Intro for the reading last night

Thank you everyone for coming and supporting

Below is the introduction I wrote and read aloud for the reading yesterday. It was a truly beautiful evening. Special thanks to Matthew Gasda, Peter Vack, Steven Philips-Horst, Ani Tatintsyan, George Olesky, and Sophia Englesberg for performing.

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The cliche’d dream, standing up to recite something in front of a crowd completely naked, is never one I’ve found very scary. I’d much prefer to perform naked than to an empty room. Having no one show up to your event, performing with confidence for nobody at all, well, that’s much worse than sitting in the nude. Either one, though, is really not the end of the world. If you want to go anywhere as an artist you’ve got to be OK with embarrassment, a real will for discomfort. Embarrassment, as a writer, any form of artist for that matter, is not a hurdle to be leapt over, but rather rammed through, like a wall of slime that sticks to the body for ages but helps you grow and eventually thrive. A willingness to put yourself out there, be embarrassed, a little humiliated, if not very humiliated, is, in its own way, the name of the game. So let’s have a nice evening.

April 18th, 2024

Apathetic, a state of pure melancholy, the very opposite of gregarious. On a Thursday afternoon, sitting down to write an intro to be recited out loud for the forthcoming Sunday evening reading at the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research, hyper-caffeinated, over-iPhoned, and under-read, I’m a bit blocked, I must admit. I take my dog for a walk and decide to give my German friend Martin a call. Martin, some ten thousand miles away, has lived between Bali and Thailand for the past eight years. He has an Australian girlfriend who owns a lamp shop and teaches breath-work. At the moment, there’s no need to describe to you any more about Martin, because ‘my German friend who lives in Bali and Thailand' probably says enough. Though Martin is prone to the influence of odd wellness theories on niche podcasts and online Reddit forums, he’s full of insight and originality and I always come away from our conversations feeling more enlivened than before, even if he’s a bit of a quack. After briefly catching up — I’ve begun snorting turmeric, he says. I’ve been macrodosing Ashwaghanda, he says — I begin telling Martin about my upcoming reading, my inescapable melancholy, as well as my slowness, inability, to get going with writing the intro, and he provides a surprising yet very characteristic response:

‘How many times have you released semen this week?’

‘What?’ I say.

‘How many times have you let go of your sperm, in the past, I don’t know, seven or so days?’

‘Released my sperm? You mean jerked off? Had sex?’ I ask.

‘How many times has sperm, you know: come, spunk, jizz, bust, exited your penis in the past week or so, in any circumstance at all?’

‘Oh gosh, I don’t know. I haven’t been taking note at all. Should I be? Hm. Maybe three, four, probably five or six times?’

‘Oh my God.’ Martin says. ‘And your reading is on Sunday. This coming Sunday?’

‘Yes.’ 

‘Jesus Christ. It’s Thursday. It’s Thursday, man. This is really, really bad. You have to stop immediately. You don’t understand the life-force that’s being sucked out of you every time you ejaculate. No wonder you’re in a permanent state of melancholy. People can tell, you know, that you’ve been ejaculating too much. They can sense it. I can feel it over the phone, even. You’re less vibrant than your natural you, less effective, devoid of energy and, dude, even more important, vitality… It’s clearly lacking, not there at all.’

‘Are you, like, an anti-fapper now?’ I reply. For a second I think that, even though the anti-fap movement is usually associated with the fringe-far-right, it does sound an awful lot like Antifa. All the Antifas taking a vow to only bust once a month, more energy for protest and vitriolic internet screed. The other thing that crosses my mind is that I probably had ‘released my semen’ closer to eight or nine times over the past week. I can only imagine his reaction if I’d told him the truth. Yet, with his very obviously online take, even if parts of it are true, there’s a poignant sense of artifice in what Martin's saying, in his words, his faint ideas. It feels like a specious concept he’s latched on to out of a sense of isolation, or desperation, in his perpetually palm-tree’d paradise of southeast Asia.

