Interview with Mike Kitchell
Jackson Nieuwland: Yo Mike is it cool if I interview you?
JN: Sweet I'll just jump right in then.
Two books are coming. Are books, to you, sexual objects or architectural objects? Or neither? Or both? Or something else entirely? Or just books? Have you ever fucked a book? If not, would you? Would you fuck a building? Didn't a woman marry the Eiffel Tower once or something? Books being architectural makes sense: we fuck in buildings and so we must also fuck in books. RIght? Or wrong? Doesn't everything we do outside of books eventually find its way between the pages? Can the same be said for houses? What can be said for the books you have coming out?
MK: Three books, actually, if you count Land Grid, a "chapbook" that I'm self-publishing. It's the first thing Solar▲Luxuriance is releasing that I actually paid a printer to print & didn't print and bind myself, so I count it. [Jackson: Land Grid has been released since this interview took place.]
I would say that books are not quite sexual objects to me, but some of them are certainly fetish objects. In parallel to my sexual fetishes, the object of my fascination has to be particular. I think, if we regard a narrow definition of what 'fetish' actually means I would have no actual fetishes, but that's narrow. No one likes narrow. Similarly, I don't think all books are architectural objects. Some of them, yes, in that they build, whether conceptually or literally. Artists' books that turn into boxes or hallways, literal architecture. I am a snob. I am picky. I don't think reading for the sake of reading is anything better than watching TV. What counts is what you're reading, what you're watching, what you're building with. What you're getting off to. Of course, who am I to judge what someone's getting off to. I like books that hold sex. I like books that are conduits to sex. In this case they are sexual objects, I suppose, beyond fetish objects.
Are we using fucked in the sexual sense? I've never literally stuck my dick inside of a book, no. I've perhaps fisted a book. The future is less phallocentric, so maybe, yes. Where do you hold your libido. I'd fuck a building. I fuck buildings in everything I write. I either want to fuck or suicide the world. I'm not in control. I think we fuck inside of everything. Books are books are objects are books are conduits are books are zones of affect are the future are the past are nothing are irrelevant what even is a book, fucked.
There are three books. The first, already mentioned, Land Grid, is three short stories that are somewhat thematically linked. The longest story, which was originally the titular story of the collection (until I changed the title), is very narrative, almost straight forward, diverging from the rest of my work. It's still me though, it couldn't not be. It's about a boy and his brother who go to stay at their Aunt & Uncle's house one summer. The boy discovers a secret underground world, built in the basements of suburban houses, all holding parts of a miniature golf course. There is a lot of abject sex in here. Another story is about a hypnotist at an abandoned carnival. The last story was a story where I told myself I wanted to write about the materials of earth, glass bricks, and snuff films. So I did, that's what that story is about. All of them hold a whole, I can't write about anything but death. I can hardly write a sex scene without someone breaking down crying at the end, someone discovering they're actually god. There are some photos too. The second book, Variations on the Sun, is coming out from Red Lightbulb's LOVE SYMBOL PRESS. I think I'm technically the first book, though that's sort of an accident. All of my manuscripts are already laid out as books, like as pdfs that are formatted and shit, because I'm a control freak and have to do everything myself. Someone told me it was poetry once. I don't think it is. I mean, I don't care what you call it. It's fragments about a group of nomadic children. There are a lot of photographs in it. It's a strange whole. There is no sex on the page, only between the pages. Russ asked me to find people to blurb it and I suggested he get a group of 12 year olds to read it and have them blurb it. That might not work though, it's dark, because, yeah I don't know how to write about anything but death. Questions about death. Maybe by death I mean god and maybe by god I mean the impossible. What are you looking for? The final book is the big one for me, because it'll have an ISBN and everything, it'll be the longest, the fullest. It's coming out on Blue Square Press, a division of Mud Lucious. It is another book where parts add up to a whole, but the parts are not fragments, they're arguably self-contained stories. But wherever there is an "I" (everywhere) you can hold the same protagonist throughout. Everything I write is basically horror. Everything I write is basically me trying to re-appropriate 70s & early 80s euro-horror, to queer it, to fuck with it, to make it question. Every narrative of mine is a quest. There is always loss and sadness and the impossible.
JN: Is Land Grid a sign of things to come for Solar▲Luxuriance? Are you renovating/expanding the publishing house? Are you knocking down walls? Are there doors to be knocked on? Do you think of it as a publishing HOUSE? Do all the books and writers living together happily inside of it, getting along like a house on fire? Or is it a broken home? When does a building die? When does a book die? What is death? What isn't death? When will you die and how do you envision it?
MK: Land Grid might be a sign of things to come. I'm working SECRETLY with a SECRET ACCOMPLICE in considering moving S▲L away from being such a micro-micro press and more into the realm of "actual" micro-press. Some things will stay the same, some things will change. I've been questioning the place that yet-another-"publishing house" has in the world. There's a surplus as it stands, so why do I need to add to it? I'm trying to figure that out. I'm also in the process of examining my own relationship to this realm of so-called "indie lit" as it stands, because I fear things that move into a hegemony, and with there being so little that has surprised me in a good way lately, I'm afraid of staying so connected. The only way to overcome fear is to fight through it, abandon it (alternatively, one can obsess over it and use narrative to break it apart). I am nomadic and the press is too. I want to re-articulate the relationship between art and writing in the world. What is the best method for this? How can I figure that out? The only way is to experiment. See what fails and what doesn't fail. Lately I am more excited by things happening at publishing houses related to critical theory and philosophy and art. But fiction, whatever fiction means, is important to me. Poetry is becoming more important to me, but only poetry that moves like the sun and warms my body. The sun that permits excess. Of its thirteen releases, the only authors from S▲L that I have met in the flesh are me and two others. The rest exist to me only immaterially. That might change one day, it probably will. Everything is decentralized. Nothing is broken because there is no home. Books can die. Books are already dead. We are already dead. I used to insist that I will one day die in the ocean. Now I'm not so sure.
JN: What other SECRETS can you tell us exist without revealing entirely? Why do you hold SECRETS? What power does a SECRET hold? Are there too many SECRETS or not enough? How many people must know a SECRET for it to cease being as one? Let's move from SECRETS to secretions. Which is your favourite? Which is your least? Which do you produce the most of? What is the difference between a tear and a bead of sweat? Is hair a secretion?
JN: Are you SECRETS so SECRET that this interview is over because I asked about them?
MK: uh yeah idk i guess i'm done for now lol
