The Paris Review – On Nate Lippens

I’ve been reading Nate Lippens for years. I think this is the third time I’ve read My Dead Book and I’m finally getting a grip on what kind of machine his writing is. I think it’s a poetic instrument and also some kind of natural phenomena. I went to Joshua Tree one night in the aughts with a gang of people to see the Perseids. I’ve been thinking about that. We had sleeping bags and some people had drinks and their drugs of choice and then we all laid down flat looking up the sky waiting for the show. There wasn’t much. Like almost nothing. There’s one. And then in maybe about seven minutes another. Then another one. And nothing for a while. Then wham and all of the sudden we were screaming, giddy as kids because we were getting inundated with meteors making the sky like this crazy vibing net and we were ancient people animals lying there looking up in naked awe. It was the best. Start to finish I think that’s what Nate Lippens has done. Let me lay it out here. My Dead Book starts off with a fairly sentimental recitation, a recollection of one of his dead friends from the past. And then another one. I mean of course I like the way he writes. It’s clean, it’s fairly direct, and conceptually I am reminded of how practical friendship is to a lost child which this narrator definitely is. If you don’t know who you are then you make yourself up with bits and pieces of your friends. And losing them means continually losing yourself who never existed except what you got from them and what’s constant in these evocations and recollections is the trashy elegance, swarming and specific bravado of a collection of souls who are lost and living antithetical to the values of the culture itself. Young rent boys and old rent boys and the people who collect them. We have books of course that are memoirs by particular people living in particular times but My Dead Book will have none of that. These are no ones mostly. Self-declared. It’s a midwestern book. Going to New York or LA to trick, even living there for a while but always coming back. Maybe there’s one kind of someone but he doesn’t value that. And it turns out he’s invented. He’s mostly me, Nate said. So we’re on the fringe, the fringe of the fringe. So what we have is loss and a compounding of loss, more and more. People age out, bodies get found in the river. People jump in the river. The cup spilleth over. So what’s the story. It’s a rhythmic trick. Like poetry. Like God is. And a queer one. His narrator tells about Gore Vidal saying that there are no homosexual people, only homosexual acts. So wise in a late-night-talk-show way (and Nate is not from that generation (mine) who stayed up late to see Truman Capote and Oscar Levant and Gore Vidal preen and pontificate on swivel chairs, but he’s entirely of it and Oscar Wilde too, definitely the Oscar Wilde of De Profundis but funnier) but the joke I want is how our narrator finds that quote funny because Gore Vidal was such a faggot. Rich as he was and toney and all he nonetheless handed them that joke. He was one of the boys. So he knew he’d be laughed at when he left the room or when the teevee went off for the night. So imagine reality being that place then. So we retreat into language here. Some of the jokes are just quietly squeezing the repetition. Almost with your fingertips. If money weren’t a factor somebody, a friend with money, begins a speech. What follows is a very conversational sequence of if-money-weren’t-a-factors but thinky, inside oneself. Which is also one of the main soundstages here. The narrator can’t sleep so he’s prone to long conversations with himself. If money weren’t a factor he asks finally (alone in bed) would we even know each other? It’s a quiet laugh followed by further critique of the wealthier friend but he has displayed his sword, his wit so we roll along for the next skein of thoughts. Nate takes huge risks with our capacity to suffer with him. And I like being pushed to that edge which is like watching your single mom clean the house and never knowing (it might take forever) when she is going to say something disarmingly filthy or just informative—something you’d never known about her before.

Of his class of boys Nate Lippens tells us:

We remembered social workers, outreach volunteers, and youth counselors with their advice, programs, groups, condoms, free anonymous screenings, and clean syringes. They trained us to be vigilant. No exceptions. They saved our lives and taught us to trust no one.

It’s a revelation. These dark comedians were “built” in so many ways. By social programs that saw everything but them. These are the kids who had the shit kicked out of them in school, whose dads beat them up for being fags—Dear Officer Krupke fuck you—but gay. The inside strikes back with a ton of young and not-so-young death. Thud, then everyone returning for encores throughout the text while the bodies keep landing on the deck like fish. Thump. And that’s the story.

There’s no rules when you’re not telling a story but stories. For me that’s the most redemptive thing of all. And because the narrator always loved Shane, perhaps the most recurring burnished tragic figure here, he ends a passage explaining that he wanted to save him with a kind of Diamond Dogs flourish:

I pictured us like salamanders, emerging from the fire with bright iridescent scales. Always the “just before” creates the very swirl of this. I imagine such lines bursting forth from hours of listening to music high for hours, and beauty and excess stepping out to dance just like humor always puts a stop to things and gets us out of the room. As I read My Dead Book again I was increasingly in awe at Nate’s timing and intuition. He was a poet first before anything else and you can smell it here. Most machinically, his bits and pieces are generally just a third of a page, a procession of them. This is a book full of asterisks for sure. Just when we’ve hit bottom with a character’s absolute inability to have intimacy with anyone other than his listening friend (and including him) the story races off to consider a world where “all the people who called ‘us’ bitter in the ’90s are now”—guess!?—“at the Whitney’s David Wojnarowicz exhibit.” Point being they would eat our dead bodies if we were famous. Turned out like this, the despair that floods this book like an abandoned car feels more like everybody’s problem and it is.

Humor is a kind of disordering, like ten, nine, eight, seven, three! and three tears a hole in your expectation and you crawl out laughing from a trap. Sometimes it’s ta-dum, sometimes a line noodles in like the moment when he’s talking about a show of matchbooks from “now-defunct gay bars and sex clubs.” His tone slightly shifts maybe lowers before explaining that the show refers to “a time that is an intermittent blinking on some abandoned shore, maybe.” I love the maybe. A whole era could be vast as in a movie about it, or infinitesimal like a kind of distant unforgettable light. But honestly it’s almost more than the beauty of the line, its noodling, its refusal to be major as another way of honoring what’s past. We were and now we are not. That’s all it means to say. It’s antimonumental. I feel I’m in danger of saying things I’ve said before, swooping Nate’s work into a wave of praise for things I’ve categorized before. If he’s related to that he shines most as the most uncategorizable, a poet of adamantine failure who while he’s experiencing the heft of his own declaration teases himself and us with vows of love, pledges to specific beauties, rages against conformities of comfort in relation to wealth and ideas and who’s declared valuable by “the community” (a phrase which he sneers at, delightedly) that wants to embellish our gay or queer love with the cozy and warm fragrance of home (and—at last—acceptance).

The spiky poetic homelessness of My Dead Book is in relation to a devotion to not fitting in, not anywhere ever. I haven’t read this yet before, not anywhere at all, though he’s moved by a literature I know that is never fiction or nonfiction but poetic fact unraveled with unparalleled and sidestepping skill.

Whatever his truth is he’s willing to die for it, woulda, but didn’t. And there’s one final effect which I’ve got to mention which is that once I’ve gotten used to the erratic flicker of his prose, the effects that randomly lighten his dead load, as the book comes to its final curve and it feels a bit like the narrator is a survivor after all and is mourning his loves and his own life and his family in recollection, what I’ve experienced in this book is formal somehow, the lights begin to stay and the final passage is bright as hell like one star stayed, yup, and got us home as well. It says hello. And man, can you write.

Excerpt from Eileen Myles’s introduction to My Dead Book by Nate Lippens, to be published by Semiotext(e) this October.