Chapter 12: When You Exit A Room You Just Enter Another One

Over the course of 2020, Brad Phillips and Gideon Jacobs wrote a 12-chapter "serial novella" for Autre. Click here to read Chapter 1: G and B.

text by Brad Phillips (and Gideon Jacobs)

Gideon did a great job above finishing his last chapter of this project. You can see that right? Don’t take it for granted that Gideon has talent.

He wrote about the beginning and the ending of things. When you exit a room, you end the experience of being within it, but of course when you exit a room you just enter another one. You are never not in a room.

This is the end for me. Everything has an ending, even an ending. This is the end of my ending. On Monday though, I’m starting Wellbutrin after almost a decade of not taking antidepressants, only mood stabilizers and Clonazepam. I am weaning myself off Clonazepam. Clonazepam, ironically, increases anxiety over time. I have been taking it for twenty-six years, never once having missed a day. Anything soothing will, after a span of time, become terrifying. 

(For a while I had a literary agent who was an idiot and when I sent him the first draft of my first book he seriously thought I should replace the word CLONAZEPAM with the word KLONOPIN for American readers. And he also seriously thought that I should drop the U from words like colour and labour so as not to alienate American readers, and this is the utter stupidity you sometimes have to deal with in life, and I stopped working with him when I saw his high school yearbook photograph and he was wearing a bowtie, and then I saw his Instagram and he was STILL wearing the bowtie.)

I’m wondering about NXIVM. About Keith Raniere and what about the women in his house who died of cancer from rat poison, why is nobody talking about that? I want to know what’s happening to him in prison and I hope it’s rape and beatings. In Canada there’s an allergy pill called NEXIUM. I want to send it to Catherine & India Oxenberg for their allergy to poor people. I’m writing my first novel. I thought it would be out by now. My first book was published on my birthday in 2019. I turned 45. In February I turn 47. I basically just started a writing career. I’m worried a gap of more than two years between books will damage my possibly ascendant career. And I worry about the book itself. All the time. I’m writing about science-fiction and basically everything my first book wasn’t about, cause I don’t want to repeat myself. But I want to make money, and I don’t want all the ‘fans’ of my first book (who are numerous and loyal and generous and thank you) to be disappointed or feel alienated that this new one isn’t about BRAD AND DRUGS AND BLAH BLAHAHLAHA. I couldn’t be more boring as a subject—this should be apparent by the end of this paragraph. I wrote a detective novel that’s an irritatingly postmodern book within a book. I hate postmodernism. I’m trying to figure out how to incorporate it into the structure of the larger novel. It’s fifty-five thousand words, the detective book, which is already the word count of a short novel. If I insert it periodically in the structure of the main novel, I worry people will lose track of the larger novel, become frustrated by the interruptions, or only read the detective novel which is admittedly more gripping. The best solution I’ve come up with is to insert each chapter as an endnote at appropriate points throughout the novel proper, but as soon as you think about endnotes you think about David Foster Wallace and I really hate the idea of what would likely be ALL writing about the book to be about Infinite Jest and the endnotes. Cause Wallace himself got super bored of that and irritated (even though everything about Wallace is obnoxious and fake and performative and of course he loved the endnotes and the talking about them), but I’m not like him. I wouldn’t get bored, I’d get upset cause I don’t want to be compared to him or have people think I ripped him off. I’ve been painting a long time and nobody can say I ripped anyone off. But with your first novel if its got a lot of endnotes people can say you ripped of Wallace, especially someone like me: a soon to be 47 oooh 12 step meetings type wears a thing on his head all the time white asshole with a chip on his shoulder or a seeming or perceived chip on his shoulder and even now this sentence sounds like Wallace. I hate David Foster Wallace. He threw Elizabeth Wurtzel out of a moving car.

People say they like the ending, they savour the ending, they wait and they wait, and they postpone the ending cause it’s so bittersweet this ending, but ultimately they want it cause they have to move on. But death, everyone is scared of that ending. That’s why religion and Jesus and the virgins and reincarnation and all the lies people tell themselves about a new beginning which is really not a thing so much as a choice one makes every day.

I am supposed to be working on a novel and making paintings, but I ordered books, some suggested, some chosen by me, and they sit in front of me telling me, “Brad, fuck work come read” and these are the books 
- The God Molecule by Brian Clegg (or Particle, some aren’t right in front of me)
- The Superrationals by Stephanie Lacava 
- The Incest Diary by Anonymous
- Child of God by Cormac McCarthy who I never read and who everyone says you have to read
- Serotonin by Michel Houllebecq which I ordered an advance copy of the translation and thought it’d take a lot longer to come out then when it came the other day I was like, shit now the Houlellebecq book is here and I really want to read it but also it’s a bad idea to read it cause his writing style might somehow influence me and then I’d be ripping off yet another shitty white guy with bad hair.

