INTERVIEWS

THE AGE OF CELEBRITY SEX TAPES AND EXECUTION TAPES: AN INTERVIEW

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In If You Won’t Read, Then Why Should I Write? (Penny-Ante Editions) Jarrett Kobek uses transcriptions of celebrity sex tapes to trace a narrative through decadent, post-internet celebrity in America. Beginning with Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s 1998 honeymoon tape, fragments of amusingly vapid dialogue are juxtaposed with the celebrity’s criminal history (on inlaid black strips of paper) to sketch an era in which entertainment overrides justice, and a life without consequence is the norm for a privileged few. Kobek is the author of two previous books. We spoke over Skype. – Matthew O’Shannessy

THE BELIEVER: To start off with, why did you get interested in celebrity sex tapes?

JARETT KOBEK: There’s probably a twofold answer to that. The first is that I think in the last ten years, everyone has unfortunately had to develop an interest. It may not be as profound as my own, but everyone is at least aware of these things. The genesis of this project was whenever the first Paris Hilton sex tape came out, which was almost ten years ago at this point. And you know, the sex on these things is always really bland because probably the most uninteresting thing in the world is watching narcissists fuck each other. But what was really interesting even then, was the dialogue that was occurring during the sex or between the sex, or just watching Paris Hilton and her big dumb boyfriend try to talk to each other like human beings and their complete failure to do that.

I think in that tape there’s this really amazing moment where at some point she’s having sex and actually her cell phone goes off, so she just gets on her cell phone. So then you have three layers of dialogue going on. In the background they’ve left the television on because if you’re Paris Hilton you’re going to leave the television on while you have sex, and there’s the dialogue between her and the guy that she’s having sex with, and then she’s on the phone. It’s just an amazing biopsy of a certain kind of profoundly consumer American life. You know, taken to its furthest extreme.

BLVR: Obviously these tapes are much longer, and you’ve picked out certain elements and then arranged them, put them with the criminal records. In a way it’s more than a transcription. You’re going for a certain effect.

JK: If you put Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian on a camera for five hours, you would be amazed how little usable material there really is! So there’s some editing, but it’s not huge. And I really didn’t want to transcribe people moaning or whatever it would be. The sex part is by far the least interesting. The criminal records — I think I was transcribing one of Vince Neil’s sex tapes from Mötley Crüe and I realised that he had actually killed a guy. Then I remembered that the actress Rebecca Gayheart also had a sex tape and she had also killed someone, and I started to think about how we had gotten to this point as a society where there’s an actual distribution mechanism. There’s an actual product in which we watch felons fuck. 

And I thought, that’s really interesting, that’s a way to elevate it beyond just being this sort of gag book where it’s like, Oh yeah let’s laugh at Vince Neil, or Let’s laugh at Tommy Lee. When you start to realise that – maybe not the majority, but a significant minority of the people in this material actually have criminal histories, they have committed really crazy or serious crimes, and that none of them did time¾ that’s the key. You start thinking about the way that fame in particular, but also money, perverts criminal justice.

If I had run over a nine-year-old kid, I probably would have gone to jail, but Rebecca Gayheart didn’t. I think she got 1200 hours of community service. So inserting the criminal records became a way to put some gravity into the work.

BLVR: The sex tapes are part of an era – the last decade or so – where it’s not about suppressing the tape anymore, it’s about turning it into a marketing tool. It’s a way to kick-start your career. What interests you about this era?

JK: That’s a good question. There’s a narrative in the book, I don’t know how evident it is to anyone else, where you can see the point where the tapes begin. At first, it really is just people’s home videos. Then in the middle of the book it shifts into people doing these videos with the intention of turning it into a marketing tool. Then by the time you get to the end of the book, it’s become an actual genre. I don’t know if I have that much to say about it other than it happened, that it’s a definite narrative progression.

