Brian Whitener: Your amazing book brings together proletarian dead, fantasies of revenge and redemption (including Jeff Bezos’s demise) and the late 80s, early 90s tv show Unsolved Mysteries. As you write: “We’re going to take Jeff Bezos’s money and we’re going to document ourselves and our pets, all our affections, our quotidian habits.” How did you come to articulate these elements and what is their utopian promise or political valence in the present?
Marie Buck: I pretty arbitrarily started watching Unsolved Mysteries. It was, perversely, on Amazon Video, so newly easily watchable. A friend told me he was watching it. I also started watching it—just in a binge-y way, at night, while folding laundry or winding down or whatever. I got intrigued pretty quickly, though. For one, there are all sorts of regional dialects I had never heard. Working class people in their 50s or so, speaking in the late 80s, often in some rural region of the US. And those accents aren’t really in mainstream fiction films; they’re just not captured or represented anywhere that I had seen. And I was intrigued by that, which then made me realize that, more generally, a lot of people appear on the show who aren’t represented in media, who aren’t captured very frequently.
And there were a few other aspects that caught my attention too. One is that the show—and more literally Robert Stack, I guess—is an unreliable narrator in these sort of glaringly obvious ways. I’m thinking of, for instance, an episode that speculates on who might’ve killed a woman, Patsy Wright, for most of the show, really playing up the mystery aspect—she lived this staid life, she had no enemies, why would someone have possibly poisoned her, etc.—and then at the sort of climax of the episode the voiceover says something like “could it have been her ex-husband, against whom she’d taken out a restraining order?” And then details a history of abuse and threats, including Patsy having told friends that the ex was stalking her in the week leading up to her death. And there are at least a few episodes like that in the early seasons, where you’re like “IT IS DEFINITELY CLEARLY THE HUSBAND” but the show plays up the mystery. It really registers the tendency to downplay intimate partner abuse and play up possible threats from strangers. It seems very of its fear-mongering moment. There is also sometimes ambiguous queer subtext that intrigued me—some mysteries around lifelong bachelors and the fact that they didn’t marry, for instance.
The other wild part of the show is that it really reveals how much more surveilled we are in 2020 than we were in the 80s. In the show, people seem to commit fraud or murder and then move a couple of counties over and go by a different name and remain undiscovered for years. Or they get adopted as children by a family thirty minutes away and decades later run into their twin at the grocery store or whatever—there are also these “lost loves” segments about people being reunited as well as all the mysterious deaths segments that the show is better known for.
But it’s a weird structure: the show turns its viewers into snitches. It’s interactive and viewers are encouraged to call in if they have information. And it’s really bizarre to see that just changing your name and growing a beard twenty miles away was enough for people to fly under the radar. Everyone was, relatively speaking, off the grid and not very surveilled. And then this show often blows their cover when viewers call in. I don’t really have a take here: fuck snitching, and also I don’t feel a lot in that many of the suspects here did things like murder their families. But all to say the show really records this incredible shift in surveillance that has taken place in our lifetimes and that was striking to me.
With regard to the other part of your question, the revenge and redemption part: I think this worked its way in via a feeling of political defeat. Or maybe not quite defeat; I was writing this during the pre-Covid Trump admin and then also was doing various phone-banking etc. for Bernie and feeling pretty hopeful about left electoral strategies, actually. But I guess the thing that’s changed for me in the past few years is just that when I was younger and first participating in organizing and left political work, I had a sort of real faith in a Marxist teleology. Like in an almost religious way, I really felt like we’d ultimately win, even if not in my lifetime. Or, I at least tried to force that belief as a way to keep myself engaged. I’m remembering that “I-I-I-believe-I-believe-that-we-will-win” chant and jumping up and down shouting it at a rally once. I mean, I think the entire Left is sort of burdened with having to have a sort of encouragement/booster orientation and aesthetic at all times. And there’s very little space for disappointment, defeat, anxiety, etc.—it usually gets metabolized into debates about theory or strategy, instead of their being a space for mourning. Which I’ve always felt as a strain; I can never quite totally buy in. But I wanted to.
And my desire to think that I had a belief system and a strategy and a formula and all of that strikes me as quite naive now. My politics and beliefs are still the same, but there’s no guarantee of anything, and I feel deeply agnostic about strategy. (I think the Left tends to turn in on itself in the face of defeat—it would be nice if whether we won something or not was a matter of the correct caucus convincing the incorrect caucus of the better strategy, but so much of the time the reason for a defeat is simply that the capitalist classes and the state have more power and have defeated us.) But anyway, in my agnosticism and sadness, I’ve had a real desire for religion that would mean something. Or like, we’re probably not going to get justice in this world and I’d love to see Bezos and the rest of them burn in hell. And I feel sort of like I understand religiosity in a way I didn’t when I was younger: of course, you want there to be some accounting for all the evil in the world in some other world if not here. (Obviously most religions, and definitely the Catholicism I grew up with, have a different notion of evil than I do. And I write this without having done any study of religion, so please forgive that I’m being entirely anecdotal.)
