Author Interview – Rocco Sweetheart Johnson

by Lane Chasek

 
 

Jokes Review’s new book series, Egregious Pulp, is an egregious, pulpy, NC-17 imprint that harkens back to the days when genre fiction and other forms of “low-class” literature weren’t as esteemed as they are today. This was a time when sci-fi and detective novels were printed on cheap pulp-fiber paper (hence the term “pulp fiction”), and whenever readers were done reading said novels, they’d either burn them in order to cook dinner (hence the term “pot boiler”) or wipe their asses with Chapter 7. 

Rocco Sweetheart Johnson’s Meth Pirate Town is the first title in this brave new series. Meth Pirate Town follows the debauched story of Frank, a one-eyed, multiply terminally-ill drug-, porn-, and slum-lord, and a cast of students, prostitutes, and cops who intersect with Frank’s attempts to build an empire. It’s a novel about meth labs, porn production, affordable housing, and the intricate financial landscape of the sex-work industry. I got in touch with Johnson via email and wound up with the following interview.

Lane Chasek: Well, let’s start things off personally. How did you get from the womb to where you are right now?

Rocco Johnson: I’ve been stomping around the urban wastelands of greater Los Angeles for most of my life. That’s how it started and probably how it’s gonna end.

The first word I thought of when reading Meth Pirate Town was “Dickensian.” Or maybe Tom Wolfe with more drug use. Who would you say your influences are? Am I close with Wolfe?

Yeah, Wolfe is on point. It’s hard to complain about a book like The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. I like anything with a sense of mania or stylized enthusiasm. Plus an unusual cast of characters.

Here are a few names. Alejandro Jodorowsky, Donald Barthelme, Eve Babitz, François Rabelais, John Waters, Bukowski, Palahniuk, Kōbō Abe, Philip K Dick.

I understand this is your first novel, but I’m always interested in learning about the process behind the novel. Was there a draft before this one? Was this the offshoot of a different project? Or was this more of a rapid-fire first-go-around situation? Really, what’s your process for writing a narrative like this?

I wrote this by hand in a notebook. Using different colored pens. When you flip through it, it’s a crazy, multi-colored mess. I have many notebooks like this. Meth Pirate Town is the first full novel I’ve transcribed from the notebooks, but I’ve probably got a few other novels in there. Definitely a lot of rants, screeds, scribbles, and thoughts.

The protagonist, Frank, uses lube that’s a byproduct of crystal meth production, which is an idea I don’t think Breaking Bad ever touched on. Where did this idea come from?

The book was partly inspired by my time living in an old apartment building where my neighbors on the other side of my bedroom wall, I’m pretty sure, had a meth lab. And I had some reasons to believe my landlord was in on it. So my roommates and I talked about meth a lot. It was a wild time. I imagine “meth lab lube” must have come up as a funny idea at some point. And I must have written it down.

I did watch Breaking Bad, by the way, but not till long after I’d written Meth Pirate Town. All the meth references I have came from my time living in that dumpy apartment.

I understand you currently live in Los Angeles. But as I was reading Meth Pirate Town, I couldn’t help but think of all the similar run-down neighborhoods I’ve encountered in cities like St. Louis and Detroit. It had a real Rust Belt flavor. Did you construct the setting for your novel with a specific slum in mind, or would you say you drew inspiration from a more abstract, Platonic ideal known as “slum”? What does “slum” mean to you?

The town in the book is a mishmash of places I’ve lived or visited–mostly in California but also some other places. There are a couple of clues in the book about where things took place. Somebody really familiar with California cities could probably piece together the geography.

I love words like gutter and trash. Filth. Dirt. Shit. And slum of course. I haven’t thought about it much beyond that.

Porn is a recurring motif in Meth Pirate Town, and this is one of those rare novels that touches on the artistic and cultural merits of porn as a genre. Tell me your thoughts on pornography.

Frank, the main character in the novel, is just really into porn. It’s really deeply ingrained in who he is as a person. He sees everything in the world as something to turn into a porn film. This is a fantastic proclivity for him to have as a character because it makes everything he does kind of goofy and absurd.

