat background colors that impress on viewers the cordycep’s phallic shapeliness. (The colors of Tropical Skittles.) All these seductions aside, what I most love about these images is their crystalline-stillness, the way the the organic has been frozen, saturated, shaded, a kind of jewel-crusted death mask for nature; a carbonite-gemstone frieze. I think of the way photo manipulation and collage have become the currency of social media and platforms like Tumblr, and the way fine arts generally have the tendency to root out repulsive natural processes and turn them into exquisite amusements, saccharine songs, or lush paintings. Oh, and then you begin to map your life, modify your behavior, per the aesthetic dictates of the internet—that old chestnut. Tayler’s photo series, to my mind, allegorizes this process with wit and vividness.
Dear Friends,
The editors at Yoke Journal published my short story. They asked me some questions about the piece and I replied at ferocious length. I flogged my wildly neighing hobby-horses (Norman Rush, n+1) for comfort, as it was a deeply uncomfortable experience all around. The above is a link to the conversation. You will also find Heather Cox’s prose-poem, melancholic, mysterious, and beautifully titled “The Pain Jacob Wakes To, Remembering.”
Best,
Evan
P.S. The above is my Turin hobby-horse!
I saw The Turin Horse with Heather (not Heather Cox; my Heather, whom I go to school with). She took me to see Lore last night, an Australian/German co-production of a very long Anthropologie commercial, with Nazis.
Text from Heather: “Forgot to ask u last night- did u hate the movie?”
My response: “Oh yeah — yep. Totally hated it!”
Before that, Heather took me to see Wuthering Heights, the super-moody Andrea Arnold adaptation—yet also an Anthropologie commercial, only this one with a Mumford & Sons song at the very end! This was on Valentine’s Day and half-through the film, our theatre was hemorrhaging students who had happier love lives to pursue.
I like how Google image searches make this film out to have a luxuriant, wide aspect ratio (the product of Agatha A. Nitecka’s mindblowing set photography), and Andrew O’Hehir at Salon calls it a “widescreen” feast or whatever once in his pick of the week, and again in his Best of 2012. Quoting from the former:
Perhaps assuming that most viewers will already know the basic story of Brontë’s novel, Arnold and Ryan go much further here into spectacular, wide-screen abstraction. Shot in a subdued color palette that often comes close to black-and-white, “Wuthering Heights” features extended scenes of long outdoor takes, and a level of spectacular nature photography that suggests a leaner, meaner, British-centric Terrence Malick.
But! The aspect ratio is 1.33:1 throughout, or what you see in old boxy TVs. I appreciate Robbie Ryan shooting Arnold’s films in this way. I like it fine. The square of light in the middle of the long rectangular screen. But really what I liked was leaving this film, and the others, and yanking my soul from the teeth of the wind, off the birch forest floor, out of the lips of the sucking mud. Especially Wuthering Heights. “By Christ if one more dog barks in this flick,” I said, “I hope it chokes!” And then two dogs are hung by their necks, on fence posts, and I was ashamed.
P.P.S. I’ve been listening to “The Enemy” now for about an hour. Damn it.
The above is a photo of me pawing through my piece on The Awl about the meat markets.
This piece started as a failed conversation my friends and I had about truffle oil.
We were drunk at a loud bar. Rather the bar was loud because we were drunk in it. Two of my friends were talking about ham-fisting or fisted hams. It was a pork dish of some kind. I was angry at my phone because twitter wouldn’t update. I was angry at myself for never having read The Magic Mountain.
One of my friends turned to me and said:
“What do you think about truffle oil?”
“What?” I said. I thought he said something like muffled foil. Not that perfectly off but close.
“Truffle oil. What do you think about?”
“I think there’s a silence walled up in the violent structure of the founding act.”
Which must be a typical thing for me to say. We started talking about The Girlfriend Experience, never to return to truffle oil or muffled foil.
We left the bar and didn’t get into the next two bars and ended up somewhere we shouldn’t have been.
I want to make the connection that Stuart Ross recently wrote for HTMLGiant about Here and Now, the correspondence between Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee. I like to think Elizabeth Costello was somehow integral to Ross’s newest essay, at least when he provides this fond recollection of his grandfather (of all our grandfathers):
Our grandfathers never talked back to their food. They didn’t look good food in the mouth. Mine was a butcher, from the Bronx, borough of butchers. He was my king. For him, steak was clock. Fowl was work. He sliced off bits of fingernail throughout the day, the scent of shed blood hounding him. The only marketing he ever saw were the bubble letters announcing the cut and cents per pound. His freezer at home was filled with wholesale steaks and chops, and tubs of Key Food-brand orange sherbet. Steak and sherbet, that’s all he ate. He didn’t need the potatoes, the asparagus. He liked his steak bloody, never tartare.
