Two Dollar Radio

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It’s true: Good books make good gifts, but great books make super-freaking-awesome potentially life-changing gifts.

How do you follow up a play for a sleeping audience? If you’re Jeff Jackson and Jim Findlay, you channel the dead.

VINE OF THE DEAD is a new theater production directed by Jim Findlay and co-written by Jeff Jackson - whose novel, Mira Corpora, we published in 2013.

The website states simply: "11 Ritual Gestures. It's about the void. It's about asking the universe and hoping to hear something in return. Or nothing.”

Jeff expanded (slightly) on that by saying: “It’s a piece about contacting the dead and the occult uses of early technology. It’s designed as a series of ritual gestures. It’s theater for people who are typically sick of and bored by theater.”

If you’re in NYC, you should check it out. If you’re not in NYC, you should go to NYC and check it out.

Details:

Ahead of its special presentation at the Toronto International Film Festival next week, there is now - finally - a trailer for the film adaptation of Amy Koppelman’s novel, I Smile Back. And, to top it off, it looks pretty excellent.

Trailer for Jeff Wood’s cinematic novel, THE GLACIER.

"Call Jeff Wood's The Glacier what you will—a novel-in-screenplay-form; a prose poem on the themes of death, suburbia, and the cruel symmetries of cosmic time; a surreal prophecy from America's anguished heartland—it will remain what it was always aiming to be, and that's one of the most indelible and visionary movies you've ever seen." —Jon Raymond, author of Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, and Meek's Cutoff

This fall (September to be exact), we will publish the first in a series of “cinematic novels,” a spellbinding work of fiction called The Glacier, which re-imagines the American frontier of the late-nineties and early-aughts. Following a cater-waiter at a convention center, a surveyor residing in a storage unit, and the dazed and death-obsessed denizens of the burbs, The Glacier is a poetic rendering of the pre-apocalypse.

The author, Jeff Wood, is an actor and writer from Ohio currently living in Brooklyn and Berlin. He is a founding member of the experimental film/art group Rufus Corporation and the Wallabout Oyster Theatre Brooklyn. His 10-year collaboration with Eve Sussman and Rufus Corporation has resulted in the works 89 Seconds at Alcazar; The Rape of the Sabine Women; and numerous international screenings including the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA NYC, MoMA SF, IFC Center NY, and Sundance New Frontier. He is a 2014 Fellow in Screenwriting from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Following is an interview with Jeff about The Glacier.

In the recent past, we've been preoccupied as a culture with dystopian works that imagine “a post-apocalyptic world.” The Glacier occupies an intriguing place in our national psyche, in the late-nineties to the turn of the century, when there was this very lazy, complacent belief in growth. Like Reaganism fell asleep at the wheel and the car is just drifting, very slowly, somewhere. You describe this as the “pre-apocalypse,” and in many ways it is even more ominous than what comes next. Can you talk about the seed of The Glacier and how you came to write it?

Yeah. I grew up in this small town in Ohio which straddled all the typical Midwestern lines between small-town working-class culture, small private University culture, the county agricultural culture, and the urban zones on the horizon beyond that. There were all these clear benchmarks and signposts of Americana in the way that the geography and the demographics were organized. You could travel across these borders in your mind and in reality, and back again, and sort of always know where you were, and have a sense of your own comfort zone, or identity, whatever that might be. I did a lot of traveling around the country for much of the 90's, living in different cities and spending time in wild places and on the road and places in-between. Over those years I'd come back to Ohio, and travel in and out, and I started to notice a change in the landscape occurring simultaneously with a change in the broader culture. The American suburban phenomenon has of course been around since the 50's, and treated endlessly, and I remember all the inflections of it from childhood in the 70's and 80's - these strange spaceships of huddled, flimsy, futuristic housing constellations; the attraction of mall culture, car culture, video games and other material novelties that mesmerized me as much as any other kid. Things that transported us away from our small Ohio town and to this alien place, which is what you want, particularly as a teenager. But in the mid- to late-90's, during the housing boom, the proliferation of development seemed to really metastasize. It took on a different tone and scale. Something else altogether. It became hyper-urban, and really almost totally off-world. I realized that this was not an aberration, or a novelty of the new, but this was the way things were going to proceed and it was neither going to stop nor be stoppable - and nor would very many people actually care.

The changes in the landscape and the culture were regarded as positive changes according to the true values of the culture. And they still are. The value is placed not on what is being lost, or sold, or could have been protected, but in the production-values of the Theatre of Sacrifice; and on the artifices of authenticity that are positioned in place of what had previously just been actual. This sounds academic, but it's not, not if we look at how we have compensated in the culture since then - and the paralyzation in the political culture that has since then maintained this theatre of sacrifice. As a concrete example: when I was growing up, the downtown of my small town sold things that people actually needed and used. Now it sells meaning, 'historical' artifacts pulled from the ashes of the burn - Americana, antiques and antique-effected flotsam of identity that households (and kitchens in particular) can utilize in order to reinforce "who and where we are", since the who and where we "were" has been replaced by something else. I don't make a judgement on it. In many ways these transitions have saved the business districts of small towns and revitalized them as social places. But it's fascinating and has consequences. We're not sure what that "something else" is yet and it's a precarious place to be in in terms of reinforcing manufactured constructs of national identity. We don't as a society have the sea legs to gaze into that abyss as a reality. Its too scary for the society, or too politically risky. The negative-G's of the acceleration are too much and we don't have a big enough puke-bag.

I realized then, at the end of the 90's, as part of my own reckoning with identity that there wasn't even a reliable reference point to begin with. The point of reference was being manufactured as something that was claimed to have existed in the past but was actually coming off the jet-wash of the future. So my understanding of time began to shift. And the shift in the architecture and the landscape seemed to be opening up that void and annihilating an understanding of it simultaneously. It seemed like an inhumanly massive force. So massive and inhuman that I began to see the phenomenon of development and its attendant culture as a geologic event. This was clear. This made the most sense to me and seemed poetically and in reality the most appropriate way to account for the vastness of the phenomenon. I was utterly hypnotized by that wall and the abyss beyond it, and I think as a method of both self-preservation and regeneration I needed to build myself a little gangplank out over the chasm in order to be able to see into it a little better and for a little longer. You can't fully trust the gangplank, or the submarine, or the flying machine if somebody else builds it for you. You've got to build your own. And then you've just gotta be able to stomach the view while a lot of other people are gonna be like, what's up with the crazy guy out in the garage rambling on about some invisible geological event? Those were precarious times! They still are, but it's a different time now.

Two things happened to me during that time that effected my view in a very direct, hands-on kind of way: First, I took a job as a land surveyor, working out on the suburban developments with a survey crew, literally mapping out development and participating as a worker-ant in its take-over of all the local farmland and wild pockets. And second, not so long after that, I think the same year, I took a second job as a cater-waiter with all my close artist friends that, among other places, had us working in the Columbus Convention Center at super-massive banquet "Events." I felt, between these two worlds there's really something going on here with the super-structure of the society. Both jobs put me at the epicenter of what I then and now regard as the new culture of unadulterated global neoliberalism and its homogenized exoskeletal architecture: the culture-less culture, where inflections of tradition are obliterated to make room for the acceleration of the Social. And the truth is, we are all that now, to one degree or another. There are very very few people who are not a part of it. Americans are particularly susceptible to it because we never had a deep cultural tradition to begin with. But no one in the world is entirely immune to it. There are pockets of immunity and thin layers of immunization that I've seen in different societies in the world. Anyway, at some point during the course of those two jobs I was struck by the geological character of the "event-in-process," referring to the sweeping architecture and obliteration of the landscape as well as the infinite number of cultural symptoms and details that were blooming in its wake. This geological reference kinda stuck, among my friends and community in Ohio at the time, as a reference point for that tangible architectural shift, as well as for this cultural phenomenon that was so massive that it seemed to be almost invisible, or translucent, and on a different time-scale - slow as molasses and moving at light speed at the same time.