The book could be read as a commentary on the dark side of the porn industry. There’s definitely an undercurrent of that. The main female character ends up where she is (as Frank’s muse and secretary) because she’s had a really hard and traumatic life. Surely working for Frank wouldn’t have been her dream job before, for example, she got addicted to meth. But she’s also a champion and fully enjoys her life. So in a sense there’s a meta-commentary that, even despite the horrors of the particular industry you work in, there’s still a lot of enjoyment to be had from life. 

There is quite a lot left to explore in the genre of porn literature. Aside from the book Blue Movie by Terry Southern, there aren’t too many porn-centric books that are really worth reading. My favorite book vaguely in this genre is One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding by Robert Grover. Hilarious book with a really memorable narrator. But–like most great books–it doesn’t totally lean into the porn elements enough to truly be in the porn genre.

While on the subject of porn: I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who watches lesbian porn. Not even lesbians. Yet everyone seems to agree that lesbian porn is popular. Why is that, do you think? 

OK, for this question I had to cheat. I had to stop and read some articles to find out. The experts say that women enjoy lesbian porn because it centers female pleasure and doesn’t just show women from the perspective of the male gaze. 

And, to pull a quote from the Atlantic, men like lesbian porn because “men are most aroused by visual cues that emphasize youth and downplay drama and emotional complexity. … The only thing better than one nubile, personality-free woman is two of them.”

Fascinating. 

Also I’m down for some lesbian porn and so is Frank, so that makes two of us.

What does the future hold for Rocco Sweetheart Johnson? Any new novels on the horizon? Maybe a short story collection?

I hope to have a story collection finished soon. I’m also getting more into filmmaking and am working on a few (nonpornographic) short films. 

Lane Chasek (@LChasek) is the author of the nonfiction book Hugo Ball and the Fate of the Universe, the poetry/prose collection A Cat is not a Dog, and two forthcoming chapbooks, Dad During Deer Season and this is why I can't have nice things. Lane's current pride and joy is an essay he published in Hobart about Lola Bunny and the latest Space Jam movie.

Interview with Brian Duncan, Jokes Review's New Fiction Editor

 
 

JOKES: Can you tell us about your background?

BRIAN DUNCAN: I grew up in the central valley of California, in a town near Merced that most people haven’t heard of named Atwater. It’s a small town, but it continues to have a big influence on my life and ideas. It’s a stop along the truckers’ Highway 99; a hot plot of dirt and suburban homes and lakes crisscrossed by asphalt, canals and railroad tracks. A local airbase, Atwater Air Force Base, was shuttered there in the early nineties, and at least half the town, all military people, moved away. Opportunists swooped in to fill the void in the local economy, in one case promoting the vision of an “Atwater Theme Park.” I still remember passing the small storefront they’d set up—it had TVs in the window playing rollercoaster footage nonstop. After the city’s checks had been cashed, they skipped town of course.

This theme of mundane tragedy followed me through a pretty miserable three-year stint in high school in Utah, followed by much better times in Santa Cruz, then traveling around Mexico and Argentina and Chile, then San Francisco. While in SF, I earned a degree in Computer Science from SF State, much to the surprise of myself and my family, who always thought I would go into the arts. The truth is that I always loved computers as a hobby, and found the certainty and clarity of the discrete world very comforting. Also I wanted to know more and I didn’t think I had the discipline to study it on my own. This degree helped me move on from office jobs into programming jobs. I worked at the wild company that did tickets for Burning Man, among others. It paid the bills, but I still longed for a creative career, opportunities and community, so went back a few years later and got an MFA in Creative Writing, so there you go. During my time in that program, I served as the Associate Fiction Editor at Fourteen Hills, the grad student publication.

How was our experience as an editor at Fourteen Hills?

It was tough at times, exhausting, and we didn’t always agree—surprising, right? Still, I really enjoyed working at Fourteen Hills. It was eye-opening to see behind the curtain for the first time. I did novel things like reading the slush pile, sent acceptance and rejection letters, solicited work from emerging writers, talked to local bookstores, and led discussions with staff readers, many of them undergrads. I should also note that since it was part of the MFA program, the whole Fourteen Hills experience had a meta-quality to it; that is, I was working at a lit journal while also learning about how one works at a lit journal. In that framing, I did things that I probably wouldn’t normally do. For example, I read every short submission in its entirety even when I knew right away it wasn’t a good fit, just so I could practice putting into words why I thought so, using evidence from the submission to back up my opinions.