But I guess at least we can put that feeling—that desire for justice—into art. I’m thinking a little bit of David Wojnarowicz’s writing about art in Close to the Knives here: “At least in my ungoverned imagination I can fuck somebody without a rubber, or I can, in the privacy of my own skull, douse Helms with a bucket of gasoline and set his putrid ass on fire or throw congressman William Dannemeyer off the empire state building.” So I guess the poems are perhaps fetish objects for me. I’ve often made the argument that poetry is not itself political in the sense that it does not wield political power—you can read politics off of it, but it’s not part of a strategy for organizing a union or defunding the police or getting Medicare for All or getting rent canceled or etc. Poetry is not politics itself; instead it’s where I’m putting my sort of existential desire for something else, my need to imagine the world as meaning-bearing, suffering as not simply arbitrary, etc.
I’ve been watching a lot of quarantine movies lately and recently wound up accidentally doing a sort of double-header of Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light, a bleak movie about a priest and his lover and one of his parishioners all being without faith, the parishioner killing himself, God not existing, and Gregg Araki’s Smiley Face, an old favorite that I think I first heard about from Brandon Brown—a stoner movie wherein Anna Farris’s character gets so high that, through a series of events, she loses her old professor’s original 1848 copy of the Communist Manifesto, scattering it from the top of a Ferris wheel while super stoned. We see leaves of paper scatter from the Ferris wheel out onto Venice Beach, but then along the highway, back to the town she was in earlier in the movie, to the feet of various characters she’s encountered along the way. I.e., the movie is referencing a left aesthetic trope in which a text is disseminated and these are little seeds, the revolution is not defeated but is growing in new places, etc. (One intense scene like this is in I Am Cuba, where the police raid a print shop and one character runs outside to the balcony and throws the group’s just-printed leaves of agit-prop into the wind and is then shot, his body slumping and falling as the papers swirl through the air and are then picked up and read by the crowd below—and it’s a common trope across various movies and texts.) But here it’s different: no one in the movie except the professor notices or cares about these pieces of paper, Anna Farris does not care about them—she just went to the house of her former Marxist Studies professor when she was super high, had some orange juice and Tostitos, and was accidentally given this manuscript by the professor’s unwitting mother, who mistakes her for a TA; she knows some things about Marxism but doesn’t identify with it and just wants to return to the comfy bed that she recently bought; she is planning on selling this rare copy of the manifesto on eBay; and the movie is not really “about” the manifesto; it’s definitely mostly about being high. The rousing speech that Anna Farris’s character gives at a pork plant she’s stumbled into, even, turns out to be a stoney dream sequence, and she can’t say much of anything because she’s too high.
This is all to say, Smiley Face struck me as not totally unlike Winter Light, in that it’s also about the most important tenets of one’s worldview being rendered as arbitrary, with no guarantees of actual meaning. I feel like most leftist art doesn’t debate whether life has meaning in the way that the Bergman movie does—it assumes yes, and that we want life, more of it, for everyone. But Smiley Face is like, yep, people can have pages of the Communist Manifesto fall at their feet and it can be arbitrary and accidental and we’re not on any forward path. And that resonates with me and also feels like a motivation for using poetry as a place to put—in a very different register—all that despair and desire for a system of justice in this world or another one. Let’s at least imagine justice in the space where we can, and maybe that will help me muster the energy to do actual political work again.
BW: I want to pick up on that idea of the uses of poetry and also the verb you used “imagine.” This book is filled with fantasy, sometimes of revenge, sometimes sexual, sometimes of suicide. But it is not fantasy like the speculative fiction that many have written recently. You write: “We can dwell in it if we want: don’t go to work, stay here and fuck and be fucked, like the scene in Eisenstein’s Stachka when the factory workers have struck and a couple lays around in bed with a great fur blanket. Mid-day fucking, the opposite of work.” So one use of poetry is to imagine the world as it might be otherwise. But also to show it and its pasts–as you do in the retelling of Unsolved Mysteries episodes—as they actually are, with all their unrelenting violence and proletarian death we often pass over? And is a third connected to “muster[ing] the energy”? It doesn’t seem like you want to mourn the dead, but rather to avenge them. Is there a connection between fantasy and psychic energy and avenging (and maybe redemption)? Or between generating psychic energy and investments and this book’s particular vision of justness (or is justice the right word)?
