Their Unlived Lives

Harris Lahti (HL) in Conversation with Calvin Cummings (CC).

Foreclosure Gothic is out June 10 from Astra Publishing House. 

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So you’re in your car. Are you back home? In New York?

Yeah, I’m at my house, I’m just—out on the lawn, sitting here. My kids are getting out of here for a little bit with my wife and I’m trying to dodge them, so I don’t have two little mongrels climbing up my legs while I’m talking to you.

I did something similar. Just barricaded myself up in our room.

How many kids do you have again?

One. He’s about four. We’ve talked about having others, but we don’t have the money for it. We need to get him into a public school, stop paying these daycare costs.

I know. It really is just so, so crazy. I was talking to somebody yesterday about raising kids, and it’s like, you can’t fuck around if you want to have a kid. You have to plan ahead in years, especially because it’s so hard to get ahead.

Yeah, you find yourself in these situations where, like right now, we’re fine financially, but it’s just every month there’s some bill or some weird thing we weren’t even expecting. And because of the consistent costs of having a kid, there’s no flexibility.

Right. Are you a homeowner?

Yeah, we bought a couple of years ago in Baltimore. So our interest rate isn’t as insane as it would be now, but still not great. But this is our second home. Our first home we bought right before COVID in Chattanooga and our interest rate was half what it is now, like 3%, and we remember being told, “Just hold out! Wait until it drops to two!"

Right. Well, if you talk to the boomers, they’ll say even 7% is good because during the early 90s, it was around 16, 17%. So to some people, it seems super low, but for us it doesn’t because we aren’t, like, raking it in.

Exactly. They were making enough money that an average house was only two to three years of income or something, whereas for us, it’s four or five.

Yeah. We would never be able to live in the house we live in if I hadn’t bought it as a foreclosure for like $100,000 and renovated it. Its value is almost all sweat equity I put into it.

This is a great place to start talking about the novel, because we’re already just naturally talking about the atmosphere, this cloud of concerns that this book seems to be interested in representing. Is this what brought you to want to write the story of Vic? This guy who’s trying to make it?

I mean, I wrote “Sugar Bath,” the second chapter, first, and at the time I had just bought a foreclosure with my father as a partner, which is now the house I live in. I don’t think people understand this, but when you buy a foreclosure at auction, sometimes you don’t even have access to the inside of it, so really what you’re buying is just a lock box, and you can look in the windows, you can break and enter, you can kick the tires via the village records and all that sort of thing, but ultimately you’re really gambling. You don’t have an assessment of the septic field, you don’t have an assessment of the well, you’re going in so blind. So at the time, I was going through this house, and it was literally stacked to the ceiling with stuff, these strange things that I was discovering as I was going to Sarah Lawrence and trying to get pages in order to workshop, and I was in a serious relationship and was thinking about getting married, and, like we were just talking about, how you have to organize your life to prepare for the eventuality of children, making sure they feel safe and cared for. So that was all swirling when I wrote those pages, and it became the Rosetta Stone, stylistically, that I would use to write the stories that surrounded it. I was very much living that life as I was writing it. It was almost like reportage.

This reminds me of—do you like William Faulkner?

Yeah, I was a big fan of Faulkner. I liked The Sound and the Fury.

Do you know the image that inspired that whole novel, allegedly, if I’m remembering correctly, was of a girl climbing up a ladder with dirty underwear? Faulkner saw some young girl on a ladder with dirt on her underwear and there were boys around her watching, and that image gave birth to the entire novel. It’s a scene in the novel, too, but reimagined with the characters. So, hearing this, about how you were also processing these images from your life—I’m even looking at, you know, lines I have underlined from “Sugar Bath” right now: “His flashlight moves across the modeled stone as he sips nosefuls of earth and fuel oil, squinting to read the names. He squints harder, but they’re two rounded down, just little bowls of dancing shadow.” There are so many great images in that chapter and throughout the novel. And it sounds like these images for you, similarly to Faulkner, gave birth to this whole universe. Would that be accurate to say?