That last decade was such a deeply fucked-up time that it just seems endlessly rich in terms of material to mine, in a way that I’m not sure the 1990s necessarily were rich. I mean, everyone in the 90s thought they were rich, but then if you look at them in comparison to the 2000s, the 2000s have a lot more of real consequence going on. At least from the American perspective, it’s a much richer time in terms of society just going really haywire and getting truly bizarre and truly baroque.

For me, I was a teenager for more or less the whole 90s, and I hated it, I really hated that decade. I hated the 2000s, too, but I hated them in a much different way. Where I felt like the 90s never made any sense to me, the 2000s made sense to me in this aspect where everything was just breaking in America. The 90s in my memory were just so incredibly superficial. Not that the 2000s didn’t have superficiality, but there’s something much darker about popular entertainment when Amy Fisher actually shoots someone through the head and now you can watch her have sex for money, on tape. I mean, that’s really deeply disturbing!

I don’t have any hard conclusions to draw about it, because it’s not completely clear to me what’s going on. Usually when I do these things, I do them to try and figure out how I feel about them, and I usually have a much better sense by the time the project is done. This one, I don’t. It’s still really murky to me. It’s like, maybe that stuff is beyond critique. Maybe the critique can only be indirect ¾ because how do you critique Amy Fisher’s artist statement? It’s just so bizarre.

BLVR: In your other books, there’s an interest in the overlap between fact and fiction. But what you’re talking about here with the tapes is that they’re contrived or they’re a marketing tool.

JK: Yeah. I really feel like having read as much Philip K. Dick as I could in the 90s was like some bizarre training ground for the eventuality of the 2000s, in terms of this sense he had that everything eventually was going to become entertainment and everything eventually was going to be about how you can make money by transforming everything into entertainment. He strikes me as profoundly ahead of his time.

BLVR: So you’re interested in the sort of entertainment complex that produces these things?

JK: Yeah. It might’ve been about 10 years ago at this point — but there was a moment when the Russian Mir space station was crashing into the earth, and Taco Bell actually put a giant target out in the ocean. The idea was, if the satellite hit the target, then everyone in America would get a free taco for a year or something like that. That was the moment when I started to realise that Philip K. Dick may have been much more prophetic than I had given him credit for. Reality TV, these sex tapes, strike me as very Dickian. They strike me as science fiction — in the most mundane as possible way: there’s not a lot of science but there’s certainly a lot of weird fiction in there.

BLVR: There’s a lot of negative writing about this sort of stuff – “being famous for being famous,” all that. Are you critical of people who don’t earn their fame, or are you just observing?

JK: I feel like there are much better things to worry about. It doesn’t really matter why people end up famous. In an ideal world, everyone would win fame and glory for actual achievements, but I don’t think that’s the world we live in, and I don’t think that’s ever been the world we’ve lived in.

At the same time, it is dispiriting when you find out how much money Kim Kardashian has made in the last three months. When you live in a society where the people from Jersey Shore are making millions and millions of dollars for apparently nothing, it does become incredibly dispiriting.

I think there’s something useful in looking at these people and seeing the extent to which luck and base motivations can get you to the same place that you’ve been raised your whole life to believe that if you just work hard enough, America will reward you. Most of the time it won’t. Often it seems like success comes not so much from their hard work as from profound psychopathic tendencies.  

BLVR: We haven’t talked about the sections with Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein. Why did you put them in?

JK: Well, Saddam has been like a lodestone over my literary career. My short story about him was the first thing that I ever had professionally published. I’d seen Saddam’s execution tape, and I don’t know how it happened, but he’s a genocidal dictator who used chemical weapons against his own people, and yet somehow in the tape he ends up coming out looking like the best person in the room. You know, he’s funny in it, and he’s calm in a way that no one else is.

I was thinking about these tapes and how it was interesting that the mechanism for the delivery of Saddam and Gaddafi being executed was pretty much the same mechanism of delivery for these sex tapes. They were all shot on really shitty equipment. I think Saddam’s was shot on somebody’s cell phone—probably Gaddafi’s was too—and then distributed on the internet.

