Recently cut passage from the work-in-progress Dry Your Tears To Perfect Your Aim

.



He started with my very first book. He said he admired the youthful energy, the punk spirit, how I saw literature as a war and my book was like a one-man army fighting off all contenders. I certainly wasn’t fond of the military metaphor but it was clear this wasn’t a discussion, rather it was a critical monologue on his part and my job was to sit there, cowering in fear, and simply listen. About my second book, he spoke about how encouraging it was to watch me, step by careful step, marching toward something that resembled a more conventional novel. I realized he was telling me all this to get inside my head, or to show that he was already inside my head, that he already understood me. I tried to remember what it was actually like for me to write my second book, thinking that if I could reground my thoughts back toward my own lived experience it would help me resist his misguided analysis of my work. Did it feel like marching toward a more conventional novel. For a moment, under the potential threat of further pain, I thought that maybe it did, but he was already onto my third book, which he said was like a concise summation of the history of leftist defeatism. This was a topic that clearly interested him a great deal. He carefully explained to me how the root of winning any battle was believing in the strong possibility you might win. Of course this principle could be taken too far: as had frequently been proven, over-confidence could also easily lead to defeat. But he would always prefer over-confidence to under-confidence, for the simple reason that winning a battle required a certain effortless arrogance, or at least that was how it had always seemed to him. It was starting to amaze me just how much he loved to talk, loved the sound of his own voice, felt emboldened by the sight of me strapped to this chair, an absolutely captive and terrorized audience. About my fourth book, which he also seemed to know was by far my most successful, he said that it was fascinating the degree to which my take, my approach, to the topics of sex and violence were so completely opposite from his own. He wouldn’t go quite so far as to say that for him sex and violence were for all intents and purposes one and the same, but his thinking was clearly more along those lines. What is the libido without the urge to dominate, what is desire if not the thrill of the chase. Fucking might also be love but, then again, love might also be terror. By this point I was no longer quite following him, losing interest, all my concentration spent in an effort to stay awake, in the fear that if I fell asleep I would be awakened by a jolt of pure pain. I couldn’t even begin to understand what he thought my take on sex and violence was. I think maybe he just assumed they were two things I was afraid of, which in retrospect might not be so far from the truth. About my sixth book he felt he had to admit that he didn’t understand why so many people wasted so much energy criticizing capitalism. Capitalism was just another part of life, no better or worse than anything else. Why so much obsession with the evils of capitalism? He was sure he would never completely understand it. What would our world look like if you took away all the products and comforts created by capitalism? He was sure no one knew, and if no one knew why even bother thinking about it. He told me that I must agree with him so I agreed with him. I barely had the energy to hold my head up. At that moment the evils of capitalism did not seem like such a pressing matter. He then admitted he hadn’t actually read all my books because he hadn’t read my most recent outing, book number six, yet. He had ordered it but for some reason it hadn’t arrived with the others. So he would have to get back to me on that one. And we could stop there for today. I was really glad I hadn’t written any more books. He did not comment on my seventh book for the simple reason that I had not yet written it. My seventh book is the book you’re currently holding in your hands.



[Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is forthcoming in 2024.]



.