IT’S THE SCANDAL THAT IS THE SCANDAL

Emmanuel Carrère has set the literary world on fire again.

His new book, YOGA, is being sold by its French publisher as nonfiction. The horse is dead. But it gets kicked anyway.

In these kinds of economic discombobutations, I make it a habit to sneak behind the curtain just to see who is there creating bells and whistles and big hot air balloons. Usually, it’s an agent.

Is it fiction. Is it nonfiction. Is it a literary hybrid. Who actually gets to define history. I am usually way too controversial for an agent to jump into bed with. The issues in publishing are just too sordid. I have had great agents, and they cared. But I am a stupid fuck, and they do not miss me.

I have had great, talented editors, and they cared. But I am a stupid fuck, and they do not miss me.

Who cares. History is winner takes all. Publishing makes money from this issue from the people who now rush out to buy the book. Agents begin to talk movie rights. Who gives a flying fuck, and who cares. Titillation sells. Dead horses sell. As does sex. I am a whore. Who gets to write the sex scene. Hopefully me. Cave men drew dirty pictures on the walls of French caves. They charged Other Cavepeople money to get to see the dirty pictures.

Were the dirty pictures — publishing. Yes. Always. If we place our trust in corporations who own publishing companies, what does it mean. It means the French have always been right, and writing books should always remain the cottage industry it has always been with awards, medals, reviews, and Barack Obama’s publicist. I have had great publicists, and they cared. But I am a stupid fuck who has AIDS, and I hear voices. Do we trust the publicist.

Perhaps. You might. You are not me. Our histories are different. Our reality is not shared. It’s class that defines and redefines what we think is real.

I just can’t go down the publicist rabbit hole. I would rather write. My publicist from Random House, Ballantine once verbally attacked me about being difficult, and I would never have lunch in her town again. She was livid. I had been bad, and had called the publisher of a magazine I had been interviewed by, and I had complained that the interviewer seem filled with malice. Imagine that. Writers just don’t do that. And publishers rarely back down. But this one did. The interviewer was let go. I stayed in Dodge a few more days. Not many.

You always need to know — your ears to the ground — when it’s time to get out of Dodge. People think I was Nasdijj for a couple of years. I was Nasdijj for ten years, and the first thing he ever wrote was published in ADVOCATE MEN.

No one cares about these issues but people in publishing, and French courts who are tired of being besieged by people who sell books.

Publishing will scream bloody murder that porn is bad. But publishing is the classic whore of quid pro quo.

The very next day I had been bad, I won a book of the year award for that very book, my second, (actually, it was my tenth book but I neglected to tell anyone that, and I have always used different names, including tell-alls from ghosted female pornstars). Take the money and run.

The publicist rings me up again with the news of the best book award, and her tone had changed significantly. If you fight for your work, I am not going to tell you will win anything. I will tell you that the day will probably arrive where if you don’t fight for your work, you will want to let them do anything they want to with

the damn thing, and you will be leaving Dodge tomorrow to escape the French courts entirely.

There are many much larger issues in the world. But publishing gets to pretend it’s important. Seriously. Who do you know that defines their entire sense of what reality is — according to a book they read on a summer’s beach or in front of an autumn’s fireplace wrapped in grandmama’s homemade quilt.

Let us take that to another stretch. You just read an article in VOGUE about a movie star pop cultural icon who was dishing shit about how they grew up. My eyes to the sky.

Do you reorganize your life, and your thinking to now wrap the story of yourself around the flagpole of Old Aunt Doris who was the county’s chief election official in 1924, and, who, as her family maintains, was famous in her time. For her vigorous defense of the Constitution. Old Aunt Doris who actually did throw out votes that changed the election in Wyoming.

The issue is language.

That becomes the written word.

The French take language very seriously. Writers are the heroes of French culture. Americans cannot be the heroes of anything.  In France, the heroes usually win in court. In America, the same kinds of people as the publishers in France usually lose in court, and almost no one ever hears from them ever again. If it’s truth you seek, are really going to go to groups of publishers and agents. Please.

It’s a book.

So. Few. People. Will. Even. Read. It.

