Over the course of 2020, Brad Phillips and Gideon Jacobs are writing a 12-chapter "serial novella" for Autre. It will be written Exquisite Corpse style — they will alternate who writes each month's chapter, and won’t have access to the previous chapter until it has been published. Brad and Gideon have not discussed plot, structure, format, themes, characters, etc, and promise not to do so even once the project is underway. The idea is to react to each other's work, and hope the final Frankensteinian product is something that deserves to exist. If the authors like what they've made when it's done, the editors might publish it as a "zine." Installments will go up on the 15th of every month. Click here to read Chapter 5: Cheaters.

text by Brad Phillips (and Gideon Jacobs)

Dear Ms. Jacobs,

If you’re reading this letter it means your son is dead, along with a much older man named Brad Phillips he was working with on some obscure writing project - a project which I think tested their endurance for suffering, a test they seemed to have failed. Typically, when you receive a letter like this, it will say, ‘If you’re reading this I AM dead,” and comes from a loved one in the form of a suicide note, or it comes from a friend or family member who is being stalked by the American Intelligence Apparatus (see Danny Casolaro). I wish for your sake your son had it together enough to write an ‘If you’re reading this’ (Dear John becomes Dear Mom) letter himself, but please try not to judge him too harshly — only now am I beginning to understand the amount of pressure he and his friend Mr. Phillips were under to — as they described it  somewhat pretentiously — ‘revolutionize contemporary literature’. Attached is a letter Mr. Phillips wrote to your son Gideon. Perhaps more letters will be unearthed. I wish you the very best and am sorry for your loss.

-Detective Leslie Morris

[Letter postmarked 01/15/20]

Dear Gideon,

Hey buddy. The bit about Ellen Page and Juno really fucking made me laugh. The hamburger phone, Bradley Pepperino etc. You really nailed that perfectly. I resent that I paid to watch that film in the theater where strangely, I don’t regret paying to watch The Blair Witch Project. I don’t know why I am connecting the two. I dated (married) a woman once and broke up with her in large part because she called sandwiches ‘sammies.’ Ellen Page is Canadian. Cristine is always, as are most Americans, surprised at how many celebrities in Hollywood are Canadian. But save Phil Hartman and Alex Trebeck (RIP x2), they’re almost always an embarrassment - Ryan Gosling, Justin Bieber, Rachel McAdams, Celine Dion, Harold Ramis - it’s endless. Sometimes I still get very upset at Phil Hartman’s wife for murdering him but who can I take that anger out on? I think William Shatner might be Canadian and many people believe he killed his wife, who ostensibly drowned.

Knausgaard. To use the argot of your people, oy vey. I tried it, I couldn’t get past the seventeenth page of him detailing how his father both bought him a guitar and showed him how to use it. (by the way I’ve never been anywhere more terrible than Norway - they push reindeer meat on you like crack dealers push sweet crack rock). In my head I thought this - Fuck you, you had a dad. And this - Fuck you, you had a dad who gave you presents. I think of the writers I truly admire, and I don’t want to out myself as a cliché male reader (I love Octavia Butler!) but, Nabokov, Houllebecq, Martin Amis — I think the most I can recall of any of them describing characters sounded like...I’ll try to break it down by writer, and remember as is often the case with me, I might be totally wrong or misremembering. Nabokov would say, “He had a limp and a cane he used with more labour than was truly necessary so that it appeared to be an accessory, an eccentric flourish, not a functional and needed item (I’m not quoting here, I’m impersonating). No his hair was brown his eyes were blank he was tall he was short - just a limp and a cane and you filled in the blanks. Houellebecq would be more like, “I’m pathetic and I like little girls. I’m damp and ugly and painfully aware of it. I feel as if I emit a strange odour that keeps people at bay, and know that my penis is unusually small and that my flabby stomach is too developed for a man my age. In short, I know I am a disgusting man, yet nonetheless, for reasons unknown to me, I’m able to maintain the attention of the occasional beautiful woman. Life is a mystery in this way, and the only mystery in this world that holds my attention is what draws a woman to accept the presence of my penis in her mouth or vagina.”  With Amis, and it’s been a while, it would be more along the lines of, “He was rich and he was fat and he was terribly South London.”

I think everyone is supposed to like Proust for the same reason people like Knausgaard, and they valorize Proust almost obscenely yet I’ve never read him, and I can’t say I honestly know anyone who’s read Remembrances of Things Past but you always see it on people’s bookshelves (maybe yours buddy). Most people think they can get away with saying oh yeah Proust and that Madeleine Cookie (sp) at a cocktail party or something, and that seems as if they’ve read him. Nobody reads him. Nobody reads Chaucer, and nobody likes light operettas except maybe psychopaths, or people obsessed with hot air balloon culture. 

