bibles @appropouture - Birth and death are connected in a miraculous seance of grand literary sweep and ambition. Sexual mores, perversion, tender beauty and chaos are juxtaposed. This book contains multitudes: it is by turns hilarious, dark, terrifying, obscene, hallucinatory and realistic. It is a visionary, powerful statement from the unchained id of a singular artist

bibles, The Better Face of Fascism, Expat Press, 2016.
https://twitter.com/Appropouture?lang=en

“Change is necessary, I say. To write bibles, I must become bibles.” The nature of authorship is challenged, the reader-writer relationship is thrown into upheaval, normie literature is forever undermined and the stylistic consequences of this book will reverberate through the annals of psychosexual adventurism. Currentivism breaks books. The heteronym bibles @Appropouture is a veteran of currentivism. Author of Hosanna in Hand, Psychopompous, and Antiquity Fails, the appropouture is a divinely guided vessel. A web search for appropouture yields a dazzling panoply of writing and art across various mediums and through time inexorable. Bibles writes on his telegram channel, on twitter, on any platform and to any audience. It’s all writing. Currentivism is the here and now. Here on channel prime one currentivism, reality and dreams are in confluence. The most important book of the Trump era, this book engages with you directly. It reaches into the interiors of your soul and pulses near your vitals and pressure points. It is full of secrets, a vibrating conduit. It has mystical properties, it is mutant memoir, it has spiritual magic in its movements. The Better Face of Fascism is the story of a year under the Trump administration as bibles tracks the birth of his first child in the Utah desert, surrounded by Mormons, a bizarre cast of characters both familial and strange, real and unreal, you and not you. Birth and death are connected in a miraculous seance of grand literary sweep and ambition. Sexual mores, perversion, tender beauty and chaos are juxtaposed. The Better Face of Fascism contains multitudes: it is by turns hilarious, dark, terrifying, obscene, hallucinatory and realistic. It is a visionary, powerful statement from the unchained id of a singular artist. If you get lost or confused, it’s only your imagination galloping away from you, and your reliable narrator, bibles, will take care of you, whisper the words you didn’t know you longed to hear. The Better Face of Fascism walks with balletic grace on the razor-thin cutting edge of literature. It is the music of the spheres, percussive primal bleats, a wry sense of humor, neobeat filth, romantic poetry within a blink. Submit to this primordial concoction. It goes down better than hemlock.

Chicory Knife Slave
Vanilla Pump (Heavy Athletics)
Race Relations (Terror House)
Never Negotiate: bibles @appropouture

The Better Face of Fascism by bibles is not a novel. Let’s get that out of the way. To classify it at all would be to try to contain it in some way, and this is a book that will slip through your grip every time. The question, then, is “what the hell is this?”

The answer is it’s a howl from a place we all have inside of us. Many of us may not know it’s there. If we do, we make a great effort to pretend that it’s not. Your place and my place may not look like bibles’, not exactly, but if you’re honest (and if you squint) you will recognize it in this book.

That still doesn’t explain the actual narrative you’re being asked to engage with for nearly 200 pages. And there is a narrative here, certainly. It just tends to go off the rails. I’m of the opinion making comparisons to other art as reference points is lazy, but when you’re dealing with a work as difficult to pin down as The Better Face of Fascism, an exception can be made for the sake of illumination.

The two main works I kept thinking about while reading were films rather than other books. I was reminded of David Lynch’s Eraserhead and Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ during my time with the book. Lynch actually appears as a point of discussion late in the book. The two films correlate with the two main narrative points presented here: the anxiety of having a baby on the way and the difficult task of creating a work of art while dealing with the intrusions of the world around you.

Both movies and this book use the surrealism of internalized thought to create an expressionist version of what is ultimately the mundane. Having a kid is common. Creating a work of art, still relatively common. Yet, they can cause what feels like a personal apocalypse if you’re the one living through it. Much like the death of loved ones, we all have to deal with it. But, once it happens to you, it becomes the greatest tragedy. That is what bibles’ does here.

