Lonely Christopher, The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse, Akashic Books, 2011.
"TWO BOYS LIE ON A BED, ONE OF THEM IS ALREADY DEAD; they listen to Glenn Gould playing Bach and talk about suicide and love. A lonely narrator mourns the end of a relationship and the disappearance of a mysterious object as a frustrated artist jumps out of a moving car on his birthday and runs for the last streetlamp in the universe. Awkward parents and angsty teens negotiate a dark suburban landscape, searching for something they can't name, spelling out balletic sentences of failure and shame. Helicopters menace the night sky, a horse is murdered in a kitchen, victims go missing in swamps of ambiguity, and everybody waits for what the construction of a new road into town will bring: the end of the world or something worse.
The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse, a radical map of shortcomings in our daily experiences in the form of a debut story collection, presents thematically related windows into serious emotional trouble and monstrous love. Lonely Christopher combines a striking emotional grammar, reminiscent of Gertrude Stein's Three Lives, with an unyielding imagination in the lovely/ugly architecture of his stories."
"For all their postmodernist touches, the nine stories in poet Christopher's provocative and refreshing debut collection offer coherent plots and accessible prose, starting with the long title tale, about the efforts of a guy named Dumb to forget his dead boyfriend, Right, as he embarks on a new relationship with a person called Orange. In "Game Belly," which charts the night moves of club kids, characters are identified not by name but by brief tags like "the kid with long hair." "White Dog" finds menace in a woman's not so mundane trip to the supermarket. The supershort "Milk" plops a horse into a kitchen. With a lot of alternative fiction, one gets the feeling that the writer's rejection of traditional forms isn't earned; not so with this author, who's also a librettist and playwright. More Russell Banks than Donald Barthelme, Christopher could write solid, naturalistic stories if he chose, and he almost does." - Publishers Weekly
"Praise seems superfluous for a book as accomplished, cohesive, and devastating as Lonely Christopher's debut collection, so consider these words admiration instead, and admonishment: if you still think fiction counts for anything, then you should buy this bookĘright now." - Dale Peck
"Lonely Christopher, as his name suggests, knows despair as only a hobo or a clown can. This knowledge animates his fiction and provides each story with a humor that belies the terrible things that happen to his men, women, children, and animals. His formal experimentation will reward readers who have been craving a Huysmans sort of Nick Drake sort of Andy Kaufman killer writer. These readers will, like all good boys and girls, go to bed happy at last." - Kevin Killian
"Damn straight I judge books by their covers, and I judged the hell out of Lonely Christopher’s The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse: The cheeky nom de plume, drily academic title and bloodied prepubescent doll-boy had me anticipating some unholy union of Tao Lin’s preciousness, Ben Marcus’ experimental airlessness and Dennis Cooper’s deadpan depravity. To be clear, I would not have enjoyed such a mélange. But when I rallied to actually read the book, I found sharp and shimmering constructions inside, stories that sparked like burning bugs. What I found was a vicious debut collection by a young writer not on the verge of great things, but a young writer already doing great things.
Guided by the black light of Kafka’s “The Judgement,” perhaps literature’s supreme domestic nightmare, Lonely Christopher worries at the wounds made by family and at the odd cancers quickened by desire.
The strongest (and longest) story here, “Nobody Understands Thorny When,” is also the most superficially traditional. Darting back and forth on the mine-ridden timeline between a boy’s abduction and eventual return home, Lonely Christopher uses a rather familiar story arc to upset notions of tragedy and redemption. What emerges is an unsettling and haunting study of what it means to love people who love to hurt us, to hurt people who hurt with love for us.
Things do get structurally strange, as in “That Which,” an Oulipo-esque experiment consisting only of one-syllable words, and the narratives do flirt with outlandishness—“Milk” concerns a horse trapped between a fridge and a microwave—but the limpidity of Lonely Christopher’s language and his startlingly keen eye for common (but no less damaging) emotional cracks keeps the stories moored to a world that is recognizably ours. “White Dog,” the final story in The Mechanics of Sexual Intercourse, introduces us to a woman who has just woken up in a grocery store’s parking lot. She does not know how she got there, but she decides to shop, because although the nature of her arrival might be a mystery, the fact of that grocery store and its stocked shelves is not.
