FictionDaily likes to interview our favorite writers and editors.

d.

What follows is a series of questions we sent to the writer named d. and, below, the holistic response we received to them.

1) Where are you from? Why?
2) Generate a relevant formula.
3) I get a sense from your recent story in Tattoo Highway that you take spirituality seriously. What is spirit? What role does it play in writing?
4) Why don’t you capitalize letters?
5) In that story above, my favorite line comes at the end when you write “in the end you must die in a cradle of computerized empathy.” What do you mean by “computerized empathy”? How does one achieve this?
6) What is there and what should we do about it?
7) This is the viscera question. Expose us to something visceral, either in writing or image.

*

“turangalîla: an interview”

big crush, sugar.  don’t make me fight like a stray dog for my basic needs.  i unloaded on the night.  hell, hell is here.  die, she was dying.  i remember the smell of splintered white oak, the smell of blood.  come dawn, we buried everyone with a tractor on the banks of the klamath.  i was in love with nikki.  she’d been shot through the stomach, and i blamed ronald reagan.  lie, live off lying.

i’m wearing my forehead on my heart.

to keep it real.

like big crush, or little crush? she says.  she says, you’re not helping me feel safe.

big crush.  and i’m like, yeah, no kidding.  it’s too late for me.  die, we are dying.

i want to expose the humanoid-centered for its arrogance and ignorance.  the world beyond humanoid viewpoint makes for broken and beautiful frames.  participation in the chorus of other creatures seems impossible.  but it’s not.  some people call me a dreamer, but i’m not.

ur the girl i wanna dig out.

dig out?

to dig out.  english slang.  to make small-to-medium curvy girl feel safe.

aaawwww.  that’s sweet.

i’d ask you out, but i need a formula.

yeah?

yeah.

interview = jewelry

relevance?

the relevance is to process.

much of the important work has been done.  it’s our attachment to ego and notions of authorship make us lonely.  she’s not gonna be with u anyway.  she wants stability.  your best chance is to make a tiny, twinkling city of LEDs, pretend it’s london or beijing and you’re birds of a feather.

i get the impression you take spirituality seriously.

no, she says.

made of clay–i’ll say anything she wants.

and she’s like, you know jesus don’t you?

and i’m like, yeah yeah yeah.

you think he’s a cool guy?

o yeah.

picture jesus cruising around, blessing people.

i picture her naked.

she says, if he were attached, he wouldn’t be able to do all that.  because he’d be bitter, or too exhausted.  he was able to be a pure spirit by always being in the moment, in the now.  even when the father sacrificed him, he wasn’t upset.  because he wasn’t attached.

art is attachment.  it’s experience, memories and emotions.  it’s body and mind.  faking the divine on purpose.  you’re not your spirit until you die.  and you can’t take your body with you when you’re dead.  and you lose your mind.  you don’t get to float around, how cool, i’m just my thoughts now.  you’re not a spot anymore.  you’re everywhere and nowhere, everything and nothing.

but aren’t connections to other creatures and things spirit?  like you are a spot–you are in your body and you’re yet to lose your mind–but you feel outside yourself.  if you never feel that, your art will be provincial, because individuality is provincial.  your work transcends you when you are erased.  and i feel if you cherish yourself, that’s an act of spirit, 2.  because the universe is loving.  and to cherish yourself, your whole self, it means you 4get all you been told, like what’s good about you and bad about you, cool about you and dorky, and you’re like, i am creation.  if you don’t accept yourself, your work won’t be honest;  and you can’t accept yourself socially.  nobody is socially acceptable.  you must turn to the universe for affirmation of the stuff you’re socially self-conscious about and afraid of.

so what now? she says.

what do you mean?

you mean you didn’t think beyond this?

they lay in her bed, warm together, surrounded by eight-foot-high stacks of boxes of beads, stones, gold and silver.  the devil watches us.  an owl calls.  it must be early morning.  we lost our shirts in the firelight, tumbled in the dark, and lost count.  she has playful black eyes and a pretty mouth reminds me of the f-hole on a violin.  his eyes change colors like mood stones and his heart beats like bombs go off.