Stripped down to its skeleton, this is a book about writing a book. The character, the narrator, the author bibles frets throughout about how the book isn’t getting done because life is happening. This baby is on the way and it has completely eaten up all available mental resources. That would be easy enough to digest, but it’s not written that simply.

If you are in possession of an overactive inner monologue, particularly one that is prone to outbursts and self-flagellation, you will recognize what bibles is doing here when he diverts from the storytelling into stream of consciousness asides that are used like paint to complete the picture. Space and time jump around. It’s disorienting. You may think you’re in one place, but then you are taken to another like you were black bagged and thrown into a trunk.

Meanwhile, you’re also being asked, repeatedly, to deal with bibles’ laundry list of anxious obsessions including weight gain, hemorrhoids, moles, masturbation, to name a few. I’m no doctor, but I’m fucked up, so I can tell you it feels like going along for the ride of someone else’s OCD.

This is all to say, I can see this book being divisive. It all comes down to whether you’re willing to buy the ticket and take the ride as a certain writer who blew his own head off once said. Not that one, the other one. This is a difficult book, there’s no question. It’s a very insular work. There are a lot of characters, but they often feel like talking scenery. They happen to inhabit bibles’ world for better or worse. This is about bible’s internal journey. Celine is mentioned throughout and this does feel like a Journey to the End of the Night for the online generation in all its nastiness and loathing.

There are also plenty of inside baseball elements at play here. Twitter and what it has done to friendship and politics rears its head quite a bit. This book was published by Expat Press and labelmates/the publisher appear as characters discussed throughout the book. Does it hurt the book if you have no idea who Atticus Davis or Manuel Marrero are? Not really, but it does add meaningful context when they are mentioned and furthers the “am I reading a memoir or novel or what?” effect the book causes. Let’s just say being an Extremely Online Writer adds a little something here when reading.

I like difficult art. I like being forced to think about uncomfortable things. I like The Better Face of Fascism by bibles. Go to that place or don’t, but I think you should at least try dipping a toe in just to see how it feels. - Anthony Dragonetti

http://neutralspaces.co/blog/post.php?id=145

 The Better Face of Fascism is an exceptionally honest book. The author, bibles, is unapologetically transparent— a transparency maybe best achieved through anonymity. Everything from manic ecstasy to self-loathing depravity, megalomania to helplessness, is explored through his meandering journey. Inspired by the idea of Currentivism, which capitalizes on the speed of technology to collapse the space between the artist and their audience, bibles’ style is one of intimacy and immediacy. It’s a hyper-aware stream-of-consciousness, complete with the absurd non-sequiturs of intrusive thoughts, the obscenities of a brash inner-monologue, and the self-mythologizing we’re all guilty of but hate to say out loud.

The book is, on its face, an extensive recording of a soon-to-be parent’s life as he and his wife prepare to bring a child into the world. It’s the viscera of all the change and upheaval such a colossal event entails. With life bearing down and threatening parts of him that have long been crucial to his identity, the writing itself takes on a therapeutic quality as an exercise of catharsis and consolation. It becomes a cyclical process of rumination, critique and untangling.

Consequently it’s also an exploration of artistic creation, particularly creation under numerous constraints— increasing responsibility, financial strains and, of course, a lack of time. The process is dissected and examined, questioned and answered again and again, sometimes hesitantly, other times with absolute, unflinching conviction. If you’ve dedicated significant time and energy to an artistic pursuit, the anxieties dredged up will be familiar, if uncomfortable at times. Likewise, the highs will remind you why you pursued such a thing in the first place.

But this isn’t to say it’s a self-serious, humorless narrative. bibles’ often flippant attitude in his day-to-day interactions has an absurd, playful quality to it. He’s all too aware of the gulf between him, a neurotic, extremely-online writer, and the comparably conservative citizenry of his suburban Utah. His own exhaustion at the mundanities necessary to life make his writing all the more necessary as he navigates his own addictions, failures, successes and progress in graphic detail.