Lonely Christopher is, in his subtle way, describing his own work, a push-pull of sense and transcendence that commands us to keep moving, keep searching for ways to understand why we are this way." - Chris Stamm
"There’s this theory that activist and writer Eve Ensler and I talk about from time to time about people who are living in the world who are alive and people who are living in the world who are dead.
Call it a way of looking at human beings that explains death not only as something that stops life in one motion but also describes what people are doing when the engine of wonder sputters and leaves someone stranded and soulless: alive but hollow and strange. We all know people from both sides of the theory: dead people, living people.
Lonely Christopher’s first book of short stories is called The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse (Akashic) and everything about it—from its title, subject matter, syntax, even to the author’s photograph (a dark and barely decipherable image of a man squeezed into an open closet with his head inside a cage)—feels like a document delivered from a community of people who are living but who are… dead.
Not only are characters in these stories haunted by their own, (mostly), missteps, but they are fixed in their wrongness and are drawn as static, self-interested, inarticulate creations lacking real passion for anybody or any thing.
They are living blocks of wood who, more often than not, have mistaken addiction, violence and hanging around, as life. Here’s a scene from the first story in the book, “That Which”:
Dumb sat anxiously in the tub, Morton, having lowered the cover, sat on the toilet, and Lucy stood in the doorway of her bathroom holding a beer. “What then?” asked Morton. “Then he said, ‘I don’t usually drink vodka,’ and I told him he told me that when he was puking in the wastebasket before he passed out,” said Lucy. “uh, yeah,” Dumb agreed. “And described how you felt for me, please,” said Morton. “Nothing, I guess,” Said Dumb. “Everything really hurt, and maybe there was only room for some thoughts about what a bad idea it was to have drunk that much.
This strange and completely other book (an imprint of Akashic Books called Little House on the Bowery, curated by Lambda Literary Award winner Dennis Cooper) is made up of stories quixotically drawn around people like the ones above and other kinds of them that we all know but sort of wished we didn’t or, perhaps more importantly, never have really looked at closely enough to see if there was any light inside.
A great upheaval of the lost are here: outside the outside—beyond merely being marginal: sorry, negative and weirdly enough (?) gay most of the time. They all have names that practically declassify them as being human: Burning, Victim and Ash and you’ve already met Dumb.
The stories have strange titles, too: “Nobody Understands Thorny When,” “Game Belly,” and the title story: “The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse,” which is about two boys—one them who happens to be dead—both “listening” to Glenn Gould playing Bach, among other things.
The story really has nothing (or is it everything?) to do with sex or love or Glenn Gould. It reads—as every story reads—as a chance encounter, a haphazard arrangement of language with some people and places thrown in and after a while the complete avoidance of complexity or lyric beauty in subject matter or in language really begins to wear one down.
There’s no real morality or understanding of life as these stories have their curtains fall—all unseemly parts of an arbitrary sum: skewed syntax, an expanse of desert where once some flowers were.
And, of course, they can be surreal.
The story, “Milk” begins: “The horse was in the kitchen.”
It ends with this:
‘That horse was nothing but a pain in the neck,’ my mother said at supper. My father winced and ejaculated an overstated sigh. We ate meatloaf and broccoli and drank tall glasses of milk. The television, carted in from the living room, played the evening news a low volume following our required prayer. The stable thereafter was a shed. Father brought a new riding lawn mower he kept in there. The name of the horse was Black Beauty even though it was brown.
Much of the writing in the other stories has the same musicality and sense that sentences are independent statements of thinking related or not related to a strict story sense. Sometimes this works beautifully and one is sort of transported into this bizarre world of saying something and anonymity and at other times it all feels pretentious and meandering.