MB: Oh, I like this question—yeah, I think that’s exactly it; I don’t really have much faith in actual justice happening, and so I guess I am thinking of art—and fantasy—as possibly the only realm in which it can. Or maybe: of course we want it to happen in real life, but since we so often wind up feeling defeated, why not comfort ourselves with a vision of winning? I want the book to feel like a sort of placeholder that lets you at least see the negative space around a victory. And I think of the sex in the book as kind of utopian too. Obviously sex itself can be fraught or violent or any number of non-utopian things. But in the book it’s utopian, it’s connection, it’s a little opening for something that can very much feel outside of everyday life, where everyday life is pretty violent and unhappy.
BW: Let’s talk about sex then. This book is filled with fascinating mediations on sex. In one part you blend a discussion of a threesome with Frank O’Hara’s personism, writing “how hot it is be a conduit” and in another you write, “In real life, you rub your clit with a rapidly vibrating Hitachi and find that you feel nothing.” In conversation with friends I kept trying to describe what sex was doing in this book or what the book was doing with it. Sexual ethnography? Erotica of concepts? Pornosocial theory? It felt very different than newer queer version of sex positivity, conversations about intimacy or kinship, or writing where sex experience is channeled through a strong I (though there are elements of each in this book). What were you thinking about when you were working on these poems?
MB: Hmm, this is a good question. I think one thing the book is doing is mapping desire for a different world onto sexual desire, and sexual desire is the thing that can get fulfilled much more easily.
The book is also to some extent about keeping records of things—about death and everything turning to dust eventually—but also about a desire to record the world, to preserve it. And sexual experiences feel like they’re especially in that realm of significant-life-experiences-of-which-there-are-usually-no-record, where even the memory of something dissipates quickly afterward, like a dream. Which makes me want to record them. I read Mechanical Fantasy Box: The Homoerotic Journal of Patrick Cowley just as I was finishing up initial edits on the book, and I was very moved by it. It’s the sex diary of Patrick Cowley, who made Hi-NRG and disco music in the 70s. Some of the entries are really brief, some more elaborate; some matter-of-fact descriptions of sex, some sexier, more pornographic descriptions of sex. And I loved that there was a record of these usually very brief encounters from nearly fifty years ago—we, the readers, get looped into this fleeting pleasure through this text, which exists only because Cowley’s friend saved the journal after Cowley’s death and then eventually, just last year, published it.
Unsolved Mysteries is interested in intimacy generally, and it always strikes me as a bit of a miracle that physical intimacy, even, or sometimes maybe especially, absent emotional intimacy, can feel—to me at least—very euphoric and real. Like a weird little gift. The book is I guess interested in bridging gaps of time, too, so that writing becomes a way to keep the dead present. And there are a couple of fantasy sequences about fucking people from the past—the 1985 pig farmer from Louis Malle’s documentary God’s Country, in the poem “Oh,” for instance—and intimacy across time, so that we can sense history unfolding, feel its contingency and the possibility of other worlds, resurrect the dead and penetrate their bodies and have them penetrate ours—and I guess this is just a pretty good fantasy for me, and one that can exist only in writing. So that some of the sex in the book exists as euphoric and utopian in the gaps of our real-life dystopian world, and some of the sex is part of this fantasy of preservation and archiving and holding onto things and people. At one point when I was writing I was like “is this book about fucking ghosts? That seems kind of goofy?” But I mean, it kind of is, and I guess I ultimately like that fantasy.
Sexuality is also obviously fraught in lots of ways—but maybe that’s some of the pleasure of writing and reading: we get to include only the good parts if we want.
BW: Gaps! I had a bunch of notes about different kinds of gaps, especially temporal ones or opening up gaps between the past or future and present, but couldn’t formulate it into a question. I want to ask a follow up question that ties together some of the different threads we’ve been talking about—sex, the dead, utopias, politics, and fantasy. I spent a lot of time thinking about how the book relates to the, once again, fashy present. I think there’s only one place in the book where there is a direct mention of a fashy figure or event. But I know obviously you have thought about and followed all those developments closely. Reading, I felt like maybe one place of connection might be in how the book is motived by drives—sex and death, and perhaps fantasy. It feels libidinal. If fascism is a politics of drives and a libidinal economy of death, maybe your book models an anti-fascist libidinal economy (of fantasy, sex/desire/intimacy, and avenging). Where do you see the connections to this fashy present or how was this part of the present present when you were writing?