It’s really interesting that it’s the same medium, and that it sort of works in the same way, in that the object of fascination in the tape is based primarily on these people being flashing images that have come before you. What’s an interesting contrast is that these are people who actually do end up suffering some kind of punishment. Whether or not it’s a just punishment, it’s punishment for actions they’ve done in their society, that then come to a definite termination point. I mean, I’m not trying to liken Saddam and Gaddafi to Paris Hilton in that obviously these guys were genuinely horrible individuals responsible for some really atrocious things, but it sort of seems like it’s a related if dissimilar genre.

The precursor to those execution tapes, much like the precursor to the sex tapes was Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson’s, is the execution of Ceaușescu in 1989. So there’s a real parallel. I thought, How much celebrity can you have without consequence? and, Okay here’s consequence: here’s celebrity, here’s consequence.

BLVR: People have talked about literature being, in a sense, behind other art forms – not having caught up to things like contemporary art or music. Would you agree with that?

JK: Completely. It’s weird that literature is always going to be bound to a human need for stories that have a beginning, middle, and an end. My big inspiration over the last ten years is the Scottish comic book writer Grant Morrison. He’s really really fascinating because he’s been writing these really shitty superhero comics, which are the best things ever because he’s figured out that, okay, you have to have story beats here, here, and here, but you can use the moments between these beats to talk about whatever it is you want to talk about. It’s crazy when one of the major works of experimental fiction for the last six years has been a guy writing Batman, but it’s a really astonishing work.

BLVR: Your book is more like an artist’s book, in the sense that the design and physical aspect of it is so carefully crafted.

JK: Yeah. My interests and sensibilities may be better aligned with the people in the art world than the people in the literary world, and thus far my literary career seems to have had a pretty huge intersection with the art world. The literary world is — I mean, there’s a lot of criticisms you can hurl at the art world, but all of them can be hurled at the literary world in a much more severe degree. It’s kind of dismal. My one success was with Semiotext(e), who I don’t know if anyone in the world would look at them as entrenched within the literary establishment. I think there’s a certain flexibility in the art world that isn’t in the literary world right now.

I know the intention with Penny-Ante was to have the book be more like a limited edition or an artist’s book than, okay, we’re going to publish this thing that will infinitely be in print. It’s more like, We’ll do 1000 of these books or we’ll do 300 of them, and that’ll be the end of it.

Matthew O’Shannessy is a writer and member of the art collective Tape Projects. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.

Interviews

Bob Hicok

[Poet]

When I first discovered Bob Hicok, I felt empowered. His fearlessness to explore seemingly unpoetic content - working mundane jobs, screaming at an old dog - was refreshing. He also reminded me that humor and gravity could exist in the same space. After moving to San Francisco a few years ago, I read that Hicock would be reading at the Bookshop West Portal. Unfamiliar with the city and its bus routes (and without a smart phone), I ended up walking four miles to see him read. Below is an excerpt from our full-length interview that will appear in an upcoming issue.
-Matthew Sherling

BOB HICOK: The mind is generative. If you look at it, listen to it, it offers, it wants to be engaged, used. It’s like a dog in that dogs want to work, to do something. I think the biggest part of writing is noticing what’s appearing before you with some shine on it, what’s exciting or compelling, and simply picking it up. I sit down and see what’s there and start making decisions. Put a few lines down and see if I’m bored by or curious about them. I almost never begin with a sense of what I want to write about. If I’m not curious, there’s no reason to proceed. Ever watch cats? Show a cat a pencil and most of them will do the cat equivalent of shrug. Show them a pencil then cover it with a piece of paper, and oh my they come to life, many of them. When I wrote the poem above, you had supplied the first line, in a sense: what’s your process? I was curious about that, if I could write my process in a way that contained my process. The line I’d stress here is “remember I would like to exist.” I think this is what happens to me when I write, I exist in the fullest, most engaged way I have discovered. It’s performative, in that I’m trying basically to record who I am, what I feel/think in the moment I am writing. Because of that, editing for me is also largely performative, kinetic. I read the poem over and over as I write, and change what I don’t like as I write. If, later, I don’t care for the poem, either I throw it out – the most common outcome – or take a new angle into the poem, a new step toward whatever that shiny bit was. I think I’ve tried to make the “first word, best word” philosophy breed with the “a poem must be revised eight hundred times” perspective. I’m trying to watch myself as I come into existence and tune that existence in the moment it becomes palpable through the poem. I will mostly fail but mostly have fun doing so.