Yeah, I think at the heart of every one of these chapters, there’s a real object of curiosity or horror or concern that I tried to build the story around and understand more. For example, the gravestone that that quote is describing, is real; it’s sitting in my driveway currently. I really connect with what you were saying about Faulkner and having something to try to understand and work through versus, you know, inventing it. It tends to lend itself to a more authentic and compelling story when the author doesn’t understand where it’s going. There’s this sense of discovery. 

I was talking to another writer the other day and they were saying how they didn’t have a great imagination. And I’ve been thinking about that a lot because the writer’s writing is highly creative and interesting and intuitive. But it struck me as strange at first, that a writer doesn’t think they have an imagination. But I think what writers have is more of a curiosity about something, an emotion or an image or a conflict, that they’re trying to understand versus something that they’re trying to finesse to evoke to manipulate a response from their reader. And I find that approach much more compelling and interesting. I think it’s something that we do naturally.

This gets to some of people’s problems with sci-fi or fantasy, where it just feels so made up. Of course it can be compelling, there can be real characters there. But maybe it’s finding that enigmatic or strange image or moment, and unpacking that repeatedly over, over thousands of words, maybe that’s the core of the thing, storytelling, whether it's genre or literary.

Yeah, I mean, my take on horror and sci-fi—and I know that the book is being perceived as a horror book, and I think that’s true to some degree—I just feel like life is strange enough. And anytime you’re adding things that are supposed to make it stranger or confounding are extraneous—unless they’re feeding into some true core, very human emotion or relationship, right? Something that is sincere to the author. You can feel that. There’s this bullshit detector that we all have. 

The novel is spooky for sure. There are so many moments of the weird and the eerie. In particular, the garbage man and his deteriorating home life. With him, there are even moments where this interesting defamiliarization happens, where I couldn’t tell if the book was hyperbolizing or not, if what I was reading was actually happening in the world of the story. Like when the garbage man, covered in grease, is smearing the grease from the top of his head on the ceiling. It was this strange way to describe a strange man which allowed for this strangeness to exist and build the atmosphere of the book.

Yeah, I was living in a duplex at the time I wrote that. And the neighbors were right across the wall and they had three kids and they were very present as either background noise or obnoxious noise. And the father was a garbage man, and, after he relapsed, he built a tree house in my backyard and it grew up into my second story window. I just kept looking out the window and watching it grow, become crazier. It was a very physical representation of a psychological state, which are always the best sort of moments you can include in a story. And that creeping invasion into my life was something I felt. So making the garbage man in the book seven feet tall only amplifies that real fear. And those strange moments are just imagined details that also ring true to me because our responses are often outsized to the actual facts in front of us. So to drift into hyperbole, when you’re doing that, you want to do it at a point where it’s going to make it feel more real and work with the story versus a manipulation. It felt like a discovery to make those choices.

Yeah, I felt it. And it’s Heather, too, who is the one who’s noticing this happening at that point in the novel. So I was thinking about this in terms of what is like capital A, capital H, Actually Happening in the story versus what is being perceived by a character in the story. For me, it didn’t matter whether the grease was streaking across the ceiling or not, because of what this detail was telling us about how Heather perceived the garbage man. The novel’s hyperboles, these exaggerated physical characteristics, interpretations of movement, etc., I felt really allowed for those elements of horror to be felt by the reader. Is there something about horror that has to use something like this in order to be horrifying? 

I think projection is perception. So for Heather, in that moment, she’s bringing in a lot of other fears outside of the fear of the garbage man’s physicality and crumbling mental state. She’s also afraid her husband has turned this corner and is becoming this sort of greedy, hungry real estate investor. So those stranger moments are happening alongside the more domestic drama and raising the stakes of both. This gets at what I was saying about sci-fi and horror; I feel like there has to be a real, beating heart underneath it. But yeah, I also just fucking love absurd, gross stuff like that. I think that there’s a place for the profound and there’s a place for the profane. And those moments are really fun for me to write. I don’t know if it’s perceived as fun, I think it can drift into dark humor at times. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in situations where I tell someone a story and I expect them to laugh, but they just look at me aghast. 

