Jared Pappas-Kelley - Here, events are presented in a glassy contemplation of travel and transition. Stilted and strange dialogue, description, minor reality stars, historical influences, lists, architecture, movements, and mundane pop culture observations of a misinformed but well-meaning observer montage into an internal and external reverie

 

Jared Pappas-Kelley, Stalking America. Delere

Press, 2023

Excerpt:

Stalking America blends an interior/exterior assemblage of a young person on a train riding cross-county where everything is subtext and suspicion. Here, events are presented in a glassy contemplation of travel and transition. Stilted and strange dialogue, description, minor reality stars, historical influences, lists, architecture, movements, and mundane pop culture observations of a misinformed but well-meaning observer montage into an internal and external reverie. In America, nothing is seen or spoken directly. Conversations and thoughts wander in from around a corner—a deleted browser history of experience—ripple into the cliché of a coming of age. In this sense America is half-baked like a teenager. The protagonist obsesses over historical references to nude bathers, anarchist colonies, reality television, communes, volcanic eruptions, and songs in a playlist trying to understand a certain aspect of America through observations and false epiphanies. A vacated puzzle attempts to undo itself while each piece ploddingly re-assembles with the assurance of the train ride as elements come into proximity. To understand America, to really appreciate it, is to fundamentally misunderstand it at the deepest levels—to read into its flattening out and image as the ultimate subtext and that is where the story lies.

I wish I could wear a permanent wireless earpiece like actors do when they don’t know their lines, and that it was connected to a microphone that Jared Pappas-Kelley hovered perpetually above while simultaneously viewing everything I saw through monitors connected to surveillance cameras littered through my surroundings, and that he could also magically live a rich, full-fledged independent life and keep writing up a storm. - Dennis Cooper

Sometimes who you are is kind of where you come from, and sometimes where you come from is kind of remade by you. Maybe America is a melting pot, maybe it’s a tossed salad. Whatever it is, it’s a mess, just like you and me, if you’re as apple pie as I am, as Columbined and Mayflowered and high schooled and low schooled and junk-fooded and beautiful. That’s us, that’s our US of A. Jared Pappas-Kelley understands why every American feels stalked by history, and also needs to stalk our legacy, our detritus, to do whatever we need to do to understand and maybe make peace with our place in the busted world. - Rebecca Brown

Interleaved with the salvage of a Gordon Matta-Clark essay that glides to other sites of narrating memory, Jared Pappas-Kelley’s well-oiled construction here invites us to eavesdrop in a passenger compartment that doubles as confessional space, where connections surface, cathexis is sketched and flipped, and the communal share transpires. His montage has a searching, glowing quality of folds through time, and I find myself sitting back for the deferred destination, morphing graffiti, overheard and worked-through conversations, dips into light abstraction and high-concept fictionalizations like one of reality TV and its reaches; a picnoleptic picaresque. Like the best of waking dreams, it defamiliarizes the seemly, keeping an eye all the while on some expensive shoes and accompanying muffin crumbs across the aisle. It sent me. - Douglas A. Martin

Jared Pappas-Kelley’s Stalking America is one of those rare beasts, a truly unclassifiable novel: a text of a kind so mercurial that it seems to want to shrug off even that label. On its simplest, most rudimentary level, it follows the doings of a reasonably nondescript young man—and yet even in saying as little as that, the word “follows” becomes conspicuous, overloaded with meaning. That’s because the protagonist develops an interest in a reality TV series called Stalking America, which itself follows a woman who in turn follows, and films, other people. But then, just as you’re maybe thinking that the novel sets itself up to make something of the reverberations between these two characters, it does something different. It splits itself apart, cordoning off various sections of its narrative, slicing viewpoints into pieces, creating boundaries around and gaps between different ways of looking at (following?) events as they unfold. The result is something restless, a little insidious, equal parts frustrating and compelling, and made up of many more fascinating elements than a summary can capture. Following the publication of Stalking America last summer, Jared Pappas-Kelley spoke to 3:AM’s Daniel Davis Wood about the stuff that Stalking America is made of, and the stuff it tries to unmake.