MATTHEW SHERLING: What do you see as the limitations and possibilities of language [when used in the way of poetry]?

BH: Limitations of language: it can’t realign my tires. Brush my teeth. Can’t go to Paris unless I carry it or a book or an email or a pigeon does. So language needs a vessel, a body, a mouth. But all of these things it can’t do it can almost do, seem to do, in a poem or book or note to a loved one. It seems a fair postulate that everything we think or feel is encoded in words, that we don’t exist without them, nor they, without us. This is inherently a spiritual relationship, a symbiosis, a marriage. Language allows us to hold what we don’t actually hold, we can write spirit or God and carry these notions, these objects, in our minds, exchange them, debate them, love them, hate them. Language supplies the genes and bones of being.

MS: Your poetry is often very playful. But what’s interesting to me is how you oscillate between the humorous and the heavy. How do you see this oscillation working? Are there any specific writers or artists that inspire your aesthetic? Early? More recently?

BH: It took a while to notice this pattern to my poems, which is not intentional or willed. I think there’s a sorting out for me earlier in a poem, as well as a contextualizing, a presenting of whatever images/situations/thoughts have caught my attention. I’m associative by nature, so it’s inevitable that many of my poems will oscillate on both large and small scales, swing from one thing to another around a core that is often not articulated until later in the poem. Probably a lot of my poems are records of me discovering why a particular set of stimuli hold my attention. But the process itself, the process of making, really any process of making, because it leads to some kind of output, will convey a sense of order. What I like about poems is they can also carry a feeling of the disorder that leads to order, or leads to a desire for order.

Influence is tough for me to discuss. I’ve written or said this many times, but there weren’t poets at the start for me, I was reading novels and listening to music. Don DeLillo, Joy Williams, Saul Bellow. Rickie Lee Jones and Tom Waits. Now, I tend to read poets as correctives, to pull me away from a direction or tendency in my own writing I’m tired of. I had been writing some bleak stuff and so started reading Neruda every morning, I think for the feeling of optimism in his work, the big spark to it. Then I got tired of that, it started to feel lopsided because everything isn’t as wonderful as I love his poems for making it seem, and pulled O’Hara out for a few days but found him too jumpy (I love his poems, which means at times I hate his poems), so moved on to a new book by Sommer Browning that I adore but haven’t looked at for months. I think I read different poets to strike different tones or raise a flag in my mind I then have to walk toward.

interviews

Go Forth

When the Believer asked me what could be some good ideas for their Tumblr, I thought, Well, why not ask everyone else for their ideas? Over however long we keep doing this, we will hear from writers, editors, publishers, agents, interns, and PR people, in long and short interviews, usually two at a time. These are all gifted, hard-working folks, and I am happy to ask them for information that you might find useful, helpful, and possibly pleasant. I hope this will provide an interesting resource for writers, though I would be remiss if I did not also direct you to Duotrope, New Pages, Poets and Writers, PEN, and HTMLGiant as sites to check out. Think of this as a kind of conversational space—a safe space, really. It is my honor and you’re welcome.

Love, Nicolle Elizabeth

First up we have friend of the Believer, James Greer. Don’t forget to check out his tour diary, coming in September. You guys know James from Guided By Voices and his new project, Détective, and he is also the retired Senior Editor of Spin magazine and a fiction and screenplay writer (of screenplays such as movies Catherine Zeta Jones stars in). Also, we’re from the same hometown. So I thought: Well, start here.

Nicolle Elizabeth: Hi James, thanks for talking with us. How are you?

James Greer: I’m trying to eat a lot of fruits and vegetables and no ice cream and no wine and while I miss ice cream and wine I feel pretty good.