And there’s this overriding, somewhat annoying contrivance that generates every story which has to do with the metaphorical placing of people in the dark wood and having them not find the way out.
Because so many of Christopher’s stories are populated by characters who don’t have names one would associate with human beings, we’re back in that place of living with dead people.
The worlds that Lonely Christopher makes in this, his debut collection, are all cages, at a time of the world when we really need more stories about people who are shamelessly free—helping people be alive, not letting them be dead." - Michael Klein
"In 2003, the novelist Dennis Cooper launched his Little House on the Bowery series in connection with Akashic Books. Releasing around two books a year, this line of fiction books focuses mainly on younger North American writers who, according to an introduction for the series written by Dennis himself, "believe that fiction can be as entertaining, challenging, revelatory, and, in a word, important as any other medium. I hope Little House on the Bowery will be a reliable source for readers who want literature to be an adventure on the levels of content and style. I also want it to be an oasis for people who have come to see contemporary literature as a spotty, conservative medium." Over the years Little House on the Bowery has released a number of innovative and captivating books, including 2007's short fiction anthology Userlands (confession: a story of mine appeared in this book so naturally I'm biased) and, more recently, Mark Gluth's sublime novella The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis. Early this year they released their two newest titles, a reissue of Matthew Stokoe's cult transgressive novel Cows and Lonely Christopher's The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse, a collection of nine short stories that I have just recently completed reading and will now briefly review.
This is certainly a most curious collection, and I'm having trouble classifying it. Many of the stories (which end on ambigious notes) feature characters with unusual names, such as Dumb, Vowel Shift, Burning Church, Normal Chapter, and Timmy Victim. And the writing style is very unusual. For example, the first story, "That Which," is narrated by a boy who suffered from a debilitating head injury and is thus written in a very disjointed manner. Equally bizarre is the subject matter: the fourth story, "Milk" (which is also the shortest story in the collection at a mere 4 pages) revolves around the murder of a horse in a kitchen. The better stories, in my opinion, are the longer ones that focus more on characterization, such as "Burning Church," (which deals with a week in the life of a school teacher named Burning Church), and "Game Belly," an atmospheric piece which takes place in an empty city late at night and which revolves around a number of vacuous characters going about their nocturnal activity (though I wonder what exactly a "game belly" is). By far the best story is "Nobody Understands Thorny When," which at 34 pages is the longest story of the book. It's about the relationship between an odd boy (named Thorny When) and his kidnapper (Normal Chapter), and their most strange love affair, and how Thorny's life changes when he's "saved" from his captor after four years.
Not all of the stories worked for me though. I had no idea what "The Pokemon Movie" was supposed to be about (perhaps because I'm not all that familiar with the Pokemon phenomenon in general), though if I had to hazard a guess I'd say it's about the loss of childhood innocence. And the last story, "White Dog," which is about a seven foot tall lesbian who wanders in a dream-like daze through a supermarket, goes on for way too long, with many tedious and rambling paragraphs (the narrator spends 4 pages debating whether to buy mascara or not).
For the most part, however, I found the stories to be well-written, entertaining and humorous. I can only wonder what Christopher's influences are... some of the stories have a sort of David Lynch vibe ("Burning Church" even features a hallway light that flickers constantly). He certainly has an impressive vocabulary: some words that really stood out were "videlicet," "pulchritude," and "contrastively." One thing is certain: it will be interesting to see in what direction he takes his fiction next.
Finally, like many of the other books released by Little House on the Bowery, this one also features a typically awesome cover by Joel Westendorf." - James Champagne
"I went to creative writing school as an undergrad with this guy who would later adopt the pseudonym “Lonely Christopher.” He wrote these stories that basically no one knew what to do with—they were full of weird grammar jokes, sudden shifts of scene, and a kind of dream-logic that was sometimes funny if you figured it out, and sometimes deeply disturbing. He rewrote Stephen King’s The Shining as a 100-page-long sometimes-abstract language program, started a novel that combined Dracula with the gay club scene, and drank way too much Ballantine Ale. Basically, he was the guy about whom everyone said, “Holy shit, that weird dude has some actual talent.”
