Edward Sanders - So, if you are looking for a fantastical view of the 1960s complete with walk-ons from Isis, Pharoah Akhnaton, the spirit of Che, a sexually-augmented Abbie Hoffman, and Penthouse Letters-type porn aplenty, then look no further than Sanders' book. It's so William Burroughs you'll think it's Naked Lunch, Part 2

Edward Sanders, Shards of God, Random House, 1970

Ed Sanders’s Shards of God (1970), which is filled with obscenity at its stylistically finest. Not unlike Tuten, Sanders reinvents history, so that, say, the ghost of Che Guevara really wants nooky, or a bourgeois lady consorts with hippies in order to collect “tool drool.” (The first word in the title incidentally means heaps of cowdung and the last word announces the underlying theme of sustained blasphemy.) - Richard Kostelanetz

Ed Sanders' Shards Of God is not an easy novel to review by any means. Totally of its time, it's redolent with views and sentiments which were probably outdated the day it was published; no wonder it's long, long out of print. In some ways the novel is the funhouse mirror reflection of Anita Hoffman's psuedo-autobiography Trashing (published by Rolling Stone's imprint Straight Arrow in 1970 under the psuedonym "Ann Fettamen"). Like that novel, Shards Of God features actual Yippies in main roles, particularly Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Paul Krassner. But whereas Trashing mostly stuck to real-life escapades, Shards Of God is a modern myth, a fantastical fable of drugged-out depravity.

Sanders relates the shenanigans of himself and his fellow hippies in a "living myth" fashion, with Egyptian gods even taking part. Sanders, Hoffman, Krassner et al are larger-than-life characters, more demigods than actual mortals, and each act is blossomed into some mytho-poetic fantasy of absurd degree. One need look no further than "Shards Of God" to see where modern-day analogues like Mark Leyner got 98% of their schtick.

The novel proceeds in episodic fashion; each chapter works as a self-contained short story. Real-life characters like Hoffman and Rubin interract with characters like Quick Kill Merle, Aunt No No, and She-Who-Sucks-in-a-Skirt-of-Snakes. We are treated to phantasmorphic recreations of real-life incidents such as the "Pentagon Exorcism," as well as inside looks into how one was "initiated" into the Yippies (a charnel-house sequence which most likely had William Burroughs either red with envy or red with outrage over such gross missappropriation of his writing style).

Sanders writes with a flair and verve which quickens the reader's pulse. Coupled with his obvious familiarity with ancient myth, this makes for a one-of-a-kind reading experience. The only question is, who today would want to read this? Sanders opens the novel with a preface which states that the Yippie revolution will be successful, changing the entire world. I don't need to tell you that this never happened. Like Trashing, I have a feeling Shards Of God was already behind the times upon its publication in 1970. That Sanders is so beligerent throughout that he is a harbinger of a future reality only heightens its charm and obscurity; I checked the book out from the library, and, according to its checkout slip, the last time someone else had done so was March, 1982.

So, if you are looking for a fantastical view of the 1960s complete with walk-ons from Isis, Pharoah Akhnaton, the spirit of Che, a sexually-augmented Abbie Hoffman, and Penthouse Letters-type porn aplenty, then look no further than Ed Sanders' long out-of-print Shards Of God. It's so William Burroughs you'll think it's Naked Lunch, Part 2. And it's so of its time that Rolling Stone Magazine even gave it a glowing review in an early issue; these days, if Rolling Stone even bothered to mention it, it would of course be in an unflattering light. - Joe Kenney

http://glorioustrash.blogspot.com/2010/06/shards-of-god-by-ed-sanders.html

A Conversation with Edward Sanders By Brooke Horvath

From “The Review of Contemporary Fiction,” Spring 1999, Vol. 19.1

The following conversation was taped on 18 November 1997. Ed was visiting Cleveland to deliver a talk at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as part of its special exhibit “I Want to Take You Higher: The Psychedelic Era 1965-1969.” On the 19th, Ed spoke on New York City’s psychedelic scene and performed some poems. The previous evening over room-service pasta and coffee we talked about his fiction.

BROOKE HORVATH: Why don’t people talk more about your fiction?

ED SANDERS: That’s probably because when I travel, I travel as a poet. I perform as a poet, and my choice of life is as a poet, although I’ve been experimenting with long poems that tell stories. In Tales there are the long poems—”Farbrente Rose” and “Sappho on East Seventh”—and in Hymn to the Rebel Cafe there’s “An East Village Hippie in King Arthur’s Court”—another sho-sto-po [short story poem].

If I had the unfortunate task of selecting my own gravestone text, I’d probably say something like “Ed Sanders, American Bard.” I’d rather be known as a bard, which is a poet who takes public stances. But I don’t know why I’m not thought of as a fiction writer. Maybe I need to get a little older so I look more like Mark Twain; then the prose will get more attention.

BH: You’ll have to wait until Vonnegut is through looking like Twain.

ES: I already look more like Twain than Vonnegut does. Vonnegut looks too unhappy, and Twain tried to dress well.

BH: Is it unproductive to focus here on the fiction apart from your other work?

ES: I have no problem with that. Right now I’m writing volume four of Tales of Beatnik Glory, so I’ve had a career as a short-story writer. Writing is a big sphere, and on that sphere are diaries, poems, plays, journalism, dialogues, stories, epics, epigrams, haiku, rhymed quatrains, projective verse . . . and I’m there on that sphere: have pen, will write.

BH: You said a second ago that you see yourself as a bard, one who speaks on public issues. Is that what holds your work together, that particular sense of purpose?

ES: I feel obligated to speak out because of my parents, who were Stevensonian Democrats, and because of my generation, that strange zone between Beat and postmodern where I grew up as a writer. I was trained by Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Rexroth . . . Samuel Beckett talking about clawing through the wall with your fingernails, then, when they break off, the pads of your fingers, then the bones. . . .

But I don’t have a broad take of myself, although that may be terribly improper to admit. I see myself as a member of the avant- garde, going into unexplored territory. I’m not over yet. Up to now I have this work I’ve done, that’s all, and it’s embarrassing to me to think of my life as a completed thing. I have many abandoned books, and when I kick the bucket someone is going to find a lot of manuscripts—novels, all sorts of things.

BH: In 1968: A History in Verse you talk about the people who criticized you for having fun in the midst of crisis. What pleasure do you find in writing fiction besides satisfying that need to speak out?

ES: Writing . . . it can’t be called erotic, but it has a kind of thrill. Writing is the skin of the world, and you can drum on it, dance on it, play it . . . it’s a great fun thing to do every morning. As you know, it’s not always fun; it’s also an act of discipline. It’s like a Russian short story about a horrible train trip followed by a lot of fun when you finally arrive at St. Petersburg.

But back to 1968 and the “trap” of hedonism: we have to be hedonistic in a good part of our lives; otherwise, why live? You can’t be just a dreary robot slaving away. So there’s that double life-track of having fun while working for a better world, which was the theme of 1968 on one level. How do you combine the two? Maybe you can’t. But you can’t let only the ferocious carry the political flag to fruition. Clinton has solved the problem by having very well-disciplined pockets where he lets the Other project; he’s a kind of hillbilly Bacchus. Euripides would have had a good time with Clinton—he’d have written a play called “Dionysus in Hot Springs, Arkansas.”

BH: You are routinely described as a Beat. Donald Allen and George Butterick included you in their anthology The Postmoderns, and Lance Olsen has called you an avant-popist. Do such labels mean anything to you? Do you identify your work with a movement?

ES: I’ve always been a scholar in my own pursuits, and I must say that I really didn’t know what postmodernism was when I saw myself in that anthology. So I did research—I did some at your house and in subsequent years to clarify for myself what it was. Understanding postmodern thought has helped with character definition in my short stories. But I feel confused. When I call Tuli Kupferberg and ask how he is, he says “still above room temperature,” and that’s how I feel often: I don’t know about labels, but I feel glad, honored, simply to be alive at the end of a weird century and still creating, still having books come out. I’m so pleased and honored that these things are happening and that as an independent writer not connected to any school—and who hasn’t had a job since 1965—I can afford to put out a left-liberal newspaper, to travel. So apply those labels, I like those labels, because they help define an independent writer. But I’m just a confused, skin-covered mammal at the end of a strange century beset by all my friends’ health problems.

BH: A lot of reviewers of your books talk about an ambivalence they perceive on your part, an uncertainty regarding your attitude toward your subjects: for instance, in Tales of Beatnik Glory, whether you mean glory straight or satirically.

ES: Well, as far as Tales is concerned, there is a shift in tone from volume 1 to volume 2. Volume 1 is more deliberately upbeat and defiant because it seemed to me a period—the early sixties—when the people I was writing about were just that: partisans of beatnik glory. There are some stories in volume 1—for instance, “Mindscape Gallery”—where betrayal plays a factor, as it does in every scene, whether it’s a straight, ultra-right scene or a left-wing or middle-wing scene. Betrayal is a threat, so I brought in betrayal. But my attitude in volume 1 is ebullience. As I said in my introduction [to the Citadel Underground edition], I had come through some very bad years, had written that book on the Manson family that had left me with what we used to call in the Fugs “metaphysical distress.” So I wanted to write about an era I knew and loved—when I was young and came to Greenwich Village in 1958 through the Cuban missle crisis and Kennedy’s assassination. I loved those years and knew I had met many, many interesting people I could combine and weave into stories about the past with each character morphed from ten or fifteen people I knew—things they might have said, clothes they might have worn, situations they could have gotten into. Once I had these characters, I let them do their thing and wrote it down. That’s how I wrote that book, not quickly, but very precisely.

But when I got to volume 2, I faced some issues such as the way the Beat generation tended to treat women. So in a story such as “It’s Like Living with a Mongol,” I focused on the question of how women were sometimes treated like hookers, lookers, and cookers, entities that were supposed to drop everything and start cooking spaghetti. But I meant those stories seriously. I love those people, and I feel very sad now that I’m reaching the end of that decade. Volume 1, you see, went through 1962, volume 2 through ’65, volume 3 from 1966 through 1967, and volume 4 will take me through 1969. Then it’s over. To my horror, one of my characters, Uncle Thrills, gets leukemia and dies. And then there’s the whole urban commune movement, and the question of Kerouac turning against his own generation late in his life, supporting William Buckley and voting for Nixon in 1968. I’ve got to deal with the politics of my people.

I take these stories very seriously and love those characters. I thought of them all, they all have careers, and they are all very alive in my mind, all the dancers and poets and thinkers. They’re real to me still. As I finish volume 4, I’ve got to say good-bye to them . . . unless I pick up on them later, but I don’t know if I’ll have time for that. I’ve got a list of books I want to write, and I’m already fifty-eight. So I’ll have to start triaging off projects to get to the ones I really want to do.

BH: So when a reviewer writes of Tales as John Yohalem did in the New York Times Book Review (9 November 1975)—”Sanders can’t decide whether he is glorying in decadence like a shopkeeper on a spree, or striking the poses of the self-righteously liberated, or putting the whole scene down”—that is simply missing the point, the intent.

ES: Yeah, that’s missing the point. What I wanted to do was to be anthropologically exact, true to the times, nothing said by anyone that would be untrue to the era. For instance, they say that language as a whole changes every six hundred years, but the language of the cutting-edge counterculture, of bohemia, changes every couple years. So—in volume 3, for instance—I wanted to be true to that month in 1967 when “beatnik” was no longer used, and everybody was a “hippie.”

But back to the review you quoted: that’s why I don’t read reviews, man. I was on the cover of Life magazine, but I’ve never read the story inside. I didn’t want to get into one of those weird feedback loops. Oh, sometimes I read them because now there’s this new generation of slash-and-burn types that attack, and I answer the overt attack. I learned from Clinton on that: if you are controversial and the attack is heavy, you’ve got to answer right away. But when someone totally misinterprets what I’m doing or just phones in the review, I forgive.

BH: Tales is an attempt to conjure through fiction the spirit of those times. When you write in the introduction to the Citadel edition that you have imagined places that “should have existed, but never did,” you aren’t saying, “it should have been like this but wasn’t.”

