A solenoid is simply a coil of wire. It has the potentiality to create an electromagnetism, but it requires an electrical current to complete its function. Just as a book on a table is an inanimate physical object, sheaths of paper bound and nothing more. It has the potentiality to create a connection, to spark an understanding, to share a secret, to communicate, but it requires a reader to complete its function. In the Fall of 2022, I read Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated by Sean Cotter, published in English by Deep Vellum, and completed its function.

Solenoid is a contemporary Romanian novel, 663 pages in length. It is a surrealist, maximalist interior tale fixated on the body, death, mites, mathematics, literature, organisms and orgasms, consciousness, non-being, the infinite, pain, our skin, memories. Solenoid has captured the attention of the literary world, already the subject of a Dustin Illingworth New York Times piece, an incredible (can-not-be-missed) two hour video analysis from Seth of WASTE Mailing list, and initially put on most of our English-speaking radars by the inimitable, indispensable Patron Saint of World Literature, Andrei of The Untranslated, back in 2017, before it had been translated into English, wherein he dubbed it “the greatest surrealist novel ever written.” For scholarship and artistic, leading literary analysis & critique, I can do no more than offer links to their tremendous, important works which will form the foundation of a philology good to eat for a thousand years.

Mircea Cărtărescu is not without his literary detractors. His prose can be boring, suffused with details to the point of suffocation and distraction at times. He takes the long way often, figuratively and literally, through the streets of an unreal, too real Bucharest, and winds so many disparate threads and obsessions through the magnetic field of his literature to supply dizzying effects that may excite or sicken a reader, depending on their stomach for a ride.

I read nothing else while I read Solenoid. Nothing serious. Nothing substantial. I gave it the most precious gift we have. I gave it all of my attention. It is too massive, too sprawling, too serious, and too wonderful for me to completely unravel.

It took me an incredibly long time to read this book: an entire fall. Longer than my first read of Infinite Jest, 2666, The Recognitions, The Invented Part AND The Dreamed Part (though not The Tunnel, which suffers still from stiff back pages), Shadow Country, Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming. During whole stretches swallowing up several days I may find myself glazing over the letters like hieroglyphic symbols (or the famed Voyanich manuscript, which comes to these pages as two texts, connected and essential, and is ultimately a kind of fulcrum in the novel), unable to settle myself into its pages. I read it restless. I read it tired. I read it sad. I read it during two panic attacks and accompanying dissociative episodes. I read it in the dark, with a flashlight, the night a hurricane knocked out our power. I read it on Grandfather Mountain, in the gift shop, while my wife and kids walked over the swinging bridge I was too afraid to join them on. During the first panic attack, the one in the car alone (like the original one, the very first one, by the field – it was fallow – I have written about this elsewhere – I told the entire story in Characters, in parts, out of order, mostly through innuendo and other falsehoods and truthfully, several times, or at least once, as an aside), I read it at the Circle K in Stanford, where I ran into some trouble, waiting for my wife to pick me up. A young man in a tow truck stopped and asked what I was doing. He said did I need some help. He said there could be trouble around here. He said it’s not as nice as it looks around here. I took my copy of Solenoid and thanked him, stood up, and waited in my car for my wife to arrive and rescue me from my mind. I read Solenoid in an emergency room. I have been to too many emergency rooms. At some point I should have counted. I read Solenoid during a rough season of my life and this is my story.

The narrator of Solenoid, whose thoughts we never leave, is a writer. A failed one, he admits. As a young man, at a workshop or creative writing class, he read aloud his masterpiece epic poem, “The Fall,” and the response convinced him to give up his dreams of being a writer and settle into a quiet life as a teacher of Romanian literature at a high school in Bucharest, “the saddest city on the face of the earth, but at the same time, the only true one.” [pg. 425]

I recognized something of my own nothing hometown in Cartarescu’s vision of his Bucharest. The feeling that nothing springs forth from these places. The feeling that these are lost dots on a map, populated by lost people, shuffling along in their lives, from birth to death, anonymous, lonely, unknown and unknowable. Winston-Salem, North Carolina felt, to me, like a ridiculous place to be from. I read of Bucharest and heard the Moravian church bells of Old Salem and the RJR Tobacco smokestacks. I had an immediate urge to travel to Bucharest, this random city. Before I see Paris, I told my wife, before even a speck of Spain, before Prague, before Oslo, before Reykjavik, send my body and soul to Bucharest to see the streets of Solenoid, to complete its function, finally making it a real place.

I began reading Solenoid in the fall of twenty-twenty, during my own book tour for my first novel. The conceit of this narrator writing these pages in his secret diary with the intention of burning them, all 663, and me having to walk past displays of stacks of his novel to read from my own to three incredibly kind booksellers, two browsers who stumbled in from the rain shaking out their umbrellas in the very back, and one friend I used to do drugs with that lived there in St. Louis and was letting me crash the night was always very depressing and very humbling.

Like the narrator I too am obsessed with literature. I am obsessed with the intimacy and power of literature. I am obsessed with the transference of bits of consciousness from writer to reader. In William Gass’s ghastly literary masterpiece The Tunnel, the demented diarist William Frederick Kohler asks “What is a book but a container of consciousness, a draft of cantos?” A lonely teacher of high school Romanian literature and failed poet bears little resemblance to Gass’s high priest of literary villainy until you dig deeper and the private details of a consciousness transference, the energy of acute awareness traveling through time and space, become beautifully illuminated.

“Is writing to yourself a healthier insanity than talking to yourself” (Gass, William. The Tunnel, pg. 8) Kohler asks. Both narrators write to themselves and for themselves. Kohler is writing an introduction to his historical study Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany, while the teacher of Romanian literature at School 86 in Bucharest is a failed poet writing in a diary only to himself to catalog his “anomalies.”

“I like my desperate gesture of writing here, and the more desperate it is, the more senseless, the more anonymous, the more stuck in the mud of centuries and millennia, of galaxies and metagalaxies it is, the more I like it.” [pg. 380]

When you set out to write about everything, you usually do. That is the beauty and the curse of many big books. Receiving this transference as a reader all comes down to timing in your life and how the prose hits you. He tried to write about everything. Everything wasn’t great. He is being translated so the music of the prose is being played for us. I do not know any Romanian. Not a single word. I don’t know anything about the pacing or the customs of their language system. I am glad there are some people that know these things. I do not. But I do know that it is hard for me to say anything negative about Cărtărescu’s prose, translated for me by Sean Cotter, when he blesses us with sentences touching the divine: “Everything in my bedroom is true: the sheet is a sheet, the plaster is plaster, I am an unimportant mammal who has lived for a moment on Earth.” [pg. 66]

For Cărtărescu, literature is not merely an aesthetic distraction or entertainment, but something far more capable and powerful:

“A book should demand an answer. If it doesn’t—if your gaze ends on its ingenious, inventive, tender, wise, joyful, and wonderful surface instead of pointing you in the direction this book shows—then you have read a literary work and you have missed, once again, the meaning of any human effort: to escape from this world. Novels hold you here, they keep you warm and cozy, they put glittering ribbons on the circus horse. But when, for God’s sake, will you read a real book?” [pg. 210]

The narrator’s insecurities stemming from what he perceives as his own failure as a writer spew directly from the firehose of pressure he places on literature as cosmic and spiritual guide, as maker and interpreter of Meaning, as salvation. His very love for the potentiality of literature to communicate pure energy and connect the reader and the writer in divine communion paralyzes him when it comes to contributing his own private literature to the eternal public scroll. I know something about this.

Specifically, Cărtărescu seeks in literature an answer to the dark question we have been cursed with since the first bite of the apple and our sudden, painful knowledge: the question (fear & curiosity & ignorance & flirtation) of non-being. “Like horror beyond horror, the greatest horror, the mother of all our fears: the fear of an eternity in which you no longer exist.” [pg. 108]

I have struggled with this, as I know many have, my entire life. Recently, I came to something of a an understanding with myself and it goes like this: In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche, in his essay collection The Joyful Pursuit of Knowledge and Understanding, declared “God is dead,” and modernity was birthed from the canal of The Enlightenment. With all this science, and with all this knowledge, how would our moral structures and societal bonds react under the pressure of this existential realization? We could no longer rely on God to organize or explain. Science and Reason were now our masters.

To this day, 140 years later, many lost souls are still stuck sucking for any air in these dark waters. They miss the findings of another brilliant thinker, who, using the same tools of Science and Reason that had murdered our God, proved His existence and unlocked the mystery by proclaiming the necessity of the mystery to the creation and continued sustenance of our physical world.

In 1931, Kurt Gödel published his Incompleteness Theorems, discovering the limitations of science and mathematics to explain our world, and, specifically, to explain themselves. He found there was always going to be a paradox present, a mystery, and that the tools we use to explain the functioning of the world were unable to explain themselves. We could no longer count on mathematics, reason, science, and logic to complete our understanding of the world.

The paradox was found in set theory, in what may sound like logical wordplay games. A set could not contain all sets because it cannot contain (or be consistent with) itself. Gödel found that not only was a paradox present, but a paradox must be present. It serves some critical function in the structure of our universe.

I believe it is in this paradox, within this mystery, where God exists.

Whether my belief is correct or not is, of course, irrelevant. It is a belief, like any other. It helps me during the dark nights of the soul; it soothes me when I look into my children’s eyes and see pain or confusion; it steels me when I face the harder, coarser roads in life. I believe God is the paradox which completes our function. I know that Gödel found a lacking in science to resolve our questions of non-being. I believe, like Cărtărescu, that these questions belong not to the Sciences, but to literature and the Arts. Humanities, we called them.

“…I knew better than anyone that delirium is not the detritus of reality but a part of reality itself, sometimes the most precious part.” [pg. 63]

In Solenoid, in my own private reading, I found a strange fortuity. I followed its thread. I tried to read carefully, for the signs. Irina, the physics teacher at the Bucharest high school and the narrator’s lover, asks him: “What would you do if you could save one thing only from a burning building, and you had to choose between a famous painting and a newborn child?”

The question comes up again and again in Solenoid and permeates the text. It is a question I knew very well, and had just recently permeated my own life + work.

In the pages of Characters, the debut novel I was book touring and podcasting on, traipsing around the country trying to find my readers, I unraveled (through the dirty lens of auto-fiction also traversed by Cărtărescu in Solenoid) the disintegration of a lifelong friendship. The beginning of the end came when my friend, upset that I had written auto-fiction about people and places he knew, asked me a version of the same question, one he had found in a Paris Review interview with Karl Knausgaard.

Interviewed by the Paris Review, Knausgaard told a story about a famous poet who was asked by a journalist whether, escaping from a burning building, he would take “the Rembrandt or the cat.” He chose the cat. “I would do that too,” said Knausgaard, but it is far from clear whether that is true.

Cărtărescu‘s auto-fictional narrator also claims to leave the painting on the wall.

I answered my friend’s question indirectly in Characters, long after we’d stopped speaking directly, in the chapter “Requiem for a Cat.” As I drove from mid-sized American city to mid-sized American city to read aloud from my novel, all while carting Solenoid across the expanse of strip malls and mega church highways, and trying to take in its beauty and its secret messages, I felt this question of choosing art or life riding shotgun with me, or chasing me down unmarked country roads, lost and gaining steam on me, as I pressed the gas pedal for literature, over and over and over again.

I questioned myself constantly. Had I made the right choice? It didn’t feel either right or wrong; it didn’t seem subject to the framework. It didn’t feel like a choice. I had written because I had to write. I had purged because I had something needing purging. What choice? I tricked myself into thinking this was a real question, and almost lost another friend. Thank God, I wasn’t too far gone to miss the signs. I turned around. I said “it can’t be either/or.” I said, “it just has to be.” I am trying to be. I am trying to be literature.