Because the thing is - to really answer your question with regard to this idea of the "pre-Apocalypse" - this whole experience was dovetailing with the coming and turning of the millennium. So there was this mythic structure at work that was sort of adding harmonies to these architectural and socio-cultural transitions. And to those of us who were riding the spine of that transition, at the right age to be acutely sensitive to it, and participating in the counterculture that was watching it, as artists and musicians…. there was really something intense happening. But it was so intense, and so massive, that, as I said, it was nearly silent and invisible. Just this increasing drone. I'm referring to the approaching of the Apocalypse as both a real and mythic thing, and how it acts like a giant magnet on the society and culture, pulling time toward it. The Apocalypse is never real. That's not how it works. It works as a cultural magnet, a bookend to the story. On the other end you have a Creation Myth, and they're working together at the same time. So here we are in, say, 1999 and 2000 and early 2001…. and I felt so intensely that something was happening, something was coming. Something was dying, or being born, or I didn't know what - but it was expressing itself in the landscape and in these emerging social sectors, and it was this wave of extreme intensity, all the time - but I had no idea what it was. None of us did. And the thing is, the tendency is to look at the notion of the Apocalypse as something literal when in truth it has to be looked at as a perpetual tendency and dynamic - a psychological structure, or archetype. And it WAS actually happening - it was just invisible. When I look back now at that pre-Apocalyptic feeling associated with that specific time, I'm just astounded. It did come to pass and everything has in fact changed so enormously. As Terrence McKenna would say, "The Alien has landed. And it is us." Just not in the Hollywood style that is continually envisioned for us. No, in a much more pervasive and as you say, ominous way. A total sea change.

Take the two most obvious, concrete examples that occurred immediately following this Invisible Pre-Apocalypse of 1999/2000… September 11th and iPhones (or the explosion of the network in general). Together they have syncretized reality and the theatre of reality, and really have just changed everything profoundly. By everything I mean the Social: the way that we relate to ourselves as relations to others as a mass relation; the way that we ingest, identify and protect ourselves from the infinite multiplication of the known universe, on a daily basis. The iterations have gotten closer and closer together. Our behavior has changed, moment to moment, and the way it is mediated and self-mediated. We already take it for granted because we must, but the transition, even if it's a lateral one, has been titanic. And part of what makes it possible and digestible, psychologically, is this theatre of exchange or sacrifice. We don't see new possibilities, or a better, brighter future. We just see more, faster. So a transaction, or bargain has to occur. American culture has from the beginning been particularly preoccupied with the Apocalypse - or a regeneration through violence. It's directly relational to our lack of productive dialogue about sustainability. Sustainability is simply not in our cultural vocabulary or cultural currency. That's changing, but it's no accident that the flood gates opened up on Apocalyptic literature and media over the last 15 years. I found this pre-Apocalyptic moment or state of suspension to be particularly compelling. This just-before. Just this holding of the breath, this weird state of primal tension just before you launch into warp speed. I wanted to hold it and look into it for as long as I could stand it. Not because I knew any better, but just because we were dead-center inside of it. It's one of the hardest places from which to to see, but it's also the most quiet. We lived that threshold from another world into this one, from one time into another: from the past into the future. The present is what was sacrificed, and continues to be. For this reason the text kinda feels like a dirt-covered piece of folk art to me now. A hunk of driftwood with fading pictures painted on it. A piece of the lost present. At the time I wanted to look at one elongated hallucinatory moment of that present as an expression of its operational mythology in Ohio - like a creepy little nursery rhyme - not from a domestic or humanist perspective, but in the treatment of it as an event-entity. That was most immediate and urgent to me: to isolate within that moment what I saw as its most fundamental symptomatic elements. One elongated moment of that myth would also be one frame from the mirage. A moving image that does not happen over time, but happens in a single, suspended moment, like a natural history museum diorama, or a snow globe. A movie that is actually a still-life, and vice versa. Or the way that in the ecstatic moment, within the cultural theatre of sacrifice, time is both a duration to be endured and a static icon that temporarily relieves us of the terrifying reality of impermanence.

I certainly see it existing in the tradition of Terrence Malick, particularly The Thin Red Line, in its concern for the beauty inherent in the world and the threat that we pose as humans to that beauty. How important do you think it is that artists, and now as a parent, that we confront this issue of respect for all things?

I have to admit that when The Thin Red Line came out, I thought it was just about the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. A nature documentary where there happens to be a war going on. So beautifully shot, and when Malick's inner voice-over works, it really works. I saw it in the theatre by myself, in Columbus, without really knowing what I was going to see and it was like going to church and the candy store at the same time. That dialectic is exactly how I saw The Glacier as a phenomenon: there's this nature documentary going on, and then there's this huge annihilating machine happening that in fact no one is actually driving. Like a war, but slower and quiet, creeping. It seems to be just happening. They're both just happening, the two overlapping worlds, and there's this primal dialogue. Everything in between, everything human, or individual is just glimmers and flashes and waves and bursts of chemicals. Something else is going on that we're in the service of. It sounds theological, and it can be if you want it to be, but I mean it as a materialist. Something else is happening that is much bigger and much smaller than us. Both within the society and certainly outside it. And it extends so much deeper into time than we can comprehend in our daily choices. We understand that, now, to the incredible degree that we can see in both directions. The vertigo of that perspective can inspire nihilism and passivity, or wonder. On the one hand, in the scheme of things, nothing really can be changed, and that may be so. On the other hand, nothing ever changed for a place or a community unless there was a value that had light shined on it by some audacious individual. As the father of a 6-month old son in the year 2015… I feel a little bit like the father in The Road, just trying to keep working batteries in the flashlight a rearview mirror duct-taped to my busted up shopping cart. The spaceship seems unmoored at just about every level. And yet it still holds together somehow, because miraculously things do, at least for now, in some parts of the world.

A few weeks after my son was born I woke up one morning and realized simultaneously that I was so far away from home, and that before I'd even gotten out of bed I had the opportunity to see someone being beheaded or burned alive in a cage. What are we supposed to do with that? How are we supposed to take responsibility for that? We can't. And yet that's the burden we take on by being participatory-witnesses. I thought: Well, fuck. Keep your helmet on, and keep your goddamn paddle in the river. There's still birds in the trees. We understand somehow now that the world is fundamentally corrupt, and always has been. Perhaps even this notion of Reality is corrupt to a Gnostic degree - which would partly explain the massive popularity and prescience of both McCarthy and Philip K. Dick - and meanwhile, it could not be more spectacular. It's all still out there. I think it's mainly a question of how do you circumvent the tourism of it and get to the thing itself? There's a conspiracy of propaganda and exploitation that we know very well we're all participating in. That's the dyad of being both an individual and an extension of the mass. We protect ourselves with irony, cynicism, resignation, depression, medication, rage. Fair enough. There certainly could not be a more crucial time to teach the wonder, fragility and interconnectedness of things. Respect for all things…. how do you confront that in the age of youtube? How did you ever confront it? Life is imperfect. Nature is cruel. We're all insects, ripping this place to pieces, wallowing in it like hogs and devouring our mates and young. But it's all happening all at once and respect arises from actually being engaged with something. So, yeah, if I can teach my son to build his own fire, and all that goes along with that, the attention, patience and physical reverence that requires, I think there's something to that. Something real and something magical. If I can show him that water actually has a taste and a smell, maybe he'll appreciate water a little more. If I can take him to places where he can actually smell water through the trees… We need wild places because we can connect to them in the same way that we connect to music, in an immediate and unmediated way. We understand their value without having to articulate why. Unfortunately you have to work harder now to arrive at a place that's not mediated, and you actually have to work a great deal less in order to participate in the cycle of propaganda and exploitation. But once you've eaten real food prepared in the method of a cultural tradition and realized that up until then you'd only been eating processed food, there's no comparison. Once you've been in deep wilderness you truly gain a different perspective. You know something. Once you watch honey bees working, and you handle them, you walk away with a more complex appreciation for everything, because they are in fact connected to everything and the amount of knowledge they possess and are capable of executing is just mind-blowing.

