Brian Warfield - I plucked my eyes out, to be more homer. Sight impedes poetry. You think trees or trash blow- ing in the wind is the answer. You think, my god, naked women

Brian Warfield, Shotgun Torso, Turtlneck Press, 2012

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'Scrub with anti-bacterial soap, line yourself with latex, then step into that HazMat suit. You're gonna need it. Actually, forget all that. Just bring your body to this book, peel some skin, and enjoy the fester.' -- Paul Siegell

‘Shotgun Torso’ is a life in three parts. For the first part of the primordial ooze, that’s birth. Birth is pretty gross. New people, places, and things are necessary. Middle age is for the production of new people. For whatever reason people like making new people and peopling the Earth. Who knows why? It appears to be maddening. At last there is death. Death is the interview to end all interviews. 

                Brian Warfield finds himself in ooze. Growing up involves being born. That’s the first step. Hospitals document the birth of children through discharges. Admissions do not count babies. Babies leave. No baby simply enters the hospital. The baby was already there before anything else happened. From there Brian notices a decapitated clown head. Obviously Brian is afraid of clowns. What Brian fails to realize is that decapitated clown heads run America’s economy. On Halloween those ‘pumpkins’ and ‘jack-o-lanterns’ are really shriveled up clown heads put on display. Some children love clowns to try to offset their inevitable decapitation. Nothing can prepare a clown for getting down into the ground. 

                Getting down is the topic for the mid-section. Brian describes sex. Odors are an important part of sex. That’s why showers after sex are critical. Without those showers there is little way to become clean again. Shoulders are clothes hangers. Various manufacturing groups are well aware of the necessary size of clothes hangers. Brian describes the hotness of toe cleavage. Toes can be very attractive. It is clear that Brian really loves the feet. When a toe shows off its goods it can attract other toes to join the foot. If the toe lacks a proper bust, well then the foot lacks other toes. Few suffer from toeless feet but it is a problem. Thank goodness that toes are such voracious flirts.

                Death finishes it. Brian is waiting to eat his cereal, waiting for the food to get all soggy in soy milk. Out of nowhere death reckons it can simply take him away. Brian doesn’t get to eat his cereal. Death is rather rude. The proper thing would be to wait for the cereal first, perhaps wait for Brian to get a cup of coffee so he’s awake during his death. Going through death half-asleep is a wretched way to die. Yet that’s why so many people die in their sleep. Awake it is much easier to defeat death. 

                For the finale Brian interviews in hell. The bathroom line is too long and the fire hurts. Afterlife makes life look like a joke, which is sort of is. Life is a three-part act.- Beach Sloth

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Excerpt

i. Shotgun Torso

I am sinking under dark liquid. Tobacco juice, oil spill, something coughed up from the lung. My feet don't touch the bottom; I'm not even sure if I have feet. Someone painted a barn the wrong color. Barns burn. I watched the fire blazing like a hole in the night. Pure darkness then the sucking out of no light, vibrant scaf- folding of flame.

I held on to the ladder. It was a vertical con- veyor belt. I wanted to find out what it would convey to me. The tunnels had open mouths which were compelled to swallow.

I was jealous of people with broken limbs, climbing out onto faulty tree branches. Mil- lions of miles into the future. Time machines need oil changes, parts and labor. A machine gives birth to poor babies. Oldest living man's last request was to fuck a newborn infant.

I plucked my eyes out, to be more homer. Sight impedes poetry. You think trees or trash blow- ing in the wind is the answer. You think, my god, naked women.

I climbed down that rung to where the water started. I watched it eat the soles of my feet. He wanted to submerge himself. The crying of animals = the crying of humans.

Decapitated clown head. Serrated smile.

I used to want a line, a string, a strand that was tied to my door leading out into the world, and I would wrap the rope around my wrist and feel it burn as it turned marking my passing. I wanted to get to the end of that rope.

Empty trees carry nothing in their arms. Barren barons. Birds forced to fly always in the sky die of exhaustion. Wings beating, beaten, sprain.

Moles on bodies develop into cancer like old photographs.

Sidewalks contain in their souls a register of every footstep ever commemorated upon them. Every heart enshrines that which breaks it.

I can see your body stuffed inside my dryer folded on itself like prayer going around thumping your bones inside your skin.

I held my breath and penetrated the wall. Her eyeball was aghast with blood.