“Like sex, like drugs, like all the manipulations of our minds that attempt to break out of the skull, literature is a machine for producing first beatitude, then disappointment.” [pg. 42]

It was beautiful to sit in the Hotel Trundle writing pretty sentences. What beauty was I producing now, reading stories from a Greensboro punk house night after night, to sell my book or just to say I went on a book tour (I sold very few books). I couldn’t find the beauty. I found plenty of disappointment. I wanted my publisher to take-out full-page ads announcing the arrival of my novel. I wanted royalty checks to feature more zeros. At the very least a comma. I wanted to be interviewed. I wanted my friend to forgive me. I wanted someone to see me read and see their Winston-Salem, their Bucharest. Night after night, Marriott Courtyard after Marriott Courtyard, across America in the Fall, I found disappointment. Nothing I wanted was going to happen. I was living out an idea of myself. I was stuck here. I was going to have to find some other reason to write, some other reason to go on. Or accept incompleteness. Accept incompleteness, and embrace. Perform an incompleteness. Tell an incompleteness. Assign Godly properties and spiritual salvation to an incompleteness, to not knowing, to simply being alive and well enough to wonder.

To stop trying to make literature do so goddamn much, mean so goddamn much, fill a hole the size of a friendship, the size of a life. What does it mean to write this piece at the end of the year where I finally, at the age of 40, entered my own name in the ledger of literature? What did I learn from publishing, from putting my work out there? Was Characters like ‘The Fall,’ and the reception is my own failed literary workshop, as I vow to recede into the wallpaper of this digital salon & hope & pray that my existence as a fiction writer be quickly, summarily forgotten? Am I any closer to finding God, Truth, Love, or Light? Or  am I ruining relationships to selfishly see my name printed clearly on the spine? What should I think about all of this? This is not a rhetorical question. I would appreciate your guidance and candor. I would like to be told what to think. My thoughts are terrifyingly familiar, uneasy, repetitive, and my thoughts, in fact, landed me here at this moment, in this sentence I cannot find the end to, in this literary stew I feel lost and ashamed to have inserted myself into once again, and, yet, also, too, not wanting to be anywhere else or anyone else, I think. I read, sometimes, to steal your thoughts. I write, sometimes, to purge my own.

