REPLY TO THE DARK

Interview with Adam Johnson

In the early days of 2023, I talked with poet and novelist Adam Johnson via Google doc. We discussed Twitter and literature, specifically what I call la moisissure noire, or black mold, of “theory-horror” as a subgenre of writing. It wasn’t a very long interview as this specific interview form is new to me. I’ll just say that Adam is a friend, a colleague, and a coruscating recorder of human ills in his two books of poetry (What Are You Doing Out Here Alone, Away From Everyone? and White Paint Falling Through a Filtered Shaft) and his novel, Cialis, Verdi, Gin, Jag.

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Adam, what’s going on. I thought I would initiate an interview with you somehow someway to end 2022 and maybe recreate for potential readers some of the energy of our back and forth in emails or texts. You are definitely my closest friend in this niche of writing and I think we have an interesting relationship. I think it’s not perfect. It’s weird. At times I have felt a little like an Ezra Pound to your T.S. Eliot: somebody who is encouraging but at times condescending, like I know the ins and outs of this literary culture and I’m trying to advise you and guide you. I apologize if it’s ever seemed like I was being a dickhead impresario or anything. I just see a lot of potential in you and I want to be a supportive friend. First question: We have different experiences with Twitter, arguably. While a mainstream perspective would have it that you, who deactivates and gets off Twitter with some regularity and is a dissident to its function and purpose, are the disadvantaged one, I know a few people who feel like you have the right idea in taking vacations from it. Can you tell me what you’ve learned by pushing away from the card table and going elsewhere occasionally?  

Hi Jesse, how are you?  That is a question that I think is relevant to a lot of people.  If I can describe my approach to Twitter in a single word, I think I would have to use the term ambivalent.  It’s not a perfect word, but it came to mind.  I don’t care about Twitter.  But then I do.  And then I don’t again, and burn it down, only to return under the facade of yet another username to start from scratch by following a few close friends.  Is it called a username?  I don’t know.  I have a very meticulous process that I follow for account destruction in the moments when I swear off Twitter for the final, last, ultimate, terminal (until the next) time.  It is the equivalent of dumping bottles down the sink, scissoring a driver’s license, and eighty-sixing oneself from the bottle shop in one fell swoop.  Twitter was designed to make money, and it has done that, but at the cost of exponentially multiplying psychopathy across the country, and world.  But more to your point, or what I think you are getting at, Twitter, and particularly “Literary Twitter” (you’ll pardon the term) can be divided into many camps.  Among these, I think there is a defining feature, or line, that can be drawn between people who are attempting to scale the industry within the guardrails and those who operate without regard to the customs and norms (or even laws) that are naturally erected in a marketplace such as Twitter.  I would leave for good, but at this point I would miss communicating with some people, I would miss hearing about their book, sharing in some of their happinesses, successes.  I would also miss the opportunities to occasionally bitch and moan and grunt, which seem also to be Twitter’s hallmark features.  With regard to your prefatory comments at the beginning, you are very kind, and a great friend.

I suppose I ask about your Twitter habits because among our circle of friends it’s just known that you disappear without any announcement and then reappear and it takes a little effort to find you again. To the point that I feel like your followers, people that want to be mutuals with you through thick and thin, may carry more weight in a sense than mine, because they have jumped over multiple hurdles to be with you. But then again, this persistent company may not keep the nightmares at bay. Changing subjects, what are you reading right now? Or, more broadly, rather than specific books or writers, can you describe your recent trends in what you are finding you like to read? 

I like to think that I enjoy a small circle of ride-or-die types with respect to Twitter following/followers, but I harbor some suspicion that it is just a collection of some very nice people who feel bad for me, and therefore engage with me out of charity.  But then, I also think there are people who enjoy what I have to say from time to time, just as I enjoy what they have to say from time to time.  At present, I have 61 followers.  I am right where I should be.  As for books, I am seeking out things that will rip my pants off.  To be more specific, I am interested in difficult, short books that experiment with subject matter and language, that refuse to raise the white flag.  At bottom, it has to be good.  I recognize this goes without saying.  To name names, I am currently reading Eyes Impaled by Spikes by Morgenrede.  Before that, I read The Sluts by Dennis Cooper.  I am not exaggerating when I say that Eyes Impaled by Spikesis on the same levels of quality and intensity as Elizabeth Aldrich’s Ruthless Little Things.  These are all “boundary-pushing” books, or “transgressive” if you will.  It’s not all I’m after.  If I could find an equivalent to Swift’s Directions to Servants, or Thackeray’s The Book of Snobs, I would be in full clover.  There is a book by New Juche that I want so badly (The Worm), but it’s nearly $50.