Overall, I got to experience first-hand how much hard work, dedication—and debate—goes into making a publication come together. It is a true cliché that putting together a lit journal is a labor of love.

Are there any common mistakes you’ve seen writers make? Or any advice you’d like to give to writers submitting to Jokes Review?

Advice

When in doubt, submit. In the past, I’ve sat on pieces I’ve written that weren’t “perfect” yet and watched as their relevance and potency slowly dwindled away. Don’t be like me. It would have been worth sharing those pieces with others. Nothing will ever be perfect and you will always change and grow. Phillip K. Dick often wrote very flat characters (gasp), but had amazing ideas that only grow in relevance to this day (see: Predictive Policing). I’m so glad I can read his stories because A. they were submitted in the first place and B. they were published.

Common Mistakes

The number one most common mistake I see are pieces that hinge on dramatic events, but the drama isn’t earned. Or, in other words, they hint that “feels” should be felt but deliver no feels. Examples: Someone is sobbing, or breaking stuff, or punching someone, and the reader feels nothing other than a generic sympathy toward the idea of Loss, for example. I would go so far as to say that this is a Great Blindspot, and that 9 out of 10 writers will need to actively study how to earn dramatic emotion rather than relying on intuition. My advice is to study how other authors do it. Describing an emotional reaction is just the tip of the iceberg and sometimes it’s not even necessary. In most cases, when reading, you will anticipate an emotion before it’s even described, because as an empathetic human being you understand how a specific someone would respond to a specific situation.

You recently moved from San Francisco to Sacramento. How was your experience living in SF? What do you like about living in Sacramento?

I came to SF fifteen or so years ago, for the same reasons as a lot of others have—to find a sanctuary from what I saw as an oppressive culture of puritanical, guilt-inducing patriarchy. SF to me represented the idea of safety, for example, when it came to how you formed your family and friends and represented yourself in the world. I longed for the idea of a place where people could just be who they were, out in public, without the culture hammering them down like the nail that sticks out. In many ways, I found it to be that, because it was and continues to be for so many people, because collective ideas are powerful.

It is of course not so clear-cut as all that in reality—there’s no escape in sight from what bell hooks called the “imperialist, white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchy.” Who you are allowed to be has large class, gender and racial components. Existing class divisions have only accelerated in recent years in SF.

Sacramento for me represents a fusion of my childhood in a hot, suburban Central Valley and my adulthood in San Francisco. In some ways feels like a return, and in other ways, like something completely new. I’ve regularly visited family and friends in Sac for years, so the shift from the Bay Area did not feel so abrupt. It’s relaxed here; live and let live. There’s great local businesses and cafes. You can camp out on a lawn with friends and watch the sun set and not worry about catching the last BART train home. It represents unexplored possibilities for me, music to find, creatives to meet. I found Jokes Review here, which I am thrilled about.

Do you have a favorite bookstore in SF or Sacramento?

Green Apple on Clement street will always have a place in my heart, of course, and I’ll visit whenever I’m in SF. So far in Sacramento, I’ve visited Capital Books the most. Three floors of books, LGBTQ friendly and local. They also have a roaming bookstore cat and a solid manga collection. I love any bookstore where it’s hard to leave because I want to live there. I value loving curation, endless possibilities, and being left alone to explore.

What are a few of your favorite authors?

Haruki Murakami
Toni Morrison
Ursula K. LeGuin
William Styron (Sophie’s Choice)
Chinua Achebe
George Saunders (whom everyone recommended to me after reading my work)
Ted Chiang

If there’s one book you’d recommend, what would it be? 

This is so difficult to answer! I’ll pick the latest book that has taken up residence in my soul: Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo. It’s a polyphonic trip into purgatory and an examination of how a single person’s power can shape the world and create a sort of Hell others are trapped in—and so much more. So relevant in the days of Musk and Bezos. Also, it was also a big inspiration to a young Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who, in the forward of a newer edition, related how his author friend threw the book down in front of him one day and said “Lea esa vaina, carajo, para que aprenda!” (rough translation: Read that shit, for fuck’s sake, and learn!).

Follow Brian on Twitter or Instagram @solfugit.