‘I think these labels, like, anti-fap, are ridiculous,’ Martin continues. ‘Absolutely ridiculous. The reductive nature of labels strips the meaning of something that’s actually very important, like the way we men drain ourselves of everything we can offer. You know, women can tell, especially vibrant, sexy, fertile women, they can sense when you haven’t masturbated. They flock to the men who retain their semen. They can feel the strength of their vivacity, their buoyancy and verve. Trust me.’

‘That hasn’t been my experience at all,’ I respond. ‘Often it relaxes me. I think if I kept it all in I’d be overeager, a little bit anxious. I do get what you’re saying though, like, sometimes I do feel really tired if I’ve masturbated too much.’

‘If all you’re feeling is tired and none of the other things I’ve mentioned, you need to be more aware.’ Martin replies.

‘Yeah, like, maybe you’re not totally wrong.’ I concede. ‘I mean, the constant melancholic apathy, the weeks on end throughout my twenties where I’ve been unable to sit down, show up, and write on a daily basis, maybe this is because I’ve been releasing too much semen. Who knows, maybe you’re right.’

‘I mean I know I’m right,’ Martin replies. ‘You have three days until your reading, which, by the way, is nothing. You should be going months without coming, but we can talk about that another time. Why don’t you try it until then, let me know how it goes, if the melancholy begins to dissipate. And, well, I already know the answer. I can guarantee you, Gordon, that it will.’

Still on the walk with my dog, almost arriving back at my apartment, I tell Martin I have to go, assuring him that I will not abuse myself, at least for the next three days. I wish him and his girlfriend well (and then wonder in my head, almost out loud: do they fuck?), before going back upstairs into my apartment to sit at my desk and continue writing the intro for Sunday night, to ignore the comfort of all melancholic disposition, open up my laptop, log into the user setting with no internet, and stare unto the blank page of Microsoft word until something comes out, that is to say words, sentences, and paragraphs; not semen.

Sluggish, I decide to do an hour of yoga before I begin writing. I start to unroll my mat onto my living room floor. What the hell is he doing now? My dog looks up at me and thinks. The setting is lugubrious, one I’m seeking to transcend.

Yoga is the very opposite of masturbation, an alternate-reality of having sex. Yoga is the act of fornication with the universe, the reception of spiritual pussy, ethereal penis, effervescent orgasm. The act of yoga is paradoxical, something you do for yourself, in your own space, yet that allows you to achieve a sense of connection in its purest form.

And now that the yoga is complete, as well as twenty minutes of breathing, meditating, inhale exhale, with the mantra, I am not my body, not even my mind, I feel myself drifting far deep into the ethers, the separation between my body, the self, and my perception of the outer world has finally begun to dissolve. My antennae feel intact, and I now know it’s time to go and write; my dog sighs with relief.

Melancholy, what Victor Hugo called the happiness of being sad, is an understandable ailment for any burgeoning artist, much more so than chronic masturbation. Let’s consider, for a moment, why and how.

More than ever, it seems like it’s never been easier to fall prey to demonic, soullessly deranged, ultra-depressing thought patterns. It’s become awfully common for an artist to become deluded enough to consider their role in society useless; to consider originality to be a thing of the past; soulful gatherings a thing of the past; the spiritual impetus to create meaningful work something merely anachronistic. One begins to think, quite deeply, that the dogwhistles on Twitter, Instagram, Nihilist blogs and YouTube channels are true: art, in the face of tech and commerce, is dead, and even worse, we risk, no, we are, in the process of being replaced by insidious A.I. driven technology. The intention—provided by a boring, uninteresting, selfish and equally soulless elite—is to turn humanity into something even more droll than a computer. While there’s a perverse logic to these arguments, I’d like to maintain a sense of faith in the contrary, something like optimism. I believe, genuinely, that at the tail-end of despondency comes a new form of insight, the very-human, only-human capacity for both inspiration and change.