Room packed with unborn children. I don't want to wade through their skin, the skin of not-even ghosts haunted by unlived lives still in their mothers' chambers, still in their fathers' sperm. Still.

I eat them without tasting. Feasting.

The circular room, the ambulance. Crying mis- erable ugly body potato-shaped breast. Beasts with no backs, all rib flesh. Organic on a ses- ame seed bun. All enticing tying shoelaces. I want to drive a truck full of bread. Through a window. 13th floor. The smell of yeast, dough, collagen, clawing up the nostrils. Brainward.

Feet that walk at the bottom of bodies propelling forward toward ... something. Hell, skate, diving board, french, pleasant, please. Write with your left hand, sawn off. Blood, children; beautiful children. Eat them.

 

 

A Kind of/ Not Really Interview with Brian Warfield

A few months ago, long after I had finished writing Grey Inserts Himself, Like an Oven Mitt in a Top Hat, I found Issue 3 of McSweeney’s at a used bookstore and purchased it. In the letters to the editor section there were questions from David Shields, and as I read them, I recognized some of the things that had motivated writing my story. So I am using his questions as a kind of/ not really interview. Thanks to McSweeney’s for giving permission to reprint these questions.
　
DS: Is there a sense in which a writer’s vision gets more thoroughly and beautifully tested in a book of linked stories than it does in a collection of miscellaneous stories or in a novel?
BW: Linked stories provide cheat codes to writing a longer work. You are able to walk through walls and have multiple lives. Which is not to say that it is easy, but there are certain things you can do in seven stories that you can’t in one long one. You are able with each story to start fresh. By linking them, they work together as a whole. I think linked stories have the benefits of both short stories and longer pieces. You can work on the micro and macro level simultaneously and consciously. Novels that focus too much on micro tend to be disjointed, whereas short stories that focus on macro seem unfinished.
DS: How do linked-story collections combine the capaciousness of the novel with the density and intensity of the novel?
BW: Each story is a separate entity. It has a function and a purpose in and of itself but also in support of the collection. Because each story contains tendrils that attach themselves to the other stories, they function together as a whole. The density comes from the accretion of each story building towards one large story. Like Voltron.
DS: Why do linked stories often have a stronger thematic pull than do novels?
BW: Typically the theme is what links the stories. In a novel, you have one theme that may manifest itself in various ways and you might stray from the theme to develop other aspects of tone or characterization. But in short stories, especially if they are very short, the theme is going to be like a pulse that you feel asserting itself in every story, and every story might do it differently.
DS: How does each story in a collection of linked stories achieve a sort of closure-but-not-closure?
BW: This was one of my main interests in writing these stories. I wanted each story to have a problem that was resolved. I wanted a series of births and deaths, so to speak. Because each story is its own reality, each story has its own rules. I was interested in making these rules rub up against each other in the spaces between stories, which I felt leant it that lack-of-closure aspect. It is like watching the coyote get hit in the head repeatedly by the anvil. It brings the story to a close, but it can’t because you know that it is just one link in a chain.
DS: What is the difference between repetition and reprise?
BW: The coyote getting hit in the head with an anvil over and over is repetition. There are certain elements that repeat in the Grey stories. Certain phrases or ideas. Reprise is variation on a theme where the same kind of thing happens but there are subtle changes and amplifications. These tend to underpin the feeling of interrelatedness without drawing attention to themselves.
DS: To what degree do linked stories seem to be about pattern, about authorial obsession, about watching a writer work and rework his material until he or she simply has nothing more to say about it?
BW: I was interested in pattern, in telling maybe the same story in different ways, becoming obsessed with an idea, the idea of writing it and the idea being conveyed. I felt that grey paint as an object of obsession – it was the only emotion one could feel towards it. And “working and reworking” could very well explain the contradictions intentionally sewn into the narrative.
DS: What epistemological questions thus get raised? E.g., Is everything we know provisional?
BW: Is there such thing as truth or a soul? Where does it come from? How do stories help us re-author our lives? Can fractured, conflicting stories be more comprehensive than a straight-forward or “true” event? Are there an infinite number of universes? What do we learn?
I am interested in the questioning aspect of story-telling and I think that my answers here are just that: my answers. Your answers might be different. If you’ve read the book, or even if you haven’t, feel free to add your comments.
http://turtleneckpress.com/news-interviews-reviews-emus/a-kind-of-not-really-interview-with-brian-warfield/

 

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