Sometimes you and I talk about how shocking certain writing is, and I suspect you have a stronger stomach than I do. For me it sometimes feels like an inquiry into my own feelings of the moral purpose of literature and the aesthetic questions that get raised, like am I able to answer them, can I defend the point in these books the same way that Norman Mailer could defend the point of American Psycho by saying it was an exploration of Dostoevskian themes, or whatever he said in that blurb. At other times I’m just grossed out and angered and am probably a gigantic pussy who shouldn’t be reading big grown-up people’s books. I wonder about you. We know that you’re a criminal defense attorney so you must have some cold-eyed familiarity with the depths that people can go to. And in reading your two poetry books and your novel Cialis Verdi Gin Jagwe can see some pretty harrowing proofs of this, I would think. Or is it all imagination? You as a writer “refuse to raise the white flag.” Why do you think this is important? In a second I’ll ask you about a certain strain or variant of this. I’m looking forward to reading that Morgenrede book.

I have witnessed death and destruction, but at a certain distance and through a unique lens.  I can’t imagine what it would be like to be a first responder.  No doubt, things take a toll on one.  A lot of great writing reflects the world as it is, not how so-and-so wishes it  could be.  Aspirational fiction always involves the rounding off of some edges.  And the world is simultaneously very dark and filled with light.  Creative expression attempts to come to terms with the world, even when it attempts to “reject” everything.  When I write, I am not attempting to explain things to the reader, but merely to shine a light on the little corner of the earth that I have come to understand.  As a reader, I enjoy being shocked, but it must be done well.  I have no interest in gore or wonton scenes of violence.  A long, graphic description of some scat scene may be shocking to some, but I would find it boring.  To state it plainly, I have never read an interesting passage that involves entrails.  In The Sluts, which I am using as an example in an attempt to  illustrate the point, there are some horrific descriptions of sexual sadism and violence, forced castration, and snuff.  I can stomach them, but they’re not my thing.  But I am taken by some of the perverse propensities exhibited by some of the message board users.  There is one user who describes being into “scenes of pneumonia” or something to that effect.  I laughed out loud.  It was absurd, but also, believable.  It pointed a finger at the reader and exclaimed, “Admit it, you know this is real.”  I made the white flag in reference to myself as a reader, not writer.  But I suppose this attitude would apply to both.  The only problem with the latter, in my case, is that I don’t write anymore.  Let’s hear about this strain or variant you mentioned.

Have you read B.R. Yeager’s Amygdalatropolis? I haven’t read it. I’m scared to. Some reviews of the book say that the horrific details in the book stay with you forever, and it has given people nightmares. The strain or variant I’m thinking of, I can’t really diagnose it or put it in a box since I haven’t really read a lot of it. The best I could do would be to call it “theory-horror,” or experimental horror fiction which has been brined with a heavy broth of theory, literary criticism, French intellectual ideas, that kind of thing. There’s a publisher called Schism which publishes theory under its own label and then fiction and poetry under associated labels called Schism [2] and Schism Neuronics. It’s run by Gary Shipley. It all seems somewhat extreme in a way, but part of the extremity is a need to have a baseline fluency with writers like Bataille, Artaud, Cioran, Huysmans, and that swampful of frogs. (Cioran is Romanian, I know, but I’m lumping him in with the others.) It’s like horror, but not dumb genre horror, more like horror for bookish philosophy majors who know we’re all about to die in blazing heat and choking thirst as the atmospheric temperature increases by a few fatal degrees. This type of writing, or associated writing, kind of spreads throughout a cluster of publishers like a black mold – or “la moisissure noire” to put it in the home language. Presses like 11:11 Press, Inside the Castle, Orbis Tertius, Equus, and many others traffic in these kinds of brainy, nearly impenetrable books. It’s almost like the horror is located not in the body, with wounds, strangulations, gore, entrails, etc, but in the cerebellum. It’s interesting. Some of it seems quite good, some of it seems irretrievably niche and unreadable. Or like you need to have taken the prerequisite college courses. And they don’t care if it’s alienating. I wouldn’t class Expat Press with these presses, even though Expat can get pretty dark and nasty. Or is it just me, and writers like you and all the rest can cope? You have acclimated to the temperature of the boiling pot…more frog metaphors. And I’m the one looking around who’s going, “Damn, this is all pretty dark and evil.” 