3:AM: I’d like to begin by thinking a bit about your vision for Stalking America, particularly in terms of its breadth and scale. I’m not quite sure how to classify the book. While it often feels like a work of fiction, there are parts that hew closer to autofiction and the text itself flirts with the label “memoir”—so let’s just say that it operates on a very personal level. At the same time, though, the prologue announces an intention to grapple with “this moment we currently inhabit,” and the text is also shot through with shards and fragments of what sound like fleeting contributions to “the discourse.”

So, to me, the vision of the book is one that pulls in two directions simultaneously: it both concentrates on a singular experience and broadens out to something more panoramic. I’d love to know more about how it came to be that way. Did you know, early on, that the book would be working towards this, or did it come about by trial-and-error and experimentation?

JPK: When talking with my editor, that was something we were trying to figure out—this slippage or blurring that was the structure—and he put forward an idea that for him Stalking America was what he’d classify a “thinking novel.” What I took that to mean was that it was primarily about a process of thinking or thought. For me, it became more about layering these impulses and drawing out parallels in the material, to let the threads pool together so that certain bits would click and others sort of drift back into the background in a mundane sense. And it was about blurring these approaches between fiction, or “discourse,” and playing with conventions that might cause someone to read it as perhaps memoir or biography or artist writings as a way of tracing a thought within this slippage.

I was interested in putting something forward that at the same time undermines or questions itself, that parallels the movement from the singular to the more panoramic, as you put it. Is this something that fiction can support? Or is it collapsing under its own weight when it plays out in this manner? There’s the idea of tricking a truth into revealing itself, but instead it might be a sidestepping, and as an approach it is maybe like with an eclipse—not something to be viewed directly. Building these overly-complex and clunky apparatuses or structures—like a hole poked in construction paper inside a cardboard box with a paper towel tube: an eclipse viewing box, to make the indirectly viewable visible—might allow us to approach this idea of truth, to catch it unaware or startle it into view like a woodland creature. And perhaps that’s tied to a notion of the post-truth, whatever that means, how to navigate and perceive or cut through.

3:AM: I love the shambolic nature of those “clunky apparatuses” and I think the book absolutely pieces itself together in that way. Alongside narratorial discourse, you’ve got some typographic play (sporadic sans serif fonts, dialogue inset like a blockquote, a dream sequence rendered in double columns on a single page) as well as snippets of cultural ephemera. I’m thinking of text messages, magazine cover headlines (“Somali Gangs in the Midwest”, “It’s Time to Break Up with Your Boss”), and the detritus of digital life: “We would like to keep you up to date with news and events from our affiliates. To unsubscribe from this, please click here.” If Stalking America is a “thinking novel,” what are these bits and pieces contributing to the thought process?

JPK: The different bits sift together into something hybrid, or that’s what I was playing with, and in my head I approached it like threads or a feed aggregating in a way. How things have shifted or are shifting. How these elements coincide without always being attributed. That’s what I was interested in with the dialogue and those other elements, and it became more about texture and building an affinity or magnetism between parts. With the typographic and formatting elements, I was exploring this anatomy, ways to signal elements approaching from different sources, and flattening out, but also giving cues that they shift registers. How to map this experience on the page?—that’s sort of how I conceived it. I also wanted to flirt with a sort of call and response between what was accruing, these elements or ephemera, and a narrative that was developing. We have perhaps become so hardwired to read these cues or bracket them out, ignore them, so I was also looking not so much at what’s right there on the surface but what wanders behind it.

3:AM: Which brings us to the subject of structure, the arrangement of disparate parts. What’s striking to me about the structure of Stalking America is the way it looks a bit haphazard but actually, on reflection, is working within a tight design. Can we talk about that design a little? The book more or less opens with some notes on the real-life installation artist Gordon Matta-Clark, who made his name by “cutting up buildings”—by literally taking slices out of enclosed spaces in the built environment. Matta-Clark’s work is important to the substance of the book, but also to the structure. How did his spirit inform the way Stalking America demarcates and arranges its various components?