He woke up at 3:30 a.m., came home at 3:30 p.m., reclined in his chair, finished the crosswords in the Post, the News and the Times, Mondays thru Sundays. When the crossword was finished he dropped the whole paper to the carpet. That’s when I would crawl over and snatch it away, devour the sour news and snark I couldn’t begin to understand. I’d look up, take a peek at the spine of the book he would’ve started reading, doorstops about the tragedies at Treblinka and Nagasaki. And what today might be brokered as WWII fan fiction. What I wouldn’t give for an audit trail of his library borrowings.
It’s that shading there, at the end, Treblinka and Nagasaki, that so offends dear Elizabeth’s audience, but, taken as a wily rhetorical maneuver, I’ve always found it so apt, so moving (quoting now from Elizabeth Costello):
And to split hairs, to claim that there is no comparison, that Treblinka was so to speak a metaphysical enterprise dedicated to nothing but death and annihilation while the meat industry is ultimately devoted to life (once its victims are dead, after all, it does not burn them to ash or bury them but on the contrary cuts them up and refrigerates and packs them so that they can be consumed in the comfort of our homes) is as little consolation to those victims as it would have been—pardon the tastelessness of the following—to ask the dead of Treblinka to excuse their killers because their body fat was needed to make soap and their hair to stuff mattresses with.
At least inside the safe confines of Coetzee’s novel—this long sad sentence raging around the problem of empathizing with animal consciousness, and where the ecologically devastating and indubitably unsustainable industry is mated to the mass psychosis of another era. And it’s strangely moving, too, for Ross to end on the death of his forebears, to move from a critique of the culture, our consumptive lunacy, our dumb fleshly desires, into poignancy, into memory, the way those voices from a different generation make our decisions (going vegan, for instance) appear less urgent, or to seem like folly. Well—it is a very lovely essay, and the logic of it plays out lyrically. It is not an angry wash until its end, when it matters.
My own father, I might add, did kill chickens as a boy, on my grandfather’s farm. He fed the birds, he kept them from foxes, and gathered their eggs, and he wrung their necks, then plucked them, gutted them, he handed them over for supper, familiar in every way with his fowl. Now he forks the tiny animal cubes out of his chicken noodle soup because of it. But he would not stop eating ham or beef because of it.
Other news: Has anyone listened to Colin Stetson’s New History Warfare, Vol. 3: To See More Light? The title song is what I’ve had in my head all morning. I got up to chat with Nicholas, to eat my vegetarian sausage burrito and drink coffee, and fell into the maw a big mean bass saxophone. Lots of trills, too. “To See More Light” has three or so distinct passages—and while I composed this, and drank my coffee, and texted with Nicholas, I have felt breathless and harassed, like I were jumping trains in an action movie, or plunging into an arctic ice abyss, the tincture of ice fracturing, tinkling, loosing stalactites all about me; the album was co-produced by Ben Frost, so all of this palpitation in one way makes sense. I’m not certain about Justin Vernon’s contributions—he is not an angel in sable orbit, he does not knock about the celestial orbs, vibrating in their order, the way Stetson does all on his own with his huge wailing instrument, his plangency and menace. Vernon is more like a squire, a boy in the retinue, humming, a description that reverses, I suppose, the majesty of both in Bon Iver. I’m glad they throw each other work. And for it, I am transported to a far more pleasant place. What is today? Muggy, I think, the humidity is a cataract this morning—this noon-time; it is past noon, now.
My boyfriend called me “batflap” affectionately during this time, and an exchange from yesterday went thus: “Dear Coco, the basement is cool and dark this morning; I slept under a goose down blanket.” And he replied: “Thk u pecky.” Pecky!