The only thing they will read about it will be the juju of the scandal if there is one.

There is no one, no American, who lives on my block who has read a book in five years.

My scandalous book even had a caveat no one read because no one read the book. It was an insinuation that memory usually sucks.

Writing was invented around 3200 B.C. What people confuse with writing is proto-writing, which is a precursor to writing. The word writing is defined as the activity of skill of marking coherent words on text.

Unless you are Thomas Pynchon, and you’re not.

I am now riding my motorcycle all over America and writing about it. Maybe it’s for me. Maybe it’s for you. Maybe it’s for an editor (perish that thought). I just can’t care. My job is to write the book and take the photographs. I am entangled with the images of the people who have HIV surviving the onslaught of covid. My new book is about just that. What does America look like in the middle of a pandemic.

From a bike. I have published tidbits from it in the New York Times, and their magazine.

I talk about the sixteen-year-old who is driving as I hang on to him, and somewhat precariously take photographs of a surreal loneliness with a GoPro.

The book — GOING ROGUE — either evolves or it dies. It’s about survival. It evolves into a focus between the sixteen-year-old and myself. It’s loneliness that bleeds like a stone at the heart of it.

It’s about people. People who are struggling. If shit happens, so do relationships.

I am writing this on my MacBook sitting in a gas station toilet. The door is locked so no one sees me writing or taking a shit. I think the two are connected if you are painting a picture of a time of unfolding events. Writing is not always done in the stuffy writers study and constipated cigar emporium. Those days are over. The NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS is another ancient ruin not unlike a Mykonos hotel.

I refuse to tell you what kind of bike we are riding on. I don’t want readers to know what we look like when we roll into town. Leave us alone. We have hit every summer riot in America. The question evolves into how does America survive the tragedy of the murder of black people, a disease murdering hundreds of thousands of Americans, economic collapse, hunger, isolation, quarantine, anarchy, blood, capitalism, and grief. What more do you want.

We joined ANTIFA.

The riots were invigorating. They are the only thing I see that suggests any hope whatsoever. Defund the police. No justice, no peace.

Who is writing about how ANTIFA works. No one. Who brings Idaho survivalists into the issue of violence.

Who is taking photographs of all of this. No one.

Who gets out of Dodge in under a minute. We do.

Who gets denounced in the New York Times for writing this book.

I do.

I do not know where I will place these photographs. Somewhere. The GoPro is kind of hard because it has software that operates a shutter that closes slowly because the software is eliminating the reality of movement.

Can you get it. Eliminating the movement of reality. Vice versa. You now enter the world of physics and dimensions. There are more than four. There are more than twelve. But our reality precludes seeing them in the same way we cannot see radio waves, but we know they are there. If you want movement, consult post-production.

So far, the photography has been seen on my art accounts, social media, galleries, and Instagram. But I’m riding shotgun on a bike. I just take the photographs. The kid can decide what to do with them. I trust the reality of him with my life. The kid is driving because I do not dare drive. I get us lost.

Because I have AIDS dementia. You don’t believe it.

Read the book. As Nasdijj, I was compelled by reality to acquire health insurance.

It was an economic reality. It was life and death. Does anyone remember when health insurance companies lived by the credo: Preexisting Conditions. They deplore HIV. Anything can happen and does. This kid is keeping me alive. Along with over a dozen pills a day. Covid is not my pandemic. I will be taking my good morning dose in about a minute from the tap of a sink covered in gas station grime. That, too, is how I see America. Covered in grime. There’s a toilet scrub brush in the corner of this sad room.

If I do not tell you, and I won’t — what kind of bike we are driving — does that deconstruct your take on reality. Every other message I get from readers wants (demands) to know what make of bike are we driving.

I am told I owe you that.

I live above the Dodge movie theater in Dodge. Metaphor or no metaphor. You don’t believe it. What do you actually know about ruins. I am bearing witness, and I have arrived to tell you that America is a ruins.

I call GOING ROGUE fiction. A novel. No caveats. No ex-wives. No courtrooms. No insinuations regarding memory. I have none.

I would rather be in France, but I hear things are bad there, too.