Art can do this too - not raise awareness of something in particular, but just heighten awareness, attention. It can certainly also do the opposite. I feel lucky to have had my awareness heightened through art over and over again. And I'm indebted to the people who opened me to that possibility. I don't think art should strive to be political. Probably better if it doesn't. Art should just be frickin' good. It should be dazzling and hilarious and weird, smart, stupid, transcendent, ridiculous, and as inventive, heartbreaking, cruel, empathetic and violent as it needs to be. You know, all of it. Good at whatever it needs to be. Art should have killer rhythm: it should keep us engaged enough to exercise some reverence and flexible enough to be outrageously irreverent. The Rolling Stones certainly did not have a political agenda, but in the scheme of things what could be more empowering to the individual than that life-enhancing injection? Art that is truly alive and dynamic makes us feel more alive and more at liberty to express a respect that is organic and not ideological. What is the agenda of A Love Supreme? It's a cathedral that you can unfold in your living room. We require these refuges. I want them for my son, almost as much as I want the world to continue to support biodiversity, for his sake, and for the same reasons. And my son, I should say, is also giving that to me. His smile is political. Can I say something as ridiculous as that? Like a walk in the woods is political. It protects me and I would do anything to protect it. The world is such an inalterable reckoning with anxiety - and I can't afford to be wine-drunk all the time - so the world should also be magical, and full of mystery, and bigger than us, no? I appreciate Malick's transcendental vision and effort there, even if he can get heavy-handed at times. He's a really vital and lyrical voice of American Transcendentalism, and I've definitely been influenced by that school. I'd also also count the painter Charles Burchfield as a huge influence in that same vein. And Dead Man. Lyrical and magical realist perspectives on American landscape and tragedy.

There's also a bit of David Lynch or Sam Shepard mixed in there, with mysterious strangers who are engaged in quirky and sometimes menacing tasks.

It'd be hard, I think, to find someone of our generation who hasn't been influenced by David Lynch, for better or worse. That's something to be very careful of because he does what he does in such a specific and singular way and we have to work our way past that. But I was always intrigued and energized by the way that he incorporates mysteries of nature into his narratives and his symbol-sets. He appeals to that sense of familiar otherness - the intimately strange - in a really effective and entertaining way. Alongside that, there's always something hiding under the rug. No matter how shiny or idyllic the surface of any given situation is, there's always something else or more sinister going on below the surface. Those two elements combined are particularly true of Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, and really ring true with my experience and the nature of American culture in general. He nailed that dual nature. In one way or another, if you grew up in a small town, you know the truth of Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. The world can be strange and dangerous, especially when it pretends not to be, often simply because we want it and need it to be. I was also attracted to the psychotic, cut-up structure of Lost Highway as a horror-inducing disarrangement. It has this quality of channeling William Burroughs, or getting at pathos through simultaneity and dissociation rather than through meaningful association.

Sam Shepard was a really big influence early on in this. And certainly for me as an actor as well. He taught me whatever I know about dialogue. And he looked at the tragedy of American mythology and landscape head-on, like a deer in the headlights, and you're not sure whether you're the deer or the one driving the car. His surrealism, like with Lynch, is always necessary. What at first seems like a decorative indulgence is usually actually very utilitarian, because it's the truth of the moment, no matter how far-out the moment might be. In that case the surrealism, or magical realism, isn't forced; it's actually the path of least resistance, or the most efficient way to actually get to the kernel of the problem. For me, Shepard's works were the first revelations I experienced of how haunted the American dream is and how psychotic and funny and surreal the problem of family can be, and home - or how to express it. Lynch and Shepard share that skill and influence in a masterful way. Growing up with Spielberg can't be underestimated either. They all occupy different rooms in the same house.

There does, too, seem to be a concern with the idea of home, or displacement. The story opens with the haunting image of a boy who plays in the woods every day behind his house. He finds solace there and it seems to be how he interacts with the world. One day, he bursts from the door to his house to discover that there is a beige house obstructing his path, and beyond that, a sea of identical houses one after the other that have conquered the woods. Are you that boy?

Well, yes. Of course. In a non-chronological kind of way. On the one hand, when I was a child, nature was my refuge and my space of transport and imagination. I spent a great deal of time in the woods and today I hold onto and engage a sense of nature which I regard as simultaneously romantic and real. Again, it's that refuge between materiality and fiction. But we lose some of that sense of wonder as we lose childhood. That's just the way it is. I've done a pretty good job of maintaining that connection with nature as a priority, often at the expense of other things that should probably be priorities. But disillusionment or disenchantment just comes with adulthood. So that's one kind of beige wall. On the other hand, my parents divorced when I was about 9, and my father moved from our old house in town to a small suburban development on the outskirts of town and I became extremely sensitive to the shift in architecture, the shift in the quality of the grass of the lawns, the brand-new trees, the cut-off quality of this place only accessible by car and the shifts in style between the aesthetics of the two homes. I didn't necessarily value one aesthetic over the other. But one was simply more alien and expressed itself in the vernacular of the alien. At the same time, there's this fundamental question that's confusing for a kid: What do we admire and value more - something that is old, or something that is new? Something that is cheap, or something that is invested in? Of course they're not questions that have general answers. But at a young age I became very sensitive to the complexity of value and meaning of aesthetic/architectural zones as places charged with personification and vibrations that I couldn't understand. Everyplace became haunted. That's certainly why I was drawn to the theatre. The stage is a haunted place. But at the time the woods was my refuge and my hidden perch from which I could look back on both homes. It was my domestic/psychology free-zone, and still is.

The other beige wall is the one that is connected to these childhood pathologies but is also happening in reality, in the world. I wanted to explore them at the same time, and the connections between them. Edward Abbey advocated for the preservation of wilderness not because he was a tree-hugger or a climatologist. He advocated for the preservation of wilderness because it is psychologically necessary. His thesis was that if we don't have a relationship with that wild, prehistoric, inhuman Other - that intimate other - we will go insane. The danger of our experience of the world becoming more and more human - human, all to human - or hyper-human, is that we experience the effects of solitary confinement in the close proximity of others, night-terrors in broad, unending daylight. I think the saddest thing I've ever read must be Undaunted Courage. Meriwether Lewis describes the Great Plains and Montana in great detail as being utterly Edenic - without exaggeration - totally overflowing with wildlife for as far as the eye could see. And he expresses wonder and awe, an appreciation for it that is beyond his Federal charter to discover routes of commerce. Then within a few years of his maladjusted return to domestic and political society he'd blown his head off, and within 70 odd years the American West is "closed" and the bison are gone. It's an astonishing rate of development. And you feel that when you drive out there now, as awesome as it still is out there. So that beige wall, cutting us off from an idealized childhood wonderland is also just an explicit allegory for what is actually happening. The beige wall represents itself. It's not symbolic. It is what it is. I'm obsessed with iconography, not symbolism: things represent what they are and point to entire universes by virtue of being charged with a living current that oscillates between materiality and fiction. I think that's the specific potency of magical realism which can easily get watered down, misunderstood or misused.

Can you talk about the history that The Glacier has, as a story and as a screenplay?