Now he’s got a real book coming out, called The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse, on Dennis Cooper’s publishing imprint, Little House on the Bowery, and is getting a bunch of rave reviews from people like Dale Peck, which is not bad for a 23-year-old who still drinks way too much Ballantine. His book release reading/party is tonight at Bluestockings Books, and after that he’s going on a big book tour that includes a reading with performance artist Genesis P-Orridge. I swallowed my jealousy the other night and went over to his place, bought him a 40, and talked about how it feels to be all semi-famous and shit.
You went to school for writing and you produced a book of short fiction—that’s pretty much what every writing student, in their ideal world, pictures themselves doing, right?
- I suppose so. When I was writing and thinking that I was eventually going to write publishable stories, in a way that was working against the attitude of writing school. It was sort of designed as a bit of a fuckaround, and a lot of the students were idiots, you exempt.
Thanks for that. Why is it such a fuckaround?
- Maybe it’s just an accident, I don’t know. We studied under some really good teachers, like Joshua Furst, who used to teach at Pratt. He had a pretty defensible teaching model, which was he was going to take his students seriously, and whatever they were writing he was going to help them figure out logically how to develop that into something that worked.
I think writing school is very beneficial so long as you know what you’re doing and you have enough focus as a student, but you do have to cut through some of the bullshit. A few professors, when I was learning how to write fiction, believed in my work and spent the time to help me develop as a writer, what I was dealing with a lot was—you know, I wasn’t writing the kind of work they knew how to critique or that they even enjoyed and they said, “This is just too weird and not, ever, ever going to get published.” And it’s really easy to tell someone their work isn’t going to be published, because 99.9 percent of the time you’re going to be correct. Another thing about where we went was they didn’t actually teach us how to behave in a publishing industry environment, like that’s so unfeasible they don’t even get around to talking about it.
Well, there was that one class where they told us that we would never get published.
- I didn’t go to that class. I went once, and there was an agent there who lectured us in a very condescending way about the publishing industry, gleefully, it seemed, crushing our souls. What she told us was that no one was going to respect our integrity as writers and if we wanted a book we would have to write a popular nonfiction book, and then people would start talking to you about your novel.
But you did get your fiction published, thanks to Dennis Cooper, right?
- His interest in my work has obviously been life-changing. All of a sudden I had the interest of a relatively well-known established fiction writer who I had a lot of respect for. I mean, you wouldn’t be sitting here asking me these questions if that turn of events hadn’t occurred. So I’m really thankful for Dennis’s support, and I’m happy that this book is out, because otherwise it would be sitting in a drawer and no one would be talking about it. It’s been a startling experience having a conversation about my work occur in a room where I’m not sitting. That’s definitely new to me.
How do you feel about that kind of low-level fame?
- I don’t know. My reaction vacillates between out-of-control pride and complete existential despair.
I mean, I don’t think there’s any special or inherent quality in myself that makes me any better than anyone else who has to make those kinds of decisions, and I’ve been poorly managing my life so far and I just happened to hook up with a really small but big enough publisher in Brooklyn, so I have a book now.
Well, in fairness, you’re one of the hardest-working writers I know.
- It’s not to say that what I’ve been pursuing doesn’t take a lot of work and sacrifice. I mean, I’ve been living a pretty indigent, despairing, bohemian lifestyle. I’m sort of embarrassed for myself the way I’ve been living. I don’t know if this is something I picked up in school, but this tendency to be self-delusional and think what I’m doing is important enough to not have to figure out how to live in a very expensive city and try to make it work. Which it really hasn’t been. I mean, I have a book, but the rest of my life is going completely to shit.
I realize that we might lack a certain perspective and people might find it foolish that we’re talking so gravely about our circumstances when we’re so young, but I don’t feel particularly young.
That’s fucking depressing.
- I mean, I know I’m living like a child, but—
Like a drunk child.
