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In Search of Our Ulyssean Lady
an introduction to MY KATE LIKE THE SEASHORE
Ah, the better I do, the more they come after me. Come out of the woodwork, in 3s and 4s, sometimes more, sometimes with pistols and sometimes with shotguns. If I cured cancer, an angry mob of Floridian fat people, liberals more than likely, would appear in a matter of seconds to place me in handcuffs and leg irons, then set at once to defecating upon my prone body. While chattering like monkeys about their miraculous “apps”. Their Taylor Swift and their Netflix and their god damn marijuana.
My enemies are Good People.They don’t slice themselves up with broken bottles or engage in intravenous drug use. They don’t go on 12 month alcohol binges or to the emergency room and they don’t have sex with teenagers. Also, I’ve noticed, they tend not to write good prose, or even interesting prose. Rotten adolescent poetry is what you’ll find in most cases, or that they do not write at all. It serves one far greater to affect an “artistic” temperament than it does to actually engage in the bloody, cruel business of war, of fighting in service to the Pantheon, that hallowed manor of our most significant composers… Far nicer to stagnate in cultureless masturbatoriums, to self-negate as a snarky suburban wastoid awash in middle class dilettantism… Far better, it seems, to petulantly huddle beneath a patchwork quilt of daintily manicured or altogether manufactured idiosyncracies than to face alone the lashing mad sea of oblivion… to in fact devote oneself fully to composition.
A genuine literary consciousness is as much a terrible burden in life as it is an enhancement, and the only legitimate compensation for the world-class rape you endure is in completion. In doing right by your family. Your literary family. Your Pantheon.
The only redemption is in composing. In carrying your vision home.
Arriving at Apalachee Prison in 2016, after the fairly uncomplicated realization of the somewhat complicated Bigger Than Life At the Edge of the City (a novel I still consider “built for speed”), I assumed that there was not much, nothing of any real substance, anyhow, left for me to say. That book satisfied me, and I felt it would satisfy anyone who found the comparatively primitive Dog Days to their liking. If I were to write anything more at all, from that point on, it would be film criticism. Or maybe the world’s first prison-wine wine-blog. Then Kate happened. I mean it exactly like that, because that’s how it was. I woke up one morning to find that she’d paid me quite a visit. My heart heavy, my groin gooey, I realized that she literally had me by the balls… I’d enlisted to fight in a war, but could hardly remember the particulars. Kate, and this war, almost immediately, began demanding unimaginable sacrifices from me. It’s a decade later, the war is over, and I’m still picking up the pieces. Still putting my head back together. Still cleaning up the mess. What a woman!
Kate arrived also wanting a big house. She wanted land, her own roads. A river named after her. She wanted a view of the entire world. In planning all of this for her, as a lay builder, I found myself seeking out certain texts. Namely, Ulysses. And In Search of Lost Time.
It’s horribly oafish to invite comparisons to any book, let alone a great one. But honestly, I’ve tried to avoid it! There’s just no end of trouble in explaining Kate to people. Because I don’t have the correct reference points, I guess. I’m at a loss to define or even describe Kate’s house: four fat volumes of vertically-structured, triple narrative, multi-dimensional 70mm sexdream My Kate Like the Seashore.
Certainly I’m not going to boast of having never read Ulysses. And that’s not exactly true, anyway. I’ve read from it, been reading out of Ulysses for many years. And it’s not as if I am immune to its many charms. But no, never a straight read of that book. Not even in prison. Not even with Kate whispering in my ear. And as for Proust, I suppose I’ve been even less reverent. Or accountable. All that inert moaning about those grand old days at Combray… Jesus Christ, it just about sets me to shrieking.
Those are the first two works that always come to mind when a “book person” asks me what My Kate Like the Seashore is all about. I’ve said remarkably tactless things like, “you gather up all that pretentious Greek mythology and replace it with 80s hair metal, swap Dublin with New York, and Ulysses is basically Kate.”
(“Whatever, Gene.”)
And then there’s Our Lady of the Flowers, Jean Genet’s psychosexual prison dream. Oh sure, so remarkably similar! In so many ways! Conceptually! Thematically! But I’d argue that I’ve departed well and truly from Genet’s faggoty torpor by infusing such wide swaths of American dirtbag noir, that essential Charlie Starkweather white-line romanticism, in fact re-imagining the 1990s road movie as a twelve hour miniseries directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. But, of course, I haven’t actually read Genet’s book either.
Nonetheless, it comes down to those three, my sources… three books so often thought of as portals, or as universes… certainly as holding the promise of authentic transcendence. And three books which synopsize outrageously well. That all but promise you the world in the fearlessness of their unique departures.
I’m no longer chasing BIG COSMIC via these precious Prousts and Genets and all their swishy preponderance. I set off my own big bang by first considering the immense canvases upon which those three works/worlds were developed. Love them or leave them, you can only be awed by these artists’ ambition, the sheer diameter of the foundations upon which their monuments were born. And in considering such a man as Proust, his general aberrance maybe more so than his art, you can learn a great deal about the task at hand by simply appraising vast white landscapes such as the one he took residence upon… long, egoless gazes across the first blank page, as though it were an entirely separate work of art. Even a sort of map to your own otherwise inaccessible areas. When Joyce was dealing less in metaphor, before the allegorical flourishes took root, Joyce pre-draft, when he was excavating, when he’d barely started clearing brush, when the wendigos of his swollen subconsciousness were only beginning their demands of blood, bone, a central nervous system for the Great Beast Ulysses… Ulysses as raw starstuff!