It started out as poems. These sort of beat, cyberpunk poems that were the only way I knew at the time to get at these abstract feelings that I wanted to understand, or articulate, and the scale of the world to which they referred. Those were important because they were free of narrative and I find narrative very troubling when it's not unfolding effortlessly. I didn't think narrative had much of anything to do with what I was looking at. I was already experimenting with the notion of the Apocalypse as an ecstatic psychological state - an internal state, or archetypal benchmark - rather than as a physical event. The other part of that is that among all the parts of the prism I was looking at, I'd grown up having had seen The Day After on television. Can you believe they aired that shit on TV for 12 year olds? And this was really the crux of, for me - what is the distinction between fiction and the reality of terror? We'd really ridden up on a cross-roads there. And we're still standing there in the heat, scratching our heads. This is something that we've really absorbed and taken up into our DNA as an iconographic structure. But still, I had no idea how to approach that narratively, and not much interest in doing so because I thought it would dilute it. But of course you have to render the darn thing somehow. So one cold clear day I was riding around in the back of the surveyor's truck and I happened to be reading Kafka's The Castle. And I suddenly realized that I was a semi-paranoid land surveyor riding around in the back of a truck inside a meta/architectural labyrinth reading about a semi-paranoid land surveyor inside a meta/architectural labyrinth…. and that we were both impostors. And I realized that if I didn't make that transition into the cockroach, or build up some kind of exoskeletal structure in order to protect myself, I wasn't going to make it. I was just too exposed. It was this real living Philip K. Dick moment - I'd had a couple of them during those years. So I realized that I might have some kind of structure there with these autobiographical mirrors that weren't reflecting the truth but were reflecting the fiction which was more true than the dry facts. So it just sort of went along from there in the way that I knew things should feel and sound. I didn't set out with the ambition to write a screenplay. I just wanted to dig away at a mythological sense of the place I was from. I knew it had to have sound, and that it had to be pictures, and that it was also some kind of literature, but I also wanted it to have a physical, theatrical quality - so in that sense it had to be a screenplay. It originates from a cinematic perspective on the world and the iconographic template of the blank screen is really at the center of the whole thing. I really felt that it had to be seen, that it was a visual thing, so, yeah, it had to be a screenplay.

But now my understanding of what the visual is, and where it resides has changed. So this evolution of it to this current state is really interesting. Where is the image exactly? This is the problem of perception. Where is matter? The first draft was written in the Spring/Winter of 2000 out on my Dad's land. I was sick, and holed up there and writing. I knew I wanted it to have a whorl structure, to function narratively around an empty center. Or like an umbrella structure, without the skin. There are clues or puzzle pieces built into it that indicate what is really going on, if you want to look for them, because as I said, there are the effects and the reflections of things happening, and then there are the things that are actually happening. It's difficult to tell which follows which, and one of them is invisible and the other is not. I can't say which is which in this case. It went through many subsequent drafts from there, and had an entire life as a screenplay in New York, and LA and even in Europe. That would be really interesting and fun to talk about in detail some time - but the shards of puzzle pieces that are built into it, as a screenplay you have to reveal those, and you have to spell them out and pay them off and I was not going to do that. Not because I'm above it. I was just not capable of it in this case. It's just not how it works. But that's how it has to work in screenplay land.

Particularly as the expectations of "Story" have grown so intensely in recent years, which is by and large a good thing, and asks more rigor of writers, but also has created a formulaic effect that reveals itself by the time it gets to the inciting incident. I don't want to know what I'm watching. I don't want to understand what I'm reading until the chemicals have all lined up and then I do. But that's not how you sell things or find the amount of money that you need for this sort of thing. Understandably. In this case, the clockworks and the precision and the payoffs are there at the subterranean level, in my opinion. Or I hope they are. But that's not really for me to say. Over time, as an oddly structured piece of literature - and a thing that was in limbo somewhere between being what it actually was, and a blueprint for something else - I began to see it as a kind of long-form or epic haiku, because of the mode of the structure, and all the white space that you have in a screenplay that dictates how you phrase things. In that way I felt that that's where a lot of the action was happening, and how some of those puzzle pieces work, in that white space. The stuff hiding out in broad daylight.

You now live and work as an actor in Brooklyn and Berlin – can you talk about how growing up in Ohio influenced your worldview?

You mean the two-headed calf at the Ohio Historical Society?! Aw, man. I love the Great Lakes region in general so much, and miss it like crazy. Ohio is, ironically, so many things. And I think when I learned that all places are complex, I learned to look at the details of Ohio and appreciate them more. It's very specific, and subtle, positioned between the Rust Belt and Appalachia - but not overwhelmed by its own identity, or inflated value, in the way you have to reckon with in many of the other places I've lived and now live. And consequently, it's psychologically and creatively full of so much possibility. There's still room to do stuff. Even if I needed to travel to other places in order to try things out and explore. I used to say, Ohio is the Center of the Universe because everywhere else is interesting. I just desperately wanted to get somewhere else, get out West and to wilder places. That's only natural. So I did, and eventually, and as you get older you realize the truth of that other aphorism - The Center of the Universe is Everywhere. I'd traveled a good deal and to some powerful places, and at a certain point I felt compelled to look at the mythic qualities, as well as the banal details, that might exist in this place that I'm from that in many ways is a pretty blank slate and not exactly brimming with exotic excitement, unless you mean Kahoot's Gentlemen's Club or the Little Miss Pumpkin Parade (I apologize for placing those two events in the same sentence). But you have to go back to keep completing the cycle. So I go back as often as I can and light giant fires and play porch music and I have a communication there with my people that I'll never have with anyone else. It's very special, and some of them are the artists that I most admire in the world. I think it's a particular Midwest thing that a lot of us were tempered with this balance between consideration and ambition. There's a looking… what I've found out in other places often gets taken for a cowboy thing. I think its because there's a value in just looking, and seeing how thoughts play out before you just throw them out into the room. A dry sense of humor. There's a lot of possibility, by virtue of a certain cultural neutrality, a certain kind of openness. There's some kind of built-in compass and bullshit detector that can be specific to the Midwest. A certain mind-speed. Not too fast, not too slow. That can work for you or against you because I think we often take our ambition with a grain of salt. It's a very different way of being in the world in general than the way of someone who is from NYC. In that sense I really consider myself a geographic patriot - being from the country of Ohio. The landscape makes absolute sense to me even if not all of the culture does. On the other side of that, in terms of everything we've been talking about, Ohio has unequivocally sprouted a seed of that apocalyptic sea-change. Ohio is a testing ground for the culture-less culture of the globalized development, and across a lot of the population, there's a very contemporary sense of conformity. It's relatively unchecked by opposing forces out there. A place doesn't have to be as garish and extreme as Dubai, or as hip as LA, or as remote as the outposts on Antarctica to express the "glacial" phenomenon. It just has to be at work in the daily lives of people who are, without knowing it, mainlining and evolving the dominant culture and test-driving its architecture.Which is one reason I feel so alive there. There's a lot to work against, a lot to work with. Because there's something really banal and sinister and radical happening in broad daylight in terms of the processing and globalization of Americana. It can tend to get back-watered in a lot of armchair nationalism, which is infuriating and sad, but really, beneath that, I think it's mostly just about commerce, and participating in all these mirages of manufactured identity. And there's nothing like being out in the parking lot of Home Depot during tornado season. I love it. There's a lot of contradictions, a lot of grist for the mill that also makes for an awesome, and in my opinion, honest, counterculture. Progressive pockets of the culture living very closely alongside conservative culture.