ES: No. Look, some of the stories in Tales of Beatnik Glory are broadly satirical but at the same time catch the essence of something. For instance, I think I very accurately capture the essence of the late fifties/early sixties open poetry readings in the story “The Poetry Reading” [Tales volume 1]. There are two theater groups out there right now doing plays about that time, and they’re using that story as a way of putting people right there. On the other hand, when you use humor, when you satirize, you immediately point out how things might have been different. You make things slightly more grotesque than they were to point out the humor of it.

But again: that book was meant as an act of love. I talk about spiritual things in the book because although I’m not very spiritual, I know a lot of people are, so I talk about ghosts, other things. I’m not personally a believer, but a lot of people are and were.

BH: Satire seems a good word to use when talking about Fame & Love in New York. How did that book come about?

ES: It came in the same flow as volume 1 of Tales. I’d finished the Manson book in July 1971. I was totally devastated by that book, and my wife, daughter, and I went down to where her parents had had their honeymoon in rural Virginia, to an old southern mansion. I sat there for a week trying to decide what to do, wrote a long poem—”The VFW Crawling Contest”—then shortly therafter a long piece about the entrapment of John Sinclair [former chairman of the White Panthers, jailed at the time on a marijuana charge] for the L.A. Free Press. John Lennon read that and made his decision to help.

Then I didn’t know what to do. A year got blown—1972—but by 1973, I knew what I wanted to do. I worked on Tales of Beatnik Glory, and as I was finishing that, I noticed this thing called SoHo. There wasn’t any SoHo then, just lofts—no boutiques, no fancy Guggenheims, no elegant places where you could spend $5 for a cup of coffee. It was illegal to live there then; the lofts still had oil stains from old machinery from fifty years earlier. It was funky, but I could see what was going to happen. I’d go into the Lion’s Head and the same people buying beer were buying cocaine. I decided to study SoHo, do some research. I was reading Balzac, decided to read all of his novels, and then started to write this book called Fame & Love in New York. I knew a lot about rock ‘n’ roll, so I put a band in the book. It’s a book about the problem of being an artist, a member of the avant-garde, and a democratic socialist. What are the problems associated with having a vision of a mixed economy where the government participates a lot in the economy, as in Sweden? And I had this idea of a deadline, like the year 2000. Creative people live with deadlines: deadline to get your record done, your book, you know? How many openings are there where the paintings are still wet and you can’t touch them? So I had this idea of a “glorious deadline” for a real big future. But I had to predict SoHo because it hadn’t even happened until right around the time the book was published in 1980.

The reason I’m babbling on is this: I wrote Tales as an act of auto/psychotherapy so I could feel better about my life and my generation. Then I wrote Fame & Love so I could get off my chest certain things I’d detected in the artistic left that I’d encountered in my experiences with the Yippies and also in 1972 during the Democratic convention. Some of what I was satirizing can be found in 1968: A History in Verse.

So I wanted to have a good time and heal myself. I moved to the country and kept writing and writing. I finally got Fame & Love done, and to my everlasting gratitude Bob Callahan [of the Turtle Island Foundation] took it on, and George Mattingly did a genius design job. I wanted to write a humorous left-wing novel while I still had the chops and wasn’t burned out. While I was writing it, we’d moved to Woodstock. I was removed by then, living in 1974 on a very beautiful farm. By the time the book came out, we’d already bought a house in Woodstock, and I’d become a country boy.

BH: You talk in Fame & Love of a “fear of the fate of Hipponax the Poet,” a “bard of the gutter,” and of the dangers of “smut and spew-spackled scandal.”

ES: Yes, because Hipponax exists only as fragments, and the only reason those fragments exist is because he wrote in limping iambics, an interesting meter. He was a guy who would chase people around in public, a literary version of Don Rickles. But Rickles always smiled and shook the hand of the guy he lampooned in Vegas; Hipponax played for keeps. So his story shows that you’re in trouble if you take on public figures when you don’t have a support system—like Tom Paine taking on Washington. But the reference to Hipponax was also an in-joke for anyone who’d studied classics.

BH: You weren’t warning writers against smut?

ES: No, it’s not a warning. Just saying that if you pursue a certain life-track, you can get painted into corners as a writer.

Usually writers write all their erotic things up to about age thirty, then they harumph off and become quite proper, like Diderot. It’s a tough gig to last thousands of years if your act is raillery and highly charged erotica. The only reason Catullus survived is because his home town saved his manuscripts. So there’s a lesson: always put your erotic poems in your home-town library, where local patriotism and boosterism will keep them from being burnt.

BH: I thought maybe the Hipponax story explained why you’ve stopped listing Shards of God among your publications.

ES: Oh, no—I’m not ashamed of what’s in Shards of God. I don’t care about its erotic material—many of my books have lots of eros in them. It was my decision to omit it from the list of my publications in Hymn to the Rebel Cafe and so forth, but I’ve lots of booklets and other things I don’t list; for instance, I don’t often mention Vote!

But I don’t think Shards is a very good book. I view it as a failure on my part. I had a perfect opportunity to write a book about Chicago in 1968 and the broader cultural issues that came into play in that police riot, which I’ve only thirty years later begun to discuss in things like 1968: A History in Verse. I was afraid to look at that stuff for decades because I was horrified, shocked. What happened in Chicago made me weep for America and led, I think, to Phil Ochs’s suicide. Such injustice.

Shards contains some interesting writing, and I certainly sign enough copies when I’m on the road. It has a certain pizzazz. But I’d never written a novel before, and as a whole it isn’t constructed that well. It just didn’t live up to what I intended, which is partly a critique of my own cowardice for not diving in and doing a real book on Chicago. I didn’t know I could do it. I hadn’t done my book on Manson yet. [Charles] Olson talks about a saturation job—one giant research project to prepare you for all the others—and I hadn’t done mine yet, so I didn’t know how. I was still, not a rock star, but very well known in those days, and I was caught in a weird warp I couldn’t step out of.

BH: It seems to me that you must have had a very clear sense of what you didn’t want Shards to be.

ES: I had had very little experience writing prose except for term papers in college. I had no models except that I knew microscopically a lot of prose—I knew Beckett’s books backwards and forwards—and was very influenced by my study of Greek culture, by the Iliad, the Odyssey, Hesiod, Diogenes. And Chekhov was a big influence, whom I read for pleasure as soon as I discovered him—when I opened the Peace Eye bookstore and got his books from wholesalers. The first story I remember reading was “Rothschild’s Fiddle,” which completely changed my take on literature.

But I had done all the “proper” reading. Allen Ginsberg had told me to read Pierre, which was the Melville you were supposed to read if you were Beat. I read Edward Dahlberg, who became a friend. I liked his prose style; he was sort of an electronic Isaiah. I’d read all the Beat tomes, and my mother had read Dickens to us. So I had a primitive sense of narrative, although I’d never taken any literary classes, any workshops. I’d have rather stuck up a Seven-Eleven than take a workshop. In college I only took what I thought were useful courses: languages, mathematics, science.

And I never read the introductions to anything. I always thought that if the novel couldn’t do it, I didn’t want to read it. It turns out that when I read some of those introductions I sneered at years ago, I probably should have read them. Not all scholars are useless.

But I read like everybody in my generation. We tried to outread each other—it was like a reading contest. From 1957 to somewhere in the sixties there was a mad rush to read more than everybody else. But I can’t spin out a list of narrative sources.

BH: No. I just wondered if you were intent on not being, say, the next John Updike.

ES: What was that novel . . . Couples! I got viscerally angry reading that. No, I didn’t have anything in mind other than wanting to do an act of imagination. I had my typewriter there on Avenue A, had just broken up the Fugs, and didn’t have anything to do, so I started that novel.

BH: I have the impression you are impatient with what’s going on with literary criticism.

ES: I don’t know anything about it. What I know I’ve learned from visiting people like you and reading what you have lying around your house and office, which I do all the time. I go to colleges all over America and always spend a couple hours studying the books in professors’ offices. I was just up at Union College in Schenectady studying the books. Professors always have great books. What we need is a website listing the books in every decent professor’s office.

BH: What’s going on in current fiction that you like?

ES: I read in a very specialized way. I live in my own little maelstrom. I don’t keep up on what’s being written, and I don’t follow the rebirth of narrative, although I think that is happening. Because what is needed now are pathways through the chaos, and writers can be helpful. Who knows what’s going to happen? Whatever it is, it will be unusual, and the task of the writer will be difficult—creating virtual rooms to sit in and participate. Whatever happens, narrative will still be required, and a lot of negative capability, a lot of “just say no.” In a fact-suffused universe, saying no is very important.

What the writer does is, I think, vitally important, although I could be wrong. I do think good writing is still the most intimate way of describing reality. However, I’m fifty-eight years old, don’t have the time to figure out what’s going on in literature, and am going to let others do this new thing that’s going to happen. I have my march orders.

https://www.dalkeyarchive.com/a-conversation-with-edward-sanders-by-brooke-horvath/

In the 1960s, Edward Sanders co-founded the groundbreaking rock band The Fugs, opened the Peace Eye Bookstore, and appeared on the cover of Life magazine, becoming a hero of the American counterculture. He is a classics scholar, pioneer in investigative poetics, inventor of musical instruments, publisher of The Woodstock Journal, and author of many books, including the best-selling Charles Manson expose The Family, the ambitious, nine-volume project, America: A History in Verse, LET'S NOT KEEP FIGHTING THE TROJAN WAR: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS 1986-2009, and most recently, from Granary Books, A BOOK OF GLYPHS (2014). He lives in Woodstock, New York.

 Ed Sanders likes to refer to himself as the only beatnik who can yodel. A countercultural icon, he co-founded the raunchy, avant-garde rock band The Fugs and was instrumental in the Youth International Party — commonly called the Yippies.

The 72-year-old is also a classical scholar who wrote a best-selling book about the Manson family. His latest book is a memoir, Fug You, about life on New York's Lower East Side in the 1960s — a slum, back when Sanders lived there.

"It didn't take much money to live," Claudia Dreifus recalls. "You could live poor, you could have a lot of fun. People didn't need a lot of stuff. And when rents were cheap, all kinds of creative forces ended up here."

Dreifus is now a science writer for The New York Times, but she cut her teeth at a counterculture newspaper called The East Village Other. She calls Sanders, who was a neighborhood fixture and fellow writer at The Other, a hero.

"That word is used loosely and stupidly these days," she says, "but he really was. He showed us how to be free ... by showing us there was a way to say what you wanted to say."

Sanders put out a literary journal with a pretty unprintable title. He hand-cranked it on a now archaic bit of technology called a mimeograph machine.

"I did everything myself," he says. "I drew all the stencils, I made ... what I called glyphs, which were based on Egyptian hieroglyphs, and I carried on a big correspondence with writers to get manuscripts. And it just seemed like turning that handle was a kind of religious experience. I don't know, it seemed to work. I put out all these magazines that I gave away free."

He gave them to writers and artists, some of whom would soon gain fame in the underground comic book scene. And he opened the Peace Eye bookstore, near Tompkins Square Park, where he recalls The Fugs drawing crowds of thousands to free concerts.

"The bookstore became pretty famous. It was the stopping off point for all visiting librarians and professors because I had a lot of well-known writers hanging out there — William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg," Sanders says.

In his memoir, Sanders refers to the Lower East Side as a "little zone of revolution." He and several other founders of the Yippies lived there, and played key roles in the anti-war movement's "exorcism" of the Pentagon and the protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.

Sanders says much of the political and cultural activity of the era was fomented on the Lower East Side. In addition to political activists, writers and artists, the neighborhood was full of musicians like Peter Stampfel, a member of both The Fugs and The Holy Modal Rounders.

"The main thing about the scene back then was that there was this amazing feeling that something wonderful and amazing was going to happen inevitably," Stampfel says.

But the '60s faded into the '70s, and Sanders disbanded The Fugs. He went on to write The Family, about the Manson family, and release a solo record. He also decided to leave the Lower East Side.