[Laughs] Yeah, the novel’s ending has this sort of ecstatic grotesque-ness to it, and it’s all these things—funny, violent, casual, gross, transcendent. There’s also this involvement of nature in those final scenes. Vic has been fighting against nature, basically the whole novel. Laying out the property lines and putting nature into order, and then nature gets involved in a new way. It felt like a natural thing to happen, even though it was violent, which is where I found the transcendence. But I can understand how it could put people off. Do you worry about that?

I want to put people off; I want to be jarring, I think it’s useful to get your point across. And this motif of renewal is very present in the book. And something I find really interesting about nature and our modern lives is that the two are divided, right? We have extricated ourselves from nature by creating artificial, digital life and factory farms. We think that we are not animals, but we do a lot of weird fucking shit, and animals also do a lot of weird fucking shit. And when you learn that raccoons regularly commit necrophilia, you start to question your own existence in a weird sort of way. Like, this is what we were born into, right? And getting comfortable with the fact that when you die, a bunch of little bugs come and lay their eggs in you and slowly deteriorate you until you go back to the earth, and that’s the process that happens to every single carbon-based life form that’s ever lived—this is a strangely grounding thing, too. It’s very shocking and surprising when you describe it and you think about it, but we all know it in the back of our heads. Which creates for this contradiction in our consciousness, and stories that deal with that contradiction are always going to be more interesting because they’re charged with this curiosity, and a reader looks for an answer that may or may not be there.

Yeah, you hope for reconciliation of that contradiction, even if it’s not promised, and that’s what propels you forward. Similarly, maybe to what we’ve been talking about, these images that can give birth to these universes, like it’s maybe that pursuit of reconciliation of the image that keeps you writing and your reader reading, and the motifs, themes, etc., come about naturally.

Yeah, like the vultures. They’re ever present in the book and they’re always swirling and they’re scary. They look like little druids. They have six foot wingspans. They’re just these disgusting little creatures that are like the vacuum cleaners of nature. And, you know, I don’t look at my vacuum cleaner in my home with any sort of fear or trepidation. So why do I with these birds? And as a renovator of foreclosed houses, you’re really doing a lot of the same things, cleaning up. And when I’m in my house alone, if I think about the blood spatter that I painted over in the closet that someone had spat there, or the stories I’d heard about the lady who used to live here, and the infection she got in her leg, and how she fell over and her leg exploded all over my living room, or how she was a heroin user and she used to hold up here with a bunch of people and party. You start thinking about these things and you’re looking around your relatively clean home and you’re like, what’s this weird world we live in? 

Yeah there are these lives that have existed in these spaces and even haunt them, even if it’s just a haunting in the sense that, as an individual in that space, you remember in your conscious mind that these people existed. 

Exactly. I think that ghosts exist, but only in our heads. And story is a powerful fucking thing. And when I’m walking around my house at three in the morning, my head’s definitely on a swivel. I hear a little sound. I know it’s not a ghost, but it’s hard to divide the home of now versus the home of then, especially this one, which is unique because it had so much stuff in it. And the stuff told this strange story as I cleaned it out. It revealed itself.

It’s interesting how you’re talking about stories being this powerful thing and being related to haunting, because, in the novel, there’s the haunting of these lives that have existed in these houses, but the characters are also haunted by stories of the lives they didn’t live. That’s actually one of the most exciting things about the novel for me, its interest in how story functions and what it does to our consciousness, particularly Vic. There’s this story he can tell about his life before doing the house flips, that of him being an actor, but Dr. Reginald Mack, the character he played on the soap opera, is also a character whose story he takes on and off throughout the book. He’s haunted by the specter of Mack, both as a literal character he played and as a representation of a life he could have had. And this informs his whole trajectory, even when he’s chosen a new path. Do you think we’re all haunted in this way? And does it have the same effect on us?