Being in Europe is a trip, and problematic, in a great way. I face the "American problem" daily. There's an enormous admiration for certain aspects of American culture that in the same breath is accompanied by an equally enormous resentment, condescension, and disdain - much of it, of course, merited. But there's a freedom and candor with which it is expressed that can be surprising and catch me off-guard. It's very easy to forget how much of the world is inundated with America America America… so there's a counterpunch with which it comes back at you that I'm not always prepared for. But it's fascinating and useful and necessary, and stretches you. I get to explain over and over again, for example, how I can value the experience of having grown up learning how to shoot a rifle, but I can still be totally against the NRA. I appreciate those contradictions. They've probably influenced my worldview more than anything else because I inadvertently carry those contradictions with me out into the world and apply them to other scenarios. The starkness of the contradictions are really potent and really get me going. In Ohio I get to feel perfectly at home and like a space alien at the same time. So I'm really happy that this is happening with Two Dollar Radio. Both of us having lived in Ohio and New York I imagine that we share some perspectives. On that note, I'm pretty fired up to be returning to Ohio this summer to act in the Two Dollar Radio production of Nick Rombes sci-fi film The Removals. See you then!

If you are a bookseller or critic interested in receiving an advance reading copy of The Glacier, contact us here.

Say hey to Kendall from Georgia, the 29th member of the Two Dollar Radio Tattoo Club!

“I got this tattoo as an appreciation for the diversity and quality of literature that TDR features. Also, I'm a senior in nursing school and need some leisure reading.”

When we sign a new author, we like to do an interview with them that calls attention to some of those aspects of their work that we found the most attractive. In February 2016, we will publish a first novel by writer Mark de Silva, called Square Wave. The story follows Carl Stagg, a historian researching imperial influence in 17th century Sri Lanka, itself a security state, who makes a living as a watchman in a factionalized America where confidence in democracy has eroded. Along his nightly patrol, Stagg finds a beaten prostitute, one in a series of monstrous attacks he learns. Suspicious of his supervisor’s intentions, Stagg partners with a fellow part-time watchman, Ravan, to seek the truth. Ravan hails from a family developing storm-dispersal technologies, whose research is jointly funded by the Indian and American governments. The watchmen’s discoveries put a troubling complexion on Stagg's research, giving it new shape and impetus, just as the weather modification project begins to appear less about dispersing storms than weaponizing them. By gracefully considering the effect of a militarized state upon the personal nature of its citizenry, as well as the study of microtonal music and weather modification, Square Wave signals the triumphant arrival of a young writer certain to be considered one of the most ambitious and intelligent of his generation.

Like any ambitious first novel, Square Wave feels as though you have interwoven everything—many of your varying interests, as well as all of your enthusiasms and energies—into one grand puzzle. Here we have microtonal music, weather modification, a crime mystery, political theory, and the imperial history of Sri Lanka. How did you go about merging such disparate topics?

Well, the seed was just this: a novel that would crosscut the near future with the distant past. Specifically, it would juxtapose two beleaguered states preoccupied with questions of national security and, more basically, the equality of persons.

Daydreaming did most of the work from there, really. Nothing terribly fancy. I began by holding a few scattered thoughts, images and feelings together in my mind and letting them mingle. A few of them fused. Whatever didn’t, I discarded. The fused bit suggested further things to me about the book, formal things—tone, structure, and so forth—but substantive things too: characters, settings, and all topics you mention. I didn’t have a rich enough picture of those topics, though, for my imagination to really get to work on them. So I would read about them, just as a way of stocking the mind with material—ideas, sense details—that, through more daydreaming, could be put into contact with the nub of text I already had. Of course, whatever else was on my mind (or reading list) at the time also fed into that swirl: some of the musical material, for instance, and quite a bit of personal stuff, shall we say.

A small portion of this new material would then bind with the text I already had. That’s how the novel grew, through prolonged daydreaming at and away from the keyboard, interspersed with reading suggested by whatever those dreams delivered. Eventually I had a text that seemed reasonably whole. I reshaped things from there, but as I’d been making intuitive adjustments and consciously reconceiving things all the way through (whenever I would stop to read), there wasn’t as much left to do as you might imagine.

Was there any subject you left out that you had originally hoped to include?

Looking at my notebooks from a few years back, I find the phrase “sentimental race relations” written prominently on an early page. I can think of a few things that might mean. Unfortunately I’m not sure which if any of them I actually did mean when I wrote it. So I can’t really say whether the topic made it into the book. There are less ambiguous notes, though—on scientism and religion, for instance, and on athletics. This material definitely refused to merge with the rest. Maybe it will show up in future manuscripts.

There are flashbacks in Square Wave to seventeenth century Sri Lanka, written by the protagonist/historian Carl Stagg concerning his family's history in the country. With the exception of a historian-monk, Stagg's writing on the period is predominantly told from the point-of-view of the imperialist forces in Sri Lanka. How does being ethnically Sinhalese yourself influence these sections, and why did you decide to dwell on the imperial powers?

I’ve been to Sri Lanka only a couple of times in my life. My parents grew up there but aren’t especially attached to the place. And I don’t speak Sinhalese. So I come to the historical material mostly as an outsider.

I was looking for a historical power struggle that was driven by questions of equality, to set against a story much closer to our own time where equality remains a live issue. It needn’t have been an instance of imperialism, I suppose. But there was always going to be extra appeal for me in picking Sri Lanka: the appeal of genealogical excavation, of exploring the deep ground of one’s own consciousness. There was the chance of catching glimpses, however faint, of some of the origins of my own sensibilities, and of my parents’ and grandparents’. And I think I did. In sifting through the historical documents, I would stumble upon an attitude, a habit of mind, a custom, even a way of seeing, that would have a kind of intangible resonance for me. Somehow these qualities had come down to me, in transmuted form, these hundreds of years later, by the perfectly ordinary means of history unfolding.

It was vital to me, though, that the book not be a piece of multiculturalist literature, the kind that makes whites nod soberly about their ancestral misdeeds and feel not-so-secretly proud of themselves for paying (belated) attention to those they’ve marginalized. (Wasn’t there more than a touch of this in the 2008 U.S. presidential election too?) I find that embarrassing and patronizing, and I didn’t want to contribute to it. A lot of celebrated books, actually, have gotten the reception they have largely because of the way they slot into this broader project of “giving the marginalized a voice.” Some novels written by women have been received this way too. It’s an unfortunate reason for a book to do well. My hope is that the moral jaggedness of this book—and it has struck several early readers as very jagged—will make it more difficult to assimilate into that framework, though I am sure someone will try.

Your background is in philosophy, and Square Wave feels very much to me a novel of ideas in the tradition of a DeLillo or a Bolaño. Most young writers start with a few stories and then attempt to shop around a collection, or a “novel of connected stories,” but it looks like you were just itching to go really, really big.

The book of course is not that big, physically. But that’s because the material has been distilled to an unusual degree. While I do have the high hope it’s ended up as conceptually rich as doorstops like Underworld and 2666, that was actually not my most basic aim here. What I was really itching to do—whether I’ve succeeded is a separate question—was to throw off some of the prevailing ideas about the art novel that seem to me to be suffocating it.

For one, I wanted to write a novel that didn’t make you feel understood, or “less alone,” but in many ways more alone, more confused, precisely by upsetting your conception of yourself and your position in the world. I also didn’t simply want to capture “what it feels like to be alive today,” as if novelists were ersatz phenomenologists (or literary journalists), here mostly to bring us the twin pleasures of identification and recognition. Searching out fresh ways to feel and think about life, trying to bring a new phenomenology into being—these things seemed at least as important. I didn’t want anyone “missing their subway stop” either. Like people, books should engage you, but they should offer some resistance too. Finally, I didn’t want to settle for “telling the truth about life,” in the sense of recapitulating, perhaps in a braver or more articulate way than usual, what we already believe and feel about the world. Confirming, clarifying, or elaborating on our existing intuitions about life wasn’t going to be enough.