And to swim in that ocean…
So I outlined “Kate” for over one year, feeling foolish to attempt such a thing, even as I brought the intricate timeline into focus…I generated heaps of questions and usually ended a long session feeling ridiculed… I recall grueling 24 hour voyages, manning metal tables in predawn prison dayrooms, in thrall to my own sketching of the road York and the creature Kate, like operating an impromptu time machine there in the darkened barracks, like the way the human soul makes the host body a time machine, like the1980s Greyhounds and 1990s Amtraks of my youth are time machines, and that is how I began, very much in earnest, accumulating decades of world-feeling, land-feeling, woman-feeling, I lived in her soiled denim and felt her damaged heart… after 2 years of this, of succubus, up rise the trees, rivers, mountains.
Then the roads.
You may make it some distance upon them, or maybe just the first mile or two.
Maybe you’ll gaze on in astonishment, before putting the text away. In an old box somewhere. Out of the way.
Many -even friends- will quickly seize upon an offensive word and that will be the end of that!
For those who might travel my roads, know going in that my concerns are much the same as any other Grand Attempt’s: death and sex and time. Whether you attempt or not, by the age of 50, if you’ve had any sort of life worth reporting on, you’re going to very naturally dwell on the nature of ABYSS, the many vacuums, in fact, created by the death process occurring around you at all times. I was what you might call a morbid child -I mean to say that I was thoughtful- and I vividly remember hitch hiking, more often simply walking across, without a ride, 10, 15, 20 mile stretches of frozen PA interstate. So i began my life’s longest journey, in 2016, once again a boy, once again a traveler of arctic wastelands, but for the first time I understood the beauty of surrender. I surrendered to my snowbound desert canvas, and I allowed my lifetime of attrition, of exposure, to reduce down as pure molten literary, as part of the landscape. Standing there once again, the cold didn’t bother me. I took in the roaring vessels around me with awe, and for the first time I saw beauty.
Nothing like My Kate has ever existed, and in a lifetime spent chasing a certain lewd musicality in print, I’ve yet to encounter a performance by any writer as uncompromising. I wrote the book I had all of my life wanted to read. It was necessary for me to locate the precise historical space where it should have existed (a skill which has always come naturally to me) and then to drag it directly out of my own satanic id. My books are not popular, chiefly because I am not “woke” (although I am awakened). In fact, my “morally difficult” work proves downright indigestible for “millenials” and “zoomers” and now I have one that poses an intellectual challenge as well. But if you’re reading this, you know me a little now. You know these books exist now. You know that i painted this epic on one of the largest canvases in the medium’s history. What if I’m not wrong about Kate? Would you even know the genuine article at this point? Or is the “lost art” of the social media era indeed art itself?
And what ever happened to your rock and roll?
My Kate will be released in about 20 months, after more than 5 years collecting dust under legal sanction. Until then, you can discover Kate’s origin, the smaller scale streetlife melodrama Bigger Than Life At the Edge of the City, which effectively serves as a prologue. After being buried by sabotage and also spending years in limbo, Bigger is back in print, now a hardcover, on Amazon.com. And Nick Zedd, a 100 page excerpt from *Kate*, is available there also. Both are likely to get yanked again, so, as always, it’s “look out, kid” and “catch me while I’m still alive”, etc.
Look babies. Honeys. Listen now my whispering little troll people. I’ve been sleazy, mean, low, unfair, unscrupulous, all that. And now I’ve paid the price many hundreds of times over. I was never here to be your friend. I don’t come from a friendly place and knowing me personally has always been a terrible idea. What I do offer is far, far more urgent. And real.
I’ve been gone a long time, and brought back a virtually inexhaustible torrent of dark energy. This is rough surf. This is uncharted territory. This is work I have held to an antiquated standard, because as a self-educated and self-raised man, who always conformed to antiquated principles, I still believe someone out there knows the difference. Nelson Algren’s tombstone reads, “the end is nothing / the road is all.” It’s coffeehouses and tittering for the rest of you.
GG
7.17.26
Pinellas County Jail
Kate will be available in several formats, as follows:
Hardcover:
SPOOK: My Kate Like the Seashore Vol. 1 / $37.00
TEENAGE LUST: My Kate Like the Seashore Vol.2 / $37.00
NORTHERN SOUL: My Kate Like the Seashore Vol.3 / $38.00
THE NIGHT: My Kate Like the Seashore Vol.4 / $40.00
Trade paperback:
MY KATE LIKE THE SEASHORE: Spook + Teenage Lust omnibus/ $44.00
MY KATE LIKE THE SEASHORE: Northern Soul + The Night omnibus/ $48.00
SPOOK: My Kate Like the Seashore Vol. 1 / $25.00
TEENAGE LUST: My Kate Like the Seashore Vol.2 / $24.00
NORTHERN SOUL: My Kate Like the Seashore Vol.3 / $28.00
THE NIGHT: My Kate Like the Seashore Vol.4 / $30.00
PDF (e-book):
SPOOK: My Kate Like the Seashore Vol. 1 / $0.00
TEENAGE LUST: My Kate Like the Seashore Vol.2 / $0.00
NORTHERN SOUL: My Kate Like the Seashore Vol.3 / $0.00
THE NIGHT: My Kate Like the Seashore Vol.4 / $0.00