JPK: Matta-Clark allowed me to work with someone else as a proxy or stand-in, to frame the book as a biography around his ideas and how he approached structures. Kind of in the way his houses and interventions served as a proxy for revealing something more through their cuts and there was a freedom in that. I tend to see myself most keenly in contrast to other people. His approach gave me permission to examine that contradiction, with lived or abandoned spaces dissected and put on display as biography or narrative, but beginning with somebody else—a significant artist—and his story and the way it is constructed. Without representing, it begins to resemble. Cutting into these narratives reveals something more within the material; into vacated spaces, a stairway that led somewhere once, an impulse.

So one thing I was playing with was this idea of over-identifying with something, and how that thing begins to blend into the original or take the lead. The main character in Stalking America is perhaps over identifying with the character Claire on the TV show. Sure, there may be some connection between them, and perhaps they grew up down the street from each other, but even in this it’s a bit tenuous or overstated, so it becomes more about self-construction through over-identification. I was also inviting myself to over identify with Matta-Clark in a way as a writer, his construction and process, framing something a bit tenuous or skewed but also something that traces a resemblance.

3:AM: Yes, and you’ve even just alluded to one of the lines in the book that touches on these ideas: “It somehow seems fitting for my memoir of sorts (who the hell said it was a memoir) to begin with somebody else, a significant artist, his story, as I have always seen myself most keenly in contrast to other people, through an affinity but also where they are not like me, their experiences.” But there’s also, to me, another sense in which Matta-Clark is moving through Stalking America—or, if we prefer to think of Stalking America as a “thinking book,” then there’s a sense in which Matta-Clark is driving its mode of thought.

I mean something like this… There are the autofictional parts of the book, and then there are the reality TV parts, and then there are the “Lapso mori” sections. These intercut the other two parts with fragments of text that sometimes seem like non sequiturs in relation to the action, sometimes attempts at establishing thematic resonances with it—and I emphasise the “cut” in “intercut.” So the way I came to see these sections was essentially as prosaic versions of Matta-Clark’s cuts: as if Stalking America were a structure unto itself, with its enclosed spaces cut apart (and cut into) by the “Lapso mori” sections. But maybe that’s just me over-identifying with your narrator over-identifying with Matta-Clark! How do you see the “Lapso mori” sections informing the broader vision?

JPK: There’s this impulse of cutting to see what lies behind: carving windows as an excavation, exposing what remains or bleeds through, but not in a static way—seeking a sustained act of cutting-through in order to construct. Without that constructive aspect, it’s more of an autopsy of something gutted, or just a cluster of holes—that’s something else. So with the more autofiction bits of Stalking America, or the reality show or the “Lapso Mori” sections, perhaps an architecture reveals itself like a push notification—cutting through a proximity, reordering and observing previously obstructed vantages or lines of sight or thought, interjecting between these instances as when a wall is removed.

3:AM: Well, then, after Matta-Clark, there’s another artist who could be called the second of the book’s presiding spirits: the photographer Sophie Calle. In fact, of the two artists, she is the one I was more familiar with before I came to Stalking America. Her work is evoked in the title of the book, given that she made her name in the 1980s with a series of surreptitious pictures of a man she stalked on a journey from Paris to Venice; and the reality show within the book (also called Stalking America) basically follows a woman who stalks others, albeit in a more mundane way. But my sense is that it’s the creative aspect of Calle’s work, rather than the documentary aspect, that resonates with the book: the framing, the selection, and what goes on between the gaps. Am I on the right track? How would you say Calle speaks to Stalking America?

JPK: Sophie Calle was definitely in the material and in the initial ideas of the reality show Stalking America. When Calle was secretly following and documenting her subject around Venice, in a sense he became a bit displaced and that was kind of the point. He’s a moving target but he’s actually pretty secondary to her project, because her approach it inverts the dynamic a bit. Calle said he wasn’t especially interesting to her, but that she did it simply for the pleasure of it, and that was the jumping-off point. There is something about the act of watching, and through her attention and focus it accumulates, it becomes about this process of looking and stalking an idea through its everyday or mundane habitat to sort of put something else on display.