NE: You are a writer as well as a musician and retired editor. Which came first and which one led to which and which and which and which?

JG: I’ve always been a writer. I guess I’ve always been a musician, too, though technically I didn’t start learning music until I was ten or eleven. I learned saxophone first. My dad had a tenor sax from when he was in a Dixieland band in college. I still have it. It was made in 1919 in Elkhart, Indiana. I started editing because Bob Guccione, Jr. hired me to edit Spin magazine after I met him at a party and told him I could edit things. I guess I can be pretty persuasive when I’m drunk since he hired me in the absence of any evidence that I could actually edit anything. 

NE: Would you ever go back to editing?

JG: I’m a terrible editor. I end up just rewriting everything because it’s easier, which is just an awful thing to do to another writer. But sure, if I needed the money and it was the only job I could get. I’m better at editing film than I am at editing writers. You don’t have to talk to film.

NE: How completely different are writing about music and writing fiction? 

JG: Well, both are a form of lying, and with both you have to go to a lot of trouble to say anything new and avoid clichés. So not that different, really. At least the way I do it.

NE: How does one even get into editing?

JG: a) Get drunk. b) Be at a party where Bob Guccione, Jr. is. 

NE: Your recent project, Detective, is putting out a cassette album— is this true? And do you not see how that is completely adorable?

JG: What an adorable question. Also it’s spelled Détective, which is adorable, too. We are putting out a cassette, or rather a label called Burger Records, which specializes in cassette releases, is putting it out. Tapes are cheap to make, so you can sell them for cheap, and a lot of kids have cassette players in their cars because they can only afford old cars. I have a cassette player in my car. For instance. Also in my house, but that’s because I’m old.

NE: What advice do you have for musicians who are thinking about writing?

JG: Only do it if you have to, by which I mean if your drive to write is so strong you think you might die if you don’t. Never do it just because you want to, or for the money. There’s nothing wrong with getting paid for writing (should you be so lucky), but that shouldn’t ever be your goal. Whenever you start thinking about the commercial potential of anything you do, global warming happens. Fact.

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Giancarlo DiTrapano writes for Vice. He is a contributor to the Paris Review and many fine, fine places, and the editor and publisher of Tyrant magazine and Tyrant Books. Tyrant is known as publishing some of the strongest voices in indie lit. Something I really appreciate in Gian is that he always seems to be getting either in trouble or fired from places, and he gets right back up. (@nytyrant)

Nicolle Elizabeth: What is Tyrant Books?

Giancarlo DiTrapano: Tyrant Books is the book arm of my literary magazine, New York Tyrant. First it was a lit mag, and it still is, but I also started publishing whole entire books, by like: Brian Evenson, Eugene Marten, Michael Kimball, Atticus Lish. And will soon publish Blake Butler, Sam Michel, Scott McClanahan, Ken Baumann, and Marie Calloway. 

Tyrant is also what I have put a good share of my time and money into over the past few years. I have made and lost many friends because of Tyrant. I have bent this great country’s laws for Tyrant. I have risked acquiring STDs by volunteering my own body for the good of the lit venture. I have stayed out way too late, way too many nights, head on the bar, with awful, awful people, for the good of the Tyrant. I’ve had way too many conversations standing over a filthy bar toilet for the Tyrant. To what end? Who else does this? No one does this. This is a strange thing to say, but I feel like I am constantly putting my neck out for very little reward. That’s not totally true. I guess there is some reward. But I’m still just going broke over here, spiritually as well as walletably.

At any rate, Tyrant is a deep devotion.

NE: How did Tyrant Books begin?

GDT: Tyrant Books is an extension of New York Tyrant, a tumor on top of a tumor that grew naturally. Through the writers of the stories in the magazine, I was introduced to their novel-length manuscripts, so wanted to publish those as well. There is a small responsibility that comes with publishing a collection of twenty stories by twenty different authors, but when you take on a whole entire book by someone, then the deal gets a little more intense. You begin to lose sleep over doing your best for the book. You’ve been entrusted with something that took someone a serious amount of time and grief to produce and, well, there’s just a lot more riding on all of that person’s time and grief, you know? I’ve worried myself through many sleepless nights. I’ve gotten rashes. Lorin Stein gave me some good advice about how to deal with that, though (the worrying, not the rashes). I am greatly indebted to that man, and in a strange way, kind of in love with him.