(I feel worried and upset that by listing the books above people will think I’m attempting to appear smart, or well read, or intellectual, or that I’m posturing or showing off.) 

My hair is also thinning and I bought Rogaine and am so ashamed and can’t believe I’m writing it down.

“2020 WAS A HARD YEAR EVERYONE LET’S PUT IT BEHIND US” 

You don’t want an ending. I don’t want an ending. I want to be forever beginning, but I’m not an idiot child who shits his pants and leaves food on his face so I’m forced to face the facts.

You do not have to be forced to face anything. You can shit your pants and leave food on your face and be accountable to nobody so this is what I’m offering you at the end with very little energy left wearing a pair of red Nike sweatpants that people think are ‘cool’ but really were just cheap and I bought them at an outlet mall by my parent’s house and they’re actually the sort of sweatpants that high school jocks wear in the suburbs. I’m wearing a hat because I’m scared to see my hair and my wife Cristine’s shirt which has a big circle with a stripe through it spray painted on the front like a NO or CANCELLED sign cause I’m cancelling myself before anyone else can or demonstrating that I know I should’ve been or should be cancelled. 

So it’s this:

Turn to Chapter 4 if you want Brad to quit painting and devote his time solely to writing.
Turn to Chapter 7 if you want Gideon to quit editorial writing and devote his time solely to writing fiction.
Turn to Chapter 1 if you want this to be published in some manner.
Turn to Chapter 6 if you secretly shoplift things like beef jerky from gas stations and nobody knows it.
Turn to Chapter 9 if you’re obsessed with Tao Lin but pretend like you’re not cause you’re frightened of judgment.
Turn to Chapter 2 if you don’t want this to be published.
Turn to Chapter 5 if you’re considering Christianity in spite of having seen dinosaur fossils in museums and can’t reconcile the creation story of Adam & Eve with what you know of science but still want to really give Christianity a shot.
Turn to Chapter 8 if you want Gideon and Brad to live long healthy lives.
Turn to Chapter 4 if you’ve ever been happy and the end of that happiness did NOT bring you suffering but somehow, illogically, did not hurt you.

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For more from Brad Phillips, follow @brad___phillips on Instagram. For more from Gideon Jacobs, follow @GideonsByeBull on Instagram.

Chapter 7: An Outline of Chapters 1-6

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 6: Imposter Syndrome.

text by Gideon Jacobs (and Brad Phillips)

Chapter 1 

I’ll write the first chapter, but please know that I am very wary of being someone who takes charge of group projects, someone who breaks the silence after the teacher asks for a volunteer to captain the science olympiad team with an earnest “I’ll do it,” or even worse, an “I’ll do it” of feigned reluctance. I was never that guy in school. No way I wanted to do that much work. But I also didn’t want to be associated with any projects that I considered poorly executed, so unless my “I’ll do it” volunteer was smart, I tended to give so little effort that I could not, in any scholastic court of law, be considered a bonafide collaborator.

I assume you weren’t and aren’t a group leader either. Maybe that has something to do with why we get along OK. But our similarity in this regard, our relative non-assertiveness in group dynamics, leaves us in danger of playing a game of beta-male chicken in which we both insist on deferring the alpha position to the other. So, to save us from such a fate, I’ll bite the bullet, feign reluctance, and get us started.

I think it would be good to begin with a handful of vignettes of pretty straight narrative prose that seems freighted with meaning and significance. It doesn’t matter much if it’s actually freighted with anything at all. I guess that makes “seems” the key word here. I suggest this mode of writing because, in my opinion, this is what everyone wants pretty much all the time, to like art and not be totally sure why they like it. To be clear, I don’t mean this as a negative quality in a reader. I see it more as having something to do with our desire to feel stuff rather than know stuff, to sense that there’s more rather than having the “more.” It makes sense. We are a species that, at its core, doesn’t trust itself, and so, a desire to keep reading that can’t be explained is much more likely to succeed than one that can.

With this in mind, why don’t I make all these vignettes in the first chapter about pairs of characters whose names start with the same letters as ours: “B” and “G.” This will likely have readers assuming that I’m trying to say something about us, or authorship in general, or trying to send you a coded message, or all the above. The whole exercise will be nauseatingly self-referential, but nausea is only painful when moderate. Once nausea gets to a certain level of acuteness, one usually purges and feels better—it hurts more to bend than to break. Let’s get our audience puking right away. 

Chapter 2

So, as you’ll be writing this chapter, feel free to do whatever you want and ignore this “outline” entirely if you so please. That said, I think this is where we really need to sell the exquisite corpse element of the project, to satisfy our readers' curiosity as to how this little experimental writing conceit of ours is going to work. It doesn’t have to be too complicated. Maybe it’s as simple as picking up a couple threads that I began in the first chapter and running in surprising directions with them. That’s the pleasure of the proper exquisite corpse game after all, to extrapolate incorrectly in ways that leave you with a Frankensteinian drawing in the end. Let’s give people the Frankenstein they want, the Frankenstein they deserve.