To read this book is to come to know bibles and all his idiosyncrasies, neuroses, fixations and fantasies, and to maybe further understand your own in response. As bibles illustrates such a complete picture of himself you will inevitably see pieces of yourself— strange pieces, essential pieces, maybe lost or rejected pieces. It’s part Eraserhead, part Notes from Underground, but most of all it’s an urgent, hard to categorize work that feels compulsory and imperative to the author’s understanding of himself and the people around him. The product is a fascinating, in-depth account of chaotic growth that will leave a part of bibles with you whether you like it or not.

I reached out to bibles, who was kind enough to answer a few questions and tell me a bit about the book and the writing process.

S: When you were writing this book did you have a sense of yearning for structure? The life you portray is sort of reluctantly structured, but you seem bored by it.

B: That’s a good analysis. I wanted the natural essence of life to find the structure. I was yearning for the narrative strings of life to become the beams of the book.

S: Interesting, that’s what I like about autofiction. I think it mimics the way we process our own lives. So given this is such a personal book, do you feel like you accomplished what you set out to do with it, and was it a therapeutic/cathartic process for you?

B: It was therapeutic. I consider myself a catharsis writer. I did get what I wanted out of it, but it has left me hollowed out in some way. I’m hoping that it will hold me off through the drought of time I have found myself in as a result of the situations concluded in the book. In a sense, the production of the book is a betrayal of the writing itself.

S: How so?

B: So much of the book’s subject is the unnecessary nature of itself. Writing stands alone. When you produce a book, you are sacrificing time from writing to create the product. You have to listen to your publisher, etc. whose money you’re working under. They’re going to try and make a return from you. It’s an unnecessary expense. I appreciate the book. Don’t get me wrong. Writers lose something when they make books though, and they no longer have to now that the internet exists.

S: So do you think there’s a significant difference between writing a book under few to no constraints and writing on the internet, like via telegram the way you do? Like there’s something lost in the book, or not worth it?

B: Something lost and gained. Like I said, I appreciate the book. I love books. I think that they should be special. There are so many out and coming out. They can catch the essence of writing online, but it takes expert editing and publishing. It’s not just telegram. It’s this, between you and me. I’m on my phone. I have a piece of pizza in one hand. I had to escape my job. I’m in the parking lot of a restaurant that doesn’t serve the food I’m eating. Some people, myself included, can do great things with editing. There’s so little time though, and an endless number of editors to come.

This isn’t how I want to be coming to you, answering vital questions about my legacy, etc. I want to be at my computer, going fast, at the speed of thought. But I live under many constrictions at the moment. There’s so much unknown to me. The typos are smoothing out, the grammar becoming clearer, like we caught back onto the station. Just a blip. Right here, and it could be the last.

S: So it sounds like this all relates back to Currentivism. I think I have a pretty good grasp based on your explanations in the book and online, but could you tell me a little bit about it? And maybe about the role the internet plays in it since it seems pretty crucial.

B: It’s about getting rid of some of the falseness that is manufactured in literature. Hours spent trying to seem natural. It’s about untangling life. Wherever that is, even if it’s in fiction. It’s a breaking of the rules. Like, something you can only do now that you couldn’t do previously. Publishing takes forever. Even with lit mags. Writing already takes enough time away from the writer. So much attention. It throws me into such fugues.

S: So would you characterize your work as in a way confessional? Or maybe autofiction?

B: Yes. It’s both of those things. I grew up getting a religious thrill from confessing. There was salvation in the act. Autofiction helps me get closer to god as well. I like the way that the narrative reveals itself. Choices are presented like [BR] Yeager was talking about. I’m supposed to be a better person after the writing, but it hasn’t much worked out that way for me. However, I am allowed to continue playing in my imagination. The job I’m at is a challenge. A case. There’s an undercurrent to everything. In a way, it’s like mining for my personal truth. A personal truth that is larger than myself.

S: Ah the religious aspect is an interesting point of context. I didn’t necessarily pick up on that in the book. You do reference and at times praise God, but it seems pretty casual. So you’re a practicing worshipper?

