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.