Solenoid kept me company through the Fall, and will continue to, through other seasons, hopefully less difficult, hopefully some even bright, long after I shut its pages and shelve it in my study, at home at last, next to Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling and Raymond Carver story collections. I traveled with and through the solenoid to the mind, to the city, to the mites, to the center of something hot, alive, gurgling. My own private reading was an experience, fully immersive, shape shifting, a great unsettling.

~~~~~~~~~

The following quotes were instrumental in my reading & response to Solenoid:

This is what we all are, blind mites stumbling along our piece of dust in an unknown, irrational infinity, in the horrible dead end of this world.” [pg. 112]

“In contrast to all of the other cities I’ve been told exist—although it is absurd to believe in Beirut, where you’ll never go—Bucharest is the product of a gigantic mind; it appeared all at once, the result of a single person’s attempt to produce the only city that can say something about humanity.” [pg. 425]

“I was enveloped in a fear that I had never felt before, even in my most terrifying dreams; not of death, not of suffering, not of terrible diseases, not of the sun going dark, but fear at the thought that I will never understand, that my life was not long enough and my mind not good enough to understand. That I had been given many signs and I didn’t know how to read them. That like everyone else I will rot in vain, in my sins and stupidity and ignorance, while the dense, intricate, overwhelming riddle of the world will continue on, clear as though it were in your hand, as natural as breathing, as simple as love, and it flow into the void, pristine and unsolved.” [pg. 311]

THE END.

As an outsider, reporting on stories within niche, relatively closed subcultures is terrifying. Each decision an author faces can feel like an opening trap. The blank page can paralyze, holding us in a suspended state of zugzwang.¹ How you tell a story matters. What order you tell it in. Which details you emphasize. Which details you leave out. When you tell a story. I am not a chess player. I am a fiction reader/writer. I don’t think you need to be a chess player to spot the tactic in this position that will end the game. You only need to know how the pieces move.

This story is complex, like the game it emerges from, but it seeks to answer a deceptively simple question: can human beings play chess? For most of chess’ long, significant history this would have been a ridiculous question to ask. It is now a fundamental one. I am fond of saying I was born in one world and will die in another, to illustrate the pace at which life has changed in my short life thus far (forty years). Specifically, I was born in one millennium and will die in another and that bridge has come to define my entire generation, dismissively and often rudely since my generation, like all generations and any cluster of people anywhere at any time, is insufferable. I was alive when chess was only a game played between two humans. It always signified a great deal more than that, of course. Chess rarely has to strain as metaphor. In my lifetime (1996) the world champion Garry Kasparov played a match against IBM’s supercomputer, Deep Blue, and won (4-2). The following year Deep Blue won (3.5 – 2.5), and now there is easily enough computing power in all of our pockets to defeat any human that has ever or will ever play the game of chess. The game is irreversibly changed.

“Chesse-play is a good and wittie exercise of the mind for some kinds of men, and fit for such melancholy persons as are idle and have impertinent thoughts…”

–  Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy (1626)

Life is suffering. Chess is suffering. To play is to accept suffering. Chess, unlike life, is a solved game. In my own lifetime it was unsolved – perfect play was a distant shore, a chimera. Beauty exposed itself on the board in this quest for enlightenment. The pursuit of this ideal of perfection, like art, gave and conveyed meaning to our idle hours. In our exuberant march to obsolescence as we anxiously crossed over a millennium Godless and overly medicated, in disagreement with nature, we birthed machines and programmed them to attain this perfection over-the-board. Chess became a game of determining the distance between the limits of our mental abilities and those of the machines we serve, at least in part. The art shifted under our feet from the pursuit to the suffering itself. Life is suffering. Chess is suffering. To play is to accept suffering. This was always the case, and still is. The clues to our suffering lie undiscovered and dormant on the board like a rare combination, a brilliant move, two exclamation marks in the notations scribbled in the Grandmaster’s moleskin. The key to our salvation, however, does not. This was also always the case, but in the surety (in the act of knowing), we multiply our suffering.

What the hell am I talking about? This is what I’m talking about. A cheating scandal has rocked the world of professional chess and made international headlines.

A timeline for the uninitiated with a brief detour for vibrating anal beads:²

• The young, brash nineteen-year-old American with a recent meteoric rise in rating to become one of the top fifty chess players in the world, Hans Mote Niemann, defeats the current world champion and highest rated player of all time, the Norwegian Magnus Carlson, in the first game of the Sinquefield Cup in St. Louis on September 4th, 2022, in classical chess, as black.³
  
  
• The next day in an unprecedented and highly controversial move, Magnus Carlson withdraws from the round robin tournament. He is in excellent health and only gives, as way of explanation, a clip of a famous European football coach saying that if he were to speak he would be in trouble. Other grandmasters and commentators immediately fill in the blanks – Hans Niemman has been caught cheating in online chess before and has had his account banned from Chess.com.
  
  
• The next day a fifteen-minute televised delay is instituted in the tournament along with increased security measures (a guy with a wand like a TSA agent checks all players for magnetic devices as they enter the playing hall).⁴

The conflict reveals an existential problem for chess – it is simply quite easy now to cheat. There are sophisticated computer models that can detect cheating. These models are excellent at identifying cheating by your average player. But at the very top level it’s not so simple. I would need a computer to tell me every single move to beat any titled player. That’s not so hard to spot. A 2600+ grandmaster might only need one move at a particular point in the game. In fact, a 2600+ grandmaster might not even need a move at all. When you watch chess online there is an evaluation bar. The computer is tracking the game live and shifting its evaluation of who is winning after each move. It’s not based on human intuition or our creativity. It’s not based on our years of experience or hard study. It is a calculation of the conditions on the board on a level much deeper than any human being could ever achieve alone. Knowing where that calculation bar sits at a critical moment, whether to confirm your intuition or signal you to take more time in a particular position, might be all a 2600+ grandmaster needs to close the gap between his play and his strong human opponent. Most chess tournaments cannot afford security measures of any kind. You could walk into a bathroom and pull out a phone and evaluate any position in literal seconds. Spectators (often made up of coaches and family, individuals with vested, personal interests in the outcome of the game) are free to come and go as they please.⁵

Our ability to play the game is inexorably tied to the trust we have in our opponent to play it fairly. Magnus Carlson does not trust Hans Niemann. He has logical reasons backed by Hans’ own past actions.

• After the fifth round Hans Niemman gave an interview where he admitted he had cheated twice in online chess⁶ (once at 12, once at 16), but never over-the-board and never in tournaments or rated games. He was contrite and emotional. He explained his current drive for chess greatness as stemming from these transgressions. He spent a lot of time defending his weird accent.⁷
  
  
• The next day Chess.com releases a statement that claims Hans was downplaying his past history of cheating on their website and encourages him to reach out with an explanation and response to the evidence they had presented him privately “with the hope of finding a resolution where Hans can again participate on Chess.com.”
• The tournament ends with Hans finishing sixth out of ninth.⁸ During a twitch stream, as the entire chess world was covering the incredible story unfolding, the Canadian grandmaster and popular streamer Eric Hansen joked that one way for Hans to cheat over-the-board irl would be to insert vibrating anal beads that sent him signals on the computer’s best move in any given position. Elon Musk, a cartoonishly evil pale South African billionaire seeking to populate Mars, tweeted out the anal bead theory to his gazillion followers and sent the story into a mainstream stratosphere chess rarely knows.

To the outside world the collective tightening of chess players’ sphincters in all this drama may seem comical, absurd, and quite provincial. I assure you it matters. Recall, chess rarely has to strain. We live in a world psychotically, efficiently designed to steal our attention. An astounding amount of capital and intellectual human labor goes into fighting (for and over) our attention constantly. Digital spaces in this era of hypermodernity are not so subtly impugning our very desire to give something our undivided attention. We often chalk it up to our lack of ability and try to escape these conditions chemically, to mixed results rife with unintended consequences. A game that trains our focus on the present moment is very, very valuable. Locking away our devices and learning to sit with our thoughts unencumbered by the smartly designed distractions beckoning us to disassociate, searching instead for a hidden combination or spotting a threat, recalling a past position, preparing a reply to external conditions with incomplete, imperfect information is very, very valuable.

• Due to some existing contractual obligations, Magnus and Hans were both already scheduled to play again, in the Julius Baer Generation Cup, online, in Round Six on Monday September 19th. Hans opens the game with D4, pushing the Queen’s pawn to the center as he begins the fight.

• Magnus plays Knight to F6 as black, in response to Hans’ D4. This opening response, broadly characterized as the Indian Defence, is a hypermodern opening which could lead to the Nimzo-Indian Defence, a Modern Benoni, the Catalan, King’s Indian, Grünfeld Defence, and even some standard lines in the Queen’s Gambit declined.

• Hans plays the most common reply, C4, staking an even stronger claim to the center of the board. At this stage, Magnus’ reply will begin to further clarify the opening and the type of game they will be playing.

Trust is critical for two humans to play. What about forgiveness? Chess study is now entirely linked to engines. During training and preparation, players run chess engines and the computer trains them on moves, positions, openings, tactics, etc…The computer teaches us how to play better chess.  Less than two decades ago we were teaching the computer. This shift matters, and the implications matter. At one point we theorized these implications. Now we live them. Games are much more likely to be drawn (perfect play in chess strives for equality), and bluffing (trying to catch an opponent off guard or out of their preparation with a less than ideal move), while always an important facet of the game, is now perhaps one of the only ways to upset the march to equality at the highest levels. Hans did not turn off his engine while playing games online. We don’t know how often he did this. We will never know. He was young. He was anxious to get to a higher rating online to improve his prospects as a chess streamer. He has asked for forgiveness. Can human beings play chess?

• Magnus resigns. Magnus refuses to play Hans in chess. His resignation pours gasoline on the fire. He was not preparing for a Modern Benoni or the Grünfeld. The online site they were playing on requires that a player make one move before resigning. Magnus moved his knight to F6 to prepare for his next and final move of the game, resignation.

The commentators and professional chess watchers and fans erupted in shock. Magnus was disrespecting the game. It was not sporting. His behavior had negative impacts on the tournaments, on the standings and match-ups and other players not involved in their game. Magnus was draining some of his considerable social capital, without speaking or providing any explanation, on a principle.

It became clear that Magnus knew of the allegations and suspicions against Hans prior to losing to him in the Sinquefield Cup. Even Magnus’ most recent challenger for the World Chess Championship, the Russian grandmaster Ian Nepomniachtchi⁹ stated that he had reached out to the event organizers of the Sinquefield Cup to protest Hans’ inclusion¹⁰ due to the cheating suspicions. Why, then, did Magnus play him in St. Louis? His detractors, and there are many, argue that Magnus withdrawing from the tournament was an emotional reaction to losing. They rush to comment sections everywhere to shout, “Sore loser!” It is not, of course, outside the realm of possibility that Hans did somehow cheat to beat Magnus as black in classical chess in St. Louis, though it seems increasingly unlikely given the reports of the arbiter and analysis from many fellow grandmasters and the computer models. Did he even have to cheat to defeat Magnus? Was it not enough to allow for the possibility that he might or that he could? Would that germ of an idea stick somewhere in Magnus and begin poisoning his own play? Could he trust Hans? Perhaps if he beat him (he was ranked 200 points higher than him and playing as white) he could start to silence his own doubts and quietly move on to the next round. When he sat across from Hans, the human being, was he stricken with doubt and fear? Was he playing Hans or the computer?

Magnus has certainly been confounding and occasionally infuriating the chess world lately. His decision to not play Nepomniachtchi in defense of his world title is something of an emotional lightning rod for fans and grandmaster peers alike. Magnus Carlsen is the best chess player in the world and can play whoever he wants, and this makes people mad. There is nothing Magnus Carlson has to prove to chess. Chess has to prove to him that it means something – that it is a real thing, that it was worth his considerable mind.

He is not the first world champion to leverage his position or dictate his terms.

In 1857 the first great American player, Paul Morphy (1837-1884), traveled to Europe to try to convince the world’s best player at the time, the Englishman Harry Staunton (1810-1874), to play him. Staunton refused. Morphy played and beat a number of masters, but never got his shot against Staunton. After returning home his interest in competitive chess waned considerably. In 1875 he began suffering from paranoid delusions and he died in 1884.

The second official World Champion, the German Emmanuel Lasker (1868-1941) was heavily criticized for requesting high fees to play in matches. His successor, the Cuban Jose Raul Capablanca (1888-1942), continued in the tradition and set the price to pay him at $10,000. Perhaps most famously, the American Bobby Fischer (1943-2008) refused to play Game 2 of his World Championship match against the Russian Boris Spassky (1937-) in 1972 in Reykjavik during the white-hot center of the cold war. Fischer wanted all cameras and spectators removed from the playing area. After forfeiting Game 2 and heading to the airport to return home to Brooklyn, Henry Kissinger called and begged him to play for the honor of his country. Spassky agreed to play the third match in a smaller room away from the crowds and Fischer was ultimately victorious in the match (7-3-11) despite giving away the second game.