- Like a very drunk child." - Interview by Harry Cheadle
"TWO BOYS LIE ON A BED, ONE OF THEM IS ALREADY DEAD; they listen to Glenn Gould playing Bach and talk about suicide and love. A lonely narrator mourns the end of a relationship and the disappearance of a mysterious object as a frustrated artist jumps out of a moving car on his birthday and runs for the last streetlamp in the universe. Awkward parents and angsty teens negotiate a dark suburban landscape, searching for something they can't name, spelling out balletic sentences of failure and shame. Helicopters menace the night sky, a horse is murdered in a kitchen, victims go missing in swamps of ambiguity, and everybody waits for what the construction of a new road into town will bring: the end of the world or something worse.
The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse, a radical map of shortcomings in our daily experiences in the form of a debut story collection, presents thematically related windows into serious emotional trouble and monstrous love. Lonely Christopher combines a striking emotional grammar, reminiscent of Gertrude Stein's Three Lives, with an unyielding imagination in the lovely/ugly architecture of his stories."
"For all their postmodernist touches, the nine stories in poet Christopher's provocative and refreshing debut collection offer coherent plots and accessible prose, starting with the long title tale, about the efforts of a guy named Dumb to forget his dead boyfriend, Right, as he embarks on a new relationship with a person called Orange. In "Game Belly," which charts the night moves of club kids, characters are identified not by name but by brief tags like "the kid with long hair." "White Dog" finds menace in a woman's not so mundane trip to the supermarket. The supershort "Milk" plops a horse into a kitchen. With a lot of alternative fiction, one gets the feeling that the writer's rejection of traditional forms isn't earned; not so with this author, who's also a librettist and playwright. More Russell Banks than Donald Barthelme, Christopher could write solid, naturalistic stories if he chose, and he almost does." - Publishers Weekly
"Praise seems superfluous for a book as accomplished, cohesive, and devastating as Lonely Christopher's debut collection, so consider these words admiration instead, and admonishment: if you still think fiction counts for anything, then you should buy this bookĘright now." - Dale Peck
"Lonely Christopher, as his name suggests, knows despair as only a hobo or a clown can. This knowledge animates his fiction and provides each story with a humor that belies the terrible things that happen to his men, women, children, and animals. His formal experimentation will reward readers who have been craving a Huysmans sort of Nick Drake sort of Andy Kaufman killer writer. These readers will, like all good boys and girls, go to bed happy at last." - Kevin Killian
"Damn straight I judge books by their covers, and I judged the hell out of Lonely Christopher’s The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse: The cheeky nom de plume, drily academic title and bloodied prepubescent doll-boy had me anticipating some unholy union of Tao Lin’s preciousness, Ben Marcus’ experimental airlessness and Dennis Cooper’s deadpan depravity. To be clear, I would not have enjoyed such a mélange. But when I rallied to actually read the book, I found sharp and shimmering constructions inside, stories that sparked like burning bugs. What I found was a vicious debut collection by a young writer not on the verge of great things, but a young writer already doing great things.
Guided by the black light of Kafka’s “The Judgement,” perhaps literature’s supreme domestic nightmare, Lonely Christopher worries at the wounds made by family and at the odd cancers quickened by desire.
The strongest (and longest) story here, “Nobody Understands Thorny When,” is also the most superficially traditional. Darting back and forth on the mine-ridden timeline between a boy’s abduction and eventual return home, Lonely Christopher uses a rather familiar story arc to upset notions of tragedy and redemption. What emerges is an unsettling and haunting study of what it means to love people who love to hurt us, to hurt people who hurt with love for us.
Things do get structurally strange, as in “That Which,” an Oulipo-esque experiment consisting only of one-syllable words, and the narratives do flirt with outlandishness—“Milk” concerns a horse trapped between a fridge and a microwave—but the limpidity of Lonely Christopher’s language and his startlingly keen eye for common (but no less damaging) emotional cracks keeps the stories moored to a world that is recognizably ours. “White Dog,” the final story in The Mechanics of Sexual Intercourse, introduces us to a woman who has just woken up in a grocery store’s parking lot. She does not know how she got there, but she decides to shop, because although the nature of her arrival might be a mystery, the fact of that grocery store and its stocked shelves is not.