Can a Story Be Overedited? Review of 'Liberation Day' by George Saunders

 
 

George Saunders recently appeared on the Ezra Klein Show to discuss his new book, Liberation Day. I’m a big fan of Saunders’ writing. And I wish everyone would listen to his spiel about how stories have the power to make people more empathetic. But I do have a grievance with Saunders’ writing. His talk with Klein gives me the chance to air it.

Twenty-eight minutes into the podcast, Saunders describes his approach to writing:

“[My] stories are composed over many months. The process is to go into the first draft and micro-edit it over and over and over again. And the article of faith is that, by doing that, I’m doing two things: One is I’m infusing more of myself into the text in a way that I’m not planning. Second of all, the whole document is elevating this rhetoric to be more nuanced, more ambiguous, hopefully funnier, more persuasive, more surprising. The end results of eight months of work on a short story is that there’s a presence there that’s more intelligent than I am.”

One thing to note right away: Whatever Saunders does to write his stories, it works. Obviously. He’s often said to be the most important short story writer today.

But this extreme editing practice that he has, in my view, can be a detriment to his writing.

He notes that endless editing “infuses more of myself into the text.” This is a thought-provoking idea, and it rings true in a sort of romantic way, but I don’t think it’s right. Consider the movie Cowboys & Aliens. The script for this film was famously worked on by countless writers. Whatever editing process Saunders takes with his stories, Cowboys & Aliens received that level of editing times a thousand. But despite all that, it’s a mediocre script. And more to the point, it’s silly to think that the final draft was at all benefited by all these writers “infusing themselves” into the script.

Granted, this isn’t a perfect analogy because the Cowboys & Aliens script was a vehicle to turn a profit for film producers. The screenwriters may not have been intending to infuse themselves into the script.

But then, the more you think of it, what the hell does that even mean? Speaking in literal terms, isn’t a thing you produce all of you by definition? You can put more of your time into something, sure, but is it more of you? Is the first-draft-writer version of you less you? Arguably it could be more authentically you, right?

I wouldn’t bother questioning Saunders on this—again, he’s obviously a brilliant writer—but for the fact that his new collection feels overedited. That’s almost its primary characteristic: feeling overedited. It’s calculated to the point of being clunky. It’s dry while also indulgent. It’s forced to the point of not being fun.

Not always. Sometimes his style is 1oo% dialed in to the point of perfection. The leading story “Liberation Day” is brilliant and hits like a fucked-up action movie. “A Thing at Work,” equally so.

I really wonder: did Saunders spend more or less time on these two stories? I’d like to think less.

If not, I have an alternate theory for why many of the stories don’t work, in my view. When a rock band ages, they often keep putting out albums that have the general style of their early albums, but without the energy and authenticity. Every Pink Floyd album after The Final Cut feels like it was put out by a Pink Floyd cover band.

Saunders may be suffering from this. Maybe all the “self” he’s “infusing” into his stories through editing is contemporary George Saunders trying to call up young George Saunders, and the result is cover-band George Saunders.

As a longtime fan of his, my sincere hope is that someday he’ll put out a collection that’s raw. That spits on his old style rather than endlessly tinkering with it.

The result could be something special, a side of Saunders we’ve never seen before.

Review: The Wonderful World About Pigs, Horses & Clowns & Especially Dolly Parton

by
Lane Chasek

 
Picture from David Liebe Hart's Album Art

Detail from David Liebe Hart’s album cover art

 

If you were a weird kid (or adult) in the mid-2000s, you probably spent a lot of late nights watching Adult Swim. And if you were anything like me, you especially gravitated toward Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, which often featured a puppeteer/musician/raconteur named David Liebe Hart. David is an outsider artist and national treasure who deserves just as much national treasure status as the likes of Dolly Parton, Bruce Springsteen, and Andy Warhol. But since the universe is a cruel, unfair place, David is forced to work in relative obscurity. But relative obscurity is better than total obscurity, and in my experience, obscurity often fosters much more interesting work than mass-marketed fame ever could.