"We saw a couple of people murdered in the streets outside of our house," Sanders says. It was time to go.

Eventually Sanders landed in Woodstock, in upstate New York. His modest house is crammed with books, tapes and his wife Miriam's mineral collection. A two-car garage that once served as his writing studio is now packed floor to ceiling with banker's boxes full of files and photographs; Sanders jokes about appearing on a reality show about hoarders.

Among the collections is Sanders' archive devoted to The Fugs. He takes out a leaflet for one of the band's shows, advertising a 1965 extravaganza called "A Night of Napalm." Sanders describes it as "songs against the war, rock 'n roll bomb shrieks, heavy metal orgasms. Watch all The Fugs die in a napalm raid."

He's received offers for the archive from several major universities, but for the time being, he's going to hold on to what is clearly a valuable record of a pivotal chapter in American history. "It was just a very fervent, fermenting era," Sanders says. "The surge of creativity and movies and dance and theater and poetry and literature was too big to stop."

And Ed Sanders was right at the heart of it. - Jon Kalish

https://www.npr.org/2012/05/05/152029486/fug-you-the-wild-life-of-ed-sanders

Ed Sanders, Fug You: An Informal History of

the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press,

the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East

Side. Da Capo Press, 2011

Fug You is Ed Sanders's unapologetic and often hilarious account of eight key years of "total assault on the culture," to quote his novelist friend William S. Burroughs.

Fug You traces the flowering years of New York's downtown bohemia in the sixties, starting with the marketing problems presented by publishing Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts, as it faced the aboveground's scrutiny, and leading to Sanders's arrest after a raid on his Peace Eye Bookstore. The memoir also traces the career of the Fugs -- formed in 1964 by Sanders and his neighbor, the legendary Tuli Kupferberg (called "the world's oldest living hippie" by Allen Ginsberg) -- as Sanders strives to find a home for this famous postmodern, innovative anarcho-folk-rock band in the world of record labels.

Ed Sanders, 72, is a storied icon of the 1960s counterculture, an author-poet-scholar-activist-musician-bookseller-underground publisher with feet in both the Beat and Hippie generations: he started a mimeographed avant-garde arts journal called Fuck You, where he published (among much, much more) the work of his good friend Allen Ginsberg; he founded pioneering folk-rock band The Fugs, before the term “folk-rock” even existed; he opened a “vegetarian literary zone” called Peace Eye Bookstore in the East Village; and helped found the Yippie anti-party, all while agitating (non-violently) for the end of the Vietnam War, the expansion of Civil Rights, and the social safety-net envisioned in Johnson’s Great Society. His latest, Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side (Da Capo), is a memoir of the 60s that ties in all of Sanders’s favorite preoccupations. He spoke with Tip Sheet from his home in Woodstock, N.Y., about his book, the state of the nation, and his advice for today’s young and increasingly visible social activists.

How did this memoir come about?

Well, I began in 2009 in the summer and finished the first draft in 2010, turned in a final draft early this year. I’m a pack rat, I have an archive of 500 bankers’ boxes organized alphabetically and chronologically, so I’ve been going through a long and arduous process. I’m trained to write chronologies, I have a life-in-verse of Allen Ginsberg and Anton Chekhov, so I decided to turn my investigative skills on myself. I went through all my boxes, got help from libraries that keep my work, debriefed various friends. When I put it together and sequenced it, it turned out over 400 pages.

Do you know of any bookstores or publications carrying on the radical tradition of the Peace Eye Bookstore or Fuck You Press?

Well, rent for bookstores [today] is really skyrocketing. I had the advantage of very low rent, it was in a former kosher meat market, I left the words “Strictly Kosher” on the front and put up the Peace Eye sign next to it. Rent was $50 a month.

Fuck You was the equivalent of rebel publications on the internet—I’m not sure there are any mimeograph machines being built now. You can get some used ones but that technology is basically gone, though there are Kinkos and other offset publishing sources. People put their publications in my hand when they see me, and I get a lot of stuff in the mail. 8.5” x 11” publications are flooding the post office as we speak.

How would you compare the current moment of civil unrest to the 1960s?

There’s a lot more issues now than we felt in the 60s. Then, the Great Society had just begun, and we thought that the social safety net would grow and grow, and by the time we were old everything would be taken care of. Occupy [Wall Street] has so many fragmented issues to face. [In the 60s,] we just had war, and freedom of expression, and partying—a lot of partying. Now it’s a serious thing, kids with huge debt and unable to find jobs, more and more wars, drones. The kids in Occupy Wall Street have a noble mission to try to transform the economic injustice that’s going on but, boy, it’s going to be tough. Police come on the scene like Darth Vaders, coordinated nationally, raiding Occupy encampments all over the Western hemisphere. It’s a peculiar situation we face: the militarization of the police, the desperation of poor people, the decimation of pensions and savings. It’s gonna become like a Dickens novel, baby.

Do you think the pendulum of political America is currently making a significant swing back toward the left?

I’ve been around a long time, seen a couple pendulums swing back and forth, but I think maybe the pendulum is a broken metaphor now. It’s just a swing out to less and less, widening this abyss between people who can pay $300 for a shirt and those who get by with a $10 tee. I don’t know what’s going to happen: we could all wind up in the gutter, eating dog food quiche on an encampment under the freeway somewhere. There’s no safety net anymore except for people who have strong family ties and families that have money. Like in a Chekhov short story, where you have some out-of-work uncle living well in the manor house of a wealthy family member. I thought that when I was old that social democracy would have grown up in the United States, and my heart is broken that it hasn’t.

How does Fug You fit into the current political landscape?

Fug You is built on that vision, of America growing out of the Great Society—the good side of the Johnson administration—building on that, defeating the war party and the war interests, creating an equal society, a William Morris-like vision of a social paradise. But it didn’t happen. [Fug You] is a truthful story of a 10 year swatch of time, when I was a young semi-idealistic college grad trying to survive in the turbulent 60s. Now we have the turbulent teens, it’s sort of the same in a way: same turbulence confronting war and social inequality. We went down to the South to get black people the right to vote, now 25 states have passed laws making it harder for them to vote. It’s a little bit like déjà vu.

Do you think things are better or worse than they were in the 60s?

I think in some ways it’s better now, there’s more personal freedom. The producers of Gone With the Wind paid a fine when Clark Gable uttered the word “damn,” but thanks to the fight for personal freedom from my generation or the beat generation, you have HBO and the Sopranos and a richer [popular arts] landscape—the comedy channel can pretty well say whatever it wants. So there’s gluts of freedom, there’s just no social safety net. Paul Goodman said, “In America, you can say anything you want, as long as it doesn’t have any effect.” Bless his soul.

What advice do you have for today’s crop of young activists?

Become a scholar-activist. That is, study issues and create research and don’t hesitate to get out into the street and raise the banners of your concern. You’ve got to have one foot in activism and one foot in scholarship. - Marc Schultz

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/49799-from-turbulent-60s-to-turbulent-teens-a-q-a-with-ed-sanders.html

Logan Berry - A cursed book wrought from a cursed planet, a fetish-object emanating oblique fan fictions and haunted eco-poetics. Where hedonistic teens perform hedonistic plays on an outdoor stage, where Sky Ferreira sings of cow disease, where campers make art out of toxic wreckage–the killers lurk

 

Logan Berry, (Run-Off Sugar) Crystal Lake, 11:11 Press, 2021

Camp Crystal Lake is on fire, and everything's been exhumed!!! In the burning forest it's impossible to distinguish between the killers, the campers, and the camp counselors.

A cursed book wrought from a cursed planet, Run-off Sugar Crystal Lake is a fetish-object emanating oblique fan fictions and haunted eco-poetics. Where hedonistic teens perform hedonistic plays on an outdoor stage, where Sky Ferreira sings of cow disease, where campers make art out of toxic wreckage–the killers lurk! Berry has created a textualized slasher, brought to you in moldy technicolor splendor, that will fuel your nightmares for years to come.

CRYSTAL LAKE IS A DRAMEDY/CAMP SONG/SLASHER FILM IN THE KEY OF OMFG. BERRY’S NIMBLE, NARCOTIC PROSE PLAYS SOME VERY DIRTY GAMES AGAINST A BACKDROP OF IMPECCABLY DESIGNED PAGES, CREATING A QUEASILY BRILLIANT EXPERIENCE MORE AKIN TO THEATER THAN TO ANYTHING LITERATURE HAS HERETOFORE MANAGED TO MUSTER. BOUNDARY-DEFYING, EXTRAORDINARILY INTELLIGENT, AND GLEEFULLY SAVAGE, CRYSTAL LAKE IS BOTH PLAYGROUND AND GRAVEYARD FOR A CAST OF VERY POISONOUS PERSONAE SURE TO DELIGHT AND DISORIENT EVEN THE MOST ADVENTUROUS READER. — MARYSE MEIJER

EVERYTHING - WHETHER HUMAN BODY, TREE OR RANDOM OBJECT - CAN BE PERFORATED, EATEN, DISEASED, EVERYTHING CAN BE USED TO PERFORATE, EAT AND INFECT, AND EVERYTHING IS OR CAN BECOME GARBAGE AND WASTE IN THIS TOUR DE FORCE OF HYPERINTENSITY. THE AMBIENT VIOLENCE INCLUDES THE VERY MEDIUM OF THE TEXT ITSELF, WHICH AT TIMES SEEMS TO BE EKPHRASTIC POEM, DEVOURED SLASHER SCRIPT AND RITUAL DESCRIPTION. — JOHANNES GORANSSON

RUN-OFF SUGAR CRYSTAL LAKE IS A STUDY OF THE DEATH-OBSESSED, APOCALYPSE-OBSESSED, APATHETIC-SENTIMENTAL, QUAKING-AT-DRUGGED-OUT-DANCE-PARTIES, WORKING-AT-LOW-WAGE-LATE-STAGE-CAPITALISM-JOBS, DITCHING-SUMMER-CAMP-ACTIVITIES-AND-DUTIES TEENAGER. ADORABLE AND TERRIFYING, LOGAN BERRY’S AMERICAN TEENS, WITH THEIR GLITCHY HEARTS AND THEIR GLITTERY PANTIES, AS SEEN THROUGH THE EYES OF THE ADMIRING PRE-TEEN OR THROUGH THE EYES OF A CAMCORDER OR THROUGH THE EYES OF THE DRIPPING AND DOOMY TONGUE OF THEATER ITSELF, ARE WEARING THEIR “ACID GREEN NIGHTGOWN[S]” AND “GRAMMA FAUXHAWK MULLET[S].” THEY’RE ARGUING OVER WHETHER “THE SONG IS NEW OR FROM THE 80S” WHILE THEY GET HIGH AND GET WORRIED. THEY ENACT THE COMPLEX MATRIX OF TUMOR/THICKET AND HUMAN BODY/FOREST IN THE NIGHTMARE THAT IS OUR TIMES. THE BOOK’S SCOPE SHOOK ME/SHOCKED ME/THRILLED ME: IT’S ABOUT THE PANDEMIC, IT’S ABOUT SEX, IT’S ABOUT SURVEILLANCE, IT’S ABOUT THE FRIDAY THE 13TH SERIES, IT’S ABOUT HORROR MOVIES AS MIRRORS/UPSIDE DOWN TEXTS, IT’S ABOUT HOW “THE WORLD WON’T STOP ENDING.” IT MAKES POEMS OUT OF GRAVES, GRAVES OUT OF POEMS, DEATH INTO LANGUAGE, A WHOLE SEASON OF GRAVES—THE SEASON WE’VE ACTUALLY BEEN LIVING BUT ALL DONE UP IN EYE SHADOW AND RAVER CLOTHES—INTO THEATER. IT DRAGS ITS NARRATIVE LINE INTO A PORNY MAP OF SIMULTANEITIES: RAGE, RAMPAGE, CIRCULATE. “IS LIFE THE SYMPTOM/ OR THE VIRUS?” IT’S BEAUTIFUL TO LOOK AT AND MOVE THROUGH: IMAGES AND TYPOGRAPHY THAT GAVE ME THE FEELING I GOT AS A KID LOOKING AT HIGH-RES PHOTOGRAPHY BOOKS OF PEOPLE PARTYING IN VARIOUS CLUB SCENES. OR REMEMBER WHEN THE RODARTE GIRLS MADE A HORROR MOVIE AND IT WAS BLOODY FORESTS AND OUTFITS? OR DO YOU ENJOY THE SOUNDTRACK OF PHANTASM? DO YOU WANT TO SUCK ON SOMETHING THAT MASHES UP SLIPPERY SKELTONIC PLAY, CRACK SMOKE SMELL, WINDEX, PRAYING MANTISES, “DOPPELGÄNGBANGING,” AND THE TASTE OF YOUR VERY OWN SOUL? DO YOU LIKE TO PARTY? ARE YOU SCARED? COME TO THE WATER’S EDGE: “EVERYTHING LOOKS THE SAME/ FROM THE BOTTOM OF A LAKE.” THE “TIARAS [ARE] MADE OF BULLET SHELLS & TINSEL FLUFF” AND “THE KIDDOS COMPOSE[D] A NEW AMERICAN FLAG:/ SMILEYS, HEMP LEAVES, ARCANE SYMBOLOGY,/ WELL-ENDOWED ANIME ANIMALS.” FRANKLY, I JUST WANT TO LIVE IN HERE. OR AT LEAST WATCH IT ALL SHIMMER FROM A SPOT IN MY SLEEPOVER CAMP AUDITORIUM.— OLIVIA CRONK