I have not read Amygdalatropolis.  But I probably will now.  I have to apologize for not having read a single book from the presses you noted, with the exception of Expat Press.  I say this somewhat sheepishly, because I understand 11:11 Press is in my backyard, geographically speaking.  Not that it creates an obligation on my part, but you know what I mean.  To be perfectly candid with you, and at the risk of being taken for a rustic, I have to admit that when I hear the words “French intellectual ideas,” it makes me think of the days when I was attempting to read Foucault, and making nasty faces about it.  I have read Voltaire, Tocqueville, Pascal, and some others, but they were all old world.  The closest I have come to modernity in French intellectual thought was by reading some books of non-fiction by Camus and a smattering of Sartre somewhere along the way in what feels like another lifetime.  It is the case, in my estimation, that books grappling with metaphysical or “intellectual” horror are more terrifying than the genre horror you describe.  Kafka, for example.  The genre horror operates like the darkness of night, whereas the metaphysical horror operates like a darkness that is ineffable and vast, yet within conception.  Everybody is so unique and wondrous, and imbued with such inimitable systems of operation that it is impossible for me to speak for others on this point, but it seems to me that you are capable of dancing with the demons.  You’re not dating them.  And you know yourself as much as anyone I’ve met.

Some of these publishers would probably frown at being called “horror.” They might frown at being called anything. I’ll get back to you in case I read any more of it. Ok, what are your goals for 2023? Did I read up there that you’re not writing anymore? Is that a threat…? Are you trying to piss me off? Aren’t you going to write a historical novel about Minnesota?

2023.  Is that the year?  That was fast.  I feel like I just left 2006.  How did this happen?  And no, I am not attempting to ruffle your feathers.  I don’t feel like writing anything.  I mean, I feel like writing something if it is there, but it’s not there.  I don’t have it.  Bukowski said that if it doesn’t come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don’t do it.  It was part of his uber-contrarian shtick, but it has something to it.  Fran Lebowitz wrote Metropolitan Life (1978) and then Social Studies (1981), followed by a children’s book in 1994, but has largely spent her years walking around New York City complaining and securing fame for the books she hasn’t written.  It doesn’t sound so bad.  I have an idea for a project, but it needs to come to me.  The current idea is for a full-length book of poetry called Sonnets to [Redacted], and it has the central object of attempting to explore Life as I understand it, and to leave pebbles of myself between the spine to create a shoreline for my children to walk upon.

That sounds really good and noble.I guess for me it’s this thing where I admire all your dark writing, your poetry books and your novel, but I can’t accept that that’s it. There must be some later turning to the light, or if not the light, to something spiritually generous. That’s not right either. There’s generosity in your poetry hidden amongst the bricks of pain. Something warm and fuzzy stashed away in the basement across from the dead bodies and the well-thumbed gun collector’s zines. I’ll read whatever you have going. // What do I have going on? Funny you should ask. It’s been days since we talked, and the double-slashes above represent several days of radio silence. I am currently working to put together a book that is, I suppose, like a reply to the darkness we’ve been talking about above. You know how writers should reflect their surroundings and “add colours to the chameleon,” I want to try to do that and respond. I don’t know if it would be an amplification of the bleak furniture and decor surrounding us or a way to try to dispel it. I have a book that is already being rejected! So it’s underway. I won’t title it here so as not to put a hex on it by the rejection dementors. I suppose it’s like the darkest thing I’ve ever put together so far. But whimsical. I like the idea of dark, inky whimsy and monochrome psychedelia. I think about old Fleischer cartoons, Jim Woodring’s Frank, Al Columbia…and all types of goth shit. So fingers crossed it finds a publisher. Do you have a final word? No? Ok, it was great to chat with you.  

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Here are two pieces of music to leave you with, from my dusty bins of underground rap. Both late 90s I think. This exclusive cartoon I drew of party animals getting wild and crazy (which I should really be trying to sell to a magazine) reproduces some lyrics from 1999’s “Reign” by Droop Capone from LA. And to keep it bi-coastal, from NYC circa 1997, in the Indelible MCs track listen to the second rapper J-Treds, who drops lines like “on the mic I’ve got more ‘presence’ than attendance in a class of schizophrenics.” A young El-P can be heard. The flows of the Indelible MCs (affiliated with Company Flow and Def Jux), as compared with Droop’s slick, smooth verbal lay-ups, were chunky and staccato and perhaps they tried to fit too many syllables into their bars, but you have to respect the creativity and unusual ethos of underground hip hop from the Big Apple in the late 1990s.