David’s latest album, The Wonderful World About Pigs, Horses & Clowns & Especially Dolly Parton, is currently for sale on both vinyl and digital. Many of this album’s best tracks are delightful Trojan horses which, while ostensibly informing listeners about topics such as banana milk, Dolly Parton, and clowns of the 1960s, hurl you into unexpected, often unnerving territory. “Bacon & Ham” describes David’s love of bacon and ham and how he could never transition to vegetarianism. This pork-based ballad lulls you into a false sense of security which is promptly shattered like an impatient child’s piggy bank when David launches into a story about when he saw a male pig mount a female poodle in West Boston. This coupling (allegedly) resulted in pig-poodle hybrids, and as the song ends you’re left wondering if these offspring would be hypoallergenic, as well as whether they would possess canine intelligence with porcine loyalty or porcine intelligence with canine loyalty. Similarly, “Science” is told through the perspective of a scientist who develops life-saving medicines, but quickly segues into David describing his own Christian Science faith and the doctrine of healing through prayer. 

Hart’s specificity and tendency to fixate on topics such as aliens, ghosts, trains, and past flames is part of what gives his oeuvre that distinctive Hart charm. This often results in fans like me crawling through networks of rabbit holes in which I learn more about certain clowny sidekicks from Bozo’s Circus than I thought I’d ever want to know. If you’re someone who’s inquisitive to the point of obsessiveness, you may find Hart’s lyrics and subject matter to your liking.

If you’re a fan of outsider musicians like Daniel Johnston and Wesley Willis and have somehow never encountered David Liebe Hart, this would be a great album to start with. David and his producer Jonah also tour the U.S. and the U.K. from time to time (check their touring schedule for current dates), and if they happen to come to your city, definitely check them out. I had the opportunity to see David and Jonah live in 2018, and it was refreshing to meet a musician who was the same in-person as he was in all his songs and televised appearances. 

Outsider music appeals to people because it defies the glitz and polish of the mainstream studio, making for a musical experience that’s not just human but defiantly human. Hart stands out from such performers as Johnston and Willis because of the simple joy and optimism that shines forth in many of his songs. Don’t get me wrong, I adore Johnston and Willis, but the adolescent angst and defeatism of Johnston and Willis’s tragic battle with schizophrenia leave you feeling pretty damn melancholy by the time you finish listening to any of their albums. Hart, though in many ways just as eccentric as Johnston and Willis were, possesses a lust for life and pretty women (both Earthling and extraterrestrial) that gives you hope that the world (and the galaxy as a whole) isn’t such a bad place after all.

Lane Chasek (@LChasek) is the author of the nonfiction book Hugo Ball and the Fate of the Universe, the poetry/prose collection A Cat is not a Dog, and two forthcoming chapbooks, Dad During Deer Season and this is why I can't have nice things. Lane's current pride and joy is an essay he published in Hobart about Lola Bunny and the latest Space Jam movie.

Milan Kundera: Would Modern Shakespeare Write Scripts in Hollywood?

 
 

Have you ever wondered if you were born in the wrong time? If you’re someone who’s incredibly successful in a specialized field that seems tailormade to your skillset and interests, then probably not. But if you’re, perhaps, an opera singer, you might think about this pretty often. 

We take for granted that certain artists or writers from the past were godlike geniuses. But what if they were alive today? If Thomas Aquinas were alive right now, would he still be a theologian? And if so, would he still make an impact on the modern world? What would Leonardo de Vinci be up to if he were alive today? Would he be in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street? Or would he be an anonymous artist and crypto hacker in Europe?

I’ve always enjoyed thinking about these questions. They seem especially pertinent today with so many new creative mediums coming into existence (NFT art, VR game design, Instagram modeling, podcasting…). So it really caught my attention when I stumbled upon a passage by Milan Kundera on this subject.

Milan Kundera’s body of work is very much a product of a specific time and circumstance. The first sentence of his Wikipedia article makes this clear, noting that he’s “a Czech writer who went into exile in France in 1975.” You don’t have to read his Wikipedia bio to learn this. It’s a recurring theme in nearly all of his writing.

Would Kundera have been such a world-renowned writer if he hadn’t been born into a time of political upheaval, forcing him to take up residence in a foreign country? No doubt he’s thought about this a lot, making him the perfect author to expound on the general topic.

The following is from Milan Kundera’s 1990 novel Immortality. The character “Rubens” is a fictionalized version of the artist Peter Paul Rubens.