There’s this Carl Jung quote, something like, “The biggest burden placed on children by their parents are their unlived lives.” So I think that it’s functioning as this friction from the fact that Vic has moved on from acting and is now flipping homes, and it’s just like not as sexy, it’s not as high status. It rubs against everyone—it rubs against Junior, it rubs against Heather, it rubs against himself. And the interesting thing about acting is it’s something we all sort of deal with. We have to revise our own dreams as we get older and as we have children, because reality sets in. You have to work to make money, you have to work to afford your mortgage and your food. You can’t fuck off to Costa Rica and write your first novel when you have a kid. That is just unforgivable, in my opinion. So, the cool thing about acting—this is something I feel very acutely as a writer, this trying to justify my time playing make-believe in my office. The power of story is extremely intoxicating and it’s all you want to think about and do sometimes, but it’s also, at the end of the day, you’re just scribbling something that’s imaginary. And my father was an actor, so I understand how it works a little bit, and it’s this physical representation of that process we do as writers. So, in the novel, when Vic goes into the character of Reginald Mack, this sociopathic, coke-addicted doctor, it provides a space for hilarity, but there’s also this deeper dissatisfaction when those moments creep up. 

People are always striving in America. And there’s also a more general question in the book about when enough is enough? How do you calibrate things to perfection? Maybe it’s just a never-ending struggle. Which I also feel like is the purpose of Heather’s character. She’s satisfied in this way that Vic isn’t and doesn’t believe she is just based on his own experience because he thinks, “I’m not satisfied. I want more. Why aren’t you having the same response to these endeavors and choices I’m making as you had in the past?” The answer is, “Because we’re comfortable and we can enjoy each other.” So, there’s a horror to that too, like being with somebody who’s just like, “All right, I just want you.” And then you have to ask yourself this question of who am I?

Yeah.

Being what you do, who you are. I don’t know.

What do you mean? Can you talk more about that? Like you find your identity through your job?

Right. And then when you stop doing the job that’s scratching this evolutionary itch to provide for your partner, your mate, what do you do? I think about evolutionary psychology a lot. And the fact is in the majority of human history, we died at the age of 30. Our bodies would get infected and very rarely would you live to the point where your body is just frail and, you know, bedraggled or whatever. So by outliving our physical worth, we get put on a shelf in new and extended ways that I feel like are at odds with our self worth.

Yeah, there’s a biological or natural reality that we’ve beaten back with technology and now we have to deal with the psychological consequences of that.

Yeah, it’s honestly something that I’m shocked I never hear anybody talking about when it comes to writing, because it seems to me that that friction between how our brains evolved and the environment that we live in is oftentimes the most acute and powerful pathway to storytelling. Like, all right, Calvin, you’re kid and your grandmother are drowning. Who do you save? Your kid. Now, your uncle or your sister? Your sister. You’re always going to choose the choice that is most biologically representative of your DNA. And these decisions are being made subconsciously. And you can play with it in story, where, say, there’s a story about somebody whose sister and uncle are drowning, but they save the uncle. That’s a really interesting story, because it raises this question, because of our evolutionary impulses.

That makes me think about this story I’m reading right now by Ted Chiang. It’s about this tower that is being built, reaching up to heaven. It becomes clear it’s a retelling of the Tower of Babel, from the Bible. And while I glaze over the put-on, sci-fi world building voice, I am interested in the tower. It makes me think about how when my son and I play and either of us builds a tower, there’s that moment of tension where both of us pause in anticipation for it to fall over, or, more likely, be knocked over, usually by him. I want to keep reading the story because I expect the tower to fall, or if it doesn’t, I want to know what weird new thing is going to happen.