Also, maybe you should switch genres here. Like, if my first chapter is pretty straight literary fiction, you could take a hard left turn into Raymond Chandler territory, or even better, John Grisham land. Isn’t the book that you’re currently working on kind of a pseudo hardboiled novel? Or just vaguely pulpy? Am I misremembering? Either way, it seems that genre fiction is very hip right now, one of those things that is so inherently uncool that it’s cool now, so lowbrow, shameless, and unabashedly manipulative that the literati are beginning to fetishize it. I would be very pleased if you make chapter two something worthy of a lonely top shelf of the proverbial airport Hudson News.

Chapter 3

I’ve been wanting to write some sexy stuff, so maybe I’ll do that here. I’ll choose a character from chapter two and devise some scenario that gets them fucking and sucking. I really like writing about sex, not because I like sex more than the the average fucker and sucker but because, as discussed, I am easily distracted, easily bored, and sex seems to hold my attention. 

For example, writing this little outline was starting to turn into a bit of a chore (and I’m not even halfway done!). After I quickly wrote the first paragraph, I purchased some socks on the internet, drifted away from my desk and took a nap. When I woke from the nap, I didn’t feel like finishing this outline, so I ate a snack. When I finished the snack, I still didn’t feel like going back to the page. Then I had the idea that we could write some sexy scenes into our project, and I drifted back to my desk. It was that cause-and-effective.

 I’m not trying to say something hideously cliché about the allure and power of sex, not trying to make the kind of wink-and-elbow observation that bozo uncles of the world tend to back up by citing that ubiquitous yet totally nonexistent study that claimed men think about sex every seven seconds. But I am pointing out that sex, maybe better than anything in this world, can grab a wandering mind. That is, sex sells not because we’re all so goddamn horny, but because flesh is, in a way, always the shiniest surface in a room.

 Chapter 4

This is where I imagine you pull back the curtain and start writing about us writing this serial novella. Sure, even our most forgiving critics might cry that, right here, in chapter four, is where things got a little too “postmodern” or too “meta,” but frankly, there was no way we were going to avoid talking about ourselves in this project.

Why is that? Well, I think we’re both a little self-oriented. Apologies if you don’t like that label. I know it doesn’t sound very nice. I’m not calling us narcissists, though. I just think, knowing you a little and knowing myself a lot, that we both suffer from distinct psychological issues that share the similar symptom of having our respective outward gazes constantly turning inward.

I’ll stop speaking for you now, and just say that my periodic bouts of crippling depression are what have made my brain my most urgent interest, my most compelling project, my most relevant subject. I am very preoccupied with how I think and feel. I am obsessed with my own experience of the world, not because I think my experience is significant or important, but because my capacity for mental anguish is a product of my thoughts and feelings, and my mental anguish is, by far, the most weighty force in my life.

Actually, now I’m rethinking my previous claim about flesh being so “shiny.” Pain is shiny. Pain is loud. Sure, it’s hard to do long division while your penis is in someone’s mouth. It’s impossible when there’s a knife in your thigh.

I’ve never had a knife in my thigh. I’ve actually never had a broken bone, never even needed stitches. (When people are aghast at these facts, I usually respond that I’m simply very graceful.) The point is, we both suffer from diagnosed mental maladies, and these maladies make us a little self-obsessed. So, in short, let’s do what we do best, and write about ourselves.

Chapter 5

We’re both pretty into suicide, huh? Maybe in this chapter I’ll introduce the idea that this whole project is actually wrapped up in some plan for some kind of murder-suicide performance piece. Maybe I’ll also reveal that we’ve been cheating this whole time, that I attempted to a rough outline of the project. Maybe I’ll even hint that the outline will be included in chapter seven.

Chapter 6:

As you can probably tell, this outline has started to feel like a chore again. I’m tired. I’m bored. I want to go eat three bosc pears in under two minutes. 

Write about whatever you want in this chapter. We’ll figure it out.

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For more from Gideon Jacobs, follow @GideonsByeBull on Instagram. Click here to read Chapter 6.

Chapter 6: Imposter Syndrome

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

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

Chapter 5: Cheaters

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 4: A Eulogy For Brad & Gideon.

text by Gideon Jacobs (and Brad Phillips)

Dear Ms. Jacobs,

Below, see a transcription of one of many handwritten letters Gideon sent Brad in the days leading up to what the two writers were flippantly referring to as their “groundbreaking innovation for the murder-suey industry.” It seems they weren’t exactly following the rules of their exquisite-corpse serial novella, and were secretly corresponding behind their editors’ backs the whole time. I hope these words give you some insight into their mental states during this period, and that some insight affords you some solace. 

