Tim Barrus: New York Times

I am a communist. A subcategory, as is class, caste, the crime of I Publish Books Under Other Names. Because I loathe the publishing industry for creating ideas and imagery that have everything to do with the writer, where he lives, how many children he has, his wife’s maiden name on Wikipedia. The focus is not what he wrote. Not what he wrote. Look around. Conceptual boxes are holes in the ground dug six feet deep and always horizontal. The Writer as Rock Star isn’t writing. He’s giving them what they want. There are other antiquities who do that. My stereotyped fantasy of the publisher is some rich old white man in a suit. The generic suit is no proletariat. I can’t tell you what I do to suits. It’s a secret. I apologize for being uncivil. I. Do. Not. Know. What It Is. I have a secret, too. I have autism. A neurodevelopment that makes social interactions tortuous and suicidal unless you hide in your category shivering. Stuck in your graveyard hole. Shovels ominous. A repeated motion informed by motor memory. Autism. A tribe. We all live in the same group home. We eat cop dirt. I do not learn like you do. I know poverty, hunger, extraordinary violence no child should ever see. Categories. Tribes. Suits are filled with fear. I can smell fear. It is everywhere. It makes no sense. The Gauidi building in Barcelona laughs at all of this Makes No Sense Charade and so do I. Mental constructs are essential in the lies we tell ourselves. They put me on a book tour. It was a mistake.