If we’re going to talk about Logan Berry, the question we first need to answer is, how is Cioran’s fall out of time conceived of as a negative eternity? The key concept is to differentiate the fall out of time from a positive eternity. The fall out of time is not a happy return to a pre-birth eternality, like Plato described the realm of the forms. It’s a timelessness of another sort—a notable, tangible, negative timelessness, not a continuous existence but a ceasing of all that is.

There’s a parallel between that negative eternity and the disembodied/disemboweled consciousness that I would identify as the dominant perspective of Logan Berry’s Run-Off Sugar Crystal Lake. The book doesn’t so much describe, as it does manifest something. And the thing that it manifests is something definite, something that exists, which looks upon our material realm with envy and is, quite possibly, an indication of the positive existence of evil.

It’s the feeling you get watching a really well-done ritual scene in horror movies; like there’s something being conjured that has a name, some definite characteristics, and also an intent. Berry’s text is obscure and sometimes impossible to decipher. It functions as a summoner for something that arrives atmospherically over the course of a reading—something dark that perceives and conceives of this world as a respite from itself.

(I’d like to stress at this point that, while my reading is certainly speculative, it isn’t ungrounded. I’ve talked to Berry at some point about the apparent conflicts between Deleuzian and phenomenological metaphysics, and I think his book is a fine exemplar of how the phenomenological metaphysics ultimately wins out.)

Deleuze scholars are known for denigrating phenomenology but, when you press them, they ultimately admit that the only thing Deleuze has against phenomenology is how Edmund Husserl (the father of phenomenology, called “the master” by his students, much like Aristotle is referred to as “the philosopher” throughout medieval texts) assumes the existence of the subject. And while that interpretation of Husserl is a bit reductive (Husserl assumes some bare form of subjectivity, a zero-point of orientation from which things come to be cognized), there is a metaphysically creepier form of subjectivity that comes about in his later texts, a transcendental intersubjectivity that undergirds any individual subjectivity. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (of whom Deleuze speaks of favourably) picks up on that bit of Husserl and conceives, in later phenomenology, of “the flesh”; the integration of materiality and consciousness, conceived not as two things but one formed thing out of which all entities we know are abstracted. Deleuzians, on the other hand, conceive of the metaphysics undergirding reality as something more chaotic—a maelstrom of sorts. The Deleuzian beyond lacks intentionality prior to individuation. It’s an unrestrained cogito.

The point here is that the actual conflict between phenomenologists and Deleuze is metaphysical. The question is to do with from where things manifest. Where one conceives of a flesh from which actuality arises, the other conceives of that metaphysical base as formless.

The thing that Berry’s text evokes is that place from where things manifest. The text doesn’t express a clear plot, characters, or linear temporality, but there is a setting, there are characters, and there is something beyond them—a fundamental intentionality (a directionality or a telos) of which you get a sense through reading. It functions to bring about something, something definite, and something accessible through our reality but not really in amongst it. The narrative viewpoint of Run-Off Sugar Crystal Lake isn’t one amongst many possible viewpoints but something else, something a little separate, something disembodied. And it wasn’t a peaceful disembodiment, like the soul’s separation at death to return to the forms. You get a sense that this disembodiment was more violent than that—a negative separation of perspective from materiality.

Now this something, I might argue, requires this particular materiality (a pretty paper book) in which to manifest. Run-Off Sugar Crystal Lake is a lovely piece of art, formatted in landscape, images with text, in colour or with a notable lack of it. The book itself is a first stage in the manifestation of the dark thing Berry calls into being, and the reception by a human consciousness (our reading of the text) is the second stage in that manifestation. (The phenomenologists who study the materiality of the literary work of art refer to the former as a “realization” and the latter as a “concretization”.) The material thing provides the potentiality for our cognition (as readers) to access a formal reality beyond that to which we have become accustomed.

And I don’t think I’m being too obscure with these speculations; the thing that Berry manifests is something with which we are all, at some level, already familiar. It’s the other side, the upside down, the thing which possesses, the whatever that is below or reflects reality, always attempting to claw its way up to the surface. That’s what I take from Berry’s statement near the end of the book, “I’m already inside you.” Like how Plato’s philosophy suggests that we recall the forms we used to know before birth, these negative forms also exist in some latent form within human consciousness—except they are not from any heavenly realm and in fact quite the opposite.

I recommend this reading experience to all those interested in the negative beyond. - Charlene Elsby

https://heavyfeatherreview.org/2021/10/31/run-off-sugar-crystal-lake/

Summer camp: godless terrain, a receptacle for teenage fluids, burning alive and flickering between the film grain. Logan Berry’s newest work (RUN-OFF SUGAR) Crystal Lake (11:11 Press) arrives to us as an anachronistic totem through a contaminated portal. It is poetry, a narrative glitched to hell (literally), a visual treatment for Saturday the 14th, the horror that doesn’t end after you’ve been dragged from the canoe. The lake—infected with young blood and medical cyberwaste—is transformed into a temporal liquidizer: campers and killers as corrupted data, counselors trapped in a glassy 80’s paranoia, blending and oozing from the forgotten VCR in the woods. Crystal Lake is the inevitable response to a dying world fetishizing its own doom. Just try to survive the summer.

When I was younger, I would often fall asleep with the TV on. I would wake up in the middle of the night, paralyzed in my bed by late night horror movies playing at full volume, too scared to find the remote. Crystal Lake reminds me of those nights: bloodshed and sex filtered through a half-asleep brain, inescapable and somehow increasingly comforting. While charged with a nostalgic hysteria, the book is unafraid to indulge in slasher-kitsch, appropriating formulaic horror lines, tying in clever wordplay, and making sing-song out of a kill count. The book stretches across a wide range of visual and typographical forms, functioning within the world as a map, as instructions, as a thematic texture, darkness as a centering force, holding a shaky flashlight on the carnage. Still, Crystal Lake is most successful in its language, demonstrating an impressive balance of hyper-specific imagery and abstract dread that, when paired with Mike Corrao’s visuals, form one of the most cohesive literary nightmares I’ve seen this year. A must-read for anyone interested in the incomparable power of alternative poetry and digital art.

With the release (RUN-OFF SUGAR) Crystal Lake, 11:11 Press continues to awe me with its catalog’s variety, each book unique yet equal in its intelligence, scope, and quality. In this late-stage capitalist clown world, presses like this who keep passion and experimentation at the forefront of literature have my eternal gratitude. - Bex Peyton

https://angelrustmag.com/logan-berry/

 *All quotations, unless otherwise noted, are taken from the text.

Because slasher victims are saprophagous organisms whose screen-time subsists on decay (when one of them dies, their absence is absorbed by the next victim’s presence), a slasher film can only begin if the past has decayed into myth. In 1958, two Camp Crystal Lake counselors were murdered at work and the camp was closed. We’re wrong to refer to ghosts as the dead when their bodies are a language of acousmatic sound. Crushed leaves and creaking doors. Like “irritating, causeless pains.” The speech of townsfolk superstition. “The past extends, coeval with the present.” Our ghosts are very much alive. Twenty-odd years later, Camp Crystal Lake reopens. Annie, a new camp counselor, is told the place is haunted, that it has a death curse, but she doesn’t let that bother her. It’s 1979, and the past is just a myth. She’ll be the first to die.

(Run-Off Sugar).

The struckthrough parenthetical is the book’s first victim, and like every slasher victim it’s death breeds a replacement.

Crystal Lake.

Where bodies are walking graves, each interring their duplicate who died before them. A never ending sequence of murder and renewal. “Duplicate, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat.”

//

The film critic Robin Wood famously read horror movies as being structured around an ideological principle that he identified as the “return of the repressed.” The “aberrant” desires that have been successfully sublimated into the white, heterosexist nuclear family are re-presented in the form of a monster. When we see from the monster’s perspective – Norman Bates spying on Marion Crane, baby Adrian looking up from its bassinet at Rosemary Woodhouse – we are shown that the membrane separating normal from abnormal has frayed. That the membrane was only ever a thin disguise of embodiment in the first place. A “self remade around the wound.” But the return of the repressed is an untenable framework when applied to post-Halloween slashers. Although the slasher might literally exist outside of society – in woods and ramshackle towns and in dreams – they do not represent that which exists outside of society. The slasher, in their systematic execution of those they’ve deemed deserving of death according to a code of prejudice, represents the law.

More and more dome cameras look like open pomegranates. Surveillance is intended to capture you in such a way that if you escape you’ll be returned to your captor.

The point-of-view of the law, and the implementation of the law, are omnipresent. If Jason Voorhees is silhouetted in the woods he’s also watching you from underneath the lake. He killed two teenagers making love in a tent while flattening the tires of your Winnebago. “The law evades responsibility for its incongruencies.” A single murder is a tragedy. A multitude of murders is an institution. A franchise. “Homicide for Homeostasis.” The maintenance of the law depends on labeling certain lives as contraband, so that other lives may benefit from those lives’ confiscation. Our economy stills launders fortunes made from slavery. Our railroad ties are gravemarkers of genocide. In a world that “won’t stop ending,” where cities aspirate the ocean, and the sky suffers a pleuritic sun, desperation has been judged a murderable offense.

The victims in these movies are primarily white, and as such, they don’t see the slasher as the law, but as that which redounds their faith in the law. They call the police. As if the law prevents the law from murdering more than it otherwise would. When, in fact, “the killers tend to keep each other busy” justifying each other’s crimes.

Logan Berry and Mike Corrao, the book’s co-designer, countervail the law by creating a text that operates according to a sort of ontological synesthesia. Identities are reconstituted through their senses and evade detection. On a material level, (Run-Off Sugar) Crystal Lake is a book with a film being screened through its pages. Landscapes are blemished by a virus of light. Like snowfall from a cystic sky. The book/film’s inhabitants are mutable. “We revise the relationship between the wildflowers and dura mater.” Reality bickers with its simulation and we occupy what’s left unspoken. “Hallucinations as a Season.” Becoming and disappearing simultaneously. “Inside-out – an escape artist.”- Bryce Jones

https://brycejones.substack.com/p/logan-berrys-run-off-sugar-crystal

Run-Off Sugar Crystal Lake by Logan Berry initially makes me think this: A dark living room, a child huddled near the CRT TV, watching this grimy, sleazy 80s slasher flick, and the nudity and gore become for that child the initial revelations of a wondrous world of adulthood, but one that is rouged by the brutality of the cinema that mediates it.