B: Practicing, I suppose, in my writing. Art is my religion as much as it is that I’m looking for God in life. Art, or writing, in this particular sense of me, is my way of trying to find the god of it all. I’d say that the Latter Day Saints have lost their way. Am I against multiple wives? No. Do I have the strength of courage to have them? No.

S: You grew up in a LDS environment I’m assuming? The book does take place in Utah.

B: Yes, this is true. My mother and father are also Utah mormons. My sister and her husband are mormons, and they all love Trump. The Republican party has become the new church, and it tears us apart that I like the Jesus that is Bernie Sanders.

S: You mention Trump in the book a few times in a sort of anxious tone. Was he a consistent source of anxiety in your life while you were writing this? Or at least the effect the phenomenon of his presidency had on the people around you?

B: I will admit that my family is stupid for supporting him. I won’t say that I don’t find the whole thing entertaining. I’m of split personalities. The Better Face of Fascism is someone more like Putin, but I’m not here to judge. A person could say that it’s me for the art of it that I’m making. It’s what really gets left behind with all of the Jewish deaths and global domination. We were trying to flip the earth on its head, and look at what it amounted to. Trump is more like Mussolini— the better face of fascism. Someone to keep us from blooming utter, gross cruelties through the grasping for the freedoms of our fantasies.

S: Throughout the book you refer to your audience and the sort of debt or obligation you have to them. I understand that much of your writing is done for yourself, like you said, as a way to get closer to God and sort of unfurl your life. Is there any specific intention you hope your work has on your audience, or any particular ideas you hope to engage them with?

B: Yes. I do hope that people like the book. I hope that it hits a chord with the audience. As an author, I try to write what I want to read; I know that there are at least one or two other people out there who feel something like what I feel writing it when they read it. As a writer, I have a testing relationship with my audience. The audience is truly very small. God willing, I am allowed to get more personal than the book allows. This goes back to answer that last question. I’d say that the sequel is alive here in this interview. The struggle of having a child. She’s two now. The book is something like that old as well. We’re in it, you and me, and whoever reads this and reaches out to me is in it. I’m working to smatter past it. I need salvation. I don’t know if I can achieve it without the audience. I have said elsewhere, perhaps not in that book, that the audience is God. It’s the voice outside of yourself. It’s the peanut gallery. It’s the trusted advisor. The fairy godmother. A comrade in the battle against whatever the antagonizing force is that we’re at war with. I hope to bring people into the struggle through my work. I enjoy the way that my writing affects other people’s writing. I am a jungle carver out in the dark, moist wilderness. There are Darwins all around, white towering their way into successful careers. There is such madness out here, but there are these lights of love who come to you like volleyball friends to Tom Hanks’ castaway. They become characters in the book, whether they want to or not. It can wreck relationships, but I’ve always seen authors as having the potential to be counselors, guides, etc. I find I have that sort of an effect on my audience. They tend to care for me. Empathize with me. Through this though, they are able to find liberation. That’s what I’m hunting for. I need them and they can use me. We’re not out here simply for our careers. We are looking for liberation. The great treasure in the unexplored.

S: I find that in my life people who are truly dedicated to their art, the ones that stick with it over their life, have similar justifications for their work, that it’s their own searching that they’re concerned with and everything else is secondary. This feels like a nice, conclusive note to end on. Do you have anything else in mind that you’d like to add?

B: I think that it’s pretty good. We covered a lot of ground.

S: Yeah we went in a lot of interesting directions, thanks for chatting. I always like to hear about the way people work and more importantly why they work.

https://expatpress.com/a-conversation-with-bibles-on-the-better-face-of-fascism-scott-litts/

bibles @appropouture, Psychopompous, 2013.


bibles @appropouture, Antiquity Fails, 2014.


Therein exists a certain logic, a hidden knowledge. A kind of machine. That’s what we’re talking about then, or here anyways: a kind of machine as in a sense we all are. As is this whole universe. God perhaps. Hosanna in Hand.


https://medium.com/@Appropouture