What I wanted to do, really, was imperil those intuitions, so that the way to their transformation might be opened. I think aesthetic experience of the highest order is often a kind of trauma (though it may not always feel like it at the time). The books I value most are threats to who we are and what we think we know. In their wake, we find ourselves, as after any other psychic trauma, picking up the pieces and searching for a new order. If the book is great rather than simply very good, a rich and unparaphrasable order will also be suggested by it. I think of Underworld and 2666 like this.

To my mind, most of the books we hear praised in literary circles these days—those of Knausgaard, say, or Ferrante—are essentially harmless. They may be “compulsively readable,” or give comfort, or bear a veneer of insight or honesty, but they don’t put us under any serious pressure as readers. You could say they fail to humiliate us. So everything goes on as before. We’re left fundamentally unchanged, while our narcissism is sated.

Many of these same books also fail to offer up a fresh and deep vision of life. I mean to invoke both the sensory and cognitive dimensions of that word, “vision”: a way of experiencing, but just as much, a way of thinking (even if that way is not summarizable). You could also call this composite a sensibility.

That was the basic drive, then: to write a threatening novel that has a sensibility distinctive enough to make revelation possible. All the books I admire achieve this to one degree or another.

As for Square Wave’s being a novel of ideas, well, I do take the fate of concepts as seriously as I do the fate of people and places. So in that sense it is a novel of ideas. But it isn’t programmatic. It has no thesis or message. Or rather, it has many competing messages, built directly into the substance of an imagined world, and I’ve left it to the reader to take their measure, which means he must find his own moral and intellectual bearings in the book. That, I think, sets up the possibility of his sensibilities altering, often in unstatable ways.

Your background is in philosophy, and you told me that you began to write Square Wave because academic writing began to feel too restrictive a medium. Can you tell me how so?

In Anglo-American philosophical circles, the journal article is the primary form of academic expression. To judge by the major journals, a stylistic consensus seems to have formed around a colorlessness of presentation. The idea, I suppose, is that a purely functional approach to writing can ease and speed the comprehension of a work’s “bottom line”—the basic argument and its conclusion—the kind of thing that can be neatly stated in an abstract. So the premises and conclusions of these philosophers’ arguments are usually laid out in a heavily signposted manner, with short, flat declarative sentences doing most of the work. This gives the writing a kind of plodding, “no surprises” quality—though it should be granted, there is pleasure to be had in how pristine the basic logic of an argument can be rendered like this. In the hands of some philosophers, this style can even be artful (David Lewis was a master of the form). Still, it’s a form without much flexibility, so there are aesthetic (and, I would argue, intellectual) limits on what can be accomplished within it. The same point holds for the modern philosophical monograph, which frequently is a series of journal articles, cobbled together.

In any case, in either of these forms, things usually proceed with just the kind of inevitability that real-time philosophizing rarely possesses. Now, if you think philosophy’s appeal lies mainly in the sanitized outputs of the messy, metaphor-laden process that is philosophical thinking, the current approach to writing philosophy is not necessarily bad. But if you think the philosophical process is at least as interesting as its products, you might be left dissatisfied, as it rarely shows up in the finished essays or books. And that’s how I ended up feeling about it.

There was a time in philosophy when it was more tolerable for process to show in the final work. Take the early books of Michael Dummett, on the philosophy of Gottlob Frege. They’re often bemoaned by philosophers for their lack of clarity. And it’s true, it can be difficult to extract the bottom line from his work. But if you are interested in how Dummett characteristically philosophizes—and he has a tremendous mind—and not just in the logical structure of the arguments that come from it, you can get quite a lot more out of his leisurely books than any more schematic treatment of those ideas would allow. There are a handful of more recent thinkers who work in this way too, for instance, John McDowell, the philosopher of mind who was the subject of my doctoral dissertation. But there is far less tolerance for this style today.

Novels, of course, though unhelpful for stating definitive positions, are terrific at presenting the processes of thought (and affect too) in the most granular terms. John Gardner called fiction “concrete philosophy,” and that sounds right to me. It’s a totally unformalizable way of going about it, and it doesn’t yield tidy results. But I was never as interested in those as much as in how ideas are embedded in the fluid textures of the world itself, whether it’s the ordinary empirical world or one concocted by the imagination.

Joshua Yates and Jeff Jackson 'Commune with the Dead’ at Entropy Magazine.

In the new issue of the Columbus Alive, there's a profile of the band Bummers, who have a hot new self-titled album out. The Columbus band contributed two tracks to our debut Two Dollar Radio Moving Picture, 'I'm Not Patrick.'

Bummers have also been picked to play at Cincinnati's Bunbury Music Festival alongside Father John Misty and Tame Impala (and the Black Keys and Snoop Dogg) and the Nelsonville Music Festival with The Flaming Lips and St. Vincent.

You can check out Bummers' new album on their bandcamp page. You can also hear their track "The South" open up the following trailer for 'I'm Not Patrick.'

As we like to do when we sign up a new book, we've conducted an interview with author Berit Ellingsen, whose novel Not Dark Yet we will be publishing this November. With her appreciation for detail, narrative pacing, and consideration of science and the environment, Not Dark Yet reveals Ellingsen to be the heir apparent to J.G. Ballard.

Brandon leaves his boyfriend in the city for a quiet life in the mountains, after an affair with a professor ends with Brandon being forced to kill a research animal. It is a violent, unfortunate episode that conjures memories from his military background.

In the mountains, his new neighbors are using the increased temperatures to stage an agricultural project in an effort to combat globally heightened food prices and shortages. Brandon gets swept along with their optimism, while simultaneously applying to a new astronaut training program. However, he learns that these changes – internal, external – are irreversible.

Ellingsen is a Korean-Norwegian writer whose stories have appeared in Norton's Flash Fiction International Anthology, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Unstuck. Jeff VanderMeer chose Ellingsen's story collection Beneath the Liquid Skin as one of the best fantasy and science fiction books of 2012, saying that "[Ellingsen] is just starting what promises to be a major career, but already giving readers a unique and fascinating perspective."

Following is the interview we conducted with Ellingsen about her novel.

Q: Brandon Minamoto, the protagonist of Not Dark Yet, is faced with some taxing, ethical dilemmas throughout the novel, many involving personal agency and responsibility, whether it be to a lover, his family, or the very earth he inhabits. It becomes apparent in reading your novel that the cost of changing one's ways, and in turn, changing the way one treats the earth, can be pretty high. How far have you seen environmental activism go? And what kind of activism do you believe to be most effective?

It's no doubt that when it comes to a truly global and systemic issue such as anthropogenic climate change, activism will only be effective if as many people on as many levels of governance as possible get involved, from ordinary people in grassroots movements and in their private lives, to experts and scientists in professional organizations, to national and international decision makers. Not only because the issue is so large and encompassing, and touches the lives of everyone on the planet no matter where we live or how rich or poor we are, but also because curbing the reasons behind climate change will require alterations of almost all aspects of our societies, from financial system, legislature, energy consumption, to our everyday lives.

In September last year the People's Climate March had marches all over the world, with more than 300,000 participants in NYC alone. The desire to slow climate change is definitely there, on a large scale, and that was very hopeful to see. But because the changes that are needed challenge the systems of power in our societies, the resistance against these changes is also immense, and may become stronger as the desire for change grows stronger as well.

In addition, there is a certain level of "greenwashing" present making it difficult to know if apparently positive changes, such as buying electrical cars or trading carbon debt, actually is sustainable and beneficial for the environment. And then there is of course the paralyzing sense that it doesn't matter if one person or even a hundred or a hundred thousand people change their spending habits and carbon footprint, because how will that matter when there are 7 billion other people who don't? I think that's one of the inertias that the protagonist and also the activists in Not Dark Yet are trying to fight.