-Detective Leslie Morris

P.S. For the record, we’re still figuring out who did the murdering and who did the suey-ing. It’s…complicated. 

[Letter postmarked 01/01/20]

Bradley, 

I hate that I sometimes call you Bradley. It’s what Ellen Page’s character in that movie Juno would call her best friend if her best friend was named Brad. She’d pick up her hamburger phone, dial your number, and do a quirky dance while waiting for you to pick up. You’d pick up, and say, “Hello,” like a normal person, and she’d say, “Hello, this is Juno MacGuff’s assistant. May I please speak with Bradley Phillipino?” in a kind of faux formal voice. Then you’d have to decide whether to be a good sport and go along with the bit—“Hello, this is Bradley Phillipino’s assistant. Can you please put Ms. MacGuff on the line? Mr. Phillipino is a very busy man.”—or be a buzzkill. 

I could go on with this scenario, and maybe go on so long that I accidentally write a very bad sequel to the movie, which, in spite of its Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, is already very bad, but I’ll shut up about Juno now, mostly because I know that you know exactly what I am getting at and, therefore, know exactly how much I hate myself for sometimes calling you Bradley, Bradley. 

But Bradley, (how annoying is this?) the real reason I’m writing to you today is to talk about writing. (“Keep moving, nothing to see here, just a couple writers talking about their fucking CRAFT.”) In short, I don’t think I like it. That’s such a cliché, to hate writing, and if we’re gonna talk about that we might as well murder-suey now, before we even embark on our “exquisite corpse serial novella.” (Did you know George Eastman’s suicide note ended with the beautifully sincere question, “Why wait?) But I’m serious, Bradley. Cliché or not, I don’t like writing. Maybe it’s not that I don’t like writing—I definitely don’t though—but that I don’t like boring writing, and approximately 95% of all writing I encounter, both others and my own, bores me terribly. I start many books and finish few of them. I write every day but usually quit after an hour or so. 

I am especially bored by all descriptive language. My favorite conversation we’ve ever had about writing was about how neither of us really cares about description. We agreed that we don’t really give a shit what stuff looks like unless it’s directly relevant to the story. Do you remember that conversation? Did I dream it? Just in case I did dream it, I’ll reiterate that while it seems like all good writers spend a lot of time painting a picture, setting the visual scene, my eyes tend to speed read straight through those chunks. 

But I don’t know. Maybe we’re wrong. Maybe we’re weird. Maybe if we spent more time writing descriptively people would like our stuff more. Maybe I should start the “exquisite corpse serial novella” like this:

“I met Bradley on a very classically gross summer evening in New York City, the sort of night when the city stinks and everything is slightly muffled by the heat and humidity, as if the air’s moisture is rounding the edges of every sound, or maybe it’s not ‘as if’ that’s what’s happening but that’s what’s actually happening and I just don’t understand the physics of it. Bradley was tall and thin, so I guess that would mean lanky. But the word that comes to mind is sinewy, a build Jesus might have if Jesus had a pretty moderately used Crunch Gym membership. Bradley was also heavily tattooed and bearded, a look that, in artsy corners, allows him the flexibility to look like shit if he feels like looking like shit, or look good if he feels like looking good. I’m not sure how to explain that specific aesthetic phenomenon. I guess it is, in a way, also kind of Jesus-y, in that Jesus could easily blend in with the sick and poor, but, in a different context, could pass as the Son of God, the King of the Jews, The Light of the World.” 

Etc, etc, etc. OK, I’m not saying that the paragraph above is good. Please don’t judge it. I wrote it very quickly to prove a point, the point being that, if I ever throw that kind of paragraph into a story I’m working on, it is probably out of some perceived literary obligation to do so. Maybe what I’m really getting at is that, when it comes to art, I just don’t really care about details. This is partially why Knausgard’s books sound like my worst nightmare. From what I understand, that guy spends like 50 pages describing what’s in his fridge. I like that as a concept, but I don’t need to actually read those 50 pages, as the concept, his insane and meticulous commitment to mundanity, is the art. I’d get more out of listening to a smart person tell me about his book for ten minutes than spending a summer struggling through Knauzy’s big ol’ struggle. 

This actually reminds me of another conversation we once had about wall text at museums. Do you remember that conversation? I was interviewing you for that magazine. Or did I dream it again? Basically, we realized that although we are similar in some ways, we are very different in others, one of them being our policies around museum wall text. I read all wall text because I need an intellectual entrypoint in order to enjoy art, as thinking about it is half the fun. You don’t read wall text because you think it’s VISUAL art, and if you can’t LOOK at it and get something out of it, it’s probably very bad. Different strokes for different jokes.