I love that, yeah. I feel like sometimes with stories, you’ll be reading it for the premise versus the plot. 

Yes.

And that’s fine. That’s just another engine. But there’s something interesting about a progression because we know that there is going to be a swerve. Otherwise, what’s the point? 

Right.

So as the tower gets higher, just the precarity just continues to increase, and your intrigue, because this thing is going to fall down or whatever. I’ll never forget, I was in some workshop and we did this exercise where we wrote stories, but only used 25 different words to tell them. And this guy wrote about a forklift. Sentences like, “The forklift drove forward. The forklift turned left. The forklift backed up. The forklift turned right.” And you brain naturally just built narrative around these movements. Our brains are constantly trying to understand what we’re seeing. And by doing that, it’s like imposing all of this prior knowledge and imagination and archetypes and blah, blah, blah, onto these repetitive motions. You’re primed to wait for the difference. Repetition and difference is the way stories build their charge.

For sure. When I was teaching writing, something I told my anxious, just-out-of high-school students was that a really effective piece of writing can come from just knowing how and when to repeat yourself.

Right. Music, also. It triggers a little animal part of your brain to be like, “Oh, wait, the beat’s coming back.” And then it either does or doesn’t.

Yes, people use this phrase, “the lizard part of your brain.” Like the part that sees the green. Have you ever seen these videos of cats where their owner puts a cucumber next to them and then they jump up in the air? And it’s because apparently they think it’s a snake and their brain is just hardwired to get away from a snake?

[Laughs] No, but I like that.

Yeah, this gets to what we’re talking about, this subconscious part of our nervous systems. A story can do so many things and be written in so many different ways, but I think a story has to on some level activate that nervous system. It has to respond to whatever that that lizard brain is preparing itself for. It’s sort of like what like Nabokov said, in an essay about Bleak House, that we read with our minds, but the pleasure is in the spine. Do you agree?

Oh, I love that.

Me too. When you feel it in your neck, and there’s some systemic response being sent out. That’s when you know you’re reading something good. Like something’s happening here. And it can be the most otherwise boring thing. But as long as it’s like tapping into something that activates lizard consciousness, that has to do with sex and death, it will be interesting.

100%. Yeah, I think it works on a sentence level, too. It works higher on a plot level, but it’s all working to play the xylophone of our spines. And of course there can be intricacy and beauty that appeals to the top ice cream scoop of your brain, too. But the most effective stories are the ones that are the most dramatic. And it’s our death drive. We’re all trying to avoid the pain the narrator or characters are experiencing, or understand our own pain that the narrator or characters experience. In order to avoid it. 

Right.

And I’ve heard some people say they write stories without conflict. And I’m just like, how do you fucking do that? You know, I don’t think anyone’s interested in that. I don’t think anybody wants that. 

That seems impossible. Even for people who think they might be doing it.

Well, there are ways to achieve conflict that are extra-textual. There’s conflict contained within persona, for example, which autofiction plays with a lot. So just the fact of declaring that would be a form of conflict. So it’s having it both ways. I think you’re right.

Well, this brings up a good question for you and your book, because obviously, as we’ve been talking about, the content of your novel and your life are very similar. What relationship should an author have to their own work? And how should they speak about their work?

For the most part, I take the Lynchian approach where you let the viewer or the reader interpret the story for themselves. I think that any time the artists can allow the reader to insert themselves into the story or insert themselves into the art by provoking questions or speculation, that’s always going to be the strongest way to make something compelling. It’s also the best way to make the most durable story, like, lasting. But I do feel there is a place for persona. I think that people hype up their personalities these days, especially with the internet and the rise of autofiction, to develop their brand, which is not for me. But in this instance, because my book is so autobiographical, I don’t really mind saying that a lot of this is true, just because it adds that question to everything and it makes things a little more affecting or frightening or dramatic. Because the reader knows that these were feelings and images and people that may or may not exist in the world.