Under these circumstances it's clear that activism could go very far, maybe too far. But as in every kind of idealism, the more damaging the activism is, the more it will mar the cause behind it, however noble. In Norway we recently had a case of an animal rights activist who went undercover and filmed fur farmers killing animals in unlawful and grotesque ways. The fur farmers even talked openly about how they circumvented the regulations that had been set in place by politicians exactly to protect the business of fur farming. The recordings were shown in a documentary on national TV that  received a lot of attention because it was so mercilessly brutal. But because the filming had been done surreptitiously, journalistic organizations took a negative view on the documentary and those who supported the fur farming gained arguments which they shouldn't have. The end result was that there became no majority for a political decision to shut down the fur farming business in Norway, despite the horrors shown in the documentary. More extreme measures would no doubt have damaged the cause further.

Q: Your novel is packed with vivid prose describing an assortment of environments, whether it be Brandon's rural cabin in the woods, or the urban expanse of train stations and sky-rise apartments. You successfully establish the world you've created, you really transport us to the places you describe. I find it interesting that for a novel with such a strong sense of place, of setting, that the actual places, the cities, and even the continents, go unnamed. The city names are abbreviated to mere initials, and the continents are referred to by their location on the hemispheres (i.e. southern, eastern, etc.) Could you talk about this decision?

It was a conscious decision so that the setting wouldn't just be the single place or city it would have been if the names had been recognizable, but that it instead could be almost anywhere in the world. My hope was that it would make readers think of their own city and continent, and identify more with the places in the novel. And hopefully avoid the reaction of "Oh, that stuff might happen to other places, but not in this part of the world".

Q: Similar to the way in which you describe a landscape, the lucid dreams, and nightmares, of your protagonist are rendered in a way that is arresting and compelling, both visually and thematically, so much so that one almost feels as if Brandon is in danger even in the dreamworld of his mind. Did you do any research on dreams for the novel? Did any of your own dreams make it into the novel?

I hadn't thought of that, but it's right. The sense that things are not peaceful and good has entered Brandon's subconscious and is working at him also from there, and has taken over the dream places that he can only recall when he is dreaming. I once read in a book about dream analysis (years ago, so the title is lost) that every person you meet in a dream is an aspect of yourself. I guess in Not Dark Yet every dream place is also an aspect of the dreamer.

For the dreams I used the feeling of dreaming and the uncanny sense you sometimes have in them that something is very wrong but you can't see exactly what. Or when you just know that certain things will happen, and then they do, because you're creating them inside the dream.

Q: Brandon is captivated by the "final frontier," and throughout the book trains himself both physically, and mentally, so that he is able to perform well on a space organization's astronaut tests. He hopes to be one of the first astronauts to land on Mars. The way in which you describe Brandon's ritual preparations, his visit to the headquarters of a space organization, and his unending hopes of space travel, reads as realistic rather than far-fetched.

I'm glad it comes across as such, as I wanted the novel more to be fiction with science in it, rather than science-fiction. Through my work as a science journalist I'm familiar with the space programs and the biggest projects in space science. Many of them sound like science-fiction, but it's all science, and it's working and finding its way into applications on Earth as well, not the least in climate and environmental sciences.

Q: You earned an advanced degree in biology, and currently work as a science journalist. How did your education, as well as your current occupation, inform the writing of this novel? What kind of research did you do in crafting a not-so-distant future that looks quite familiar to the world we currently inhabit?

Most of the science parts of the novel were already in place, in that I'm familiar with the world of biological research, how experimental animals are cared for, what the largest space projects are, the major obstacles for sending people to Mars, how astronaut candidates are selected and trained, what the most pressing climate issues are, etc etc. So a lot of the background for the novel definitely comes from my own education and work. Then there were specific details that had to be researched and added, but all very interesting to read about.

Alarmingly, some of the effects and signs of climate change that I researched for the novel have become more prominent in just the two years that have passed since the first draft of Not Dark Yet. Since that time, satellites have shown that the ice cap of West-Antarctica and Greenland has started to melt. Kilometers of undersea vents have started leaking the strong greenhouse gas methane. And many climate scientists think that this summer or the next all the sea ice in the Arctic will be gone. These changes will not make the climate any more stable.

Q: There have been a surge of films in recent years that involve characters who yearn for a better existence on another planet. Most recently, films like Another Earth, and Interstellar, both involve the idea that leaving the Earth is a better alternative to sticking it out here and taking care of the problems we have on the planet we call home. Your novel's protagonist has a dream of traveling through space to Mars, and many characters throughout speak of the decline of life on Earth. Could you talk about this sentiment in your novel and in your own life?

The would-be astronauts in Not Dark Yet are pulled towards exploring the unknown, not to escape the problems on Earth. They actually don't know how close their world is to collapse, because it's been having climate change issues for years and everybody's a little tired of hearing about it.

There are also some big difficulties with suggesting that we, or some of us, can leave Earth if things become too bad because of climate change. We've barely managed to reach the moon, and the knowledge and technology for humans to reach Mars safely, not to mention land there and get back home again, currently do not exist. So far, no closed habitat for humans has been developed that has been viable, even though the research to do this is underway. Not even the International Space Station is a fully independent system. It's come a long way, but still needs supplies of oxygen, water, and food.

It will probably be possible to develop the technology that will allow humans to reach and live on the moon and Mars, and maybe even further out in the solar system, but for now the biggest threat to the exploration of space is the mismanagement of our own planet, and I don't think commercial space exploration will help much with that.

The New York Times described Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road as "[s]imple yet mysterious, simultaneously cryptic and crystal clear," and that's similar to the way I felt while reading your novel. The prose in your novel is simple and spare, and yet, like all successful "science-fiction" or "apocalyptic" novels, at the same time reveals itself to hold harrowing truths about the state of the environment, the economy, and essentially every vital facet of the modern man's existence. Who were some of your influences in creating this world (a world that seems to be not far off from the one we currently live in)?

Thanks so much for saying that. The biggest influences for Not Dark Yet are non-fiction work such as Mark Lynas' Six Degrees (which explains what happens when the global temperature rises), the writings on climate change by David Roberts and Guy McPherson, and Brian Cox' TV series about the solar system and the universe which popularizes astronomy and cosmology and even makes it sound poetic.

Fictional influences include the haiku, ‘Not Quite Dark Yet,’ by haiku master Yosa Buson, and other haiku by Matsuo Basho and Kobayashi Issa.

Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities and the dark prose poem ‘Les Chant de Maldoror’ by Comte de Lautreamont will always be hovering in the background, as well as McCarthy's The Road, with its willingness to face disaster, and that sublime ending where "everything is older than humanity".

Also the writings of the Indian sage Ramana Maharshi about the self, the mind, and the world, and the hard science-fiction manga 2001 Nights by Yukinobu Hoshino, have been inspiring. While I edited Not Dark Yet I was very impressed by a Welsh TV crime series called Y Gwyll (The Dusk) where the desolate Welsh landscape is a character in itself. That probably influenced the novel too.

While we're waiting to release a movie tie-in edition of Amy Koppelman's novel, I Smile Back, we printed some more copies of the current edition with a cool yellow banner on it!

Later this month, Adam Salky's film adaptation of I Smile Back will screen in the dramatic competition at the Sundance Film Festival. The film stars Sarah Silverman in her dramatic debut, Josh Charles, and Thomas Sadoski.

Jeff VanderMeer provided some of the most pleasurable reading for us at Two Dollar Radio this past year with his Southern Reach Trilogy, which we tore through and spotlighted a couple times on Radio Waves on our site. Which made it particularly satisfying to learn that VanderMeer enjoyed Nicholas Rombes's The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing enough to include it on his favorite reads of 2014 list, which was compiled at Electric Literature. He says:

I very much enjoyed this weird, disturbing, sometimes effed-up novel about strange films, lost films, and the fragile faith in the difference between our fictions and our realities.

You should check out VanderMeer's Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy, which they are now selling as a collected, single-volume hardcover.