Bradley, I think it’s time to cut to the chase of this letter. I can feel that we’re reaching that point, kind of like when you’re hanging out with someone and you realize you’re both ready to stop hanging out, or when you’re on a date and you realize it’s time to kiss. But we shouldn’t kiss, for the sake of our friendship, so I’ll cut to the chase instead: I am about to start writing the first chapter of our “exquisite corpse serial novella,” a phrase I continue to put quotes around because, although I came up with it, I hate it, and it’s good to mock what you hate, otherwise IT MOCKS YOU. 

What I’m wondering is if it behooves us to, well, cheat, to make some kind of masterful grand plan for this project, to outline a story that is very epic and very good, and then execute it in a way that appears to be totally spontaneous. This would, of course, require us to keep the writing raw and unpolished, to throw in lots of deadend plot lines, having characters weave in and out of seemingly unrelated realities. We’d have to make efforts to keep up the exquisite corpse ruse. 

Personally, I think this is the way to go. If you agree, my next letter will be a possible outline of the entire fucking thing. What do you think? If it it doesn’t work, if people start to realize that this improv show is, in fact, a well-reherased routine, who fucking cares. If the whole project is a dud, also who cares. We’re going to be sipping daiquiris with Yahweh and Lord Vishnu by the time the sticks and stones hit their targets. 

Happy New Year, -Gideon

---

For more from Gideon Jacobs, follow @GideonsByeBull on Instagram. Click here to read Chapter 6: Imposter Syndrome.

Chapter 4: A Eulogy For Brad & Gideon

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 3: Luridly Liminal / Liminally Lurid.

text by Brad Phillips (and Gideon Jacobs)

Here is a list. I’ve yet to meet a person who does not like a list. In fact, a person who does not like a list seems, to some extent, unhinged.

Bahrain & Germany

Barbados & Greenland

Guatemala & Bolivia

Georgia & Benin

Botswana & Greece

Bhutan & Guyana

Gabon & Burkina Faso

Gambia & Belgium

Brunei & Grenada

Bulgaria & Ghana

Guinea-Bissau & Brazil

Gabon & Burundi 

Ten Minutes Later 

Good & Bad

Beautiful & Grotesque

---

On discovering the text, the repeated use of names starting with G and B (obviously signifying Gideon & Brad) was seen as clever. Were they both still alive to read that adjective, ‘clever,’ one can only assume that Jacobs and Phillips would most likely feel hurt, as to many writers and artists, being called clever registers like a punch in the stomach — but only if the intellect is stored in the gastrointestinal system, where it most obviously is not. Writing allows these nonsensical connections. Nonsensical connections generated much of the text they wrote together. We must do our best to explore the elasticity of language and meaning! (a corny line seen in an early essay written by Phillips on the work of New York based photographer Daniel Arnold, who was a personal friend of Jacobs’). In reality, there’s nothing particularly bad (and on further examining the text, it can be seen that the two writers hint at Buddhist ideas of good and bad, right and wrong, being nothing more than constructs; constructs that have no moral or critical purpose or value. Two white guys talking obliquely about Buddhism — I’m certain were they given the opportunity to reflect, both would agree the writing could’ve been more successful without those esoteric tangents about being clever. Clever is fine, so long as it functions as an ornamental flourish attached to words like: genius, insightful, intellectual, transcendent, prescient, and brilliant. 

In the world of coding, gaming, no one faults the most gifted game designer for throwing in a few ‘easter eggs.’ Clever is a signature, and its manifestations can be seen as simple gifts, offerings — generous and kindhearted acknowledgements of the game players commitment to the game.

Spot the B in Barack (chapter 3) — Gideon is tipping his hat to Brad, as well as thanking the reader. Spot the G in Gordon (chapter 2) — Brad is tipping his hat to Gideon, as well as thanking the reader. 

These two writers, talented or as untalented as time will judge them to be, were, if nothing else, grateful for having been read. They sought to please their readers while also challenging themselves to produce quality literature. This seems like a kind and pleasant thing to do, but god knows that considering the audience is often viewed as tantamount to blatant pandering. Were she still alive, Michiko Kakutani might’ve focused on this desire to be kind and pleasant to the reader as a means to eviscerate the entire project; to label Jacobs and Phillips as hacks. Of the two, one might’ve been able to endure such an assault. Having known them both to some extent, I can attest to the fact that Burundi, as opposed to Guatemala, would most likely perish from the insult. Within any type of couple (including a couple of writers), as much as people don't like to admit it, there is always a weaker member of the team. Phillips being much older than Jacobs and far less robust, Jacobs being much more fit, both physically and mentally — I feel safe in assuming that Phillips wouldn’t have been able to weather the blow, whereas Jacobs, full of the buoyancy of youth, would’ve found a way to soldier on.

Ms. Kakutani. You remain forever the prettiest girl in high school. We want you to notice us, even take us up on our offer to carry your books, but the likelihood of your rejection is so terrifying that few are able to muster the courage and make the gesture. 