Yes, indeed, an unavoidable fact is true: people are getting stupider. This will likely not stop anytime soon. But, as many of my colleagues who are present tonight have correctly pointed out, the more people get addicted to AI induced, singleminded algorithms, the more room there will actually be for original thought, that is to say artistic thought, to be recognized, acknowledged, and then, by corollary, to have the ability to become influential.

Again, it’s true, so much of our present reality is beginning to feel like cheap satire. Considering just one slice of life, for instance — like the way college students in the US now pay seventy thousand dollars a year, often in debt, to write their papers with Chat GPT so that they can have more time not socializing, but scrolling through indoctrinating platitudes on profit-driven apps — is enough to drive you mad. And again, although artistically transcendent proclivities are more rare than ever, the human will to produce something genuine, unique, and truly personal, and therefore universal, will never completely die. The optimistic perspective, which I think we all must hold dear in order to not give-in to the aforementioned despondency, is that true works of art, given their current rarity, will shine more bright than ever before.

My primary form is literature, the singular kind written by humans, and I’ll wholeheartedly believe in its power until the day I die. Reading a book by a great author still provides the illusion that you’re in conversation with a soul that’s eternal. Over the years, growing up and gaining maturity, I’ve come to believe that it isn’t an illusion at all. That mystifying feeling of conversing through poetry and prose, the human voice, the deepest depths of another person’s unconscious mind and drifting soul, will never fail to astonish me. The same, of course, will never be true with computers. When we read or watch something generated by an algorithm, it will always take more away than it can provide.

We are living in the period of ubiquitous prompting, people of all ages and backgrounds asking AI systems questions big and small. Meanwhile, an unfortunate truth lies in plain sight: writers and artists are sitting idly on the bench, producing work, though often quietly, very productively screaming into the void, waiting for their unique perspectives to finally be recognized. For the sake of wisdom, not knowledge, wouldn’t it make more sense to prompt them? I thought, one day this past fall.

In addition to finding a pathway to receive a readership of my own, this desire to prompt my generation’s great artists, both established and up-and-coming, with questions big and small, questions that are philosophically grand, personally invasive, sometimes antagonistic to the point of parody, is what led to the creation of my 12 Questions For interview series. I seek out great artists whose work I admire, inundate them with a list of questions, which they can answer in their own time, and then publish just as is, along with an introduction that details some of the thoughts I had from the process of the interview. So far it’s been a success, which doesn’t surprise me. Of course it’s more interesting to hear artists like the ones present tonight give their opinions on topics ranging from communist polyamory to hedonistic grief than it is to listen to an AI algorithm spout a bland yet sour concoction of unintelligible thought.

Style is only the summary of one’s flaws. What’s built to be flawless will, obviously, have no style nor flair, no grace and no charm, and is at its best a joke and at its worst a mode of depressive discouragement. We all sit here, though, tonight, witnessing one another in person, with all our humanity, in pure retaliation to algorithmic perfection, a collective form of protest against the screen-induced simulacrum of experience that we’ve all, unfortunately, become accustomed to on a daily, hourly, minutely basis. Tonight we’ll all have the pleasure, and luck, of hearing some of these answers read aloud by the people who’ve written them.

On a recent Tuesday evening, at a snug, dark bar late at night, my friend Lou told me, out of the blue, something simple yet incredibly profound.

‘Humans,’ Lou began, ‘Humans, aside from giving one another a child, can, essentially, only do one other thing.’

‘And what’s that?’ I asked.

‘To bear witness to each other.’ Lou Said. ‘That bearing witness, the feeling of doing it and receiving it, is what makes life full, completely grounded, if not worthwhile.’

[LOOK UP FROM PAPER AND BEAR WITNESS TO AUDIENCE]

Again thank you all for coming tonight, bearing witness to my work, the work of my contemporaries, and, more importantly, to each other.

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