Here’s a short one. I’ve got some longer stuff cooking but I figured I’d give a little update in the meantime. I get stressed when I don’t post enough.
I was at Sovereign House “Confessions” on Sunday and they had Matthew Davis and Peter Vack reading. This was my first time at Sovereign House in at least a month. The flyer called it the “battle of the novelists,” and Matthew and Peter were promoting their new books. Matthew’s picaresque novel Let Me Try Again comes out in August, and the book’s main gimmick is like if Woody Allen was really obsessed with “the FBI crime statistics.” At Sovereign House Matthew presents a short story where the “30 Rock and Bill Maher-style liberal” protagonist finds himself reading ChatGPT verses at a far-right poetry reading with all the fascist cranks and grifters. Suddenly, an antifa prostitute heckles him for being a fascist and throws tomato sauce at him. (Basically a retelling of the “All in Good Fun” Crumpstack episode.) Humiliated, the protagonist returns to his apartment in the projects where his black neighbors ridicule him for having sauce on his shirt. Alas, the antifa prostitute was really just paid off by someone, an elaborate illusion… Just another day in clownworld…
After Matthew’s story, Peter does a reading of the same poem he always does, his meme poem, where he repeats the text from memes with references to the downtown scene self-mythos that’s always getting revised and updated. (A few examples I just made up riffing on the unplugging-from-the-Matrix meme: “Noooo put me back I was at the fascist humiliation ritual / Noooo put me back I was getting pussy from a niche internet microcelebrity / Noooo put me back I was at the River hanging out with Julian Casablancas who is now fat and disgusting,” and so on, though they’re usually more labyrinthine than that). Some of the latest updates include mentions of how Bravo was filming an “untitled reality TV project” at his Sillyboy book launch party/Covid-superspreader event and the weird portal to Sweden that just opened up. (A bunch of Americans went to Sweden recently to promote a Swedish translation of Jon Lindsey’s Body High, we’re all famous in Stockholm, the Swedes seem to think that this alt-lit shit is actually good, Peter calls himself the “Elis Burrau of Dimes Square,” Dagens Nyheter recently ran a piece about Sovereign House…) But the main theme of this rendition of the poem is promoting Matthew Davis’ book. So the riffs go on about how Matthew is the Philip Roth of downtown fascists, how Matthew fumbled Dasha who is a beautiful angel, how Peter also fucked Dasha, how Dasha told Peter that Matthew couldn’t find her clit, and so on, and that’s basically why you should buy Let Me Try Again. Ratchet!
I think they both want me to review their books. I’m still overdue for an opinion on Honor Levy’s book that came out in May. Some other things I’ve been reading lately:
Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar
Ezra Pound and the Mysteries of Love: A Plan for The Cantos by Akiko Miyake
Amulet by Bolaño
Petrarch’s poetry, 2004 David Young translation
Satyricon
Cheers,
Mike