I was relieved once, and I don’t remember the quote, reading an interview with Stanley Kubrick where he said something like the most tedious and unnecessary part of making a film is the DESCRIBING of places and people and things. EXPOSITION. I felt better when I read that, because I agree, and because I like Kubrick, but not in that fanboy way, and I don’t think they’re are all great and that in reality that space one is total garbage, and Barry Lyndon while being good is still not fantastic and if I’m going to watch a film over two hours I’d prefer it be a Bryan Singer X-Men one to be totally honest. 

Who knows if either of us can write. Sometimes as with art I think I’m good at ‘performing writing’, but this is also known as Imposter Syndrome and many artists suffer from it. Cristine will tell me I made or wrote something good, and I’ll immediately tell her she’s biased, or that I just — this I actually say often, “My paintings, it’s just a bunch of tricks. I don't actually know how to paint.” — anyway we’re trying our best and this is what matters, if you believe that trying matters. Sometimes I say, “Trying is Lying, or Deleting is Cheating” and it sounds like it means something but in the end I don’t believe it does. This is possibly true of all the work I do. But you Gideon write essays and criticism for magazines and they’re full of information which people can use to make decisions so your writing is inherently more valuable in an objective sense. I’m not putting myself down here, just being honest. I tell Cristine that too, I say, “Look babe, you’re a better artist than me, it doesn’t mean I’m being self-loathing or not saying I have talent, it just means I’m saying you have more talent, and that doesn’t bother me or make me feel bad, it makes me admire you.” 

We do both know how to do one thing, ramble. Or maybe it’s just me, I can take that on. Do you like the expression ‘dark passenger’? Like, “his gambling addiction was his dark passenger”...

I remember meeting you. I would describe you this way were I writing about it in a book — Gideon seemed trustworthy and robust, and you got the sense that if your kid was trapped under a car, he’d be the guy you could rely on to pick the car up with his bare hands. He tucked his t-shirts in, which I liked, and often wore this same mustardy coloured one, which worked well for him. He had a nice voice that was calming while being inquisitory and when he asked you questions, for the most part you felt he really was interested in hearing the answers. He bought me a mattress, and he prized tidiness, but not in a way that was anal or you felt like he’d yell at you if you didn’t use a coaster, although probably he’d secretly hate it that you didn’t, but was polite enough not to express it. This made me wonder though, maybe Gideon secretly hates me or my work, or my presence, but is just so polite he won't say so, and then I’ll remember your parents or that one is/was a shrink, and become paranoid that you have tricks to make me feel safe, while in fact i’m unsafe and hated. The tenses are wrong here but you get the idea, and that’s just how I feel today, not always, but you can see, besides the shirt and the robustness, no eye colour, or height, or style, or whatever. And that’s a true and full picture of you. 

But to get to the point, yes we must cheat. I like cheating. I like Clifford Irving’s fake biography of Howard Hughes and Elmyr De Horys (sp) forgeries. I like con-artistry more than I like sculpture. We don’t, please don’t be offended, we don’t I THINK have what it takes to do this as we (you) proposed. I thought about it, then became super overwhelmed and watched True Detective Season 1 again. So yeah. Summer and Oliver at Autre are super nice, and I mean so fucking nice it makes you wonder, like how can they be so nice (maybe they’re Scandinavian)....but I think they’d understand, and also maybe because they’re smart, not even care. It’s like a wall label in art, and this is how my perspective is the right one — if you read the label about this work we’re doing, you’d know or become suspect that something was up. But if you just read it, you’d enjoy it for what it is and not leave worried that someone sorta picked your pocket intellectually.

So send an outline. I have some ideas too, but I’d prefer to defer to yours because lately I’m not so sure of my instincts (outside the bedroom lol)....Not in the bedroom either….

When I lived in British Columbia there was a very famous mystery about the half century old corpses of two teenagers found deep in the woods in northern BC whose skeletons were holding hands and there was an old rusty .22 rifle next to them. Maybe we can be like that. Although, it does bring up certain issues related to Kurt Cobain, because unless one of those romantic kids could manage to pull the trigger with their foot, how the fuck did they shoot themselves in the head with a long rifle?

Mother’s Day is coming (it’s always coming, Xmas is ALWAYS around the corner), so Happy Mother’s Day to your mom. And whatever you’re doing today, I hope you’re enjoying it. I knew I could trust you from the moment I spoke to you, so I trust you still now, over what, a year later? 

There’s a newish movie I watched called Burning by Lee Chang-dong I think you’d really like.

Yours,

Brad

For more from Brad Phillips, follow  @brad___phillips on Instagram. Click here to read Chapter 7.