NE: How long has Tyrant Books been going?

GDT: Couple of years now. A lot of down time in between all of that, though. 

NE: How did Tyrant magazine begin?

GDT: While interning at FSG, before I got fired, I made a couple of friends and we thought it would be fun. I can remember picking up the lit mags from that period and being really depressed about most of them. I had some money, so we offered a prize, placed some ads, got some help/advice from Lish, and next thing I knew we had an issue. A first issue is tough, though. You’re asking someone to submit to something that doesn’t yet exist. Lish was a big help with that. He told us to tell certain writers we wanted that he had sent us and so the stories were proffered with little to no resistance. Very indebted to that man. Richard Nash has also been an indispensable help to Tyrant. So yeah, looks like Lish, Stein, and Nash are my very own trinity of Delphic oracles.

NE: How long has Tyrant magazine been going?

GDT: A couple of years longer than Tyrant Books, because I started the lit mag and then I started doing whole entire books.

NE: What kind of writing is Tyrant interested in?

GDT: This question is so confounding (learned that word from Lord Jim because Marlow says it). I have never been able to explain why I like what I like. I’m no good with talking about writing, and that’s just what this is. I publish stories and books that I like, even love. They feel good to read. Or feel strong to read. I do appreciate it when something has been worked on. I’m not saying if you spend a lot of time on a story that it will be good, but maybe it helps and is a respectable thing to do before making someone try to read it? Anyway, after a while, you can just tell whether any real attempt at beauty has been made on the page with only a simple glance. Like even from across the room, the very shape of the graphs on the page, from too far away to make any wordsense, but close enough to see the shape of the blacks and whites and to know something good in there is stirring around.

NE: Why?

GDT: Why what? Why do I publish what I like? Because why would I do anything else? Why would I publish something I didn’t like? 

NE: What is Tyrant’s stance on literature, as a whole? It’s an easy and simple question, really.

GDT: Our stance? Buffalo.

Or you could say that Tyrant’s stance on literature as a whole is not unlike the stance of a Puerto Rican hooker-boy who is very far from home, nodding out with his face pressed against a bar’s bathroom toilet divider, his hands on his hips, pinga in a glory hole, just wishing that he had a fresh stick of some kind of minty gum to chew on. He smells awful, but has beautiful teeth. He is not “making plans.”

NE: Are Tyrant books/the mag available in print as well as online, and where can one find both and/or either/or?

GDT: The mag is only in print for now. All of our titles from Tyrant Books (besides Baby Leg by Brian Evenson) will soon be available in ebook format as well. 

NE: What are Tyrant’s plans for the future, aside from taking over the world?

GDT: Hopefully, to keep putting out the magazine, and to keep putting out books. Though I don’t see any room for growth. I don’t want things to ever get too loose, you know, so I have to keep it a certain size. With myself as the only constant element, there have been many incarnations of the Tyrant, and many people have come and gone (as I’m sure many more people will continue to come and go). Luke Goebel is responsible for our tenth issue. He guest-edited and handled all the getting of the stories and did an ace of a job. He shot down many great writers to secure such choice content. That’s never a fun or easy thing to do. Rejecting a good-but-not-great story isn’t something that gets easier over time. It was good to hand the entire issue over to Luke because I think when too many people get involved, even more than one, then the work, or vision, or whatever, always gets watered down. Luke alone can put together a better issue than Luke with me. That’s why journals created by an entire committee of editors can seem so washy. A collection of a single person’s choices is more apt to have character and to be more attractive as like, a thing. We’re not stopping yet, are we?

NE: Why does Tyrant publish anything at all? 