I talk about Texas Chainsaw Massacre far too much, but you know the beginning, when it says “based on true events,” and it has that crime scene photography? People had never seen anything like that before. And by raising that question, you’re provoking a fear response. It tickles the spine. And I think the pictures in the novel, of the raccoons and houses and baby and stuff, serve to develop the extra textual reality around the book. I think it enhances the work, but it all has to be moving in the right direction.

But my next book is about being a mental health professional. And I would never be like, "This actually happened.” I don’t think having the same experience as your characters fucking matters at all. But it all needs to cohere. And I don’t like when the author is prioritized over the art itself.

Yeah, I’m attracted to the idealism of radically refusing to ever speak about your work if you’re asked. But yeah, you’d sort of be a fool not to play with persona in some way.

Well, I think there’s a difference between tweeting out some shit about your life that may make it into a book or like sound like a voice in one of your books. I think that’s like, completely fine, but I don’t like to psychoanalyze my characters and stuff. I’m down to try, you know, but I feel like at the end of the day, they’re walking around by themselves. And what I have to say is just speculation, even if I supposedly hold the skeleton key to it all.

I definitely bristle at that, an author trying to control their work once it’s out there. And maybe I should apologize, because I’ve invited you to do a little psychoanalyzing of your characters here.

[Laughs] I like to try! It doesn’t offend me. But yes, as a writer, I feel like a lot of times the persona is prioritized over the art. And I just don’t agree with that.

And I guess even if an author courts this conversation—what’s “real,” what isn’t—it’s still ultimately the responsibility of the audience to not do the parasocial thing.

It gets in the reader’s way though. Because sometimes the question becomes, “Do they have the right to write this?”

[Laughs] For sure.

The worst question. And honestly, if the audience is asking that question, the writer has probably failed to some degree. But it’s also in vogue to do that, especially with writers you might not jive with, and it seems like a toxic, knee-jerk response a lot of people have.

Unfortunately, it might cut both ways. A symptom of a culture out of ideas, both writers and readers, and so we’ve turned inward and are all mad at each other because no one knows what to do.

I think a lot of it has to do with the internet. It’s expanded the world. Everyone’s trying to write about everything. And really, they should just be writing about how badly they have to pee, physicalizing things in an immediate way, moving through actual space instead of this, like, digital galaxy shit that we have to deal with all the time. 

I don’t know how to manage it either. It just seems like you almost have to incorporate some internet stuff just because otherwise you’re writing historical fiction. But the internet stuff is just not interesting. And as tailored to each of us as our internets are, there is a ubiquity there that rounds off the edges in a pretty horrible way.

Yeah, unfortunately.

At Storyfort, [a young writer] was asking me, “What should I do after my MFA?” And I’m like, go fucking work in the potato field, homie.

Yeah, or maybe don’t go to the MFA at all.

Exactly, exactly. It might be better. You’re already fucking waiting. So …

Yeah, I mean, especially for [that writer]—maybe I won’t put this in.

Yeah, everyone’s always bothering that kid. [Laughs]

But I mean, because he’s already got some momentum going and is already embedded in a writing community of some kind, and he could go live his life, the MFA might not be necessary. But I guess that’s hypocritical because I’m in an MFA.

But you’re not 22.

[Laughs] No, I’m not. And I’m very much not. And my employer is essentially paying for me to get grad school credits for the work that I am already doing independently and would continue doing even if I wasn’t in the program, like this. My literary life is almost entirely outside of my MFA. I feel like you have to do it that way, otherwise the MFA will be like a bad workout. You’ll throw some weights around but your heart rate won’t get into the red zone long enough. It won’t feel good, like you really put in the work.

And I worked in liquor stores before all this. And now trying to figure out how to be a good father and husband. So being a writer on the internet is not my subject matter, not the conflict I care about depicting.