---

In early February of 2020, Brad and his wife Cristine spent a week in Gideon’s spare room, Gideon having offered it out of kindness, as Cristine had an art exhibition open on Henry Street, and Brad (along with Gideon) were part of a reading at Honey’s Brew Pub just blocks from Gideon’s home in Ridgewood. They wouldn’t have been able to spend a week in New York without Gideon’s generosity. Brad and Cristine were able to have dinner with Verne Dawson and his wife Laura, and the next day visit some galleries uptown with Verne.

Verne had long been Brad’s favourite painter, and he’d recently published an essay on Verne’s work for Autre Magazine. Brad ‘looked up’ to Verne, but not really, but also — sort of he did. He and Cristine enjoyed hanging out with older people, and while Brad was past the age at which one is susceptible to starstruckedness, he did feel a not insignificant sense of frisson being near someone—being listened to and fed by someone—who he’d admired so much two decades before. Verne had also finished Brad’s portrait, which he’d begun in October. Brad liked the painting. Verne said that he thought Brad looked like Saint Jerome in it, and Brad nodded and smiled and agreed, with no idea whatsoever of what Saint Jerome looked like. Later he asked Cristine if it were even possible for there to be an agreement about what a saint might look like, seeing as they all existed before photography. Cristine’s reply on the train back to Queens was,

“Let’s thumb fight.”

---

For more from Brad Phillips, follow  @brad___phillips on Instagram. Click here to read Chapter 5: Cheaters.

Chapter 2: Guillermo's Funeral By Brad Phillips (and Gideon Jacobs)

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 1: G and B.

text by Brad Phillips (and Gideon Jacobs)

It could reasonably be posited that Bernardo’s statement at Guillermo’s funeral; “It’s true, there was no suicide....has anyone seen a body?” was in fact a true statement.

This is why Guillermo, as is the case with many people who like keeping their families on their toes, had made it clear in his Last will & testament that he would not abide an open-casket funeral. Just those seven words alone — ‘would not abide an open-casket funeral’ — implies that the putative dead person could object in the middle of the ceremony, raising themselves by sheer force of ab muscles, to demand that their casket be shut. Obviously, to be able to shout out from your casket that you’d prefer the lid closed would indicate that death had not entirely ‘taken.’ Open-casket funerals, whether by choice of the dead or their families, are ideal for those who’ve bought into the notion of that one, most problematic idea of the late, Oprah-influenced 20th century: the idea of closure. 

Closure in relation to a casket is linguistically accurate. Closure in relation to the dead is psychologically silly. 

Consider the expression often heard at funerals: “The dead live on in our memories; in our minds.” How truly frightening is this idea, and how much terror must it strike into the minds of grandchildren, now wary to experiment with masturbation should dead Uncle Dwayne or Aunt Cathy be watching from that place where they now reside; the mind of a horny child? 

Guillermo had only ever given two pieces of advice to his two sons in their times spent in the dynamic. Bernardo had always thought his dad was ‘joking around.’

1. If you must drive drunk, eat a large spoonful of peanut butter before getting in the car, as this complicates the standard breathalyzer test.

2. If you cannot beat the breathalyzer test (or for any other reason are in the company of police officers) and are subject to a lie detector test, do not despair, you can beat that as well. It’s as simple as this: no matter what the question (the one you’re meant to be honest about—your name. The one you’re meant to lie about—did you mutilate the corpse), once that query is nearing its end and your answer is meant to begin, clench your asshole like you’re trying not to shit your pants on prom night. When we focus all of our attention on that one, tight sphincter muscle (the one most associated with shame and to some extent, relaxation and satisfaction), all systems regulate to assist in maintaining its closed status. You may appear to be sweating, you may have an elevated heart rate—you may show any of the signs that interest an expert polygraphist. Unless they’ve been trained by the Central Intelligence Agency, they will not be able to differentiate between the markers exhibited by liars, and the markers of someone who just happens to have high blood pressure and hyperhidrosis. “What is key,” he told his sons, “and this part is fucking important, is that no matter what, don’t think about the lie you’re keeping, don’t think about the fact that if you blow it you might end up doing a nickel in Ossining. You need to believe, as you’re strapped to that machine, that you are in fact on the verge of shitting yourself. And you need to remember that, like any reasonable individual, be they a murderer or a cashier at Homesense, nobody, nobody, wants to shit their pants in mixed company. You are only one thing while seated in that chair, wires hooked up to god knows where. You are a man with an intense, overwhelming need to eliminate his bowels in an environment where it would be extremely embarrassing to do so.”

---

I’d been writing this sort of ‘intellectual’ porn (which really, I can’t imagine working for anyone); stories about people like Gordon and Ben, massive insertions, strange insertions, illegal insertions, pay-to-play, hotel takeovers, huge wads on hairy backs (for which I received a small bit of payola from Semenax) for years. I can’t say I particularly enjoyed it. It started when I was in prison, because I was really unhappy with the way I was being sexually assaulted, and found that, similar to prison lawyers or elegantly literate men who could write love letters to women consigned to wait at home for their lovers to be released, I had a talent; a talent that would and did forestall a prolapsed rectum courtesy of Hank, Timmy, Big Timmy, Chinese Dwight, The Accountant, Liminal Phil, and Butch 3. 