Magnus finally speaks for himself on the matter, instead of letting the chess speak for itself, and cryptically name drops a coach of Hans’, GM Maxim Dlugy, crediting him with Hans’ spectacular rise. It’s a clever, calculated move. Dlugy is an admitted cheater. Chess.com goes so far as to release e-mails between them and Dlugy. Vice runs an article.  After winning the Julius Baer Generation Cup in simply incredible form with veritable ease despite forfeiting his game to Hans, Magnus releases a statement. He hints that Hans’ legal team has restricted him from commenting further. The New York Times releases a story written by Greg Keener, a FIDE master and assistant manager of the famed Marshall Chess Club in New York. In it, Keener makes the salacious, but strange, claim that if Hans is not cheating then “he may already be the best player in the world.”¹¹

Surely refusing to play someone you suspect of cheating in the game you are the unquestionable best in the world at is not somehow more egregious than blatantly ducking your opponent (Staunton, Riddick Bowe), for pure financial gain (Lasker, Capablanca), or to create more favorable winning conditions (Fischer). Yet you will have no trouble finding scores of chat pros across the internet accusing Magnus of throwing a temper tantrum after Hans beat him in St. Louis. Did he react emotionally? Of course he did. Did he react emotionally because he lost a game to a young, brash lower rated player? Or did he react emotionally because he lost to something else? A computer or his doubts and fears. His fears the game cannot be played, fairly, between two humans, any longer. And the subsequent repudiation of a lifetime of study and sacrifice to a game. Magnus Carlson is having an emotional reaction. Is he allowed this? Can human beings play chess? (+)

Was there a better, more pleasant way to handle the position? There almost always is. It is very difficult for us, as humans, to find it. Can Magnus be forgiven? Can Hans? Are we capable of something approaching grace? Is everything only ever black and white? Magnus Carlson is having an emotional reaction. Is he allowed this? Can human beings play chess? (+)

Chess is a patient game. It is a game of sustained, unwavering attention to the present situation. It stands to reason Magnus Carlson would move carefully and deliberately. This story is not over.¹² Nothing has been resolved. We stand on the sidelines straining toward the possibility of a catastrophic stalemate. My thoughts circle in on themselves and return to the same position again and again. I am having an emotional reaction. Am I allowed this? Can human beings play chess? (+) ½ ½

 **********

Acknowledgements:

I could not have written this story without the following incredible resources:

• GM Hikaru Nakamura’s coverage on his twitch stream
• GM Daniel Naroditsky’s coverage on his twitch stream
• Chessbrah’s coverage on their twitch stream
• The Perpetual Chess Podcast with Ben Johnson
• C Squared Podcast with GMs Fabiano Caruana and Cristian Chirila
• GM Ian Nepomniachtchi’s Podcast ‘Lachesis Without Q’
• The books The History of a Game by Richard Eales & Chess: A History by Harry Golombek
• r/chess & chat pros everywhere

SETTING:

My algorithm blinks + buzzes for weeks with cryptic signs, sigils, and digital monuments, triangulations from a block, maybe two, in the lower east side of Manhattan. Why did it choose me? I am afraid of New York. I live down south, in the flaccid, comforting exurbs, ten minutes to an apartment my aging parents rent, ten minutes to the ballfield, ten minutes to the pool, ten minutes to the Circle K, ten minutes to everything and nothing. Much of my life plays out in one of three rooms, all of them separated by very few footsteps.

I take an unhealthy interest in the lives of others. I begin to take notes and fixate on certain lines buried in cultural commentary:

• “She had to figure out a way to pitch to her boomer editors whatever she was going to write about this corner of the downtown scene, “Dimes Square,” “angelicism,” and so on.” (Mike Crumplar, mcrumps Substack, 05/27/22)
• “But in these days of anti-woke film festivals and blackpilled Substacks, the proper noun ‘Dimes Square’ signifies a bit more than it used to, looming larger in the city’s imagination, having become a concept, a chimera, a state of mind.” (Will Harrison, The Baffler, 05/24/22)
• “You’re supposed to laugh at the backstabbing coke-binging clout chasers not because of how alien they are but because of how familiar they are. You’re one of them.” (Mike Crumplar, mcrumps Substack, 03/01/22)
• “Performed in packed lofts across town – I attended a showing in an apartment belonging to novelist Joshua Cohen, recently awarded a Pulitzer prize for his novel The Netanyahus – the play dramatises the petty rivalries and self-serving ambitions of the scene.” (Nick Burns, The New Statesman, 05/26/22)

To expel these intrusive transmissions, I write a parody of an ending to an imaginary article and post it immediately on twitter – doggedly proud of my abilities to dissect and distill the coverage of a scene and a group of artists I know absolutely nothing about in ten minutes from the comfort of my iPhone.

It quells nothing. The buzzing gets louder.

I decide I want to read the play Dimes Square by Matthew Gasda and actually review the piece of art as it appears on the page. I reach out. I find him responsive, polite, and he agrees to send me the unpublished play to review. The distance between us is immediately evident when, in that first (and still only) conversation between us he tells me I should put the play on myself, in a house down here, and I explain if I did so it would only be for the pleasure of my kids’ friends’ parents.

I. SCAFFOLDING:

The epigraph, from William Gaddis’ The Recognitions, sets the stage both in themes and atmosphere.

Thematically, we are going to venture into a world of artists, the dregs of their work, and their human shambles. But The Recognitions quote does more than that too, as it immediately recalls the lengthy, dense yet uproariously funny party scenes, over hundreds and hundreds of pages, satirizing the bohemians, beatniks, and New York socialites of Gaddis’ own era. Textually, as I wanted to experience this work of art, it is an incredibly effective introduction to what unfolds. That Dimes Square is not itself a satire won’t settle itself for another ninety-nine pages.

The setting is an apartment in the eponymous block in the lower east side of Manhattan. “Foucault stacks on the floor…” along with detailed, hyper-specific stage directions on how, when, and how much coke to do serve as the only atmosphere we need to immediately locate ourselves.

The cast of characters is eleven scenesters. Most of them in their twenties or just thirty. One 19-year-old. A 45-year-old and 55-year-old. They are writers, editors, students, musicians, artists, filmmakers, a journalist and a fashionista. The action is simple: they sit on the couch, in various combinations, and smoke cigarettes and do coke and talk shit about the scene and each other and themselves.

II. SCENE:

The coverage of the play, and the scene, at times inseparable, loves to focus on the status and celebrity of certain cast members. A famous novelists’ talented daughter! A well-respected literary critic! Performed in the living room of a Pulitzer-Prize winning Novelist! It adds something to the allure of seeing it, for certain, but it also hints at something deeper: the desire of the critical playgoer to inhabit the lives of the cast and characters — both real and personae (intertwined in service of both the play and the century we find ourselves in) — and when the critic does not get what they want (and how could they?) they pan it or mock it or focus entirely on its (light, minor) transgressions or imagined politics.

The social dynamics will be familiar to any artist navigating a world mediated by access. At one point early on, Iris, the “MFA Poet,” asks the writer, Stefan, “who even let him into the scene? Was it you?” 

We want to be in that living room with those people having those conversations and doing those drugs. We watch the scene unfold. We watch the uncomfortably familiar social climbing inherent in any scene, and we watch them perform a version of their lives we imagine. The parasocial relationship is front and center in the play and our everyday lives.

This might be a world where a passing mention in a Substack or an inside joke in a podcast denotes clout and acceptance. But the characters here didn’t make the world. They just have the unfortunate luck of living in it and Matthew Gasda is reporting live from it. The characters seem like they are having fun and, if I had to guess, this is a big part of why the coverage of the play and the scene is itself so joyless, either due to our jealously, FOMO, or just basic puritanical guilt keeping us from imbibing in the same unabashed revelry when we are constantly told how awful everything is.

The characters in Dimes Square are not immune to the awfulness. They live in the same world as their audience. The hedonistic thirst for drugs, sex, art, belonging, and recognition is a stubborn refusal to wallow in it and resign themselves to trauma (their own or of the collective) as identity.

Like anyone else, they are constantly obsessing over their petty human dramas. Midway through the play, Bora, the Cinematographer, tells Stefan, “You surround yourself with people you secretly hold in contempt.” Scenes, and in particular countercultures, are brilliant breeding grounds for resentments and Gasda is at his best as a writer when he digs all the way into the neurosis and insecurities of his creations.

There is also no shying away from the particular indignities of our hybrid digital/physical lives. Who follows who, who said what on twitter, who messaged who; all of it flows as easily as who saw who where, who’s fucking who, or who has the drugs tonight. The line between these two spaces, digital and physical, is as intentionally paper thin as the line between cast and character. This is a play, at least on the page, so drenched in naturalism that it can feel more like we are peeping into a Dimes Square apartment than experiencing a theatrical production. This effect is dizzying, intoxicating. During the pandemic social lives ground to a halt. The parties shut down, the bars and clubs closed, and we became floating heads with filters, avatars for a life we wish we had. We became desperate, lusty voyeurs. Matthew Gasda expertly feeds our desires by bringing a scene to a living room and selling tickets to ogle, gawk, and leer.

The characters even worry about their own balance:

     KLAY:     Fuck, I’m way too online aren’t I?

     IRIS:         You’re like, Tweeting as we speak, so.

Ashley, the youngest at 19, a college student, is able, perhaps through the clarity of youth, to sense there is something sinister in the scene she’s found herself in. This leads to one of the more poignant moments of the play when she asks Rosie, an artist, if she should “like really invest time in this world?” After a definitive no, Rosie distills the scene perfectly in one beautiful, universal line, “It’s a bunch of social climbers railing coke at 4am shitting on their so-called friends.” In this way the audience is not let off the hook for their own desire to sit on that couch and rail coke and shit on, and with, these people, for access and even, perhaps, a shot at acclaim. The participants are never unaware of their roles, either on the page or in the streets.

Are they obnoxious & pretentious & petty & miserable? Of course. They’re fucking scene kids. They are also brilliant & funny & sexy & real. There is no dignified way to be a human being.

III.  SPECTRUM:

Much of the coverage of the scene is devoted to their politics. Their ideology. Their vibe shift. Whispers, everywhere. Angelicism. Catholicism. Peter Thiel money.¹ Transgressive. Anti-Woke. Aristocratic. There is the spectre of a philosophy at the heart of this nascent collection of beautiful freaks and weirdos.

I wanted to study the text. I wanted to experience the art for myself, in my preferred style and investigate like a kid with a Visceral Realist super-secret decoder ring.

There are philosophers scattered throughout the text. The three sentence setting instruction calls for stacks of Foucault “on the floor.” A character talks over another with a Nietzsche name drop. A dig on the “ideology of a professional managerial class.”  Rosie admits to being “really into Catholicism lately.” Stefan needles Terry, the filmmaker, about starting a Delueze reading group then a Benjamin reading group, Adorno and Zizek. But all of it is in the service of atmosphere over allegory. These are signifiers for an in-group, like green matcha tea or Ukraine Flags for their Williamsburg brethren. All of the philosophers, theorists, and religious curiosity do is suggest a sincere, serious search for truth, meaning, and intellectual stimulation. They don’t seem willing to accept the status quo but if everything is so awful then why would any sane, loving person accept the status quo?

There is a veiled reference to those infamous Thiel Bux when Terry, discussing the realities of financing a film, says: “There are so many things in my head that want to get out. That’s all I care about. Scrounging for resources is a necessary evil. Dealing with sociopaths is a necessary evil.” 

As to an actual philosophy present in the text? Any that does exist is presented as fairly standard young nihilism, an affect more than anything else. There are cracks in this superficial nihilistic candy-coated shell, of course. Fittingly, they come from the youngest, Ashley, presumably the least dead inside as yet: “I just don’t know how much longer I can pretend to be this person who doesn’t feel anything.”  It certainly seems more indebted to Less Than Zero than a Céline pamphlet. 

Why the obsession over their politics and ideology? We live in a time of ideological purity without any decent, feasible ideologies. Communism and socialism? It’s resource hoarding time as we all collectively hurdle toward less and less usable natural resources and you think we can Robert’s Rules our way to peace, love, and happiness? There is so much more death, destruction, and decay coming our way before we get anywhere resembling there. There will be rubble before there will be revolution and some of us have to live through this part too. In 2022, a political ideology might tell us practically nothing about who someone is and everything about how someone copes. The dusty old rags and liberal institutionalists chasing down the ghost of a young, alt-right Manhattan fear a great reshuffling, as it threatens to throttle their corporate power. The barbarians are the gate & they/them are sipping limoncello in Bushwick, Beverly Hills, and Brussels while the rest of us fags argue about the word ‘retard.’  

The political philosophy underlying Gasda’s chattering class of today’s bohemians is, if anything at all, one of desperately wanting some alternative to all the shitty political options and identities available to them. This hits me as a universal urge shared by every young group of interesting, bright, sexy, smart artists and thinkers that ever lived or probably ever will. Towards the end of the play Iris, the twenty-five-year-old MFA poet, complains to Klay, the thirty-year old “Journo dude,” of having no means to meaningfully dissent.

     KLAY:     Dissenting to what?

     IRIS:         The way things are.

****

The thread holding the scaffolding, the scene, and the spectrum together is what the play ultimately celebrates and achieves: great art. There is still fun to be had in the creating, witnessing, and talking about great art. There is a tremendous monologue by Dave, the elder, accomplished novelist, three-quarters of the way through the play, where he eviscerates a fellow writer. It is so well-written, blade so well honed, an absolute blast to read and re-read aloud.

Several pages later, Chris, the oldest of the group, and Dave’s editor, lays into a young writer and it speaks to me also as a sturdy dissertation on the difference between what they are performing in this play (& what they also perform in real life, each night, in apartments across the lower east side of Manhattan and in Brussels, Berlin, even somehow Toronto) and the work of art itself. “…you don’t tell your kids about meeting ‘relatively clever’ at a party. No. Hell no. You get hard for shit that will survive over time…”