GDT: Not to make the world around me more of a world that I would want to live in. Not to make any kind of change at all, because that’s impossible. Not for the money (ha, obvs). Not because I feel the need to do something. Not because I’m any good at it. Not enough people read the shit for there to ever be any great effect (I remember being dumb enough to think that a book could change the world). I guess that there have always been a few people who do really read the stuff and enjoy it, and maybe I do it for them. Like feeding a small group of insects that might be facing extinction? It’s good to keep a portion of the population a little tweaked on fine lit, what with life being so strange and changeful. That small group of people who read the stuff might actually turn out to be a very important part of your immediate society. Or it might not. It probably won’t. It definitely won’t.

NE: What are the responsibilities involved in being a publisher—as in, do you just publish whatever you want or do you consider the readership, etc.?

GDT: I don’t consider the readership. I’m not dumb. If I considered the readership, then I would publish books that I know more readers would love, so more readers would buy the books and I’d get rich as Nazis. I guess some people really do love it, but way more don’t, either by not knowing about it at all (the obvious majority), or by being repulsed by the writing in some way. It wasn’t until the third or fourth issue that someone pointed out to me how dark Tyrant shit is. Not just on the surface, but underneath too. I hadn’t even noticed. But I think there is more dark stuff being written because it’s easier to do. To write a happy and hopeful story is much harder to pull off without sounding like a simp. 

NE: What even is good writing?

GDT: I feel like saying that what I call good writing is just the writing that I like. Though I have in the past, like a lot, and probably still do occasionally, I can’t say what’s good or bad writing. So much depends upon your age and condition and location and the weather at the time of reading something, I think. That’s for most things. Some books are undeniable in any situation. Those are the ones that stand out. But the extent of me talking about writing is usually, “Hey, you read so-and-so? She’s pretty good.” And that’s about all. When people say, “Oh, he’s a great writer, I just don’t enjoy reading him,” it’s like, what in the hell do they even mean? That the syntax is done good? That the punctuation is done real good? That big words are used good? I like things, and I don’t like things. Some things touch me, where others don’t. I’ll tell you that I don’t like something, but I won’t go any further than that anymore, I don’t think. What I truly enjoy are the times when I’m talking with someone and then you both realize that you’ve read a certain book that you both love the hell out of and you just kind of big-eye each other but then don’t say anything else at all. 

NE: Well it’s just that sometimes I think—okay, no, a lot of the time it seems like commercial publishing can be behind the times in a way, which why even is that, and do you think our generation of writers and publishers can change that?

GDT: I intensely believe that most Americans, our immediate and potential audience, are suffering through some kind of dark ages. I am terrified of middle America, but mostly because I can’t carelessly kiss my boyfriend in public there. And if I do kiss him, then I have to worry about someone wanting to fight me. That can certainly add a thrill and make a kiss all the better, but it’s not something one would want to deal with on a daily basis. 

NE: Will asking that ruin my career when people read this?

GDT: Probably.

NE: Why do mean people win?

GDT: They don’t. It just seems like they do. Everyone can be mean. But I think that because a lot of people (like myself) are just really easy to fuck over, and if doing that (fucking them) doesn’t bother you, then the world can be an easy place and you can get where you want to be by screwing over your friends. But if you’re into screwing friends over, then where you’re trying to get to, like the “winning” position or whatever, is probably not a very chill place to be. In fact it’s probably majorly unchill. The most difficult chore is to try and always be fair and mostly kind to others without letting them step on you. I have yet to learn how to do this. I’ve been betrayed and shit on by so many people, people to whom I’ve given over myself completely, that it got so not funny anymore, that it went full circle and became funny again. I can’t help but trust people, and I feel like this is a mistake that I will continue to repeat until I die.

Nicolle Elizabeth is a first-generation college graduate from the middle of nowhere and is a contributor at the Brooklyn Rail, Bomb, and a whole bunch of fine places. She is the poetry editor at Word Riot, also a bike mechanic, and you should follow her on Twitter because she is a cornball: twitter.com/thismighttank.