 

Rubens once visited New York’s Museum of Modern Art. On the first floor he saw Matisee, Braque, Picasso, Miro, Dali, and Ernst, and he was happy. The brushstrokes on the canvas expressed wild relish. Reality was being magnificently violated like it battled with the painter like a bull with a toreador. But on the next floor, reserved for contemporary paintings, he found himself in a desert: no trace of dashing brushstrokes on canvas; no trace of relish; both bull and toreador had disappeared; the paintings had expelled reality altogether, or else they limited it with cynical, obtuse literalness. Between the two floors flowed the river Lethe, the river of death and forgetting. He told himself at that time that his renunciation of painting might have had a deeper significance than lack of talent or stubbornness: midnight had struck on the dial of European art.

If an alchemist of genius were transplanted into the nineteenth century, what would his occupation be? What would become of Christopher Columbus today, when there are a thousand shipping companies? What would Shakespeare write when theater did not exist or had ceased to exist?

These are not rhetorical questions. When a person has talent for an activity that has passed its midnight (or has not yet reached its first hour), what happens to his gift? Does it change? Adapt? Would Christopher Columbus become director of a shipping line? Would Shakespeare write scripts for Hollywood? Would Picasso produce cartoon shows? Or would all these great talents step aside, retreat, so the speak, to the cloister of history, full of cosmic disappointment that they had been born at the wrong time, outside their own era, outside the dial, the time they’d been created for? Would they abandon their untimely talents as Rimbaud abandoned poetry at the age of nineteen?

Of course, there is no answer to these questions, neither for me, nor for you, nor for Rubens.

-Milan Kundera, Immortality

 
 

Peter Clarke is the editor-in-chief of Jokes Review. He’s the author of the comic novels Politicians Are Superheroes and The Singularity Survival Guide. Follow him on Twitter @HeyPeterClarke.

Still Just a Geek - The Annotated Celebrity Memoir (with Annotations)

by Lane Chasek

 
 
 

It feels like I’ve read too many celebrity memoirs this year. Granted, I’ve only read two, but that feels like a lot. And the fact that I’m reviewing them for a literary journal feels like a crime, but it’s a crime I’m willing to commit. Two experimental memoirs from Star Trek alums in less than a year? How could I pass that up?

Wil Wheaton’s Still Just a Geek isn’t a new book. It’s literally Wheaton’s 2004 memoir Just a Geek with annotations.1 Just a Geek is about 2004 Wheaton looking back on the life of 80s and 90s Wheaton, and Still Just a Geek stars 2020s Wheaton as he analyzes the Wheatons of the 80s, 90s, and early aughts.

Wheaton gets to do what every writer wants to do at some point: rewrite their own book. Or, at the very least, provide a writer’s commentary on certain passages and chapters. Anyone who’s ever published a book2 knows what I mean. Just a few short years can drastically change us as writers and as people, and it’s frustrating to encounter passages from our past work that we know could have been better. No writing is ever truly finished, and this sense of incompleteness is something writers always live with.

Though you probably remember Wheaton as the child star who played Gordie in Stand by Me or Wesley Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation,3 Wheaton also writes essays and stories, so he understands the struggles that writers4 face. He takes a long, hard look at his past writing and his past self. What he wrote in Just a Geek wasn’t always well-crafted, and sometimes he cracked jokes that he shouldn’t have. In Still Just a Geek, he forgives himself when he needs to, sets the record straight when he needs to, and scolds himself when he needs to. In one chapter, he makes a series of O.J. Simpson jokes that are just…awful. So awful that I won’t even quote them.5 Wheaton agrees that they’re awful, and he owns up to writing them. For that, I salute him.

Autobiography is a genre of self-reflection, so this auto-autobiography6 is ultimately a reflection on self-reflection. Even if you’re not part of the “geek” culture this book is intended for,7 Still Just a Geek is such an unusual take on the celebrity memoir that I would recommend it to anyone who’s interested in writing, not as a mere product, but as a lifelong project.

Allow me to close this review with something mind-blowing I learned from this book: The plural of LEGO is LEGO.8

 
 
 
 

1 Along with some of his blog posts from wilwheaton.net, a website which he’s maintained for over two decades.

2 Or even just a story, essay, or poem.

3 Or not. Maybe you know him from somewhere else. One of my friends who has never watched Star Trek knows him as "that guy from TableTop."