As the work of art itself, Dimes Square is, on the page, decadent and delicious. I fucking loved it.

From a distance. Dimes Square from a distance, on the page, is an exotic, enticing subject. I viewed Dimes Square from a distance, in the theater of the mind. I see Dimes Square in the distance, filling me with quixotic fantasies (like so much great art). I regard Dimes Square at a distance, unconcerned and blessedly disconnected from the clout wars and social climbers jockeying for a spot on the fire escapes of Chinatown, and am instead touched by the beauty in its vanity, and delight in its narcissistic charms.

I love an LA novel. By way of introduction, I will not bombard you with my own relationship with Los Angeles. By way of introduction, I will not define a Los Angeles. I was born and raised and live and raise my own children and will die in an American South, far removed from the Chateau Marmont.

Los Angeles is both real and not, ephemeral and enduring. Images of Los Angeles, through the years, saturate our shared consciousness, direct from the lens of the finest and flimsiest auteurs. When an author sits down to write a Los Angeles, they are wrestling always with our own store of images. It is like this for any place, but it is like this more with Los Angeles.

Los Angeles is our last try, and the greyhound busses still drop off fresh cornhuskers and hillbillies every day, to dream and propagate and populate our imaginations. Los Angeles lives for the imagination.

There are two kinds of LA novels, and maybe even more than that. There is the glamorous Los Angeles. There is the grimy Los Angeles. And in both there is a grotesque Los Angeles.

And oh, those canyons, with their literary names and the way sound does (and does not) reverberate. Snarled freeways and car chases. Helter Skelter, Kato Kaelin, The Viper Room, Skid Row, the Musso and Frank Grill, flop houses, and infinity pools. Everyone and everything naked.

By way of introduction, I love an LA novel. Life is too short to read shitty books, so I asked some of my favorite authors, readers, publishers, booksellers, and friends to tell me their favorite LA novel. These are their stories:

• Alexandra Naughton (author of A Place A Feeling Something He Said to You, 2020 Spooky Girlfriend Press)

My favorite LA novel doesn’t feel like an LA novel– it doesn’t go the Hollywood route despite the references to movies and filmmaking scattered throughout, and it’s not another noir detective novel. I adore The Loved One because it’s dry as fresh cremains, morbidly hilarious, and features a love triangle between a British expat poet who’s a total cad, an uncultured mortuary beautician who consults a newspaper columnist for all her important life decisions, and her creepily gleeful middle-aged boss who lives over the thumb of his overbearing mother. Oh, and there’s a parrot funeral.

• Alexandrine Ogundimu (author of the novellas Desperate, Agitation, and Zeke, and the forthcoming novel The Longest Summer)

My LA novel is Play It as it Lays by Joan Didion.

I’ve never been to LA and have no idea if the LA sections constitute a versimilitudinous depiction of the city. My love of this text is born of its concision, its tightness. There’s nothing wasted, to the point it compresses itself into adamant beauty, a diamond of pure vice so brilliant it burns to look at it, even as it compels the reader.

• Allie Rowbottom (author of JELL-O GIRLS, Little, Brown, 2018; and AESTHETICA, Soho Press 2022)

BODY HIGH by Jon Lindsey

Though it’s been years, I still remember the first time. Sunday, sunset, on the couch in my faux tuscan prefab apartment in a Santa Clarita cul de sac. Palm tree shadows snuck across the carpet, the page, the words like wounds in pale flesh, a language of late summer light; I disappeared into their unity. 

• Brian Alan Ellis   (runs House of Vlad Press, and is the author of several books, including Sad Laughter (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2018) and Hobbies You Enjoy (serialized daily on Instagram:  @hobbiesyouenjoy). His writing has appeared at Juked, Hobart, Fanzine, Mon­keybicycle, Elec­tric Literature, Forever Mag, X-R-A-Y, Heavy Feather Review, and Yes Poetry, among many other places. He lives in Florida)

My favorite LA novel (besides Body High by Jon Lindsey, which I published) is The Road to Los Angeles by the late, great John Fante, author of another important, and better known, LA novel, Ask the Dust, which was made into a hella mediocre movie in 2006, starring Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek, but The Road to Los Angeles, Fante’s first novel, a prequel to Ask the Dust published posthumously, is his best work, in my opinion, giving an early, hungry voice to one of the great characters in literary history, Arturo Bandini, who navigates the poor, working class world with humor and truth, struggling to pay the rent while moonlighting as a would-be famous writer, ultimately influencing Bukowski, but doing it earlier, better and in less problematic fashion, coming off as a grittier and more juicy anti-Catcher in the Rye.

• Chandler Morrison (Author of Along the Path of Torment and Human-Shaped Fiends)

Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis

It should come as no surprise to anyone even half-familiar with me that my favorite LA novel is also my favorite novel of all time, and one that I reread every year without fail. Imperial Bedrooms perfectly embodies the dark, lonely glamor of the city, and its ghoulishly vapid and narcissistic characters are perhaps the most accurate representation of LA’s populace that’s ever been put to page. The spare prose cuts like a scalpel; there’s not a word out of place, and each sentence contributes to a chilly sense of simmering dread that keeps escalating until its gutshot finale.

• Chris Kelso (award-winning Scottish writer. His latest book, which he edited with David Leo Rice, Children of the New Flesh: the early work and pervasive influence of David Cronenberg is due out from 11:11 Press summer 2022)

High Life by Matthew Stokoe

There seem to be three visions projected over the canvas of LA:

• One is of La-La Land – a place of glamour and splendor; gorgeous people sunning themselves beneath canopies along Venice Beach. A place of perpetual sunshine. A place where dreams are made.
• Another is of the graveyard of cold, cool, oxycontin-addicted, washed-up, mentally ill Hollywood casualties – the tragic wannabes of Tinseltown you’ll find in Joan Didion and Bret Easton Ellis novels. Where dreams can become nightmares.
• Then there’s Matthew Stokoe’s High Life, which presents LA as a Grand Guignol of hedonistic hyper-violent excess. A place where nightmares eat dreams for breakfast.

This book truly shocked me. Also, the writing is so assured and crisp. There is a standard noir narrative hidden beneath the horror – there’s a man on a mission. He finds clues. But the scenes of deprivation are so memorable they become the thrust of the novel for me. When I got over the initial shock, I found myself willing every scene to one-up itself. Stokoe doesn’t disappoint. Like Bruce Wagner, he makes voyeurs of us all. It’s a book I will never forget. It’s not just an inversion of the Hollywood fantasy, the book is a literary dare.

• Claire Hopple (author of four fiction books, XRAY editor)

How to Get into the Twin Palms by Karolina Waclawiak

“…it scared me to think that these people might have had a clue once and then had just given up and started wearing khaki shorts.” This book showed me a side of LA I didn’t know existed. The characters are memorable and the sentences are sharp. 

• Cory Bennet (lives in Ohio with his wife and stepson)

I was introduced to Tony O’Neill by my wife, Mila. I read Digging the Vein while in rehab in Vallejo, California. It’s autofiction, it’s unsentimental, it’s not corny. Everything sucks and I love it.

• Danielle Chelosky (writer with work in Hobart and X-R-A-Y Lit)

My favorite LA novel is My Face for the World to See by Alfred Hayes.

I could have picked The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West because they are both entrenched in the same themes of disillusionment portrayed through ill-fated young women who see Hollywood as a vessel through which they can achieve their dreams, but Hayes is a lyrical, evocative writer whose 1958 novel is able to find love and intense feeling amongst the cynicism even if it does not end well. Hayes is critically underrated and incredibly skilled at showing the human tendency toward despair be mended by the persistent, irresistible sliver of hope that comes and goes.

• Derek Maine (CHAR  ACT    ERS, 2022 Expat Pres)

I love an LA novel. I love Dreams of Bunker Hill by Fante because he wrote it poolside, dictating it to his wife, legless and dying, and it remembers a Los Angeles and I am obsessed with memory and I am scared of Los Angeles. I love an LA novel. I love Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis because he wrote it in the present tense, as it was happening, as a teenager. There was no leakage or time for memory to shine or spoil. But my favorite is The Grifters by Jim Thompson. It was also the first R rated movie I remember seeing, as I watched it uncomfortably in the sunken blue couch next to my father. He used to let me stay up and watch whatever he was watching as long as I didn’t bug him. I liked that a lot.

• Elizabeth V Aldrich (bonafide Valley Girl but makes up for it by being absolutely insane)

The Magician by Christopher Zeischegg is her favorite LA novel. Why? Because it is. It captures the dark magic of Los Angeles. it is, and she doesn’t need to explain why so much as you simply need to read it. Plus it has way more drugs than Less Than Zero. BACK TO FIRST PERSON:  I have spent a fuckton of time reenacting the Julian/$500 abortion scene at the Sherman Oaks Galleria and eating pie and coffee at Du-Pars. I stole Less Than Zero from Grover Cleveland High, where I went for a total of six months.

• Gabriel Hart (author of Virgins in Reverse/The Intrusion)

My favorite Los Angeles novel in most recent memory is “Permission” by Marc Kristal (Atmosphere Press, 2021). While largely overlooked, I wrote about it in LA Review of Books last February, where I hoped to get more eyes on this Nabokov-Noir. It’s premise only seems passé at first — a failing screenwriter descends into a maelstrom of drugs and prostitutes, but the layers it pulls back, and the tender cores that are revealed, the reader will never see coming. It’s incredible.
 

• Garrett Frame (author of Adult Situations and The Apprentices Supper)

Doc Sportello, stoned, wandering around the beaches and undercovering plots in a land where billionaires and dead bass players mingle, and Vegas is two bumps and a drive away if you’re feeling nasty. Inherent Vice is not the most representative LA novel, nor the finest. But it is my favorite. And the movie is even better. What’s more LA than that?

• Garth Miró (author of The Vacation, 2022 ExPat Press) 

Jon Lindsey’s Body High:

You should not read too many things about LA. There is a desperation there that seeps in, and soon you’re walking around examining seriously such ridiculous ideas as lifestyle. But read this book, and maybe only this book, and then call your dealer immediately.

• W Griffin Hancock (ceremonial eunuch-at-large)

Ruthless Little Things, by Elizabeth V. Aldrich – The only rule of being a great writer is “never stop doing hot girl shit”. Nobody understands this better than Eris. The first time I read this book, I had to stop halfway through for a cigarette and a nap, because it made me feel thoroughly post-coital.

• Jesse Hilson (author of Blood Trip, 2022 Close to the Bone)

My favorite LA novel currently would have to be The Marvel Universe: Origin Stories by Bruce Wagner which came out last year I think. I’ve loved Wagner’s novels about the stupendously wealthy and the struggling poor in Hollywood since I discovered him in the ‘90s. I would recommend any of his novels (in particular Force Majeure, Dead Stars, I’m Losing You), because LA is his chosen milieu and the books are dark, hilarious, illuminating, sad, and full of up-to-the-nanosecond pop culture currency and relevance about fame and wealth in America.

• Jon Lindsey (author of Body High, House of Vlad Press)

A lot of people will overthink this because the answer is clear as California light: Ask the Dust

• Josh Sherman (author of CHARM REDUCTION, a collection of poems and stories forthcoming on Gob Pile Press)

Eve’s Hollywood, the first book by Eve Babitz, is probably not a novel, yet it is often categorized this way — likely for simplicity’s sake, or maybe saleability. But format is beside the point. From the start, Babitz had her voice, and it’s the least contaminated by literary influence that I’ve ever come across. And, so, whenever I return at random to one of the scrappy vignettes in this “novel” of mid-century L.A., I’m eternally jealous of her raw talent, self-assurance, and style.

• Karter Mycroft (co-creator of the interactive fiction anthology Los Suelos, CA)

I’d probably have to say Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson. I listened to the audiobook shortly after I moved here in 2016, and remember being consistently awestruck by the sentence writing, the way Gibson twists and untangles his thoughts with such careful attention to rhythm and assonance. I was working a soul-sucking office job downtown at the time and would always catch myself pulling in late to a greasy 6th floor parking garage thinking “yes, this is me, this is my Sprawl”… Also, what a title!

• Liz Freeman (bookseller, writer, artist)

Girl Goddess #9 by Francesca Lia Block

I don’t remember the exact first time I encountered Francesca Lia Block’s Los Angeles (11, maybe 12) but I do remember that it was a lot like the San Diego I had known my whole life: dry wind that carried witchcraft, scraping your hands on boiling hot stucco, the sky in fluorescent layers of orange grey purple, the old cars permanently sun tanning in neighborhood driveways, the bougainvillea, the nasturtiums, the hills of ice plant, the rocky dry dirt in patches studded with broken glass and weeds which bloomed into yellow flowers which turned into dandelions which then blew apart …. that this adult, a published author no less, saw what I saw and deemed it worthy of sharing? That she wrote these stories and the people in them were freaks, musicians, artists; girls who had a single mom, like me?? Unfathomable. If this Los Angeles, her Los Angeles, was beautiful and strange and worthy then my place was, too. I was, too.

• Manuel A. Marrero (Founder/Editor-in-Chief Expat Press)

My choice is A Scanner Darkly (1977) by Philip K. Dick. For a dystopian sci-fi novel, there is no more accurate depiction of the way tweakers think and communicate that has ever existed in literature. The narrator’s developing brain damage and his deteriorating connection with reality is harrowing and deeply relatable to anyone who’s ever been dependent on drugs. It is also a dizzying, cutting indictment of the drug war complex on a societal level, and captures the kind of paranoia Dick himself experienced hosting drug-addled parties in LA.

• Mila Jaroniec (author of Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover, Split Lip Press)

Charles Bukowski’s WOMEN is one of my favorite novels that happens to be an LA novel. I read it in a wine bar in Ohio, far away from racetracks and sun, before I found out I was pregnant. The absurdity and joyful despair kept my chin up through uncertainty and shock.

• Ryan Alexander (co-host, the VOLLMANNIA podcast)

The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy

Despite hailing from California, I’ve always resisted the allure of Los Angeles; San Francisco suited me better. James Ellroy transplanted his experience of his mother’s murder onto the killing of Elizabeth Short, and in so doing, created my favorite novel about my least favorite cultural capitol. Bucky’s grisly discovery on a beach clinched it for me – a transcendent flash of giallo neon amongst the monochromatic noir.

• Ryan Madej (writer, reviewer, editor. Recent book, Assassin 2021 Equus Press)

My pick for LA Novel is The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler.