The series on Gordon and Ben, I actually had smuggled out by a friend and it ended up being published by Luridmax, an obscure French erotica publisher who focused mostly on golden shower and macrophilia narratives.

They are now out of business.

My brother Bernardo was right when he spoke of our father’s mercurial nature, the fact that he may have faked his own death—this was not out of the realm of possibility for Guillermo, but nonetheless, I am now the only living person who can both attest to the fixity of his death, as well as the manner of its deliverance. 

Dad had easily convinced Bernardo that he was an ‘academic’ working on a thesis. There are two reasons this was done so easily. One is that my brother is a dipshit, an asshat and a moron. The other is that Bernardo could not and never was able to accept the the truth of what our father was: a criminal. He didn’t play violent video games as research for a thesis, he played them because he was a violent man who liked to play violent games.

I inherited this from my father, which is why I was the sole beneficiary of his will, the same will Bernardo and my sister are still battling over in a probate court somewhere, while I live off the full inheritance in Tenerife. My father taught me much more than my brother or sister about how to live in this world (I’m sure Bernardo has used the peanut butter and lie detector test advice dad gave us to amuse people at obnoxious academic parties for years). My dad taught me how to break the law and not get caught. Here are some things I was told, having become the favorite child early on when dad caught me stuffing a Snickers in my diaper at sixteen months:

1. Your best friends are leather gloves.

2. Three things to eliminate in a jam: teeth, hands and feet. DNA is popular, but it takes a while. Head in one bag, torso in another, arms and legs in a third, hands and teeth down a sewer grate. Dump the bag head in a residential garbage can thirty miles from where you dump the torso bag, and thirty miles from where you dump the arms and legs. Ideally, dump each bag in a different state. This causes the police to engage in typical jurisdictional squabbling and creates legitimate technical problems, which can give you an astonishing head start.

3. When choosing a new identity from the grave of a dead toddler in a cemetery, pick a common name. John Smith, Alan Phillips etc. Whatever you do, do NOT pick an antiquated sounding name — no Forbes Pennyworth DeQuincy, those sort of names draw attention no matter what.

4. Whenever possible, marry the new wife in international waters. She’ll think it’s romantic, what she won’t know is that it’s not legally binding. That way, should your bigamy ever come to light, you won’t be charged. You’ll just look like an asshole.

5. Always look like an asshole.

I loved my father Guillermo DeTorquido San Felipe (né George Lazard). One thing I loved more than George though, was and is money. I was taught about this love by my father, so I know that in the end, while he might not have been ready to die, he would have respected my move. This is what’s most important to me. That while I’m certain he would have preferred to keep living, I put an end to it in a way I know he’d genuinely respect.

Bernardo with his PhD in Ancient Music. Sophia with her moronic dentist husband Lyell who’d say sorry if you hit his car. Spineless, weak people. Not me. Never me. 

“You may be a piece of shit, Carlo. You may be a shiftless predatory fuck, but you’re my son, and for fuck sake, you make me a helluva lot more proud than your brother and sister, living their lives inside the lines. Honestly if I didn’t have warrants out at the time, I would’ve stuck em’ both in a sleeping bag full of rocks and thrown them in the river.”

Words like these from a parent, they feel real good.

It happened like this.

My dad had just finished a three-year bit. Bernardo and Sophia thought he’d been living in Tucson, running a ‘workshop’ on some type of bullshit.

I was looking at eleven more months of a six-year sentence for felony battery. Dad had been the only one who visited me (or the only one I allowed to visit) during that time. It was on one of his last visits that he told me he’d cut my siblings out of the will, because, as he put it rather succinctly, “Fuck em.”

By the time I made it back to my cell, I had the entire thing planned perfectly. I almost wanted to call my dad and tell him, but….

My cellmate, John Allan Richards, had terminal lung cancer, was facing compassionate early release after serving almost twenty years for bank robbery. We’d developed a good, quasi-paternal relationship over our time together. Once I learned about the will, I told John that, since he’d be getting out, and since he wouldn’t have much time left out there, I had a story to tell him. I wasn’t asking per se, but I knew that since his doctors had told him he should already be dead, that old-fashioned prison ethics would steer him in the direction I needed.

Look John, I never wanted to bring it up — it’s too hard, this sort of language. I told him how my father Guillermo had molested my sister Sophia from when she was five to thirteen. John had three daughters. It would strike him where I needed him struck. “Jesus fucking Christ, Carl. This is no good. No, this is just no good. And he’s out there still?”

I told him he was.

