My novel

Here's an excerpt from my novel Haute Surveillance put up by Andrew Lundwall.

I should perhaps give some context: It's obviously a murder mystery. It's the old Hitchcockian "wrong man" who has to find the real killer scenario. Only he's not really in jail, he's in something more like a hospital (full of strange nurses and pro-life protesters), and another inmate is the "expresident" who regales him with tales of his sexual exploits and exploitations and genocidal cravings and then tricks the narrator into trying to kill "Father Voice-Over" who annoys the expresident with his announcements over the PA system. The problem with the novel is that I got kind of lost in the sexual and political pageantry of it all and I end up ending the story before he even gets out of jail/hospital. It ends when he gets out.

Right now I'm writing the sequel which is moving much much faster. He escapes jail, hitchhikes across the country with an acting troupe who puts on morality tales in smalltowns, gets to LA to find the real killer, gets help from a couple of teenage girls who more or less only speak Godard quotes and a maker of wasteful machines and his wife who takes messages Cocteau-style from the radio and his daughter who plays strange games. Then the plague hits LA Defoe-style and then he finds the killer. And that's the end of the second section.

The story has some things in common with the video for "Telephone" with Lady Gaga and Beyonce.

Here's a related thing, a scene from my pageant (forthcoming from Tarpaulin Sky Press); the character is named Trauma and this is one of his monologues. It's in the most recent issue of jubilat.

Trauma:

In the Rampant State, nobody understands how to clean the ganglia. Nobody knows how to thread it, how to abuse it, how to interrogate prisoners with it. In the Rampant State all the torture devices involve drowning or lynching. The General wants to lynch all the black male bodies with moths. He uses obvious innuendoes, to make sure his base understands him, but he cannot say it openly. To do so would be to offend the refined tastes of his base. If anybody accuses him of racism, he replies that the accusers are "playing the race card." I am playing the race card with a revolver pointing to my head. The revolver has an autonomic system. It is loaded with two silver bullets: one for my black brain and one for my insect nerve.