To me, The Long Goodbye epitomizes what the hardboiled detective novel should be: hot nights and cold women; whiskey and cigarettes; mystery and intrigue, but at the same time Chandler describes what I imagine old Los Angeles was like–or to put it more precisely, my ideal Los Angeles. The Los Angeles that exists outside of the real and can never corrode, disappear and fall into the ocean. A beautiful city until the sun goes down…a flash of light, a dream.

• Sofia Haugen (Sports Correspondent (Unofficial), The Last Estate)

Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland (Neversoft/Activision, 2005) is a compelling narrative of crime, betrayal, lust, rebellion, justice, art, friendship, and (most importantly) skateboarding. While it is not, strictly speaking, or even loosely speaking, a novel, it is one of the truest expressions of the mid-2000s American zeitgeist, and its inexplicable punk-covers-by-emo-bands soundtrack was a massive contribution to my terrible taste in music.

• Stuart Buck (Author of Quantum Diaper Punks, eic Bear Creek Gazette)

I recommend Bruce Wagner’s Marvel Universe Origin Stories, a book about LA people being disgusting LA People. It’s about people becoming literal and metaphorical birds. It’s amazing and sick. Like the city itself.

• Troy James Weaver (Wichita Stories, Temporal, Visions, Marigold)

The Day of the Locust has perfectly rendered characters, in a stripped back yet poetic prose style. The beginning and ending are pitch perfect. It is one of those rare novels that retains a modernity almost a hundred years after it was first published and makes the case that Nathanael West was every bit as good a writer as his more well-known contemporaries.

• William Duryea (Editor-in-Chief, Misery Tourism)

My favorite LA novel is Ham on Rye, because at no point while reading it did I get the impression that Bukowski wanted me to feel that there was anything romantic, exceptional, demonic, or unique about Los Angeles, an overexposed city that makes me thankful that tax incentives exist to seduce and cajole Hollywood directors and television producers to occasionally film anywhere else. Ham on Rye is a novel full of banality, pettiness, and desperation, but there’s no indication that those traits are a function of the city where the novel is set; instead they expose a vacancy we all share: the vast distance between our pretensions and ideals and the vapid, ugly reality of living. Henry’s shitty, painful adolescence could be anyone’s, anywhere, at any time; his despair is universal. 

MARCH 14th 2022

I leave for Jamaica in less than thirty-six hours. I have smoked weed every night for a little over a year. I do not know how to get weed in another country because I am awkward and uncomfortable around other people and the D.A.R.E. program in Fifth Grade left an indelible mark on my psyche. My plan was to smuggle edibles in my children’s Whole Foods Multi-Vitamin gummies, but I have run into some trouble on the internet.  

I read a story about a man flying from Baltimore to Montego Bay in July of 2021. He is detained for possession of THC gummies and misses his flight. I cannot miss this flight. My children are very excited about their first trip out of the country. The other family vacation we tried to take during COVID ended in disaster on the first day and we’re all scarred and it is very, very important that I not miss this flight.

A few more clicks and I find a hookah lounge that sells weed, supposedly, not far from our all-inclusive resort. Instructions are vague. Reviews are mixed. Logistics are terrifying. I ditch the original plan to unwittingly drug mule my elementary-school-aged children and decide, instead, to use my powers as a writer for good and pen The Definitive Guide on How to Buy Weed in Jamaica.

The trip begins the night before, with screaming. My anxieties and my wife’s anxieties are engaged in a skirmish, a kind of wrest for control. The trip has taken on more weight than either of us can safely hold. And so here we are – arguing about check-in times, how early we need to leave for the airport, and I’m pacing, uncontrollably tense, obsessing over my stack of books. I am hesitant to include the titles I carry with me, for fear their inevitable intrusion into the text will be too glaringly obvious and I’ll be hung and quartered as a fraud, the indisputable copycat. But the books you bring on vacation are the most important decision you will make. The balance is key. Potential moods must be vetted and accounted for. You once sat in a holding cell for eight hours with only a stapled thesis paper on Heart of Darkness from an admittedly strikingly-fall-to-your-knees gorgeous graduate student. You will not make this mistake again. Every book could be your last. Every vacation could be your last. You may have to sit and wait for the authorities to figure out what to do with you – pack wisely. There is also the matter of the island itself. We are not entirely antagonistic to the idea of a ‘beach read,’ with its pleasant numbing qualities – particularly on a trip where the nerves are already well-frayed. Another thing to consider: a book should conform to, or enhance, the setting. And lastly, my fear of being away from home and entering unknown zones and spaces, the feeling I am lost in time, out of place and stuck in the wrong, diseased consciousness can sometimes be soothed, even slightly, with the calming comfort of familiarity – a welcome text from another time in your life, to ground you and return you to another version of yourself. I miss cigarettes. Those worked too.

I decide on four books of varying length, for varying purposes. I bring Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis, to distract myself in what I expect to be a sea of designer fashion labels and narcissistic, naked ambition. Hopefully some tight, biting dialogue. To pull a laugh from a knotted belly. I bring Agitation by Alexandrine Ogundimu. This is the second installment of her excellent, absorbing, haunting auto-fiction series, following last year’s release of Desperate. I hate complaining about hypocrisy in publishing, because complaining about anything in publishing is a waste of cell activity, but it bothers me greatly that a mainstream lit fic world supposedly hell bent on championing diversity and ‘own stories,’ ignores Alexandrine Ogundimu – a highly skilled technician, a brutal documentarian of the private and public human drama of a trans black woman living and breathing and writing, right fucking now, in America.

I bring Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry, a book I have been starting and stopping and trying to read for the better part of a year now. This is a last-minute pull, and fulfills the role of marrying text to locale, the foreigner in the realm of the exotic and perhaps even some of the substance abuse, though Lowry is a Picasso and I am a finger painter in this regard. But really this title makes the cut because when I pitch this article to my housemates, Gabriel Hart immediately cites Under the Volcano and I think, “perfect, I can now introduce my housemates into my story & why we’re all here, gathered around Jake’s ramshackle pyre, sipping mushroom moon juice, and listening to the story of my middle-class family vacation.”

We are here because I need drugs. Every time I’ve found a drug, I’ve had some trouble letting it go:

After a high school spent drawing X’s on my hands in thick black sharpies, I sit on Emily *****’s rooftop with Adam Lazzara, before Caleb dies & before Adam leaves for New York, and we drink our first sips of orange hooch. I am seventeen years old, maybe eighteen. I will drink to drunkenness every night after this until my mid-twenties. I will be convinced I cannot sleep without it, cannot stomach the long, dark, lonely hours of the night with just the racing, intrusive, harmful thoughts.

o   I will get a DUI outside Baltimore, while disassociating.

o   I will lie to other addicts in church basements, just to get my court-ordered documents signed.

o   I will not keep going.

Following a series of panic attacks and debilitating bouts of derealization, magical thinking, attempts at self-harm, whole-body numbness, and crippling, constant anxiety my mother sends me to a doctor who prescribes me Clonazepam at age nineteen and I take it every day, usually twice and sometimes four times, until I am thirty-eight years old.

o   I stop taking them when I start smoking weed.

o   The weed seems safer, somehow.

The last book I pack is a Library of America edition of two Raymond Chandler classics, The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye. These are my comfort food, for the moments when the panic won’t subside, when my mind races to a darkness, to an empty spill of a body in the march towards not existing. I can sit by the pool and Marlowe, as he did outside the Cameron Village Library [where I once lied to my wife about going to the gym to work out and instead sat in the parking lot eating K&W pecan pie, sticky fingers, glaze oozing down my mesh basketball shorts in a sure sign of my secret shame], will carry me from one moment to the next with a kind of light, confident lilt, necessary in unfamiliar waters.

MARCH 15th 2022

By the time I land, my new piece, Depression Chess, will be released. My winter depression will be laid bare. I abhor this entire intrusion of non-fiction into my oeuvre. I do not want to be known. I do not want to be understood. Meanwhile, I am in White Boy Spring. It takes literature a long time to catch up. I have been reading Bret Easton Ellis, waiting to board, and now I sense an unlikely confidence in my writing. This sounds like an insult, but mostly is not.

On the first leg of the flight over I take 1 mg Clonazepam to stave off a mild, familiar panic in flight. The feeling of feet not firmly on ground, unable to run. The feeling of trapped: trapped in this steel cylinder – trapped in this fearful, erratic mind. I visited New York recently, to meet my publisher in person and read from my upcoming debut novel, Characters. Shortly after I arrived, which itself came after months of intense raw nerves spilling out into every corner of my life, I had a panic attack at a Mexican restaurant. Outdoors eating Tamales, with my publisher and some writer friends, I kept it together, just. My publisher has a keen eye for moods (as well as talent, clearly), and asked, later in the evening, as we walked from one spot (dead, too early) to the next spot (too much flannel, & dreadful lighting), “are you ok?” I told him I needed to know where the exits were at all times. Up here, in the sky, the exits elude me, and I take another milligram just to be on the safe side.

I put Irv Teibel’ Environments in my AirPods. Specifically, A Country Stream. Irv Teibel was a field recordist who processed ocean loops at Bell Labs with the help of a neuropsychologist (“The Psychologically Ultimate Seashore”) and elicited a confession from Richard Nixon (“I had prior knowledge of the Watergate break-in”) through the science and magic of magnetic tape technology. A Country Stream is a regular aural escape for me in times of distress. I am drawn to the beautiful idea that one soul might record a peaceful moment – I imagine him sitting quietly by the stream to soak up the sounds of a pleasant day – so that he might transfer that calm, to trap it like lightning bugs in a bell jar at dusk in Summer, and send it through the waves of time and space to me. Receiving this stream next to a mountain, I close my eyes and dream:

I am itchy knees, wet grass, staring up at a mountain (some years it was a hill), listening to the sounds of shotguns in the distance. Uncles arguing in the nearness. Sight of a young, pale cousin chasing air in dandelion fields. It will be many years before what is happening inside those curing barns comes to light. A snake slithers in my direction at the bank of a creek. Papaw says it’s a water snake and to be careful. Papaw’s eyes set back and strong, like all of him. Papaw says they’ll bite. The snake gets closer. It is pink and red and winding, and a skyscraper and its teeth are nerf bullets and the captain has turned off the fasten seatbelt sign and you are free to move about the cabin.

We walk out into the hot island sun and into a crowd of busses, cars, trucks, vespas, and pedal bikes, and are quickly ushered to a black Toyota sprinter van for the 25-minute ride to our resort. While packing my suitcases into the back of our ride, a friend of the driver pats me on the shoulder, asks if I’m all set. Do I need anything for my trip? Would I like some ganja? Yea, that would be good, I say. We walk over to his sprinter van, parked beside. He pulls out the bag, names the price, and we swap and settle up. Walk back to our ride, my daughter asks where I was, “getting some Jamaica currency,” our driver asks me if everything was to my satisfaction. I hand him a twenty and say, “everything for my satisfaction, let’s roll.” Everywhere are angels. This, it turns out, is how you buy weed in Jamaica.

MARCH 26th 2022

I am on the floor, screaming into a pillow. My wife is rubbing my back, concentric circles, firm palm. I beg her to take me to the emergency room. The emergency room has the drugs. The emergency room will feed me the drugs to make this moment end. To skip time, to skip in time, to skip over time, and then I can write this instead of having to feel it.

“You don’t need to go to the emergency room.”

My body is completely numb. Part of me is over there, in another room, in another year. I am sweat. I am heart explode. I am person erase.

“We’ve been here before. Everything will be ok. You are safe. We always make it through.”

Bite the tip of my tongue until it pops and pulses. Gnaw the inside of cheek flesh. If it hurts, I must be real. If it hurts, it must be happening. When can I take another pill? I’ve been lying on this bathroom floor for two hours and nothing is working.

“I have a timer on. You took a pill six minutes ago. Give it time to work.”

I took a pill six minutes ago. I took a pill sixteen years ago. I am the house I grew up in. I am the cries of my brother. I am a begging, shivering hole of memories disintegrating quickly and slowly from two decades of benzodiazepine dependence.

APRIL 4th 2022

Now is later, thank god. She adjusts the rim of her glasses, fidgets with a pen, sighs.

“Exercise, of course. You know this. I’m sure everyone you have ever met with has told you this. That energy needs somewhere to go. Sweat it out! Ride a bike, go for a long walk. Commit yourself to thirty minutes a day. But, Derek, you have to make some other changes too. We need to talk about the marijuana.”

The marijuana. Holy shit, is this lady one hundred and fifty years old? The marijuana. The marijuana? The marijuana is how I sleep. The marijuana is how I don’t take so many of those goddamn memory erasers you keep prescribing. The marijuana wrote half of my debut novel. It’s the half everyone hates, but still.

“I’m not saying you have to cut it out entirely. In fact, that would probably be a bad idea for you right now. Let’s start slow. Weekends only, small doses.”

I only had 10 milligrams from a weird edible I bought in D.C. in my system when I found the bathroom floor. It’s not the weed.

“It’s a cumulative effect.”

I need drugs to give this life some color. I can’t stand everything being always the same all of the time and beige or tan. I’m writing an article.

“An article? What do you mean?”

I mean I’m writing an article. On how to buy weed in Jamaica. I’m the weed guy. That’s me.

“Did you buy weed in Jamaica?”

Yes, of course.

“Do they have dispensaries there?”

They do, but I didn’t even have to go to one. Some guy came up to me right outside the airport.

“And this is for an article you’re writing?”

Yeah, well, it’s more like a guide. A ‘how to.’ This way, when someone googles how to buy weed in Jamaica they’ll find my article.

“And you’ll tell them to buy drugs from a stranger in a foreign country that just walked up to you outside of the airport?”

…

“Maybe you should write a different article.”

When my thoughts were unsafe or unkind, I started playing chess. Chess is very difficult. You have to think about it really hard while you are playing. Your thoughts should not wander.