Lonely Christopher is, in his subtle way, describing his own work, a push-pull of sense and transcendence that commands us to keep moving, keep searching for ways to understand why we are this way." - Chris Stamm
"There’s this theory that activist and writer Eve Ensler and I talk about from time to time about people who are living in the world who are alive and people who are living in the world who are dead.
Call it a way of looking at human beings that explains death not only as something that stops life in one motion but also describes what people are doing when the engine of wonder sputters and leaves someone stranded and soulless: alive but hollow and strange. We all know people from both sides of the theory: dead people, living people.
Lonely Christopher’s first book of short stories is called The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse (Akashic) and everything about it—from its title, subject matter, syntax, even to the author’s photograph (a dark and barely decipherable image of a man squeezed into an open closet with his head inside a cage)—feels like a document delivered from a community of people who are living but who are… dead.
Not only are characters in these stories haunted by their own, (mostly), missteps, but they are fixed in their wrongness and are drawn as static, self-interested, inarticulate creations lacking real passion for anybody or any thing.
They are living blocks of wood who, more often than not, have mistaken addiction, violence and hanging around, as life. Here’s a scene from the first story in the book, “That Which”:
Dumb sat anxiously in the tub, Morton, having lowered the cover, sat on the toilet, and Lucy stood in the doorway of her bathroom holding a beer. “What then?” asked Morton. “Then he said, ‘I don’t usually drink vodka,’ and I told him he told me that when he was puking in the wastebasket before he passed out,” said Lucy. “uh, yeah,” Dumb agreed. “And described how you felt for me, please,” said Morton. “Nothing, I guess,” Said Dumb. “Everything really hurt, and maybe there was only room for some thoughts about what a bad idea it was to have drunk that much.
This strange and completely other book (an imprint of Akashic Books called Little House on the Bowery, curated by Lambda Literary Award winner Dennis Cooper) is made up of stories quixotically drawn around people like the ones above and other kinds of them that we all know but sort of wished we didn’t or, perhaps more importantly, never have really looked at closely enough to see if there was any light inside.
A great upheaval of the lost are here: outside the outside—beyond merely being marginal: sorry, negative and weirdly enough (?) gay most of the time. They all have names that practically declassify them as being human: Burning, Victim and Ash and you’ve already met Dumb.
The stories have strange titles, too: “Nobody Understands Thorny When,” “Game Belly,” and the title story: “The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse,” which is about two boys—one them who happens to be dead—both “listening” to Glenn Gould playing Bach, among other things.
The story really has nothing (or is it everything?) to do with sex or love or Glenn Gould. It reads—as every story reads—as a chance encounter, a haphazard arrangement of language with some people and places thrown in and after a while the complete avoidance of complexity or lyric beauty in subject matter or in language really begins to wear one down.
There’s no real morality or understanding of life as these stories have their curtains fall—all unseemly parts of an arbitrary sum: skewed syntax, an expanse of desert where once some flowers were.
And, of course, they can be surreal.
The story, “Milk” begins: “The horse was in the kitchen.”
It ends with this:
‘That horse was nothing but a pain in the neck,’ my mother said at supper. My father winced and ejaculated an overstated sigh. We ate meatloaf and broccoli and drank tall glasses of milk. The television, carted in from the living room, played the evening news a low volume following our required prayer. The stable thereafter was a shed. Father brought a new riding lawn mower he kept in there. The name of the horse was Black Beauty even though it was brown.
Much of the writing in the other stories has the same musicality and sense that sentences are independent statements of thinking related or not related to a strict story sense. Sometimes this works beautifully and one is sort of transported into this bizarre world of saying something and anonymity and at other times it all feels pretentious and meandering.
And there’s this overriding, somewhat annoying contrivance that generates every story which has to do with the metaphorical placing of people in the dark wood and having them not find the way out.