she wants to take her time, she wants to learn him slowly.  superhumanoid, overflowing, dazzling and abandoned, his intensity scares her, the air about him of self-destruction is worrisome.  but i’m saying like, live in the present.  tomorrow is hours from now.  let’s have sex, it’s ticking, run with the wolves (dance with a dead priest), flip the switch or push the button, turbo charge this bitch and blast off.  i don’t believe in a long life.  i forget it when i sleep at night, and someday, i’ll forget it altogether anyway.  he’s so tired of being judged for being a total wreck and his soft beauty so always unseen.

what are you talking about?

tomorrow.

what?

tomorrow we shop for outdated jewelry.

i thought you had an interview.

i know.  but i’m so out of my flowery mind.

she says, i love to picture it: little old ladies living their lives, going out dancing . . . doing their thing.

that was yesterday.

tomorrow i’m the proud father of a teen boy.

i long to leap upon her, etc., whatever be her name.

[INSERT DANCING LEYAKS]

y don’t you Capitalize?

i just did.

but gag me with a spoon.  lowercase is more beautiful.

lowercase is humbler.

the metaphysician in the dark.

i’m like black dynamite says, “hold on, sugar.  this may be bigger than you, and it may be bigger than me.  but it’s not bigger than you AND me, you dig?”

i’m saying, we’re so big together, we don’t need to be a big deal.

my task is to guide u thru a myriad of voices, and to take u on a journey–holy like godly . . . funky like disco.  i speak of the domestication of electricity, the arrival of the tape recorder, and the development of sensitive measuring devices.  but, despite these advances, EVP remains a mystery.  therefore, it should be added, that much of the material presented here is of a low quality.  if it ain’t ruff it ain’t me.  and it should also be noted, that all of these samples have been altered and tampered with in every way.  u coward, u servant, u blind man–back to the front.

computerized or otherwise, empathy is to welcome as self the other.  in art i do this through process–adopting processes that allow a place in art for collective and/or non-humanoid consciousness.  like instead of me answer your questions alone, i get bullrat in advance, with metallica et al., to help, so answers are born out of a confluence, or crossroads.

what is there? and what should we do about it?

“declare peace.”  carl richardson.  pencil on paper.  smudge stick and eraser.

die, he is dying.  feel, he loses feeling.  he plunges like a knife into his calf a pair of scissors, like by doing so, something so desperate, he’ll earn of god another minute.  lie, live by lying.  his friends huddle like birds.  a doctor tends him.  he is father of the dictionary.  major motoko kusanagi, a lowly servant of a heartless neighbor, and centuries to come reincarnated as the government-owned cyborg star of section 09, the highest unit of the mobile, armored riot police in steam punk japan–she watches not without satisfaction.  sammy, or dr. johnson as some called him, was never unkind.  but pompous and preachy, especially about words.  he was like parallel structure this and never say that, and use this word and not that one, this grammar and not some other–reifying in language the very class structure he was a victim of (kissing the master’s ass for a pat on the back and some crumbs).  belabored his breathing now–we are thankful–feverish the flesh, and so oily and wet his white powdered wig it’s a blob.  thank god.  let a thousand flowers bloom, alas–revised our obsession with domestic psychosymbolic tragedies (set on hollywood soundstages) and shaken our sorrow and born a new ear.

was ‘s  er.

grabbed by the ponytail and pulled her close and whispered loudly, “don’t u ever EVER EVER stop.”

she was talking about art-making while jerking off.  she was talking about the sacred and the profane 2gether, like the fecal steam of blake’s pastoral plates–like say it like u mean it, like i am somebody, and dr. johnson, hush.

never 4got it.  programmed a halo in C++ and spread it like a virus, and when the net crashed and the humanoid race, faced with naught but now, where?, wandered outdoors, they saw a sphere aflame in outer space, our light.

d is a graduate of the university of california, davis, and the university of virginia, charlottesville.

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