P-Q4…The Queen’s pawn moves to the center. It stakes its claim, announces its intent to battle. She is a messenger of the king’s court. When White moves her, and begins the game, a slight advantage is seized, being the attacker. When Black moves to the center, in reply, it defends, it refuses to give up ground, it joins the fight. White will lead. White will need to come up with some ideas. Before these two pieces meet in the middle there is no conflict, nothing to fight over, nothing to defend, and, thus, no game. It’s an object in a room or a picture on a screen. Nothing is happening on it. It is pure symbol. Pent up energy; possibility. The messengers of the court, pushed toward the center by the Queen, meet and announce their intention. Space is claimed, staked. The game begins.

“Which move is better? Which should you play? The answer is: play the move that you like, the one that best suits your style and temperament.” (Chernev, 1957).

Chess is a three act structure. The opening consists of principles and positioning. When we claw back the curtain on all those wonderfully arcane names, gambits, and maneuvers, we see the opening for what it is – preparation for an attack, and foundations for a defense. We set ourselves up in the opening act for success in the middle and end games. We do this by getting our pieces off the back rank, controlling the center by way of either the Queen’s Pawn or King’s Pawn, castling our king for safety, protecting each piece, and practicing sound pawn structures.

Kt-KB3… I’ll need a scout to survey the land, evade, jump over landmines and pawns to gather information on the opposing force and reinforce my center, which I’ve just staked claim to, and I call on my king’s knight to activate and defend. The saying goes a knight on the rim is dim. How much sense does it make to scout from the sidelines? The game is in the center. The flanks should never be ignored, god no. And occasionally a scout on the edges of the board may find a clever move, sitting there likely for so long idle. Chess is a solved game. The computers know how to play perfect chess. We never will. This opens up a wide array of possibilities and beautiful, surprising moves. Creativity is born out of our limitation.

In the beginning, there were tricks. You can come out extremely quick with your Queen and assault, hoping to frustrate the opponent and bewilder them. It will seem, at first, for a few movements even, to be winning as you watch your materials fly off the board. Patience. Watch it fall. Let what is to come, come. And there, she’s exhausted herself and is trapped, behind enemy lines, unprotected, and alone. She falls. Your enemy knows no attack without her and white flags burst like confetti in the evening air.

The middle game is act two. The middle game is about chances, clever combinations, and creativity. When a master talks of “getting out of theory,” he speaks of entering the middle game. In the middle game the pieces move in surprising, unforeseen ways, and we find ourselves facing new threats and, hopefully, unlocking novel opportunities. Our positional soundness in the opening allows for this burst of creativity in the middle game. The game can be won or lost in any phase, depending on the quality of play and player, but, generally speaking, how the game will be played is decided in the opening and who this play will favor is decided in the middle game.

Chess is hell on the paranoiacs. It demands a steady, patient, logical mind to endure. The paranoid androids will spin their wheels replying to diversions and miss the real threats. They find their pieces on the far edge of the board, dangerously removed from their king, when the enemy reveals their plans through clever play. The paranoid android is stunned. He never saw it coming, he cries! He was tricked, he shouts! But it is too late. Our age breeds these paranoiacs, giving rise to an ever-increasing sickness: the troubled hive mind. Our internal systems and emotional registers are poorly tuned for the times, and a flood of inputs and information startle and then paralyze us to our delusions. We seek shelter in increasingly myopic bubble-tribes and batch all of the world into comforting categories of nebulous good and cartoonishly evil, like a baby playing with soft blocks. This is the age of idealogues, no matter that the ideas they peddle have been thoroughly run through, ravaged by time, left outside for decades to dry, and spoilt by the taint of tender human touch.

Life is hell on the paranoiacs. It demands a steady, patient, logical mind to endure…

P-KKt3…The most beautiful maneuver in chess is also blessed with a beautiful name: the fianchetto. The fianchetto begins as a quiet operation. It looks to novices like we are simply moving pieces to move them. The knight’s pawn steps up one unheralded step. It’s not the move our enemy should be keen to, it’s what the move opens up. The bishop prepares to fianchetto, with a gorgeous sight line to an enemy rook. B-KKt2…

Chess exposes our weaknesses, on the board and off. I learn I am impulsive and careless, too quick to panic during mild attacks and too slow to develop my own.

At the end of the day, over tea, to ward off the bad thoughts, in the study with only a quiet reading lamp for company, I study various positions and possibilities on the board. I play through the games of the masters, to briefly inhabit the illusion of divine power. That force of will to castrate an opponent with smart tactics, misdirection, patient study which is inaccessible to me in Chess and in life, and seems a terrible headache to maintain. I am preferring, these days, to get maddeningly lost in the maze of all of which I am unable, and to sink my attention into those pursuits with a clarity of consciousness I am resigned to feeling nowhere else.

I am trying to be content in playing the game and just that. If I am impulsive and careless, then I am impulsive and careless. If I panic during mild attacks or react harshly to misdirection. If I am slow to develop, if I am unable to remember. If I cannot see things in my mind or keep them there for very long. If I am watching my children grow up. If I am counting years that went by unaccompanied by joy. If I am somewhat certain a nothingness awaits. If I am afraid. If my love and your love creates suffering. If my porch light is left on. If the woods behind my house come alive and eat us all. If the tanks at the door are let in. If my love and your love only creates suffering. If my love and your love only exists to create suffering. If my love and your love only exists to create more suffering. If creation is the fruits of our love. If suffering is the fruits of our creations. I am trying to be content and just that, but there is simply too much of it, these days, besides. If the oceans rise. If the tiny voices whimper. If the men at their battle stations dance for the men in their ties in their command centers. If the truckers refuse to move goods. If the workers refuse to provide services. If the collapse is all that is left to suffer. If being born is involuntary. If I have been called to duty. If you and I find ourselves alone, together, on some certain night. If the curtains are drawn. If the wax on the candle wanes, if the moon complies, if the moment passes unmolested, if I am going insane, if I forget to protect my pieces, if I move incautiously through time and you, oblivious to the conditions on the board. If none of this ever happened. If all of it is happening, instead, all at once. Would you find me and wrap your arms around me? Could you? If we have reached a stalemate. If the desire of our desires is to desire, like Joyce’s thought of thought. If I do not move we will be stuck here, like this, forever.

R x Ktch !… The endgame, of course, is act three. Precision and calculation.

In the opening, never look the king in the eye. Punish his subjects. In the middle game point towards their king and hide your own. In the endgame find the enemy king and bring your own to the center to witness your capture and your opponent’s capitulation. To teach not to threat, that is the result of fine play.

Parry all enemies, real and imagined.

I realize, in many ways, I crave a soft male voice telling me the knight should go to E5 and to say it with a lovely pretentious tilt and I wish this wasn’t true, for so many reasons, but it is instead. In past depressions I have distracted myself with all manner of aural intrusions – the young man who’d cast Age of Empires II (a game I neither understand or play), countless hours of grown men arguing about boxing, poker theory (go all-in), the History of Rome, Ancient Warfare, Maritime History – anything to replace the sound of my harmful intrusive thoughts with the sound of someone else’s benign ones. I pull some kind of strength from absorbing other people’s obsessions. In today’s Depression Chess I listen to grandmasters on YouTube, on Twitch, on Chess.com carefully, slowly go over openings. I refuse to soak any of the knowledge in. I refuse to pay close enough attention. I hear them to not hear my self. I refuse to get better at chess. I have a life to attend to once this passes, a book to write; I cannot be calculating all these moves ahead of time. I won’t let it disappoint me. I can just play. It’s a game. A lot of stuff isn’t. Chess is a great metaphor for war or life or love but it is only a metaphor. And a fine distraction. I needed that very badly this Winter, for reasons private and familiar, universal and mysterious. 

Tonight, in fact, in celebration of a day spent living & making lunches & snacks & dropping off & picking up & sitting in the carpool line & not hurting myself & being overall fucking solid & giving them that, at least, I treat myself to Capablanca (W) Mattison (B) from 1929 in Carlsbad, in a Queen’s Pawn Game featuring the Nimzo-Indian Defense from Irving Chernov’s fine book, Logical Chess Move by Move, I am hanging on to things by a thread, believe me I can feel it. 

Resigns.

 I do not know how to read poetry I am always alone up here in this consciousness container The truth is I seek a temporary reprieve without the drama and permanence of canceling my own existence plus I have children to care for A wife to love I want to know what it is like where you are in the world Is it rain Is it cold Are there trees

What can we express in language that can be expressed no other way? The voices in your head speaking to the voices in my head, mixing and mingling memory with meaning in service of a private literature. This dance between reader and writer is my own temporary reprieve. The distance between your thought and mine cannot be measured in time or coffee spoons: the poet seeks an eternal present, to preserve these moments in amber. It is rare and it is beautiful and it is not unlike magic, turning to a page or a phrase to renew a conversation.

Graham Irvin, a poet from North Carolina, residing in Philadelphia, working in a warehouse in New Jersey. Graham Irvin invites us to taste it, to take Liver Mush from our table to our tongue and touch God.

“I want liver mush to mean as much as possible,

  to as many people as possible” (from ‘Let’s Start Over’, pg. 24)

The repetition, in Liver Mush, like an Epizeuxis hammer, anaphoric wind tunnel of screams, epimone moan, antanaclasis master class of meaning, until it settles in our throat, favorably flavored with sage from a sage, assuaging us, dear readers, from having to venture into that forest of feelings alone. Everywhere there are guides, and signposts, and shamans. We are traveling trails trodden by all those come before us, similarly swept up by the power and glory of language, forever and ever amen.

My belly is full. My belly is warm. My belly hurts. From having eaten too much or too little. From eating the wrong things. This is not one of those things. Liver Mush, the collection of 48 poems + 1 recipe, or 48 recipes + 1 poem, is the stuff of real, sustained nourishment. It’s the whole hog, as we say down here.

“Liver mush is just a word, but the word means nothing to almost everyone and to me it’s cracking open my skull, puréeing my memories into a grey mush, and shaping them into something that looks familiar to anyone reading this.”  (from ‘Liver Mush is An Essay About My Mom,’ pg. 43)

In Liver Mush, in Graham Irvin’s memories, there are dead fathers, pious, worrying mothers, an unchanging and unknowable south, love, t-shirts to cure depression, spices, more sage, the monotony and pain of just living regular, memories retold as mush or memories disguised as mush or all of it only ever and just mush, including your memories and mine.

In my mouth Liver Mush, the pork product, is too greasy. Mouth feels like slime. Fat from the gristle sticky on my tongue. In Graham Irvin’s mouth it is something else entirely. Taste as an explosion of memory on place, loss, and love. The sadness in things coming to pass and then, ultimately, passing on. Some meals in between. Do they serve deviled eggs at funerals where you are? Moravian Chicken Pot Pie at Church bake sales? Do some things linger longer than others? Is it palpable? Can you taste it? You will, in time.

“This is in service of tasting my memories.

This is in service of you becoming the closest version of me you can get.”  (from ‘Vegan Liver Mush Recipe,’ page 101)

You can follow Graham Irvin’s recipe for Vegan Liver Mush or you can go to the store, down here where I’m from, and get yourself a block of the stuff.

I need to bite into something that used to be alive. I do need to feel my suffering was not unique. Graham Irvin lets us taste it. He does, with words, what I wanted all along: to stare into this abyss with someone else, to taste it as they tasted it. The defining feature of our connected world is our unceasing, unflinching, irredeemable loneliness within it, and while I sat on gym floors watching my children play, I felt less alone, for several hours, a few times a week, in a brutally cold January, Southeastern United States and all that brings to bear, tasting Graham Irvin’s memories, reading and re-rereading Liver Mush (Back Patio, 2022), during basketball practices, stomach rumbling.

Stuart says the author looks like a sad lime in his Louis Vutton rain jacket and it’s funny and it’s true but that’s not the point, I don’t think. The author is Sean Thor Conroe, and his debut novel is Fuccboi and it comes out today and there will be, and have been, a lot of pieces written about the author and the book and that’s great for the author and the book and, unfortunately, this is mine.

Sean Thor Conroe is a famous author now, with a book deal and a $200,000 advance, and he poses in the pages of Interview Magazine in a pair of Louis Vutton jncos, cigarette dangling, beefy tanned arms glistenting, head down, and he looks like a sad lime, Stuart says, and he’s not wrong but that’s not the point, I don’t think. Sean Thor Conroe wanted to be a famous writer and he is now and his favorite author is Roberto Bolaño and I wanted to be a famous writer and Robert Bolaño is my favorite author. Sean was willing to pay the price to realize his dreams — he looks corny in the pages of Interview Magazine and he is photographed, styled, and interviewed, and his answers say nothing and they are incoherent and hyper hypocritical and blank, and he is derided by a legion of authors desperate for their own version of success and I am using Sean Thor Conroe to write about myself and everyone else is, too.

The Interview Magazine piece, written by Geoffrey Mak, is titled “The Sick Burn of Sean Thor Conroe” and makes a clumsy and poorly written and conceived  attempt to compare Sean’s “sick burn” of professional groups participating in “organized classism” to rap battles. This fresh, inciteful take on organized classism occurs underneath a photograph of the author with the following caption: “Tank Top by Calvin Klein, Jeans by Louis Vuitton, Men’s Belt by Balenciaga, Bracelet by Tiffany & Co., and shoes by Nike x Commes Des Garçons Air Foamposite One.”

“So yeah, I sampled your voice,

you was using it wrong,

you made it a hot line,

I made it a hot song”

—- Jay-Z

Fuccboi, like Sixty Shades of Gray before it, is fan fiction. Sean Thor Conroe was a big fan of Sam Pink. Sam Pink is a proudly underground author and artist. Two of his paintings hang in the room where I write. I have read one collection of his poetry, Your Glass Head Against The Brick Parade Of Now Whats, and it left no impression. Sean Thor Conroe has read everything, and it made a significant impression. Sean interviewed Sam for his entertaining literary podcast, 1storypod, and professed his admiration. Sean sent Sam an early draft of Fuccboi with a note that he (Sean) hoped he (Sam) wouldn’t find the similarities in style “too flagrant.” Sam Pink didn’t “read more than a page or two” at that time “because it was extremely hard to get into.”