Because so many of Christopher’s stories are populated by characters who don’t have names one would associate with human beings, we’re back in that place of living with dead people.
The worlds that Lonely Christopher makes in this, his debut collection, are all cages, at a time of the world when we really need more stories about people who are shamelessly free—helping people be alive, not letting them be dead." - Michael Klein
"In 2003, the novelist Dennis Cooper launched his Little House on the Bowery series in connection with Akashic Books. Releasing around two books a year, this line of fiction books focuses mainly on younger North American writers who, according to an introduction for the series written by Dennis himself, "believe that fiction can be as entertaining, challenging, revelatory, and, in a word, important as any other medium. I hope Little House on the Bowery will be a reliable source for readers who want literature to be an adventure on the levels of content and style. I also want it to be an oasis for people who have come to see contemporary literature as a spotty, conservative medium." Over the years Little House on the Bowery has released a number of innovative and captivating books, including 2007's short fiction anthology Userlands (confession: a story of mine appeared in this book so naturally I'm biased) and, more recently, Mark Gluth's sublime novella The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis. Early this year they released their two newest titles, a reissue of Matthew Stokoe's cult transgressive novel Cows and Lonely Christopher's The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse, a collection of nine short stories that I have just recently completed reading and will now briefly review.
This is certainly a most curious collection, and I'm having trouble classifying it. Many of the stories (which end on ambigious notes) feature characters with unusual names, such as Dumb, Vowel Shift, Burning Church, Normal Chapter, and Timmy Victim. And the writing style is very unusual. For example, the first story, "That Which," is narrated by a boy who suffered from a debilitating head injury and is thus written in a very disjointed manner. Equally bizarre is the subject matter: the fourth story, "Milk" (which is also the shortest story in the collection at a mere 4 pages) revolves around the murder of a horse in a kitchen. The better stories, in my opinion, are the longer ones that focus more on characterization, such as "Burning Church," (which deals with a week in the life of a school teacher named Burning Church), and "Game Belly," an atmospheric piece which takes place in an empty city late at night and which revolves around a number of vacuous characters going about their nocturnal activity (though I wonder what exactly a "game belly" is). By far the best story is "Nobody Understands Thorny When," which at 34 pages is the longest story of the book. It's about the relationship between an odd boy (named Thorny When) and his kidnapper (Normal Chapter), and their most strange love affair, and how Thorny's life changes when he's "saved" from his captor after four years.
Not all of the stories worked for me though. I had no idea what "The Pokemon Movie" was supposed to be about (perhaps because I'm not all that familiar with the Pokemon phenomenon in general), though if I had to hazard a guess I'd say it's about the loss of childhood innocence. And the last story, "White Dog," which is about a seven foot tall lesbian who wanders in a dream-like daze through a supermarket, goes on for way too long, with many tedious and rambling paragraphs (the narrator spends 4 pages debating whether to buy mascara or not).
For the most part, however, I found the stories to be well-written, entertaining and humorous. I can only wonder what Christopher's influences are... some of the stories have a sort of David Lynch vibe ("Burning Church" even features a hallway light that flickers constantly). He certainly has an impressive vocabulary: some words that really stood out were "videlicet," "pulchritude," and "contrastively." One thing is certain: it will be interesting to see in what direction he takes his fiction next.
Finally, like many of the other books released by Little House on the Bowery, this one also features a typically awesome cover by Joel Westendorf." - James Champagne
"I went to creative writing school as an undergrad with this guy who would later adopt the pseudonym “Lonely Christopher.” He wrote these stories that basically no one knew what to do with—they were full of weird grammar jokes, sudden shifts of scene, and a kind of dream-logic that was sometimes funny if you figured it out, and sometimes deeply disturbing. He rewrote Stephen King’s The Shining as a 100-page-long sometimes-abstract language program, started a novel that combined Dracula with the gay club scene, and drank way too much Ballantine Ale. Basically, he was the guy about whom everyone said, “Holy shit, that weird dude has some actual talent.”