In a sense we are stalked by our individual histories or experiences, or where we come from, and the show takes cues from that as well. There is a scene later in the book where another character kind of cool-shames or almost dismisses the kid’s own experiences, like: oh you like this cringey TV show, but the real version is this artist Sophie Calle. It’s as if the pop culture version is somehow less than, or less true. I was intrigued by how there’s something about authenticity, about the question of which is the real version (or is there one at all?), but there was also something a bit endearing about it as well.

3:AM: That discussion about Calle marks the only time in Stalking America that she is named, despite the extent to which she haunts the book. But what intrigued me the most about the discussion was the part in-between the description of her project and the claim that she’s “the real thing.” We’re told that Calle, in addition to taking photographs of the man she stalks, “ makes diary entries about the time of day, about the weather, about the man’s coat, which he wears with a camera on his shoulder, on the bridge, maps of the routes he traveled, pigeons in the square, how she changes endlessly over time through the act of observing him” (emphasis mine).

JPK: In a sense, that describes what has been going on with the show all this time. And that’s the thing: the kid is observing this person, Claire, on TV; and Claire is observing this man she follows, who we don’t really know much about—just gathering detritus-level observations about his coat on a rack in his home, the objects in his refrigerator, the shampoo he uses. So there’s this sort of this echo chamber of watching. And the documentation and objects are all rather secondary, perhaps not very interesting or forgettable, so what I was intrigued by was how Claire sees all this and the kid perceives what she sees, and—as Calle says—they are changing endlessly through the act of observing. At the same time, the main character is trying on ideas, determining which fit, connecting some, discarding some, and constructing his story from what he finds.

3:AM: Yes—so even though, as you say, we might be stalked by our experiences, something else happens to us when we record those experiences for posterity: the product constitutes a separate, perhaps more malleable version of oneself. And this dovetails with something else the narrator says in Stalking America:

Sometimes I kind of step back from what’s being said and I feel like the words are separate things from us that just exist. I picture them as brittle glass that comes out of all of our mouths to make this big shell that’s made up of all the conversations that anyone has ever had or ever will. When it’s warm, I think of it being more fluid, but when it’s cold it’s extra brittle, like something you can actually touch.

Ultimately, then, there’s a sense in which the words of Stalking America, frozen on the page, are as brittle as the narrator feels spoken words can be. And, in the same sense, so too are Calle’s photographs. Which suggests that inasmuch as Calle’s photographs are a self-constitutive project, Stalking America is a project of a similar kind, working in a way that starts off as autofiction but goes far beyond it into speculative terrain. But what, then, is the self that is constituted by the book as a whole—not only the narrator and Matta-Clark and the reality show, but also the cultural flotsam and jetsam, the Lapso Mori, and all the rest?

JPK: We kind of live in the shadow of all this stuff and then we step away. I am definitely intrigued by the idea of the malleable self, and in a way I think this is foregrounded in how people operate now. I read something a while back about how truth, when it is of the more universal variety, is wisdom. I don’t know if I believe that; it’s a weird hierarchy to think about. But I am interested in these specific bits of truth that might get lost in the shuffle, that don’t necessarily scale up to “wisdom,” or that when they are expanded become exaggerated or flawed or undone in that jump to the universal. So perhaps my approach to this is more like Mario collecting coins—gathering up all these bits of truth, attempting to hew together these fragments into this object that is a book, as self-constitutive, some bits discarded or chronicled and on display.

When writing my first book, I proposed it as a series of bombs in the shape of a book for understanding something. Maybe my approach in Stalking America still involves gathering absences, but now it’s less about gathering a series of undoings and rather about the act of gathering and letting the material congeal.

https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/qa-jared-pappas-kelley-stalking-america/

Jared Pappas-Kelley’s newest book Stalking America (Delere Press) bends the genres of fiction and memoir, piecing together a life through online platforms and information gleaned along the way. Structured as a novel, Stalking America builds on Pappas-Kelley’s previous nonfiction and theoretical books, like Solvent Form (Manchester University Press). Pappas-Kelley’s America is a place where very little is seen or spoken directly. Conversations and thoughts wander in from around a corner—a deleted browser history of experience—ripple into the cliché of coming-of-age. Life bleeds into the internet, flows in and out of states, and tries to rebuild or reconstruct time and space. The book questions our concepts of identity and how we navigate the pitfalls in this media-saturated world, with the aim to understand and grasp the now, as identities blur and change in a blink of an eye. Pappas-Kelley is America and America is Pappas-Kelley, or at least a version of it, all built on dreams. These blurred boundaries make this journey an intriguing ride and a puzzle to solve.