Sam Pink was admittedly flattered, and Sean Thor Conroe was upfront about the influence. Later, after the $200,000 advance was announced, Sam Pink wrote a 6,000-word blogpost  destroying Sean Thor Conroe as a plagiarist, a poser, a cultural appropriator, a sycophantic monied New York MFA elite that pulled material from the dingy places and spaces where Sean Thor Conroe was only ever a tourist, while Sam Pink tweets pictures of his paintings three times a day and pictures of his self-published poetry collections three times a day with an invitation to his followers to PayPal him so he can fix the broken muffler on his truck.

“You a fan, a phony, a fake, a pussy, a Stan”

— Nas

Jay-Z and Nas’ rap beef is incredibly well-known, over-reported, and understood. Jay-Z idolized Nas as an artist. On his climb up the social and financial ladder —the only direction Jay-Z had any interest in going — and with calculated moves he directly addressed in his writing, Jay-Z took a line of Nas’ and made it into a hit song. Jay-Z got paid and Nas didn’t and the feud was on. The line Jay-Z sampled, fittingly, is about the power of money (“I’m out for dead fucking Presidents to represent me.”) Decades later, both of them are rich and respected, and in 2021 on producer Rick Rubin’s podcast Nas said he was honored to be involved in the beef. Their respective roles in the feud confirm our image of each of them. Jay-z is a business, man. Nas is your favorite rapper’s favorite rapper. They traveled in different lanes and just happened to bump into each on their respective rides. Jay-Z was, and is, the motherfucking shrewdest. By coming out with his diss track first, he blunted a lot of criticism that could have come his way about ripping off styles. Not that Jay-Z gives a fuck — “I thought I told you characters I’m not a rapper.” Sean Thor Conroe made the mistake of paying respect to a writer who was working in the same stream, and Sam Pink, like a pro, pounced.  

Sam Pink was humbled (“it’s always very humbling”) to influence Sean Thor Conroe’s writing until Sean Thor Conroe got paid for his writing and then Sam Pink decided it rose to the level of artistic theft, and not mere influence. The book itself had not changed. Sam Pink still had a (supposedly still mostly unread) copy. He finally read it through though, once money got involved, and decided, once money got involved, that Sean was in violation.

“This is not beef, this is rap, homie; I don’t have a scratch on me.”

— Jay-Z

Sam Pink’s claims against Sean Thor Conroe are serious, and yet no one seems to take them seriously. Sam writes, in his blog post, “my entire work stolen from me, in the form of Sean Thor Conroe’s forthcoming book Fuccboi, which he sold for 200k.” We’ve yet to hear a word from Sean Thor Conroe or his agent or Little, Brown or his publicist or his stylist or his lawyers. Sam is a pissant minor annoyance in the New York literary society Sean runs with, and somehow this serves both of them very well.

Fuccboi is about, probably, a young man wanting to sell his book and become a famous author and the people he fucks along the way. One of its earliest champions was the influential, irreverent, and revered Giancarlo DiTrapano, the founder and publisher of Tyrant Books. Giancarlo’s support of Fuccboi (he was unflinchingly enthusiastic about the author and the work) lends a credibility that even Sean Thor Conroe cannot manage to fuck up. Giancarlo passed away in April 2021 at age 47 in New York City while visiting Sean Thor Conroe. No one has ever explicitly stated he died of a drug overdose, though it is implied in his life and work. Since his death, supporters and detractors of Fuccboi alike have muddied the soles of their shoes on his grave to further their cause, and Sam Pink was no exception.

(The layers to this story, like seemingly everything in the modern world, are complex, with each trap door, side quest, and rabbit hole designed to cement our pre-existing belief structure. Sam Pink, on January 3rd 2021, as I am editing this story, drops an unsubtle innuendo on Twitter related to Sean Thor Conroe’s role in the deaths of Giancarlo DiTrapano and an unknown individual named “Kyra.” While he quickly refuses to elaborate on his supposed information “because the people who have given me info are afraid,” the implications are clear enough. I feel absurd having to spell this out, but if Sam Pink’s “people” are correct then there are much bigger moral, criminal, and legal issues at play than stealing a literary style and if Sam Pink’s “people” are incorrect then the emotional harm and suspicion he has thrust on Sean Thor Conroe is extremely out of line.)

Littered throughout Sam’s blogpost accusing Sean Thor Conroe of stealing his entire work and selling it for 200K is a pointed attack on Giancarlo’s money, influence, and literary connections. Sam Pink reduces Giancarlo DiTrapano to a rich kid with no credibility (“…big publishing hasn’t had credibility for a long time. This is much of what Tyrant was, rich connected kids.”/“Gian somehow fooled people into thinking he was indie or an outsider, he received a lot of money from his dad and tons of New York connections.”). The importance of the work Giancarlo DiTrapano did for American literature is undeniable, and Sam Pink’s attempts to deny them by painting the deceased publisher as a fraudulent heir only serve to make Sam look jealous and bitter. Giancarlo DiTrapano put out some great books and introduced readers to some great authors, and having or not having a trust fund does nothing to invalidate that aspect of his legacy.

Sam also obsesses (oddly and unnecessarily) on women’s role in publishing and literature:

• “White New Yorker women editors/agents”
• “I can see a rich white woman in expensive office, reading Fuccboi and thinking they’d found the next dude.” (sic)
• “The white women editor/rapper slang thing…”
• “agents and editors are mostly linked by schools/sororities etc…”

At one point, in the fall of 2021, a writer working on a story about Fuccboi reaches out to Sam Pink. Sam takes the opportunity to post her (completely kind and professional and normal) email to him to his 4,846 followers with the sick burn “Get a real job” and makes a comically obvious effort to not cover up her name. The ensuing article comes out in Vulture on January 3rd, 2021. The same day Sam Pink chooses to insinuate Sean Thor Conroe is involved in the premature deaths. Sam does this, clearly, to divert attention from the Little, Brown promotional machine behind Fuccboi, hoping once again to make the conversation about him and his stolen style without recognizing that his crusade against the author and the book are only doing Little, Brown’s work for them (and for free). The article itself gives space to Sam Pink’s side of the story and is respectful, but she is a woman and she works in New York writing about literature so he had to bully her. He wrote a 6,000-word blogpost about another author stealing his “entire work,” and someone had the audacity to be interested. She took Sam Pink’s side seriously and wanted to report on it. Sean Thor Conroe comes across, in the Vulture profile and every other, like an insecure loser and an aggressively unserious writer and person.  Sam Pink’s desire to remain unspoiled by the boogeyman of an imagined all-female squad of monied literary elites hatching plans to overtake the publishing industry in their sororities means his work threatens to be reduced to a footnote in the Sean Thor Conroe origin story.

You knew me before records, you never disrespected me

Now that I’m successful you’ll pull this shit…

What you eat don’t make me shit, where’s the love?

— Jay-Z

Sam Pink’s crushing screed against Sean Thor Conroe is careful to not mention a glaring, obvious, and unfortunate truth: a lot of the male authors in this “scene” — and in particular many that Sam Pink champions and works with regularly — sound exactly the same. Does it all come from Sam Pink’s style? Is he the originator of this literary movement? I don’t know. I don’t find the writing compelling enough to find out. Much of it reads like first drafts and tumbler posts and is easily dismissed.

This is where it gets potentially uncomfortable for me because I consider myself “internet friendly” with some of the authors whose work is implicated, and I have even enjoyed and positively reviewed some of it. I will focus on one press, a press I love run by two dudes whose art and approach to art I admire: Back Patio Press. Back Patio Press is run by two authors, Cavin Bryce Gonzalez and Zac Smith. I reviewed (and loved) Cavin Bryce Gonzalez’s I Could Be Your Neighbor Isn’t That Horrifying for Expat Press in November of 2020. No one who reads Gonzalez’s work with any familiarity with Sam Pink’s work could ignore the comparisons. The author himself is well aware of them and cites Sam as an influence. Similarly, Zac Smith’s work owes a debt to Tao Lin (and Zac Smith’s new book, Everything is Totally Fine, came out on Tao Lin’s imprint, MuuMuu House.) Sam Pink’s artwork is used on Back Patio Press t-shirts and promotional materials. Cavin Bryce Gonzalez made it into the pages of Tyrant Magazine thanks to Sean Thor Conroe’s guest editing.

Cavin Bryce Gonzalez did not secure a book deal and $200K advance, and so Sam Pink happily works with him and they enjoy mutual support and respect. Sam is not writing 6,000-word blog posts laying out the case that Cavin Bryce Gonzalez stole his entire work. It’s not about art or purity of art. It never was. Sean Thor Conroe acknowledged the influence, paid respect to Sam Pink, provided him with the manuscript before it was sold, and promoted his work constantly. But he made the unforgivable sin of getting paid for his work and for wanting a version of success different than what Sam Pink wants, and so here we are.

“I’d rather be broke and have a whole lot of respect”

 – Sole, from his diss track “Dear Elpee”

It’s not the same story with Sole and El-P and their own lesser-known, underreported rap beef. EL-P, the emcee, was half of Company Flow, a rap group out of Brooklyn. He wasn’t quite EL-P, the emcee, half of Run The Jewels, the biggest rap duo since Outkast yet and he wasn’t even El-P, the producer, creating the beats for Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein, an immediate and enduring classic rap album. Sole was an underground, independent rapper involved in a nascent hipster rap scene. Sole felt EL-P dissed him. (Maybe he did, I have no idea. It doesn’t matter.) He released his diss track “Dear Elpee” in 1999.

“I feel like Selena; the president of my fan club’s trying to kill me.”

–EL-P

Sole was a fan of El-P and desperately craved his attention, acceptance, and endorsement. When he didn’t receive this on the basis of his talent alone, like an elementary school kid on a playground, he taunted and chased until he was finally noticed. El-P took voicemail messages left by Sole and turned them into the chorus of his track returning fire (“Linda Tripp”), and decimated Sole. Sole came across as a sad, pathetic fan desperate for attention. He used El-P’s relative notoriety to insert his own name and music into a wider audience and cultural conversation. It didn’t work exactly, and yet it still won’t stop me from trying the exact same thing.

I paid Sam Pink to read my manuscript and write a 772-word email telling me the entire construct didn’t work for him, that I should strip it of all the metafictional elements and artifice and stick to the self-contained stories within. He was kind and encouraging. I was annoyed. I wanted Sam Pink to like me and my work and I paid for it. I wanted Sam Pink to retweet the announcement of my book deal to his 4,846 followers. I wanted Sam Pink to champion my work because I thought then more people would want to read it. I want readers. I want your attention. It’s all I’ve ever wanted. Now I have it. It feels disgusting. Once this is published, wherever that is and whenever that is, I will crawl into my bed, cover myself with blankets and hide in shame and fear. I am willing to embarrass myself for readers. I am willing to ruin my reputation, insomuch as I have any at all, for readers. I am willing to piss off Sam Pink, who I admire as an artist, for readers. I am willing to piss off Sean Thor Conroe for readers. I am willing to tell the truth for readers, even if it means learning it myself and then having to live with it.

Rap beef is performance art and a thinly disguised promotional strategy. Maybe I’m missing something obvious in all of this. Maybe I’m wrong. It’s happened before, and it will happen again. Maybe I will regret saying anything about an author and a book and another author and a scene and a literary tradition that is none of my fucking business. But I would rather say exactly what I mean, at one particular moment in time, and risk being wrong or hated or ostracized, or clowned or ignored, than change my tune for fear of upsetting someone or, worse, say nothing out of fear of becoming unpublishable or unreadable (but it’s close!). I choose to express myself and my impressions of petty bullshit that still matters to those of us that believe in (and fucking need) literature and accept that I may be wrong or my view(s) might change. Sam wrote: “I need this kind of stuff to remain special and meaningful,” and Sean believes in the power of the novel as salvation — (“What Sean, and by extension his same-name creator, deeply believes is that to write a novel is to wield power.”) — and so all three of us agree, at least, on that.

The most degrading punishment is getting everything you’ve ever wanted. We are in the midst of inflation. The price of everything is going up. The price you pay for readers, of ever dwindling and discerning supply, is constantly going up.

The first or second piece of fiction I published online, “Wilson Street,” at Expat Press, cost me a lifelong friend. I traded him for readers. I would do it again. There were other factors. It was complicated like all lifelong relationships, and he was an asshole to me and made me feel like shit a lot and I took it because he was my friend and I don’t have many friends and I want to be liked by everyone. I can’t stand conflict even as I actively seek it out with my words and behavior, but I want readers more. And I have a few of them. The price was high. I want more. I anticipate the price will be even higher.

I’m jealous, but not of the money because the money comes at a price I’m not willing to pay. I’m jealous of the readers. The potential readers. The readers not yet born. The gawking readers, the hateful readers, spiteful readers, bored readers — all of them .

The attention, undivided, a reader gives to the consciousness creation of the author and that intimate conversation between author and reader spanning centuries, sometimes spanning languages.

Sean Thor Conroe will attend the literary parties and his beautiful, flat, affectless face will be photographed and admired, his impressive body clad in designer threads. But he will always be a poser, a phony, a fake, and everyone surrounding him will know it and never be able to forget it for even one second and he will know it and has always known it. Is it worth it? I hope to never find out. The absurdity, lack of self-awareness, vacuity, naked ambition at any cost, shamelessness, is all there for the world to see and interpret and fuss over as they see fit, and the fit is tight. I’m sure Sean would agree. Is it worth it?

This isn’t a review. This isn’t a preview. I don’t plan to read the book. Maybe I will at some point. I’m rubbernecking. I’m not a critic. I’m not a reporter. I have a real job. I’m kidding. It’s called a callback. I’m a fan. It’s a fan’s fiction.

I am a fan of fiction. I wanted to join the literary conversation which traverses time and space and is immortal and secret and precious and, much to my eventual and perpetual horror, I did. Barring any blowback from publishing this piece, my debut novel, Characters, comes out this year. Is it worth it? I don’t know yet, but I’ve fucked around and now I’ll find out. I too have gotten everything I ever wanted, unfortunately.