Slick with studio money and genre thrills, Berry carves from these Hollywood glimpses the totality of the way horror infiltrates our lives (or the lives of those few of us, at least, who have been mesmerized by its gored and brutish allure since childhood), to the point where we must consider: Is Camp Crystal Lake a heterotopia that enacts the crucial, formative rituals of adolescence? Are the camp counselors engaged in a dialectic with the nature of good and evil? Does Jason reflect the heft of our neuroses, our monstrosities, the entirety of the dark and obfuscated Freudian unconscious? Can sleaze, can exploitation, can staged misogyny and fake blood by the buckets reflect something grander, something deeper about the human condition?

To me, Logan Berry’s book proves that if we answer “no” to these interrogations, then we deny the true hybridized, fragmented power of art. - Plagued by Visions

Sort of like if there was a serial killer living in the woods, stalking a bunch of camp counselors on a foggy lake, and in between hacking and slashing them up he's hunckered down in his shack writing poetry. Gory and dark fantasies about violence and bodily fluids. What takes this a step above is the layout and design. Pages alternate between colors, textures, fonts and styles. The chaotic design reflects what is going on in the narrator's mind which helps to exaggerate their spontaneous and violent desires.

"I scrawl this in shit on prison walls:

Dear God Bring the Doom". - Bob Comparda

Run Off Sugar (should be struck thru) Crystal Lake from the astounding 11:11 press is a bizarre trip to a land described with a poetry where language is something that the sugar has run off of, and you're left with the hard, bitter, brutal truth -- almost coming to you like little hymns for a generation. There is a good deal of alliteration in the poems, not all of them, but enough for me to feel some are almost meant to be hideous, rapturous songs with a tinge of .

I am far too ignorant in the ways of poetry and philosophy to pinpoint what is happening here with any real confidence, but I really enjoyed it for its honesty, dark humor and bleakness when it comes to looking at our world.

It intrigues me so much that I am willing to look for more about the author, Logan Berry, and try to understand what the hell is going on with his writing. What is he saying?!? - Joseph (Kevin) Lewis

LOGAN BERRY, write like a man on some drug that isn't out yet. He only invented it for himself and isn't sharing.

The way this book is set up, seems uncommon, in the best of ways. Even holding it you know there is power in the folding of the pages. Out in the WOOD, at camp. Quickly, as you read and go thru the heavy symbolism that probably goes over head like a guillotine flipped upside down, just to make its a little more scenic for everyone. (felt alone in the book. not trapped, but stolen? You become a player in here, if you want. its easy to inject yourself into, these situations. I felt like I was at camp. Maybe not the best year for it, maybe THE best...) .... AND its propagates thoughts, like a champ, and thats short for CHAMPION. The book is put together like a PLAY, cause it pretty much is one, cast yourself into this. LOGAN, writes like he has more than something to say here. He has something you have to learn. Most people are born with what its described, some are not, and there is GREAT semblance in that (you can do anything kinda stuff, again, I wanna call this a self help book, but it wont be in the book store in that section, its gets its own in the dirty corner next to the bathrooms at "Barnes and Noble," you gotta get close to the fray, the real, normal people, and the books we read). Comfort, in a tale of horror and quirks we all know from camp, maybe not. An entrancing mix of, BRIMSTONE and, HOLY Water in a small plastic bottle, acquired at a CHRISTIAN SUPPLY STORE (for baptism or just drinking on a hot day, this book is like the POLAR BEAR plunge, get in the cold water....). It feel so balanced that I think that everyone, will take something different from this book. Its a quick read, but you pause to enjoy the package. Ideas will, stay with you. Topics that really stick out, or rather, you got to piece together are, dying, love, syntax on TAP (!!!), evil, evil, good, balance, nature and its intrinsic beauty, and savage universal nature to take you some day, longing, trauma solved, and trauma gained. TRAUMA. It makes some of the bad incidences, people might think about their past, feel not so intense. LOGAN writes like a daemon, who knows demons arent real. This MASTERPIECE! Incredible editing, the format is still maybe too new (it will be copied tho) and it not why it stands out even. There is a mad driven message here. One of those books you cant really spoil, cause you will find you're nostalgia in it, I DID! Might read it around a camp fire with a flash light to you're own FACE alone, and summon the god that we all know is you, heck Logan might be there. If you like, what I might call "PSEUDO HORROR" which is just life, this book with pulls teeth. - OSLO Zeimantz

Logan Berry, Casket Flare. Inside Castle, 2023 

Every city has that motel. The motel on the edge of town, the mythical place you dare not go. Logan Berry goes there.

The colossal new unclassifiable horror text object from the experiences of Logan Berry. 274 pages of full color immersive madness designed with the inimitable Mike Corrao. This is a fuck around and find out book. Beware.

"Things aren't quite what they don't seem to be."

Casket Flare is a stream of consciousness séance. Is it the Skylark motel that is filled with ghosts or is it the authors own mind that is haunted? Rambling sentences flow like formaldehyde through an empty vein. The design of this book is flawless. I felt solitude as I flipped the pages, sometimes like I could hear my own echoes down an abandoned hallway, sometimes like my head was filled with static and my vision forced blurry. Prepare to experience a book instead of simply just reading it. - Bob Comparda

excerpt

What’s being conjured? Writing is like a crossroads, a Ouija board glowing sickly blue. When I heard that Logan Berry’s latest novel CASKET FLARE (Inside the Castle) had been written over the course of a three-day séance at the Skylark Motel in Chicago, it sounded like a lucrative opportunity to connect his overlapping worlds of text, image and performance. An author and theatre director, Logan Berry follows the infernal trajectories of his previous works—Transmissions to Artaud (Selffuck), his invocation of the poet-necromancer himself, and Run-off Sugar Crystal Lake (11:11 Press), an excavation of 80s summer camp slashers—towards their liminal ends in CASKET FLARE, a book conducted in ritualized time and space. I was interested in the fabric of this highly specific experiment as both lived experience and creative process. Body, text: each a matrix of ectoplasm. The book features an Emily Dickinson quote comparing the human brain to a haunted house: “One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted— One need not be a House— The Brain—has Corridors surpassing Material Place.” A bathroom door at the Skylark left ajar, the dim frenzy of a Bluetooth speaker. A homogenous zone of motel apparitions. Invested in place, history, the occult and technology, CASKET FLARE drifts through many rooms.

Logan Berry spoke with me over Zoom before we conducted the interview via email. In addition to CASKET FLARE, we discussed his Sarcoma Cycle, a trilogy of plays: NANOBLADE 1998, SPRING BREAK 2020, THE MOURNING LIGHT 2050, which he plans to run in Chicago this year.

---

Matthew Kinlin: Let’s begin on the other side of the veil. If you could make contact and speak with three dead souls from history, who would they be?

Logan Berry: I wouldn’t; I’d wait for the dead to contact me.

There’s a Broadcast lyric from “A Seancing Song”: “Suns how they bloom, how they bloom in the room, in the room in the afternoon.” My understanding of CASKET FLARE is the book documents a three-day séance conducted in a Chicago motel, where you used a Bluetooth headset to capture your experiences with the speech-to-text function. Can you expand on what made you want to conduct this kind of experiment?

I wanted to write a book that is painfully present, that enacts its composition as it’s read. Found footage is the only genre of horror that consistently destabilizes me as I watch it. I wanted the textual equivalent of that. You’re complicit in the summoning. You descend with me.

CASKET FLARE begins with a description of the location of Skylark Motel, where you held the séance, between the northern perimeter of the Chicago Midway International Airport and the Des Plaines River. The experiment feels invested in place, which took me to Guy Debord’s definition of a dérive, or a journey through an urban landscape, as: “a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances.” Can you explain your choice of place and discuss any ambiences you encountered?

The Skylark was the only motel that hit my criteria both for pricing and location. It could’ve been anywhere, but it had to be there. 

Image from CASKET FLARE

CASKET FLARE attempts to wrest the ambiences of the motel and surrounding areas into the text. What I couldn’t have predicted was experiencing the oldness of space, the ambience of the ancient; it’s all around us, hidden in plain sight. The future, too–it’s here. 

CASKET FLARE feels like a deranged field study in parapsychology. It reminded me of Konstantīns Raudive with his electronic recordings of spirit voices. The book was in communication with this ghostly Other but also the reader. Additionally, the work details an invitation to contact you and emails from others about their own paranormal experiences. Can you expand on all these interpersonal, and interdimensional, dynamics?

A couple weeks before checking in to the Skylark, I blasted out an email describing the séance and my motives to a bunch of friends and colleagues. Their responses were varied and touching. Several expressed concern for my well-being, others described their own experiences with unexplainable phenomena, and others asked questions. I included their responses as a structural element, as breaks between sections, and to counterbalance the chaotic, inhuman forces in the book. 

Imagining the reader in the motel with me, addressing them directly, happened impulsively. I did it to not lose touch with reality. 

I enjoyed the use of Bluetooth and the overlap of business technology with spiritualism. Throughout lockdown, it felt like Zoom meetings became this global séance. There was a Montana doomsday cult leader called Elizabeth Clare Prophet, who believed herself to be the reincarnation of Marie Antoinette, amongst others. One of her mantras was: “I am, I am, I am the resurrection and the life of my finances and the US economy.” Can you expand on the relationship between the corporate and occult in your work?

I’m interested in affirming fringe and off-kilter hermeneutics of reality in my art and seeing where they go. British occultist Dion Fortune defines magick as “the science and art of causing changes in consciousness in conformity with will.” This definition is so capacious, it’s practically a worldview, and it’s troublingly hard for me to think of any aspect of corporations that doesn’t meet this definition of magick. While this is, on the one hand, an extremely enchanted worldview, it’s also extremely sinister: “What kind of magick?” is the obvious next question. “What’s being conjured, unbeknownst to me, by my work routines?” “What shapes are traced in space by my posture at my desk? By the paths I take to use the loo, to have a smoke, to take the train home?” “For whom or what do I sacrifice my flesh and time?” This is a deeply paranoid, unbearable way to live, and it fuels my writing.

In Samuel Beckett’s Not I, Mouth expresses: “no idea what she’s saying . . . imagine! . . . no idea what she’s saying! . . . and can’t stop . . . no stopping it . . .” It seems that CASKET FLARE taps into something about writing as allowing something else to speak, often the invasion of an alien entity. How do you see the relationship between channeling and writing?

I’d wager that all writing is channeling, to greater and lesser degrees, though what is being channeled is worth considering. 

Throughout the book, you invoke and speak with the entity of Q: “I beseech thee, Q.” Can you describe how you understand Q in CASKET FLARE?

“Q” is the catchall name I use for the sundry strange phenomena, hallucinations, and visions that drove me towards CASKET FLARE. It’s a quick way to address them all at once. And I like the shape of it—the “O” as a circle or sigil, the squiggle off the bottom right as an entry/exit into/from the circle.

You thank Q Lazzarus at the end of the first section of CASKET FLARE. People often have a strange and personal connection to her single “Goodbye Horses.” How does that song make you feel?

It makes me feel like I’m about to locate something I’ve been missing for a very long time. 

The architecture of the book is divided into two sections with visual elements throughout, including Polaroids taken during your time at Skylark. Can you discuss your collaborative work with Mike Corrao on the project, and John Trefry, and how the visual language of CASKET FLARE developed?

The visual language developed alongside the textual language. At 11 PM in the Skylark, I’d compose for thirty minutes via the Bluetooth headset, then I’d spend thirty minutes editing and designing, and repeat the process till morning. The original manuscript I sent to John was a massive, fugly Word doc. Mike painstakingly recreated it with a much higher standard of execution in InDesign. We then sent the book back and forth to each other with notes, ideas, and questions, which led to him adding a ton of textures and elements. 

John’s main note on the original work was that the strange, unexplainable disruptions in the text transmissions (which I’d bracketed off in ((double parentheses)) as they appeared because I didn’t expect them and didn’t know what to do with them) needed to be more clearly defined. I sent him a couple of options: one where the disruptions formed textual frames around the main text, and one where they were installed inside of cancerous shapes adjacent to the main text. He said he liked them both. Mike and I decided to roll with the latter.