Over a series of emails, Pappas-Kelley and I discussed how the artist Gordon Matta-Clark informs his writing style, the unauthorized biographies written by his aunt, the unsettling blur of fiction and reality we exist within, and how we tread water in the post-truth era. We also considered the endless image-building and the various “us” that haunt online platforms, the absurdity of influencers, chatbots, the smorgasbord of Web 3 and AI issues facing us, all while we exalt the allure and mystique of train travel.

***

The Rumpus: I really loved Stalking America. You capture the feeling of “the now,” where we flow through information daily at our fingertips. Facts and fiction are blurring, especially when something is shouted loud enough. How do you think fiction can exist when we seem to be living in it?

Jared Pappas-Kelley: Maybe the only thing that can be written now is fiction. I’m a visual person by nature, so for me a lot of it was about trying to catch an aspect of experiencing the world. This way of inhabiting the now in a sort of mundane sense, when much is mediated or at a remove, an observation, information, as that is one of the things fiction can do and still give a sense of the truth in it.

One thing I was interested in with Stalking America was this apparent distinction between truths and fictions, not mutually exclusive in any capacity. If anything, the blurring has become more overt, and that was a starting point to tease out and observe. It was also something that I tried to consciously explore with how things were structured with details like the dialogue and layering or paralleling where in many ways everything was presented like conversation threads that aggregate from various sources and experience or blurring—without trying to be too heavy-handed as a thought experiment.

Rumpus: You return to cut building works of artist Gordon Matta-Clark throughout the book. These works open up the private in a very controlled way, giving you this curated view with just enough information to conjure an idea of the person but never the whole. Why are these works so important in this book?

Pappas-Kelley: Part of it is that I just like Matta-Clark as an artist, but also in the book there is a lot of identifying or over-identifying with public personas, and writing about him gave another way into this idea. Gordon Matta-Clark was an artist who went into old, abandoned houses and sliced them in half or cut them up as interventions so that we might consider them differently, but also there is just something appealing and immediate about taking these homes apart, an artist with a chainsaw and winches slicing across domestic spaces. He’s one of those people I keep coming back to.

In a more practical sense, Matta-Clark gave permission to make these sorts of interventions into the source material in the rest of the book: to make incisions into character, show how things are performative and stepping into these domestic or public personas and question intimacies of narrative or interior spaces and what is considered outside for public consumption and like you said relates to experiences of social media or even conventions of reality TV.

In that, what is taking place as I approached it isn’t directly about writing itself but something more writing adjacent as an approach or conjuring that visual art and popular culture also allow.

Rumpus: There’s a quote I’m going to paraphrase from Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity that has stayed with me: “It’s not what you’re like, it’s what you like that matters.” Delving into the subplot of the book, the TV show Stalking America, feels like you’re tackling some of these contemporary Black Mirror-esque dilemmas. Have we moved past the Warholian “fifteen minutes of fame” to a new paradigm, where Web 3 has made us all Truman, under endless surveillance to our own self-censorship?

Pappas-Kelley: It was there already, but with something as simple as the invention of the like button, or the heart, or upvote, it’s become foregrounded so that we are now the apex predators of liking but in an extremely passive or disengaged way.

We swim in feedback, baby sharks, and it’s about how do we live in that and make sense or are perhaps shaped by it. Could this be translated as an experience, the sort of bits that fall between the cracks when nothing specifically is happening or directly contradicts? That’s sort of how I approached it, and is it a satisfying experience or what might it put on display?