4 And humans generally.

5 Hint: Wheaton compares the way he was treated by convention organizers to O.J. murdering Nicole.

6 Does this sound awkward? Probably. But what else should I call it?

7 Disclaimer: I’ve never considered myself a “geek” or “nerd” and probably never will. Furthermore, I never understood the fascination with geek culture and “geek pride” that took off in the 2010s. I know this probably sounds ironic coming from someone who runs a Star Trek-inspired lit mag in his spare time, but understand that, unlike Wheaton, I’m part of a younger generation that was inundated with “nerdy” stuff from a very young age. By the time I learned my multiplication tables, everyone I knew was into JRPGs, anime, sci-fi, and high fantasy to some extent. In highschool, I knew cheerleaders who played EarthBound ROM hacks, wrestlers who read manga, and emo kids who grokked over fantasy football (Wheaton happens to agree with me that fantasy sports is one of the nerdiest pastimes ever created). I’m a snot-nosed late Millennial (or early Gen Zer, depending on which timeline you consult) who gets to take popular culture for granted, much like the young fish in the David Foster Wallace parable who asks, “What the fuck is water?” But I digress.

8 And like MF DOOM, LEGO is always written in all caps.

 

Author Interview – Gabe Congdon

 
 

Gabe Congdon has a blast writing. You can tell that immediately. There are many great qualities to Congdon’s work, but the fact that his zest for life leaps off every sentence makes everything else icing on the cake. So even though I’ve never been a massive fan of the Renaissance, I knew Gabe would make it something special. And, oh my god, did he not disappoint.

How to Renaissance, Gabe Congdon’s new book released by Jokes Review, is for anyone—literally anyone—who appreciates the facts that life is awesome and humanity is weird. Because that’s what you get from Congdon on a sentence-by-sentence basis: a zest for life and a lot of weirdos—mostly painters, priests, and sculptors, along with a few warlords and poets.

Below is my interview with Gabe Congdon, where we discuss his new book, his unique writing style, and the creative life. To read more from Gabe, check out his story “Sandcastle,” published in the inaugural issue of Jokes Review.

Peter Clarke: When did you first develop a love of the Renaissance?

Gabe Congdon: Before I answer this question, let me just say real quick, that Joke’s Review is the shit. Their last issue was a manifesto issue and their current issues is a flash fiction one. Who else is doing that? They have a book series about non-fiction artistic movements and individuals. But most importantly they have style. As Sontag says, you gotta have style and JR does. Writers all across this green and brown world, all writers conform to the JR style. That’s what’s it's about; word is bond.

Anyway, It’s kind of how I put it in the work. I read a pop history book called The Feud That Sparked the Renaissance. All these names I knew about came alive. People used to be real characters back then. They were not only living gnarly lives, they were creating these pictures of incredible clarity. In an essay by the Late Great John Berger, Berg says we like the Ren because we like it’s clarity. It’s the motif that makes this epoch stunning in its bright harmony.

Tell us about your inspiration to write How to Renaissance.

I’d been toying with the idea but after two or three failures I was ready to set it aside. Didactic non-fic aint my bag, man. Whenever I write fiction, my art history shit waltzes in without much effort. So this project really took me out of my wheelhouse. But then Pete Clarke said that he was doing a book series about artistic movements, and I thought, well, at least I have someplace to send this thing.

You say upfront in the book that you avoided certain parts of the Renaissance—such as the Medici and the northern Renaissance. How did you decide what to focus on in the book?

Well, when I would tell people about the project they would ask, “Which part” and I’d say “the whole thing,” and they’d say, “Huh, it’s just a big era.” And I’d say, “fuck you man.” But yeah, what came out was what came out. I cut lots of sections cause they wouldn’t snuff. The book was meant to be an expressionistic personal view rather than a be-all account.

Who’s your favorite Renaissance artist?

Tough one. Obviously Michelangelo is my guy. I admire his drive. He knew what he was about and he focused on the work. When he wasn’t sculpting or painting or architecting, he’d go home and write poetry about God. And later, Berlioz would put music to some of them poems, and some of them tunes are alright. Besides that, I’d say Caravaggio (like all of us Cormac McCarthy reading dudes) even if he is from the Baroque.