Your writing often invokes very saturated colours: cryogenic greens, garish pinks that take me to films like Stuart Gordon’s From Beyond. In his theosophical writings, Charles Webster Leadbeater felt colours denoted parts of the astral body: light blue denoting high spirituality, brown with red streaks: jealousy, bright yellow: intellect. Can you discuss your relationship with colour? Are there any colours you are more drawn to?

I love color. I’m not well read on their symbolism, so my usage is instinctual. I don’t have a single strategy or principle for colors in either my books or my plays, but maybe I should. Generally, I like high-impact moments of color, where things can really pop. 

My day-to-day attraction to certain palettes is situational. For example, my daughter is nine months old, and I hate the trend of muted colors in baby’s clothing. They’re babies—why would we want to dress them in the colors of cell phone cases and corpses? Their clothes should be joyous and vibrant! But I wear all black almost every day.

The striking images in the text offer divergent influences, from decadent literature: “the first neuronic jewels strung through Lunacy’s necklace,” to cyberpunk: “the infernal ATM through which we’re squirted.” CASKET FLARE feels like a summation of many elements, particularly as it also involves the performative aspect of your time at Skylark Motel. Can you speak a little about how text and performance operate in the same work?

I think it’s probably impossible for them to coexist in total harmony. The temporal situation of a performance is completely at odds with what a book is. Is it possible to freeze the ephemeral? To textualize liveness? I don’t think so, but CASKET FLARE attempts to.

That brings me to your Ultratheater project, and the Sarcoma Cycle: a trilogy of plays you are planning to stage. If you could offer a manifesto for Ultratheater, what would it be? And can you expand further on the Sarcoma Cycle? I know in Transmissions to Artaud you called for a move towards an unnatural theatre.

I’ll start with the Sarcoma Cycle. It’s a trilogy of plays, set in three distinct time periods and genres, connected by themes of death and technology. The three plays are NANOBLADE 1998, SPRING BREAK 2020, and THE MOURNING LIGHT 2050. The same seven actors will appear in all three plays. We’ll be running them in repertory at the Color Club in June. It’s the first repertory production in Chicago in a decade, and we’re doing it on a shoestring budget. The actors and crew are ridiculously talented. It’s going to be insane.

A manifesto is forthcoming, but here’s a provisional stab at a description: Ultratheatre attunes to the hyperbaroque structures undergirding contemporary society and attempts to dramatize them in relation to cosmic forces like sex, death, delirium, dreams, and time. Its toolkit is vast. It avails itself of all historical theatrical movements, incorporating them as gestures and textures, rather than monolithic templates. (It’s no longer enough to perform an “absurd” play, for example—who gives a fuck?—absurdism is a strategy that can be used and abandoned in an instant.)  

It also avails itself of theatrical aspects of twenty-first century that haven’t been well-integrated into the theatre: public relations; self-presentation online; memetic feedback loops; perception management; groupspeak, doublespeak, and wrongspeak; the staginess of reality via algorithms, focus groups, psy-ops, social media, and statecraft. Ultratheatre isn’t producing plays about these subjects necessarily (though it wouldn’t be a problem if it did); rather, it takes formal cues from them, incorporating their structures and dynamics to create something fresh and vital, in a specifically theatrical idiom. 

It’s a mammoth, fractalizing aesthetic and thoughtform. It’s not “against” anything, especially naturalism. Naturalism is an excellent modality for setting the stage and letting the audience settle into the rhythm of a play, before the winds change, the maenads scream, and the ritual commences. 

Ryan Trecartin once said: “Our generation was ready for something like YouTube ’cause we already had it in our logic and in 2005 when it came out—I think it totally changed how people think about the ways in which people act in my movies, like new technologies create different qualities in understanding and presenting ourselves performatively.” How would you imagine a theatre of 2024?

A theatre of 2024 understands that audiences enter the theatre with a zapped attention span and a sophisticated relationship with the fourth wall from decades of media consumption. It respects their time by delivering something they’ve never seen before, that could only be experienced in a live setting. 

Giorgio Albertazzi as X, wandering through the glamorous hotel of L’Année dernière à Marienbad, catalogues what he sees: “Empty salons. Corridors. Salons. Doors. Doors. Salons. Empty chairs, deep armchairs, thick carpets.” If you could haunt the corridors of any building, other than the Skylark, where would we find you?

I’d love to say you’d find me in Bertrand Goldberg’s brutalist masterpiece River City in Chicago, the Blue Hole in Santa Rosa, New Mexico, the Horseshoe Casino in Hammond, Indiana, one of the cathedrals in Tulsa, Oklahoma, or any 7-11—but if I’m being honest with myself: the Mountain View Lodge in Bozeman, Montana. It’s a perfect motel.

Matthew Kinlin

https://www.full-stop.net/2024/02/13/interviews/matthewkinlin/logan-berry/

Logan Berry, Ultratheatre Volume 1 : THE

SARCOMA CYCLE + NASIM BLEEDS

GREEN. 11:11 Press, 2024

FORWARD BY: Mónica Belevan

INTRODUCTIONS BY: Germán Sierra & Dylan Fahoome

THE SARCOMA CYCLE is a thematic trilogy of plays exploring grief, technology, and intensity in three distinct time periods:

1. NANOBLADE 1998: set in the Cook County Hospital during a technological overhaul in medical practice. Romance, chaos, and madness ensue.

2. SPRING BREAK 2020: a multimedia grand guignol set during the Covid lockdowns. A spectacle that spirals towards an unforgettable finale.

3. THE MOURNING LIGHT 2050: set in River City, Chicago, in the distant future. About the family of a tech CEO who's invented program to communicate with the dead in Virtual Reality. Prophesies from another realm threaten to tear the family apart.

+ Nasim Bleeds Green

A workout opera in Hell.

Logan Berry, WRECKDOM / 31 Levels 

Through WRECKDOM, Logan Berry has written a work of intense confrontation and examination.

Bodies dragged through disintegrating interfaces, eyes illuminated in a radioactive green, CCTV footage looping through the static in the air. WRECKDOM is a work of ultratheatricality, luring its audience into the digitized constraints of a primitive stage.

Utilizing highly constrained and primitive game development tools, WRECKDOM has been designed with a certain abrasion in mind. The eyes strain and the ears bleed. We are all suffering in the esoterica of the watching eye.

Please hold you're breath until the performance is finished.

Logan Berry, Slasher, 2022.

https://snatchwylden.wordpress.com/slasher/

NO FRILLS.

A SON OF SALEM.

A SON OF SPLEEN.

NYC IS THE CARCASS OF A DECAPITATED VAMPIRE.

GATE THIS CITY IN & LET ME DO MY JOB.

A SMEAR OF NIGHT. ANY NIGHT. EVERY NIGHT.

A BLACK OCEAN BECKONS.

A tale of violence, mental illness, hallucination, and internal terror turned outward. 300 pages in full bleeding color. Surreal. Absurd. Phenomenological. Horror.

A long form poem from the perspective of a slasher/killer. Sometimes seems like ramblings of a madman, sometimes seems like well calculated nuggets of poetic evil. What really makes this great however is it's presentation. Every page is designed to give a hallucinatory feeling with different backgrounds and different fonts in different sizes and styles, like seeing the words planet earth written as a death metal logo. It's like a living breathing work of art. - Bob Comparda

I’ve been a fan of Logan Berry ever since he showed up in one of my creative writing workshops at DePaul University back in 2014. There, he stood out for his voracious array of literary, cinematic, and pop cultural frameworks, his offbeat sensibility and eerie wisdom, and his seemingly inexhaustible skill for the (un)canny juxtaposition of the personal, the political, the absurdly comic, and the flat-out horrifying. It’s a thrill to get to ask him questions about his first—but certainly not last—full-length hybrid/poetry collection Run-Off Sugar Crystal Lake, released this fall from 11:11 Press. The poems unfold at Camp Crystal Lake, (in)famous setting of the Friday the 13th franchise. The counselors are fucking, doing drugs, and performing plays on an outdoor stage, while the campers are left to their own amusements, and the Jasons are running around scaring each other. Everyone at the camp is also at the mercy of climate catastrophe. It's one of the most exciting hybrid books I’ve read in recent memory for the way it draws on poetry, prose, and visual imagery to explode the tropes of horror films and to illuminate the fear, frustration, and demented giddiness of living through an ongoing global cataclysm. The publisher calls it “a textualized slasher—brought to you in moldy technicolor splendor—sure to fuel your nightmares for years to come,” and every page of Run-Off Sugar Crystal Lake delivers on that threatening promise. Berry and I corresponded over email in late summer of 2021, one of the hottest on record, and a time during which (like most of recorded history and like slasher movies themselves) human beings were inflicting astonishing violence upon one another with no signs of stopping.

Kathleen Rooney (Rail): One of the most striking things about your book’s already striking title is that part of it is struck-through: Run-Off Sugar Crystal Lake. How did you decide to name the book?

Logan Berry: “Run-Off Sugar” was the working title. I put a slash through it when “Crystal Lake” became a possibility. Ultimately, I liked the look of it: like a knife slash or waste that refuses to flush down the drain.

Rail: The book is designed inside and out within an inch of its life, and I mean that as a compliment. The page spreads are adorned with red spatters and orbs and grayscale patterns and unsettling images—nudes and bodily fluids and unforgiving landscapes—with the text (“NO PREACHING ONLY MOURNING,” for instance, and “mother-cackles hit hypoxic highs”) in careful harmony or discord. How did this layout come about?

Berry: The design was a collaboration with the prolific writer/designer/multimedia artist Mike Corrao. The initial manuscript I sent to 11:11 was smaller. I imagined it as a notepad from a detective or psychologist visiting Crystal Lake and the adjoining townships, as crime scene notes towards a screenplay, mixed with personal garbage. Mike proposed we make the text more haptic. I sent him over 500 images for inspiration and wrote him two essays towards a new text-object. We went from there.

The maximalist layout creates a context for itself; it becomes a polluted prop, a blunt object, or a colorful door stopper. It's aware of itself as landfill. In another sense, it gives the reader's imagination more poison candy to gnaw on.

Rail: Yum. How did the design process unfold?

Berry: Mike did the layout. He'd send me an updated version, I'd comb through it and send notes, he'd comb through it and interpret my notes and add his own additions. It was a thrill to witness his work. Also, after our initial correspondences, I wrote 70 new pages. The biggest challenge was knowing when to stop.

Rail: “This book is dedicated to no one” you say in your “Thank You” section (which actually thanks a lot of people)—why?

Berry: I wouldn't want to frame anyone for my writing.

Rail: The original Friday the 13th came out over 41 years ago on May 9, 1980. Do you remember when you first happened to see it? How many times do you think you’ve watched it over the years?

Berry: When I was 10 or 11, my dad had a bootleg satellite dish card that let us get all the channels for free. I tuned into the channel that repeated JASON X on marathon. Most of it transpires on a spaceship. That was my first encounter with the series. I watched it dozens of times, usually switching between that and Not Another Teen Movie, Scary Movie 2, The Ring, the first Jackass movie, and the Playboy channel. Horror, farce, pornography, and parody have a circuitry seared into my brain.

Next, I remember seeing Freddy vs. Jason in theaters, though I hadn't seen a single Nightmare on Elm Street movie. I didn't watch the original Friday the 13th till 2015. I was miserable at my call-center job and decided I wanted to watch the entire series. I'd watch the movies at home and read about behind-the-scenes stuff when I was supposed to be working.

My first actual encounter with Jason wasn't in the movies. I was trick-or-treating with some friends when we were like six and seven, and we saw a giant Jason dummy on the hillside of a homemade haunted house. My friend's older sister explained the lore, smirking a lot because it clearly freaked us out, and then Jason lunged at her! It was a guy in a costume. She cried a lot, and our night ended early.

Rail: Whoa. Did Friday the 13th instantly capture your imagination and present itself as something you’d want to write about?