I have an aunt, or I guess she’s my mom’s cousin so whatever that makes her to me, and she wrote these high-profile unauthorised biographies about people like Nancy Reagan or Oprah and the royals that got a lot of attention. And I don’t really have any particular connection with her except as sort of a backdrop in family dynamics or as the tangential fabric of extended relatives when a new book came out. And she might have this lateral relationship to the subjects she writes about and their fame or notoriety, but in a very real sense I am not on her radar, but in writing this book I was interested in these oblique or tenuous connections like the main character here where they might or might not have grown up knowing this person who is now on television and this supposed connection takes on a disproportionate significance or projection. This kind of living through a perceived connection to someone else that is somehow noteworthy, trying to work it into conversations that are very tenuous or cringe is an attractive starting point and what is being noteworthy or being known in this more mundane sense.

With Warhol, you might commission a society portrait in Neiman Marcus or wherever, so for the price of admission you got the allure or appearance of being someone who is known. But it isn’t even about fifteen minutes anymore and perhaps about an ability or even desire to influence, an aggregation as the act of influencing. And with this book I wasn’t really interested in any of these big constellations but in only the most tangential of identifications through these other people and this might be the more duct-tape version of that.

Rumpus: I’m going to change tracks for a minute. Personally I find influencer culture a strange thing, I get the “we don’t believe big corporations” bit, but this “celebrity is trustworthy” shtick is crazy—it’s just another form of corporate advertising or that de-influencing trend, which was mostly humble brag mixed with lifestyle selling and cringe reverse psychology, it’s this weird desire hyper loop. I find it super sad that people talk like they’re brands too, as it really dehumanises us, we’re much more than a commodity, it’s this kind of thinking that feels like the future is more hopeless. Sorry for the doom spiral, do you have a better hope for how things will turn out or are we going to be in a hyper-stalking of everything soon?

Pappas-Kelley: I’m intrigued by jobs that emerge that our parents or their parents wouldn’t be able to conceive, like “influencer” is a genuine job or career choice, and what does that mean? What do you want to be when you grow up? A firefighter? An influencer? Do you score really high in influencing on some aptitude test or the Myers-Briggs? “I wanted to be an influencer, but my posts weren’t influence-y enough.”

Have you ever seen the forums on Reddit that are chatbots debating something, and each approaches their response from a specific point of view and finds a way to work those ideas into any conversation? And it’s unsettling to me how quickly the bots get racist as well after culling through all our cast-off material online, yet we wonder how that happens.

Rumpus: What and how we teach AI is going to be the event horizon of the future, and so far we’re not doing so great. You’re right about how jobs have changed, with the cycles of boom, bust, and bailout it seems to be having an effect on Gen Z’s approach to life and work. Things like long-term planning seem pointless when the world crashes and burns so fast before the phoenix rises again. Exploiting yourself seems like a better option than doing it for the man, I won’t even get into the politics and environment issues. So with a pull of the lever, we’re back on track.

As I was reading Stalking America, the specter of Sophie Calle, one of my favorite artists was all around me, and then she popped up and said boo. Her work feels like an important clue to deciphering your book’s puzzle and I feel she was way ahead of her time with the work she makes. Can you let us know how her art has impacted culture and your own ways of thinking?

Pappas-Kelley: Sophie Calle was definitely present in the material, following some guy around Venice and covertly documenting his movements with her camera, and I was doing this thing where I write sort of all-around something that is right there in the middle of it until it gets lost a bit and then after all that sidestepping just come out with it—and here is the piece that was missing and it deflates it, like the polar opposite of a jump scare, in a way that is curious to me and I also think that is something Sophie Calle does. I was intrigued in writing that sequence with how the other character was kind of cool-shaming or almost dismissing the kid’s own experience, like, “Oh all these things you’re interested in are the fake or poseur versions, somehow less, but this artist is like the real version.” And this happens a lot and sort of the way a music snob or someone like that would do it but in perhaps a more endearing way, and there was something more compelling rolled up in this exchange about authenticity or an inability, and in this case what was the real version or is there one.