Yeah, when I went to Sarah Lawrence, this was 2016, right when Trump got elected. And if you know anything about Sarah Lawrence—

[Laughs] Yeah.

It’s, like, a peak liberal school. So the response was so outsized, for a good reason, and people did not like you writing certain stories. So if they didn’t possess a certain craft or quality, you could get in a lot of trouble. And I fucking loved that. I thought that was really useful, because it was a way of sharpening your fangs. And I wasn’t trying to cater to anybody. I think that’s the danger of it. People try to cater and stay within the lines. But if you go outside the lines and those people accept it, that’s a good story.

I’m actually wondering what writing is going to happen now because the right has taken more control of culture. And to be provocative is difficult at this stage. I just don’t know where it’s all going to go. I imagine it may become like Jerry Seinfeld jokes, that shit. [Laughs]

Yeah. It will be interesting. I’m excited about the challenge of finding new pathways to get around the new cultural barricades. And part of what was so exciting for me about Storyfort, where we met, was this collection of people, a lot of us at different points in our writing lives, who are all doing the real thing, and trying to find those pathways. I’m much more excited by what they are all doing than whatever it is “literature” is right now, or at least what is seen as “literature” in the mediated sense, like what gets reviewed in the New York Times, or wins awards, or gets taught in schools or in MFA programs or whatever. But of course, it flatters me to tell myself like I’m involved with the people who are doing the “real literature.” Like that Joan Didion bit: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” So we don’t kill ourselves. 

[Laughs] Yeah, and all that’s like the news. People realize whose thumbs are being placed on what scales. And the internet has just been this light in the dark place, in a lot of ways, where you can make connections with people that you never have met before, and these connections start to solidify. And something like Storyfort comes around and the community is already baked-in. But it was still cool how everyone got along. The really cool thing about Storyfort that I really fucking loved was that nobody was on their fucking cell phone except for Peter Vack. It almost felt like we were at one of those summer camps where they take your phone. And that’s something to cultivate. There was no competition. There was no one upmanship. I think everyone genuinely wanted be a part of something and support each other. It was really beautiful. It flies in the face of the direction of the culture.

Yeah, and I mean, I think Nathan, Reagan, Kayla, Lamb, MD, Graham, Soft Union, Blue Arrangements, Cash 4 Gold—everything you guys are doing is so great. I talked to Reagan about this a couple times out there, about this trajectory I saw everyone on, both in the traditional spaces, but also in the new spaces we’re building. Oh, and Sam, too.

Sam, obviously. My GOAT.

Yeah, no, for real. I have sent him a text at least once a month just like, “Dude, thanks so much for letting me come.” It just was so not bullshit, the whole thing. It was exactly what literature should be right now. And it wasn’t totally other, either.

Yeah, I agree. It’s not a new thing, it’s just an extension of the old thing, but we’re bringing along a lot of the stuff that we think is cool. And hopefully it all coheres. I’ve got a lot of hope for Soft Union and Cash 4 Gold. And I think that it’s all for the fucking culture, man. It’s not for money. It’s not for anything else. The reason these things exist is because there’s a void. I don’t want to talk about any of its importance, but it’s exciting. Not to say that I wouldn’t fucking love to be in the Paris Review, but yeah.

Yeah, of course. I’ve loved a lot of their recent stuff, like the work from Tao Lin, Nicolette Polek, Jordan Castro, Sean Thor-Conroe, Jamie Quatro.

And this has been great ... I’ve got to get to church soon, but I’ve still got one more question: is the American Dream a horror story?

HL

Ooh, is the American Dream a horror story? No, I think it’s what our country’s founded on. But I think that our conception of what needs to be achieved to obtain the American Dream is often a fucking horror story, dude. Like, you think about the reason why we don’t tax the rich like other countries is because we all, in our heart of hearts, sort of believe that one day we will be rich. So that’s the horror that Vic struggles with. When is enough and how do you know? And if you can answer that question, you might avoid what happens to Vic.

So, no and yes.