Now he’s got a real book coming out, called The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse, on Dennis Cooper’s publishing imprint, Little House on the Bowery, and is getting a bunch of rave reviews from people like Dale Peck, which is not bad for a 23-year-old who still drinks way too much Ballantine. His book release reading/party is tonight at Bluestockings Books, and after that he’s going on a big book tour that includes a reading with performance artist Genesis P-Orridge. I swallowed my jealousy the other night and went over to his place, bought him a 40, and talked about how it feels to be all semi-famous and shit.
You went to school for writing and you produced a book of short fiction—that’s pretty much what every writing student, in their ideal world, pictures themselves doing, right?
- I suppose so. When I was writing and thinking that I was eventually going to write publishable stories, in a way that was working against the attitude of writing school. It was sort of designed as a bit of a fuckaround, and a lot of the students were idiots, you exempt.
Thanks for that. Why is it such a fuckaround?
- Maybe it’s just an accident, I don’t know. We studied under some really good teachers, like Joshua Furst, who used to teach at Pratt. He had a pretty defensible teaching model, which was he was going to take his students seriously, and whatever they were writing he was going to help them figure out logically how to develop that into something that worked.
I think writing school is very beneficial so long as you know what you’re doing and you have enough focus as a student, but you do have to cut through some of the bullshit. A few professors, when I was learning how to write fiction, believed in my work and spent the time to help me develop as a writer, what I was dealing with a lot was—you know, I wasn’t writing the kind of work they knew how to critique or that they even enjoyed and they said, “This is just too weird and not, ever, ever going to get published.” And it’s really easy to tell someone their work isn’t going to be published, because 99.9 percent of the time you’re going to be correct. Another thing about where we went was they didn’t actually teach us how to behave in a publishing industry environment, like that’s so unfeasible they don’t even get around to talking about it.
Well, there was that one class where they told us that we would never get published.
- I didn’t go to that class. I went once, and there was an agent there who lectured us in a very condescending way about the publishing industry, gleefully, it seemed, crushing our souls. What she told us was that no one was going to respect our integrity as writers and if we wanted a book we would have to write a popular nonfiction book, and then people would start talking to you about your novel.
But you did get your fiction published, thanks to Dennis Cooper, right?
- His interest in my work has obviously been life-changing. All of a sudden I had the interest of a relatively well-known established fiction writer who I had a lot of respect for. I mean, you wouldn’t be sitting here asking me these questions if that turn of events hadn’t occurred. So I’m really thankful for Dennis’s support, and I’m happy that this book is out, because otherwise it would be sitting in a drawer and no one would be talking about it. It’s been a startling experience having a conversation about my work occur in a room where I’m not sitting. That’s definitely new to me.
How do you feel about that kind of low-level fame?
- I don’t know. My reaction vacillates between out-of-control pride and complete existential despair.
I mean, I don’t think there’s any special or inherent quality in myself that makes me any better than anyone else who has to make those kinds of decisions, and I’ve been poorly managing my life so far and I just happened to hook up with a really small but big enough publisher in Brooklyn, so I have a book now.
Well, in fairness, you’re one of the hardest-working writers I know.
- It’s not to say that what I’ve been pursuing doesn’t take a lot of work and sacrifice. I mean, I’ve been living a pretty indigent, despairing, bohemian lifestyle. I’m sort of embarrassed for myself the way I’ve been living. I don’t know if this is something I picked up in school, but this tendency to be self-delusional and think what I’m doing is important enough to not have to figure out how to live in a very expensive city and try to make it work. Which it really hasn’t been. I mean, I have a book, but the rest of my life is going completely to shit.
I realize that we might lack a certain perspective and people might find it foolish that we’re talking so gravely about our circumstances when we’re so young, but I don’t feel particularly young.
That’s fucking depressing.
- I mean, I know I’m living like a child, but—
Like a drunk child.
- Like a very drunk child." - Interview by Harry Cheadle
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