Rumpus: She was like cookies before the Internet, stalking the mundane to get a better picture of the person. It’s really beautiful work I return to a lot. Going back to Matta-Clark, home, or the idea of it as part of our identity seems to reoccur, almost as if you’re taking his process and reconstructing within a fractured sense of identity, like you’re building a fictional you. Could you speak on this? You know I also love a good joke, like that “where are you from” line? Home. It’s why I own the perfume Rien from Etat Libre d’Orange, so when asked, what I’m wearing, I can say nothing.

Pappas-Kelley: Yes, I like the blurring where the writing appears to be more about me than it actually is and the process of constructing while cutting away. This idea of the process through which we construct ourselves or the way a narrator sees themself more clearly through someone else. I also appreciate a line like that where language sort of claps back with its flatness—what are you wearing, nothing or where are you going, home—the name of the fragrance or town is factually true but also a more general idea as it shuts the door and truth lies in a way.

Rumpus: You have these lovely little disruptive devices, “Lapso Mori,” which give you the sense of reading a book written right now, surrounded by distractions. Is the train also a device? A phone or a tablet and you’re on this scrolling journey through the time we’re in, where everything can nearly be instantly recalled by the internet and social media?

Pappas-Kelley: A bit like a push notification. Like the memento mori, a pocket that collects or lapses that are a withdrawal yet persist as an artifact, a slippage as reminder from another parallel that bleeds across and accumulates. I mapped out the beginnings of a follow-up book where this idea of the Lapso Mori becomes the foreground, so I guess we’ll just have to see if I ever sit down and write it.

I like thinking of the train ride as a device in that sense or a peripheral, that is sort of how I approached it, and in many ways, it is the least train-like train ride, and I wanted it to be this sort of engaged reverie space being constructed.

Rumpus: What’s your favorite mode of transport and least favorite? Does the “you” in the book share the same likes and dislikes?

Pappas-Kelley: Each platform has that specific aspect it brings to the foreground or highlights like image, brevity, or story, I guess, like how different forms of transportation might also do this, it’s like the way you show up.

Some of the initial inspiration came from taking a Greyhound bus cross-country in the U.S. years ago for many days, but a Greyhound felt a bit too honky-tonk in a way and I also didn’t want it to just be a story about highways which is something else. With a train there’s more of an inevitability that you will end up somewhere. It’s more automated and letting go, and the outside is out of your hands, so it disappears into a permeable bubble of the experience.

I live in the U.K. now and like travelling by train but feel like it’s really expensive and always breaking down or delayed. Maybe a train ride in someplace like Switzerland—do they have train delays or interruptions there, I feel like no, or that if they did, they’d have some mediated but posh Swiss solution in place.

Do I like the same things as the character in the book—in many ways I suppose I do, but I think I’m confused differently by things than that character, and it also allowed me to be a bit more naive in the responses which I also enjoyed. I feel like that character dislikes most things and is figuring it out, but maybe that’s just me?

Rumpus: I’ve spent a lot of my life commuting in various machines, from boats, buses, and trams, but my favorite is still the train, well, okay not in the U.K.—there’s always delays, but anywhere else it’s a great space to dream. Does America have a smell? If so, what is it?

Pappas-Kelley: When I first spent time in Southern California, the smell I remember sort of embodying the experience was a mix of fake orange and car exhaust. But for all of America? Maybe one of those air diffusers, so you have a scent profile of like four options that you put on to match your mood.

Rumpus: After Stalking America, can you describe that scent in one word?

Pappas-Kelley: Tenuous? This is a physical experience we are in, but so much of this is beyond just the physical, so thinking of it like that is a good way of giving it form. But for me it’s always how this physical grinds up against the idea or intangible aspect, and maybe through it there might be a lucidity to be examined, driven by these physical actions. - Jonathan Mayhew