Berry: It developed over time. When "Crystal Lake" became a possible title, the texts I was tinkering with—everything from transcribed marginalia I made on work documents to decades-old poems—presented themselves anew. They had a setting and atmosphere to which they could convert and refract. Different voices availed themselves. The new production began.

Rail: The Friday the 13th franchise now comprises 12 movies and counting, mostly constellating their characters and plots around Jason Voorhees, the boy who drowned at Camp Crystal Lake because the horny teen counselors were too preoccupied having sex and goofing off to properly attend to him. What’s the appeal of slasher movies in general, and this one in particular, and why does it lend itself to seemingly endless repetition and sequel-ization?

Berry: Slashers are creepy and titillating. Novel plot twists notwithstanding, their tropes are well established to the point of cliché, but that's not why people watch them. Slashers aren't meant to be narratively inventive or incisive; rather, it's about the visual flow, drawing the viewers' eye to the surface, towards a purely retinal (il)logic of textures, grains, cuts, skins, fabrics, makeup, synthetic blood, shadows, lights, angles, costumes, etc. As giallo director Lucio Fulci explains it, "There's no logic to it, just a succession of images." He calls them absolute films, "with all the horrors of our world."

Friday the 13th is a rip-off of John Carpenter’s Halloween, which recontextualized the giallo genre in the American suburbs. The moralizing aspects of the Friday the 13th series are a distinctly American addition to the formula, a puritanical anxiety about both "justifying" the evil deeds and garnering empathy for the lead girl's eventual survival. It's not (w)hol(l)y about Justice, though; it's sentimentality. I'd wager this is also what makes the series so successful. It adds a (bitter-)sweetness, a ham-fisted heart, and a moral bowtie for personal exculpation from the sleaze that gets the people going.

And sequelization happens because the films make tons of money. Production costs are low, and they're always well-attended, regardless of critics' disparagements.

Rail: When you were working on this manuscript, you emailed me at one point and said, “I'm interested in trying to turn my poems into plays and my plays into poems, so I do imagine these poems 'spoken' or 'sung' like shards of dialogue or stage directions.” Can you say more about this impulse toward the blending of genre?

Berry: Thinking about theatrical modes through poetry and vice versa attunes me to the medium’s raw materials—to their specific frequencies or forces, their particular qualities of "there-ness"—to relinquish any fallacious notions of authenticity, and to embrace their artifice. Although it's impossible, I'd like to dissolve into the work. Theater is a space for masks, for smoke and mirrors, and synchronized heartbeats. Poetry is a space for incantation and psychosis. Together, they become cocoon-like, gooey & messy. As I've argued elsewhere, the real today is far more theatrical than the theater. I'm interested in an Ultratheater, in a total work of art.

Rail: Also, you have a beautiful singing voice, and a pretty specific, eclectic musical taste. What role does music play in your personal life and in your life as a writer?

Berry: That's kind of you to say. I need music, but like anything else it can be over-consumed and lose its luster. I try to not overindulge. And although I can sing, I can't sing on beat. I don't understand music theory and have no sense of rhythm. Nonetheless, I edit texts towards their sonic quality. Though other goals concurrently persist (and are oftentimes at odds with each other), sound is always a priority. Sound has its own alien way of thinking, and I like to follow where it goes.

Rail: Who would you want to do the soundtrack for this book?

Berry: My good friend Nick Meryhew, an exceptional composer and sound designer. If Nick were busy and I had an unlimited budget, I’d see about hiring Oneohtrix Point Never, Metro Boomin, and Sematary, ideally in collaboration with each other and with full access to the Harry Manfredini archives. If they were still alive, I'd invite the late Scott Walker and the late SOPHIE to join in as well.

Rail: You’ve had some intense jobs over the years, especially working in such institutions as the Cook County Jail and a group home for at-risk youth. I kept thinking of this idea of institutions—especially ones that are created to contain and to shape young people—in connection to the summer camp in this book. Have your jobs over the years impacted your thinking and writing?

Berry: Many of the texts that became Crystal Lake were written into notebooks during heightened emotional states after escalated or demoralizing experiences at my various jobs. In that sense, the book isn't purely fan fiction; it siphons in the venom of the Real. I sublimate everything into the writing, for better or for worse.

Rail: Earlier this year, you moved from Chicago to the Watsonville area of California. Does the location in which you think and live and write impact the writing itself, and in what ways?

Berry: It absolutely has an impact; I can’t shut off the ambient energies around me. I'm part of that ambience, and, from many angles, indistinct from it. Our technological era is alienating, but I can’t help but feel enmeshed in my circumstances. What nourishes and poisons me is a concoction specific to the specific surroundings.

Rail: This book feels very much about environmental degradation and human-imposed destruction, like on the all-black page that reads “THE FOREST ASWARM WITH ARTISTS / BURN DOWN THE FOREST” to name just one instance. What’s your relationship to the environment and the ecology in which you live?

Berry: Eco-death disturbs me, but I strive to not confuse my personal impact on the environment with that of humanity as a whole. I do my best. The earth won’t miss us. But I also agree with Charlotte Gainsbourg's character in Antichrist when she says, "Nature is Satan’s Church." I respect nature with the utmost fear.

Rail: If you got to be in charge of programming a horror film festival, what would be your top choices?

Berry: I would program Halloween III: Season of the Witch, Friday the 13th V: A New Beginning, Paranormal Activity V: The Marked Ones, and The Exorcist III. Each is a self-contained outlier in its respective series. I think that would make a decent theme.

Rail: What writers in the horror genre do you count as your influences? Outside the horror genre?

Berry: I'm often drawn to works that invoke horror aesthetics but don't always adhere to the genre's strictures. Works by Georg Trakl, Sylvia Plath, Rachel Lilim, Olivia Cronk, Ai, Gary J Shipley, and Sara Tuss Efrik come to mind. Looking at the list, I think a common thread among them is atmosphere. Their texts conjure uncanniness, like something horrific has happened or is about to happen, like walking through the dark to check the fuse box after the lights go out or wading through the aftermath of a plane crash.

In terms of straight horror, I love Poe, Clive Barker's early short stories, Shintaro Kago, and B.R. Yeager.

Rail: What do you get out of horror—both films and books—that you can’t get elsewhere?

Berry: Fake demons and operatic ruptures of Time.

Rail: Your book is scary and chaotic, but also really scatological and absurd and despairing. I cannot help but laugh out loud every time I read the page that says, “The Devil pooed in my mouth. Is that true?” To me, every emotion gets more profound when tempered by comedy, so I appreciate your infusions of humor here. What, to you, makes horror successful and what makes it fail?

Berry: Glad it elicited that mix of feelings from you. Indeed, I think horror is most effective when you're not exactly sure how to feel, when it's so overwhelming and sublime, that you almost have to "decide" later how you'll want to remember it. That's why low-budget horror is usually more effective to me than the glossier fare—the schlock is so visceral and absurd and nightmarishly unlike what it's trying to represent.

Rail: Of what does a typical day in the life of Logan Berry consist?

Berry: Unfortunately, it's been unpredictable and will remain that way for the foreseeable future.

Rail: What book do you think should be added to all high school summer reading lists and why?

Berry: I'll suggest two: James Bridle's New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future. He does a good job elucidating the history of the internet, defining precisely what it is in terms of material infrastructure, as well as the entities that invested in its development. It's pessimistic, but I bet it would be a good conversation starter. And Mika's No Tiger, for the thrill of it.

Rail: What activity do most summer camps not offer that you wish they did?

Berry: Jet-skiing.

Rail: Permission—you seem to grant yourself a great deal as a writer. And forgiveness—you seem to grant it to your characters. Or at least to present them without moralizing or excessive critique, as when you matter-of-factly write, “We take the children to the petting zoo. / We smoke some dabs in the outhouse for morale.” What role do those forces have in your writing? Your life? The world?

Berry: A great question, and a tough one. I won’t be able to do it justice, but: not enough forgiveness, at any scale you mention. It’s a virtue, and virtues need cultivating. Where retribution and expediency are rewarded, you'll find a lot of casualties. In terms of permission, somebody should probably shut me up.

Rail: One of the many aspects of Crystal Lake I appreciated is the way that you encourage autonomy in the reader by giving us a lot to take in. It’s a real seven-layer dip of a book, super-dense with strata and substrata. But you also just kind of put all these layers in front of us without exactly telling us what to do. How do you think a reader should ideally approach your book, and how much was audience reception in your mind as you were writing?

Berry: I wrote the book I'd want to read. Not to be obtuse, but I don't know if there's an ideal approach. If anyone reads it, I'll be curious what they think and how they approached it. My guess is most will likely go through it quickly and then shelve it. If I'm lucky, they'll say something nice about it online, though I wouldn’t put money on it. Maybe somebody will burn it—that seems like the most practical approach.

Rail: In her book Forms, Caroline Levine argues, “It is the work of form to make order. And this means that forms is the stuff of politics.” What do you see as the relationship between aesthetic form and politics, if any? (Also, sometimes these days when people talk about the “politics” of a work of art, what they really mean is the morality of a work of art, which is something else entirely, so feel free to talk about that, too, if you want.)

Berry: Art is political, but I'm afraid that many mistake art for politics. Politics is an art and uses art. It's tricky.

Rail: You studied philosophy at DePaul, right? What appeals to you about that area of study? Which philosophers inspire you the most?

Berry: Yes, that's right. I landed on that because I was 19 and foolish. I should have gone to trade school. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't love it; I really did. I enjoyed the rigor of it. I enjoyed thinking about thinking, about the different methods, their systems and assumptions.

The lives of philosophers are largely boring or tragic (and usually both), but Simone Weil and Diogenes of Sinope led inspirationally terrible lives to practice what they preached.

Rail: Speaking of philosophers, Nietzsche suggested that art is often an eruption of that which gets repressed in the modern social order, and said that making art requires a kind of “boldness,” one which is “mad, absurd, and sudden in its expression.” Crystal Lake feels bold in that way. It also feels sort of shocking in the way that some experimental or avant-garde writing strives to be shocking—to somehow create a work of art that could forcefully alter reality. First, do you consider yourself to be “experimental” or “avant-garde?” Next, do you think that a work of art can force reality to become different?

Berry: I don't consider myself either because I don't think about it while working. If someone wanted to classify the work that way, I wouldn't object to it, since it would be true to their experience of it. And I don't know if a work of art can alter reality, but I think it's worth a shot. It depends on how we want to define it. If a car counts as a work of art, for example, then I think we have an answer.

Rail: And because you enjoyed Maggie Nelson’s The Art of Cruelty, did you ever worry that your avant-gardism (if that’s what this approach is in Crystal Lake) might shift into cruelty?

Berry: Not really. I don't aspire to shock or to cruelty. I like extremes, though, and exploring the limits of my thoughts. I write out of anxiety and pain. I'm not into hurting others for the sake of art, though I'm not against violations against myself. Truth be told, the most outlandish shit in the book, to me, the stuff that feels contrived by a pissed-off teenage nihilist, is the stuff I ripped directly from reality. I'm ashamed to admit it, but I guess this means you can include me in your list of garden-variety autofiction writers. Perhaps that's even more apt than "experimental" or "avant-garde."

Rail: I know that you’re kind of a fan of personality tests. Why?

Berry: I usually take them when I'm feeling self-destructive, so I think I use them as a means of enacting distance from myself. My recommendation is to take a couple of popular tests—the Enneagram and the Myers-Briggs, for example—compare them, then look up "the dark side of (whatever your personality types are)" and see what comes up. That can be rather amusing, especially if it's a tirade in a forum. But the best thing to do is to take a couple popular tests then look up "famous people with (whatever your personality types are)." According to the anonymous experts online, the only celebrity who has both my Myers Briggs and Enneagram personality types is Osama Bin Laden.