It were as I hoped. Caleb Crain’s novel Necessary Errors returns readers to the travails of Jacob Putnam, the kid who, in Sweet Grafton, the novella published in n+1 oh, an age ago, when my knees ached less, oh, went about his town in a kind of Christian mystic’s daze. He warded off goons with his Arthurian voice; he obviated his latent homosexuality by adventuring in the woods; he tragically ignored his sister’s eating disorder; he crushed on a mysterious older boy; he espied his rival drown a bag of cats and then he sicked under a car. Well, they’re young! Their fathers betrayed them all. These plot points do little to convey the real sweetness of the story, the real strangeness, too. Referring to Jacob making his father cry—here’s one of my favorite lines in fiction, ever: “As Jacob waited for him to stop, they held each other, and Jacob realized that there was no more of a certain kind of comfort in the world. His anger had been the last piece of it. He had thought that if he held on to it fiercely enough, it would do something or grant him something, but it hadn’t, and now it had melted away like a blade of ice.” (My other is from Pynchon’s Against the Day, by the bye: “I sold my anger too cheap, didn’t understand how precious it was.” I like the angry quotes. Also this too has to do with an emotional father.) Now Jacob Putnam takes his turn in Prague! I can’t fucking wait to read this novel. From the brief Library Journal review (which I am quoting full against some kind of copyright violation?):
Reviews: FictionCrain, Caleb. Necessary Errors. Penguin. Aug. 2013. 472p. ISBN 9780143122418. pap. $16; ebk. ISBN 9781101613658. F
Crain (American Sympathy) continues his ascendant career with this fully realized debut novel, which delights and surprises with every paragraph. The setting is 1990 Prague, a year after Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The story follows Jacob, a gay American college graduate whose ambitions of becoming a writer are frustrated by his surroundings. “‘I’m an American,’ Jacob protested. ‘There’s no one I can blame for holding me back.’” The plot is compelling, but Crain’s talent for nuance and dialog, particularly in the gay bar scenes, is an observational wonder. Through a historic lens, Crain details the beautiful East European capital city’s transition from Communist to democratic rule. VERDICT Not an easy exercise in nostalgia, this novel is a pleasure to navigate with its large, likable cast. Fans of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station will find themselves similarly enchanted here.
~~~~~~~~
By Travis Fristoe, Alachua Cty. Lib. Dist., Gainesville, FL
Ascendant career! If only what’s-his-name would weigh in, Alain de Botton. Sweet Christ!
What else? Tonight is a drag party that I am not dressing up for.
Well, excepting: the back of my hair is long enough to bobby pin. So! I’ve got two of them, going in an X, to mark where the treasure is, and a very tidy little swirly bun of hair. It’s what happens when your mohawk takes on its own course in life, takes on its own gentle manners.
I mean, you can’t tell in the least, but—were you to run your hands through it—treasure:
MISCELLANY PHOTOS FROM PHONE
1) MFA took over CLUB FEVER in downtown South Bend. Really—we had that freaky floor for like an hour all to ourselves, a hangar-sized space, but then like 3 other people came. The backs of my feet are still raw and I’ve taken to putting tiny bandaids over my dance wounds. But is there a bandaid big enough to cover a dance wound, you know, in the metaphoric sense?
2) Graduate Student Union Charity Gala in the pavilion of the an arts center named after a bank? I think Philip Johnson designed the mezzanine etc, and it’s lovely, but we showed up too late for the buffet ($25 frittered away on lateness), and the bar was cash only (and expensive), and I stuck around long enough to snap a pic of the Christmas lights hanging from the ceiling so beautifully, when Heather picked me up and took me to the Lake Michigan shore where we didn’t try very hard to see the aurora. I drank Diet Pepsi on the beach and watched the moon scuttle behind a cloud bank, it was perfect.
3) Heather! She let me screen print my own t-shirt with a Kiln Film insignia, and also a beautiful geodesic dome—she got the t-shirt for me and everything, a pale blue color. We had fun—I’ve never screen printed before (although, like reading certain books, when people ask me if I’ve ever, I just say, “of course”). Now my pale blue shirt has a lime, orange, and popsicle-pink geodesic dome on the back, in various sized, and on the side it has a naked Phoenician man with strong buttocks raking logs into a fire.
4) I wasn’t kidding about the cupcakes. I had pizza. Then I went and took a History of Video Art exam (it was really tough, in fact), then I came back to this luxurious spread.
5) Heather! Before her installation which is coming together in the basement of Riley. Here, the projector’s blue confused screen is scattering a beam of blue light against wax paper and another fiber material that I can never remember the name of, but it is very like, to me, a stiff cheese cloth, a kind of cotton screen. Obviously I am quite taken by it even in glitch form.
6) I didn’t necessarily have to run the cupcake gauntlet—because the ladies got me a very large Boston Cream Pie cupcake. Now I miss the cupcakes, and regret not indulging. I’m to go back this afternoon and recover some personal effects. I’m sure there’s still cupcakes left over. Cupcake anxiety. I look so wild-eyed/swarthy/nefarious in the photo because I was quite, quite depleted, and had about eleven people in a row ask me, “What’s next?” or tell me, “You’re gonna make history!” or “But what does one do with an MFA?” All loveliness, of course.
CONGRATULATIONS EVAN!
(BECAUSE OF YOU WE GET PIZZA AND CUPCAKES!!!!)
—
THE OFFICE SAYS GOODBYE
I feel like the set design on “Veep” has fallen by the wayside. The jokes are still tops.
HERE IS ME READING FOR MY THESIS ALSO THE POET THADE CORREA.
AT ABOUT 4MIN IN YOU CAN HEAR THOR, IT’S CUTE.