https://therumpus.net/2023/06/07/jared-pappas-kelley/

Jared Pappas-Kelley, Solvent Form: Art and

Destruction, published by Manchester University

Press, 2018

Solvent form examines the destruction of art—through objects that have been destroyed (lost in fires, floods, vandalism, or similarly those artists that actively court or represent this destruction, such as Gustav Metzger), but also as a process within art that the object courts through form. In this manner, Solvent form looks to events such as the Momart warehouse fire in 2004 as well as the actions of art thief Stéphane Breitwieser in which the stolen work was destroyed. Against this overlay, a tendency is mapped whereby individuals attempt to conceptually gather these destroyed or lost objects, to somehow recoup in their absence. From this vantage, Solvent form—hinging on the dual meaning in the words solvent and solvency—proposes an idea of art as an attempt to secure and fix, which correspondingly undoes and destroys through its inception. It also weaves a narrative of art that intermingles with Jean Baudrillard’s ideas on disappearance, Georges Bataille and Paul Virilio’s negative or reverse miracle, Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of the image (or imago as votive that keeps present the past, yet also burns), and Giorgio Agamben’s notion of art as an attempt to make the moment appear permeable. Likewise, it is through these destructions that one might distinguish a solvency within art and catch an operation in which something is made visible through these moments of destruction when art’s metaphorical undoing emerges as oddly literal.

‘Solvent form is an important new addition to a constellation of recent texts that have addressed destruction and art […] but while acknowledging their content, this book does far more than summarise their narratives, since Jared Pappas-Kelley’s study develops its own radical take on the subject. Signalling from the outset that Solvent form will be “an undoing process”, the average reader will scarcely be prepared for his in-depth, fastidiously researched examination, quotational density (248 endnotes by page 45), and a bombshell of a conclusion. Pappas-Kelley enlists destruction – through fire, theft, disappearance or design – as a critical reagent showing up previously hard-to-discern, internal or “solvent” characteristics of all artworks.’ Michael Hampton

Jared Pappas-Kelley, To Build a House that

Never Ceased: Writings, Interviews, and Letters

on Art, Sweat Drenched Press, 2023

Building on ideas of solvency in art from Solvent Form: Art and Destruction, this collection gathers many wide-ranging writings from Jared Pappas-Kelley developed over the years. Within a tradition of artist writers, it presents an opportunity to reflect and re-examine existing thoughts—bisecting and dissecting the metaphorical rooms of this writing, to see how it might collapse or build something new when placed alongside another. In that spirit, this collection of letters, writings on art, reflections, and interviews collected as To Build a House that Never Ceased offers a glimpse into the interiors, frameworks, and rooms within rooms of an artist and thinker attempting to make sense of a contemporary world. Like the processes of Sarah Winchester and Gordon Matta-Clark, with their own approaches to the spaces inhabited, this collection presents windows where before there were simply walls, slicing vantage across locales, calcifications, or almost-starts, having bricked over exits in the process of adding rooms within existing work. This slicing through and reordering reveals something more—a framework or architecture of an impulse. Seeing a stairway that led somewhere specific once: a room, actions, anxieties, trysts that could only happen in the microclimates of a particular time or day, cut across and somehow bleeding into all but matchlessly separate/spliced onto or akin. More-true somehow. Perhaps in this sense, writings like these inevitably wander a tension between a Winchester pulling down in order to construct and a Matta-Clark slicing through to show the unseen interiors and connections of the spaces we inhabit in an attempt to build a metaphorical house that never ceases.

I chat with Jared Pappas-Kelley about his new book, and it’s context around whatever it is that seems to be happening in the world right now. To Build a House that Never Ceased is a collection of writings by Pappas-Kelley, seeking to take apart ideas of solvency in art and building on his other recent book Solvent Form: Art and Destruction. Following a tradition of artist writers, the collection presents an opportunity to reflect and re-examine existing thoughts—bisecting and dissecting the metaphorical rooms of writing, to see how they might collapse or build something new. We talk about his new book and it’s connections between The Winchester House and Gordon Matta-Clark, we also chat cultural exhaustion and Jack Halberstam, and what the problem is with the term contemporary in the art world. We also discuss his new publishing imprint invert/extant press, our mutual love of Auto-destructive art and Gustav Metzger, as well as our dislike of gatekeepers, and how instead we should support and collaborate with those still starting out. These ideas and others are framed around the current era of social justice movements like Black Lives Matter, and of course the global effects of Covid 19. - Dec Ackroyd