MB: Yes! So, on the one hand, I’m often a sort of naysayer about the possibility of politics aligning with one’s pleasures. I feel like a lot of people in the arts—sometimes myself included—tend to have a fantasy that their art is somehow itself doing radical politics. It would be lovely if the things we want to spend our time on—making art or whatever else—themselves contributed to building political power. But they usually don’t. (I tend to feel like the various political poetry I love got produced out of movements and not vice versa.) And I’m very skeptical of anything where like, people are organizing around the category of poets who oppose X or whatever: “poet” is not a meaningful political category and it would be better to find the people you agree with politically.
I tend to think of organizing as mostly administrative work, to be honest. You’re emailing people and following up with them and making events happen etc., or at least I felt like I was doing a lot of meaningful work toward building the Left when I was doing those things. I also find that kind of work impossible amidst other work right now—I usually just show up to things, if I’m involved at all—phone-banking or knocking doors or marching, something where someone else has done the organizational heavy-lifting already. I very much admire people’s capacity for taking on this sort of administrative work on top of their regular jobs.
So, anyway, I tend to think of organizing as vital but dull. But, that said, I feel like I have often experienced moments of collective action as ecstatic. For me, there’s a very particular feeling that is something like I-don’t-know-what’s-going-to-happen-next-but-we’re-affecting-it—the feeling where the future feels suspended and not yet determined, and you actually have the possibility of puncturing it, of getting what you want or at least throwing things off the pre-determined track and then suddenly there is no track anymore. Which feels wild and good. I don’t know if this gets at what you’re saying—if we’d describe this as “libidinal,” exactly. But I can say that while I don’t think of organizing as fulfilling desires, I do think of these moments of collective power as intensely pleasurable in and of themselves because they open the possibility of desires being fulfilled.
Obviously Left victories are few and far between. But even without a clear-cut victory, sometimes it feels like some new formation is driving history at least a little bit, and I have found that feeling otherworldly and, I guess, libidinal. I mean, usually there’s yourself and the people you know and then the given world, which feels like a sort of fixed structure. And then you’re part of something that pierces through that fixed structure—it feels utterly new, and I assume that some similar feeling is what motivates a lot of people to stay around the Left. The first time I remember feeling it was during Occupy—something unexpected was happening and the meetings and marches I took part in in Detroit had this feeling like we were making things. I guess I think of Mark Fisher’s writing on depression here, too—I’d been alone in some state of angst about my life, my student loan debt and trying to either leave or stay in academia, etc. etc. and then suddenly this was a collective political endeavor and it felt like suddenly everyone could see something else—something other than whatever their current bad situation was—instead. So a sort of lifting of what Wojnarowicz calls the “predetermined world” and a feeling of solidarity across what usually felt like my own personal woes. It felt like I was on drugs; it made me spend lots more time organizing; I feel like there was a year or so that was just a blur. And I’ve felt tiny versions of it much more frequently. Someone moves from the sidewalk into the street and then others do too—I mean this moment just always feels ecstatic to me. Or seeing cops getting outmaneuvered and retreating. Or if you are, say, blocking something, and then drivers started honking and cheering and they are with you, actually. Or even the little sparks of feeling when I was phone-banking for Bernie and once in a while some stranger in another state really wanted to talk to me about the world and their life and what could be different. Obviously, these moments are also interspersed with a lot of ugly in-fighting, grueling administrative labor, and of course losses.
I guess what I’m trying to say is: the feeling of history being suspended in air and susceptible to puncturing feels like drugs to me, whenever I feel it, and I think that that feeling is something that sustains movements. And that suspension of history offers the possibility of a less atomized society; it offers the possibility of economic security and safety—all sorts of libidinal things.
I usually don’t have this feeling—things usually feel just fucked. I mean, I think things are definitely going to continue to get worse quickly, with cascading environmental devastation and its economic effects, etc. If I’m so depressive that picturing revolution or even a social welfare state feels cloying and forced, I can at least picture violent things happening to the capitalist class. And we can revel in the intimacies, physical or emotional or whatever, that we have, even as it feels to me like a tremendous stroke of luck that my jobs and life setup etc. allow enough time for friendship, sex, enough sleep most of the time, pleasures of various sorts. And you’re right that there is a lot of both rage and cynicism here—and in some ways, there’s no good or productive spot to put that in actual organizing, so maybe it makes sense to jettison it to the realm of arts and culture. I think the book is to some extent about making a space for rage and sadness—but then, hopefully, also about taking all the good parts of life that we can and letting them motivate us to take even more.