You’ve mentioned how the Renaissance helped to reaffirm optimism in humanity, something that seems to be lacking today. Do you think we’ll ever again have a sense of widespread optimism? Can art help with that?

As my friends and I say, that’s a tough Hillary Duff (hehe, Duff. Just like the Simpsons beer. I hadn’t connected those two before). What the what was, was the plague. The 14th century was one nightmare after another, but the survivors of the plague saw life in a way that the earlier ages couldn’t have seen. Their optimism is one of the remarkable characteristics of the time. So, would it take such devastation to bring about another such flowering? Perhaps. That’s what Zizek says. Ziz says, “Don’t worry, something bad will happen.” Me I don’t know. I doubt it. Thing being, that people spend a lot of time with art. When people binge, they bask. They’re vegging out on art. Obviously fiction matters. We can take hope from that.

As a writer, you have a really unique style—a goofiness and irreverence that’s entirely your own. It seems like you’re having fun no matter what you’re writing about. How did you develop this voice and style?

Whoever came up with this question, thank you. That’s very kind to say. The Simpsons were big for me. I watched a lot of sitcoms as a tadpole. In college, my creative writing teacher gave me Donald Barthelme and that was big. I didn’t know such things could be made. Let me tell’ya, I cracked open Snow White the other day. I didn’t know shit about lit back when, now I know stuff, and I thought maybe Donald might’ve shrunk. He has not. That book’s like sixty years old and it’s still fresh zane. Barthelme stays modern the way Picasso does.

Besides that, writing comedy almost appears easy because what we’re expecting is a laugh. We’ve earned our direct deposit if someone chortles. All you philosophy and dramatists, us of comedy look on you and ponder, how so you know when to start the next scene? Least that’s what I think. For comedy, we’re all the same when we laugh. No walls are standing. No us and they, no language barrier. Just gut wind.

Beyond writing, you’ve mentioned previously that you also act and make films. Tell us about your film projects.

I did some commercial acting as well as some independent films. It was mostly FX work; I make a good monster. I ditched that life, I didn’t really like the work. For a time my friends and I had a web-series called &@. It was tremendous fun. The best lesson learned was that anything was possible. No matter how crazy a line might be, it could be represented somehow. It disassembled because it was a lot of thankless work and we all grew interested in our own projects. However, the &@ crew has got together recently, we’re putting on a play of a Seinfeld episode in a living room. It’s super fun.

What’s your take on the term “Renaissance man”? Given your diverse creative interests, do you think it’s something to strive to be?

I’m a Sontag guy. Sontag says, if you like an art you should like all the arts. I subscribe. If I were a sculptor, I would want the playwright to look at my work. Same for everything. So I’ve tried to. It’s one part respect and one part thievery. You bet your ass I steal that shit. All I have to do is change some stuff and I’m in the clear. Like the Feud thing, I’ve yet to get a cease and desist. But seriously, I do believe in openness. Being aesthetically available. I pick up books I think I won’t like and prove myself wrong, (Let’s get a hell yeah for Middlemarch) I sat through a four hour John Cage performance and loved every second. I don’t want to discriminate about anything. That’s my philosophy. And both Sontag and I have met people who were doing incredible work and didn’t know who Proust was. That was a lesson for me to learn, I foam at the mouth much less now.

What projects are you working on now? Do you have any more books, stories, or films in the works?

Honestly, no. This Renaissance ting hugged me for a few years. Well, I guess this would’ve been the time to talk about the whole Seinfeld thing. Anyway, what I’ve been doing lately is poetry. For me, if I was talking to a writer, and say they wrote non-fic, and even got picked up by a mag or J, and I’m like, hey nice, that’s big game, then they say, but recently I’ve been writing poetry, I always thought, that’s a baaaadd sign. (Why? Game respect game and writing poetry is the toughest of the four.) Now I’m doin it and it feels incredibly tremulous. But anyway, I don’t know. I don’t want to give up on short stories either. Short stories are the shit. They’re what divides a soft reader from a true book rat. Ya say, you read short stories? and they’re like, no, and then it’s like, well fuck off then.