Rail: The jacket copy on the—trippy and marvelous—cover of the book says that it’s a “study of the death-obsessed, apocalypse-obsessed, apathetic-sentimental, quaking-at-drugged-out-dance-parties, working-at-low-wage-late-stage-capitalism-jobs, ditching-summer-camp-activities-and-duties Teenager.” I’ve been thinking about how Walter Benjamin said that “humankind’s […] self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure.” He said that in 1935 and one could argue that since then, the cultural sea we’re all obliged to swim in has remained just as shallow and doom-obsessed. Because of the self-destructive palls of apocalypse and mortality that infuse Crystal Lake, I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the relationships you see between annihilation and aesthetics.

Berry: I don't know what Benjamin means by this exactly, so I can't comment directly. I will try to do so at a slant. Millennialism has been around for thousands of years, but the doomy climate of 2021 does have a particular aura. What feels unique to me is its ubiquity, and I don't think that death-obsession is a pleasure, necessarily. Many people can't imagine a future for themselves, so they cope. In the absence of something worth living for or dying for, people feel doomed. Deaths of despair are at an all-time-high in the US and rising. Better to let art subsume the pain than to let it fester elsewhere, I think.

Rail: You and your spouse, Eileen, care for a very great, very old dog named Chomp who occupies a crucial position in your lives right now. I am consistently touched by how patient and compassionate you are regarding all his many special needs. How does his presence in your life shape your worldview?

Berry: Chomp just celebrated his 16th birthday this past September. We took over caring for him after Eileen's grandparents could no longer do so due to their own age-related infirmities. He's lived across the United States—in Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Illinois, and California. He's lived a lot of lives. He's still agile and inquisitive, but his mental faculties have severely deteriorated within the last couple of years. He has an inoperable growth on his cheek. He helps us practice patience because he requires it from us. He keeps us gentle and observant. He disturbs us while we're sleeping with occasional night terrors. One time, he fell asleep on Eileen's chest, and she had a marathon of nightmares—a real-life production of Fuseli's The Nightmare! We love him a lot.

Rail: It can be an expected, an annoying, or even an excessively capitalist (for its fetishization of productivity) question, but I’m going to ask you advisedly because I know you keep a lot of irons in the fire. What projects are you working on now and what’s next?

Berry: I don't mind that question at all. Mike is helping me redesign a book that'll be out in 2023. It's our second large-scale collaboration together, and now that we're comfortable working together, we're pushing the process even farther than before. I'm currently working on three manuscripts. I'll give some details on one of them, since it's thematically related to this interview: it's an ekphrasis of the Saw series with the working title SAWPERA. It's in a similar mode to Crystal Lake, but a lot stupider and even more horrific. - Kathleen Rooney

https://brooklynrail.org/2021/11/books/Logan-Berry-with-Kathleen-Rooney

 Logan Berry Interview

by Matt Lee

A book can haunt you, linger in the mind, infiltrate your dreams. A book can itself be haunted, imprinted with faded but charged marginalia, the spectral energy of owners long dead. Logan Berry’s Casket Flare is both—a haunted book keen to share its phantoms.

“We’re in the clouds… Gray as dog bones in an urn… They seize the summit from every direction… Flowing fast… Stalking prey… The prey that contain the cure to their poisoning… Menace in broad daylight… I would like to kill… How would they feel to kill?... How would it feel to kill a cloud?”

An unclassifiable work of daring imagination, Casket Flare (Inside the Castle) is an exquisite corpse of diaristic dispatches, surreal poetry, rancid incantations, and fleshy hymns. Beyond its linguistic pyrotechnics, the book is a visual bacchanal, artfully designed by Mike Corrao.

I traded emails with Logan Berry in “real time,” volleying questions as I read Casket Flare piece by fiendish piece.

I looked up the Skylark Motel—a real place. The motel is a frequent locale in horror cinema. Psycho, of course, but also Eaten Alive, Motel Hell, Bug, etc. The roadside oasis seems to have supplanted gothic mansions as a de facto backdrop for the macabre. The motel is a most American phenomenon—once a ubiquitous fixture found all over the country, now more often a symbol of decay and poverty. There’s something menacing about motels—rife with connotations of illicit sex, drugs, and violence. In Casket Flare, we’re dealing with a haunted motel and a seance being conducted in one of the Skylark’s rooms. For you, how does the motel fit into the horror oeuvre? What potent metaphors lie within? And what drew you to the Skylark—is there a personal connection?

Motels speak for themselves and do so reverbantly in your attentive opening remarks.

I picked the Skylark because it was cheap. Initially, I wanted to go to the Sportsman’s Inn, a couple blocks north of the Skylark, because it was cheap and I liked the sign, but it shuttered before I was ready to write the book. Ultimately, it was a practical decision; I couldn’t perform a séance at the facility where I was experiencing all the perceptual anomalies because I was supervising children there and didn’t want to endanger them. A motel seemed like the ideal space to set the stage. To recreate my work movements (down to the number of steps and cardinal directions) and commune with the entities my work routine seemed to invoke. It could’ve been any motel, but it had to be the Skylark.

We have Logan Berry the writer as well as the character “Logan Berry” in Casket Flare, which now feels less fictitious than originally presumed. I was struck by your line, “schism between the self & self” and the excerpted Dickinson poem, “Ourself behind ourself, concealed - / Should startle most -“ The narrative self and the authorial self—who’s to say which is more “real”?

So there was in fact a seance conducted at the Skylark. Did you go into this knowing you would later write about the experience, perhaps as a creative, generative experiment? Or was it moreso to resolve these anomalies you witnessed? How did you approach transmuting occult ritual into artistic construct? It sounds as if there were otherworldly forces at play.

All of the above. It took three years to prepare. I had to develop a composition method that could attend both to style and to “Q,” the catch-all name I use for the sundry strange phenomena. I wanted to describe what was happening in “real time” and allow the Things to articulate themselves without my control. I wanted something painfully, embarrassingly present-tense. I ended up “writing” it via the speech-to-text function on a Bluetooth headset. The “you” in the book shifts constantly and includes the reader. You and I are summoned by it. You’re still with me in the Skylark.

I’ve reached the “false” ending and before me lies “Casket Flare II.” The fake out—another move straight from the horror playbook. Though your book isn’t strictly horror per se. There’s mysticism, diaristic confessions, concrete poetry, quotations, and reproductions. A strange amalgamation but there is a sense of unity at play. How do you find coherence when operating in so many different modes?

There are patterns at play that can be felt, even if they’re never identified as such. The modes, for example, recur after equidistant intervals. I imagine it like musical counterpoint, where multiple melodies develop concurrently in a single song. Whether their overlaps are harmonic or abrasive isn’t really the point; their enmeshment *is* the song.

I’d wager there several key anchors throughout: the simplicity of its overarching “plot” (or “concept”), the disfigured but familiar genre tropes, and the book’s design aesthetic.

Speaking of the book’s design, the layout is a true stunner. A real objet d’art. Each spread feels like its own self-contained world, but there are recurring elements. The typeface shifts, stretches, distorts—sometimes the text is even obfuscated. Casket Flare is proof that aesthetic is a character unto itself. I know Mike Corrao had a hand in the project. It does seem like a collaborative effort. How did the initial transcript inform the design? And how do you see the design augmenting the text?

The initial version was a fugly disaster. I’d record for 30 minutes in the motel room, then I’d edit/design/typeset for 30 mins and repeated this process till I couldn’t stay awake anymore. I added in the Polaroid and disposable camera photos a few weeks later. The resulting file was bloated and ornate but crude in execution.

When he accepted the manuscript, John Trefry gave me several notes, the most important of which was that the “ghostly interruptions”—which I’d bracketed off within ((double parentheses)) inside each transmission—needed stronger demarcation. I sent him a couple concepts: one where the interruptions formed “text-frames” around the transcriptions, and one where the interruptions were installed in putrid shapes. John said he liked them both.

Corrao joined at that point. He recreated the entire original manuscript—with a *way* higher standard of execution—in InDesign and added putrid shapes to all the interruptions. I asked him to add as much to the book as he wanted, so long as he preserved the original sequence of pages. After months of sending it back and forth to each other, we added 80 pages.

With Casket Flare 2, I sent him the raw text and photos, as well as a note detailing motives and possible design concepts. He was free to do what he wanted, a process in direct contrast with his work on the first.

I think of each page as a kind of stage. The text performs itself through the design and vice versa. Corrao gets this. We work well together.

The action shifts to a house on a mountain near a dangerous (cursed?) stretch of highway. And rather than a seance or summoning, we’re dealing with an exorcism—not a possessed soul but a possessed space. The tone of the transcription becomes decidedly more religious than occult. Indeed, the sort of automatic writing you employ is reminiscent of Christian mysticism. I’m reminded of The Cloud of Unknowing and this idea of relinquishing your mind or consciousness to see the true nature of God. Has religion informed your work? Do you see creating art as an act of devotion or a way to connect with the divine?

I was raised Catholic, so Biblical imagery and the sensuous aspects of the Liturgy are seared in my psyche. I stopped practicing at 16. The God-shaped hole in my head filled with all kinds of dreck. I’ve returned to God, but not the Church. To be clear, I have the utmost respect for spiritual rigor, faith, and courage, but I have no patience for the pedants and the politicians. I suspect you can trace these sensibilities develop throughout my works.

To the extent it’s possible, I subordinate myself to the creative act. Whatever it requires or connects with is beyond my control.

I’m struck by the imagistic intensity of your language—both in Casket Flare and your previous work. It’s a bombardment of visceral symbols. “Citric vapor simmers... Leaky one-way mirrors.… Clutch the fruit & squeeze.…. Through your fist…” Corporeality is always at the forefront. Limbs and organs and fluids aplenty. Why does the body’s architecture compel you? In what way do you see the physical realm overlapping with the textual?

It’s 100% true I’m compelled by the body’s architecture. So true, in fact, that I’ve never considered why; it’s a given. Something tacit in the way I see, before perception gives way to thinking. There’s probably some perverted self-analysis I could do, but I’ll spare us all from that.

I really like the way you wrote the second question. There are many modes of articulation that have nothing to do with words. The etymological roots of “text” stem from physicality: “to weave,” “to fabricate,” and “to braid.” The “style or texture” of a “woven-work” came later. Text is physical and affective, but the physical can’t be reduced to the textual—but what if it could?

I’ve come to the end of Casket Flare, and so we must conclude our conversation. The final pages were some of the most hallucinatory. When I read the line, “We couldn’t leave because we were hooked to cash infusions,” I was reminded of how it feels to be trapped within a vampiric system, a feeling I believe many Americans today share. Casket Flare, to me, is a distorted, mutated version of the Great American Novel—shit, in that sense, maybe it’s even the Ultimate American Novel. Not just a haunted motel room, or a haunted house, but a haunted country. Do you see yourself fitting into any sort of American literary tradition? How does our current circumstance in this country bleed into your work?

I’ll answer your second question first. I’m interested in the sickeningly contemporary, for sure, but it’s more than that. Writing books is a way to engage with deep time, to flirt with situations beyond ourselves. The books decay slower than we do. They rewire future understandings of our current situation, as well as what led up to it. In that sense, the past gets recasted, too. It’s deep play with deep time in all directions. I think of the books as time capsules. As time travel. If the books arrive in a time without minds, they’d better be beautiful.

As far as literary traditions go, I’m honestly not sure. It’s not something I’ve considered. Instead of speculating, I’ll share an anecdote:

On a day-long drive to Michigan’s upper peninsula for a camping trip a few summers ago, I followed Google Maps off-roads to a gas station in the woods, to refuel and use the john. A book displayed on a wire-stand near the men’s room caught my eye: CRYPTIC MICHIGAN—WOODLAND REVELATIONS. Its primitive, homemade design; its chapter titles like “Ghost Apples,” “Mouth Cemetery,” and “The Canton Mystery Vibration”; and its undisclosed but obvious plagiarisms—made me buy it. I thought it would be perfect near a campfire.

As the cashier rang me up, he said, “It’s a shame you didn’t come by earlier. The author of this book is almost always here.”

“At the gas station?” I asked.

“Every day. Yup.”

If I fit within any American literary tradition, I hope it’s the one that includes WOODLAND REVELATIONS.

https://www.ligeiamagazine.com/spring-2023/logan-berry-interview/