Next summer we'll be publishing an imaginative, acid western by Colin Winnette, the author of Fondly, Revelation, Animal Collection, and Coyote.

Brian Evenson says that "Haints Stay takes the traditional Western, turns it inside out, eviscerates it, skins it, and then wears it as a duster."

Lindsay Hunter says that "Haints Stay had me from the very first line - the visceral ante upped and crescendoing nearly every page."

The novel follows Bird and Sugar, a pair of middling bounty hunters, and Bird, the mysterious boy who woke beside them between towns, each in pursuit of their own sense of belonging and justice. It features gunfights, cannibalism, barroom piano, a transgender birth, a wagon train, a stampede, and the tenuous rise of the West's first one-armed gunslinger.

As we like to do when we sign a new book, following is a Q+A with the author about his forthcoming work, to give you a sneak peek and hopefully get you excited about it.

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Haints Stay fits within the stable of an “acid western,” where I’d include several films written by Rudolph Wurlitzer, as well as his novel The Drop Edge of Yonder, Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff, and some fiction by Brian Evenson.  It’s a cool sub-genre, admittedly one that can be off-putting simply by the inclusion of “western,” but one that initially you steered away from pinning on this novel. How did you come around to accepting the label?

I’ve always known I was writing a western, or looking to westerns for the guidelines of this book. But there’s a whole discourse around the “western,” that the book isn’t engaging with, at least not directly. It doesn’t sit comfortably in the genre—it wriggles. So, it made me hesitate to embrace the label. The day I finished the first draft of the book, I got a haircut. My barber asked what I had been up to that weekend and I said, “I was in a cabin, finishing a book.” Then the inevitable question, “What’s your book about?” I have a terrible time answering this question. My books are tied too closely to my own experience of the world, my sort of deepest anxieties and questions, so when I try to answer that question in a casual conversation, I tend to come off as kind of nuts. So, I told my barber the book was a western—an early attempt to answer the questions succinctly (also, a masochistic curiosity as to what kind of response the answer would provoke). He was excited. He said, “What era?” And I immediately realized there was a huge difference between the way the majority of people in the world think about time and the way the book thinks about time (remember, I’d been alone in the woods for several days and this was my first conversation upon returning). What era? I have no idea. I would hesitate to even say the book takes place in America. Anyway, I said, “Well, there are pistols and covered wagons.” To which he responded, “Oh, so…Victorian.” And I said, “Sure, I guess.” And my hair was short enough at that point to call the exchange finished. So then a whole host of anxieties cropped up. This book is using the idea of the “western,” in a sort basic way. It’s using the familiar elements, even stereotypical elements, to get at something else. I’ve always been interested in the impact of the familiar. The thing that makes David Lynch movies so incredible to me is that they’re composed almost exclusively of incredibly familiar elements, but they’re all recontextualized and amplified. So you have this whole parade of Americana that’s just incredibly moving and funny and yet deeply unsettling at a core level. Or that’s my experience of his work. Or an idea that my experience of his work triggered in me. So, after giving this a lot of thought, I remembered, “I’ve always been writing a western. I never wasn’t writing a western. So this is just the way I do a western.” It’s an oblique approach to the genre. “Acid western” gets at that a little more. But I think I still prefer just “western,” which conjures immediate associations, but also has a mineable ambiguity that I really like—even if it means taking some shit from Zane Gray fans.

One of the things that I particularly enjoyed about Haints Stay is how the novel rejects the stereotype of the western male, the Marlboro Man or John Wayne type who talks little, is quick to action, and is always righteous.

That’s nice to hear. The book is definitely playing with stereotypes and each character has their own odd struggle with their imposed societal roles, and who they want to be versus what they’re capable of.

 This ties in to the last question, but Sugar and Brooke, the “brothers” at the heart of the novel, are contract killers but not especially good at it. The book opens with them destitute, without weapons or horses, hoping only for a bath and a bed to sleep on, and they spend the majority of the book shackled or just trying to survive. As the story progresses, we follow Martha, a widower hell-bent on vengeance; a 13-year-old, one-armed wannabe gunfighter named Bird; and Bird’s companion, Mary, who is repulsed by the senselessness of the violence. Was it your intention to stray so far away from any run-of-the-mill type of characters we’d find in a western?

Yes and no. I never intentionally sought to stray, but it was inevitable that these characters would only rub up against what we might expect of them. I think most people have a decent understanding of how the world thinks they should be and how they themselves would like to be. What I’m most interested in—and a big part of what I think makes us who we truly are, deep down (if we are any particular thing)—is whatever it is that keeps us from being either.

Some of your other fiction is developed by constraining yourself as a writer, or through story, and you have mentioned being influenced by Oulipo. Were there any constraints that you worked within while writing Haints Stay?

The idea of sitting down to write a “western” constrains you a little, but with this particular book, it was almost like I was coming at it from the other end. Rather than the constraints of the genre limiting me or providing a determined set of rules to follow, this rich and malleable genre offered a wealth of strange but familiar tools I could use to tell my dark little story. It’s not necessarily what people think of when they think of Oulipo, but it still comes from them. Raymond Queneau said, “Inspiration which consists in blind obedience to every impulse is in reality a sort of slavery. The classical playwright who writes his tragedy observing a certain number of familiar rules is freer than the poet who writes that which comes into his head and who is the slave of other rules of which he is ignorant.” In a practical sense, deciding to write a western was a way of describing a vague playing field and a foggy set of rules. That helped me move around, helped actualize what would have otherwise just been a cluster of feelings playing by some other set of rules arbitrarily. This choice wasn’t arbitrary. I’m incredibly drawn to the dirt of westerns and the massive and yet miniscule playing fields on which their stories unfold.

When you were midway done writing Haints Stay, you went to a cabin in the Russian River and wrote and watched westerns. How long were you there, and what was that period like?

I went away when I could see the end in sight, but wanted to give myself the room to let it happen smoothly, without my having to chase it down. I’ve called it a cabin, but it’s actually my friend Eli’s house. It’s modest, but nice and comfortable. I was there for a very brief amount of time, considering the amount of work it allowed me to accomplish—only about four days, basically a long weekend. It was quiet and still, and I was alone. I wrote by the fire or at a desk overlooking the forest. I went running twice a day, just to keep myself focused and smooth out the anxieties that start to bubble up when the rest of the world quiets down. I just wrote and wrote and read and watched westerns. I’d been watching westerns for months up until that point, but I kept watching them and reexamining the parts that were strange to me or really stuck in me. When I thought I was done, I would read the book aloud to myself then rework anything that felt wrong or rough or like I’d cut a corner. I ate refried beans and projected the westerns onto one of the larger bedroom walls. It was incredibly textured—I think the style is called “California Knockdown.” It had these little dots and shapes rising out of the wall that were almost topographical. So the movies were sort of scarred and textured in this odd way. Which might not have anything to do with anything, but that’s how I’ll remember them.

You have an interview series where you ask an author to recommend a book, then you read the book and have a discussion about it with the writer. What book would you recommend?

I’m suddenly realizing what a terrible spot I’ve put each of my interviewees in. What a rough question. The first book that comes to mind is Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns. Dorothy Publishing rereleased it in 2010, and I’ve been hooked on their books ever since. It’s so enjoyable to read, just strange and beautiful and very accessible. But it’s also incredibly dark. It really sparked my interest in treating dark material in a kind of light, direct way, but without going overboard and making an exaggeration of either element (I do, of course, go overboard at times, but Comyns doesn’t). The book just has a really fine balance to it, and unfolds in a really satisfying way—until it’s suddenly not satisfying. Until something very plain interrupts the kind of nightmare of it and brings you back down to reality, where you are confronted with the fact that the nightmare is real, and the nightmare is normal. There’s nothing fantastic about it. It’s just life.

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