“I sort of suspected John,” I told him. “Sophia was always sick, always sad, had no friends, acted too clingy when I brought male friends home. I knew my dad, I knew he was a sick fuck, there wasn’t anything I’d put past him. But it wasn’t until I was sixteen, going through his VHS collection looking for porn that I found the tape. It was the only one with a handwritten label.”

“What’d it say?” he asked, looking already like he wanted to reach through the prison, send his arm through the streets of Philadelphia and rip my dad’s throat out.

“It said ‘Little Blondes’...”

“For fuck sake!” he cut me off.

“I know, I know. I put the tape in. Well, there she was John, Sophia. I turned it off right away. I knew there’d be other blondes. I mean, fuck sake, she was mostly a redhead.”

“Alright, Carl. I want to help you with this. Cause this…I can’t abide this.”

It’s not just a myth of film and television that pedophiles are considered to be subhuman scum in prison. Just as in the real world, they’re seen as such. Everything came into motion so easily. He actually coaxed the information out of me, which was beautiful. I told him where my father lived and where my father drank, because I knew those things. He was still sending me letters, often just written on coasters from the bar. John’s date was coming up soon. The cancer had spread to his brain, he was starting to forget things and would wake up with subdural hematomas that looked like mandarin oranges. I think I’m making my point.

Carl was released on June 15th, 2009. We had a party for him, Vino brought an empty Tide container of his best pruno. At the end, when he was leaving the cell, Carl took my head in his hands and looked me in the eyes.

“I got this, John. Fuck this bullshit. I can’t abide it. I just cannot abide it. Plus, it’s likely bullshit, but maybe if I can do one good thing in this life, make some stab at redemption or whatever, God might not shit on me so heavily.”

I told Carl I loved him. I did love him. Then I slipped him the piece of paper with my father’s address on it.

July 3rd, it was in the news, which is how I heard about it first. It took Bernardo a few days to call and tell me, probably ‘cause he was playing the ocarina or some bullshit at a recital in Sonoma or Marfa.

Guillermo DeTorquido San Felipe, aged 69, was leaving the bar he drank at regularly to walk to his home three blocks away. In the neighborhood, most people avoided San Felipe. They heard he’d done some shit, and he never smiled. But, if you had a flat, he was gonna fix it for you. As he approached his home, John Allan Richards, notorious for a bank robbing spree that stretched from Abilene to Austin and released from prison weeks before on compassionate grounds, approached San Felipe in the middle of the street, brandishing a handgun and visibly limping. He was heard to shout, “Hey, short eyes!” immediately before pressing his revolver against San Felipe’s head and pulling the trigger. San Felipe died instantly. Richards did not run or hide his gun. Instead he sat on the curb next to the body. When the police came he was taken to central booking. There was no clear motive for the slaying, and police were perplexed as to why a man who’d just been released after serving two decades in the penitentiary would execute what appeared to be a stranger, resulting in his return to the penitentiary.

For three days, police questioned Richards. They pressed for his motives, enquired as to his relationship to the victim—these sort of police questions. Richards would only say one thing: “He had it coming.” Police were at a loss to understand. San Felipe had served his time in prison, mostly for wire fraud or the occasional aggravated assault. There was nothing that would explain a revenge-motivated execution in the middle of the street.

On his fourth day of interrogation, Richards asked Detective Leslie Morris to get him a Sprite. He said his mouth was dry from “talking to you fucking goofs for so long.” 

When Detective Morris returned to interview room eight, Richards lay slumped on the floor, dead. An autopsy later revealed him to be stuffed with tumors, and his personal physician later stated his surprise that Richards was still living.

The will went through probate quickly. I received very little in terms of liquid assets or investment products. I did, however, inherit an antique briefcase. Inside this briefcase was a small card — “It’s a boy!” The envelope held the key to a storage space. The day before the funeral, I rented a car and drove for an hour. Behind a bunch of lamps and stolen dishwashers I found a suitcase containing one and a half million dollars in small bills.

Once my lawyer informed Bernardo and Sophia’s lawyers that the will was incontestable, Sophia apparently expressed surprise that I was alive. I hadn’t seen them for over fifteen years.

At the internment, I stood mixed in with a group of mourners at a nearby funeral while Guillermo’s was happening. I watched Bernardo deliver his ‘clever’ speech, and Sophia her saccharine one. Once everyone was gone, I left a bouquet of tulips and a bottle of Wild Turkey on dad’s grave. I didn’t want anyone to see me. I’m sure nobody wanted to see me either.

Before I left for Tenerife, I paid for John Allan Richards’ tombstone. He had no family, and no money, and would’ve been buried in a potter’s field. He’d done me a great service, and really, John had never done anything worse than rob a bank. A thing that, really, all of us are entitled to try.

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For more from Brad Phillips, follow  @brad___phillips on Instagram. Click here to read Chapter 3: Luridly Liminal / Liminally Lurid.