(cont.) "For a long time I framed what I consider to be my differences -- the things about me that make me different than most people, speaking categorically -- in fairly obvious ways."
"My life was unremarkable to the extent that it passed in ways that we've all seen or read about or experienced a million times."
"I grew up in a small town. My father died before I could remember him and my mother was always just completely stressed out about money. I had two sisters -- twins -- who spent all of their time together. I didn't feel related to them at all, especially once they went to junior high and were obsessed with jeans and boys and going to parties. They dated the same guy at the same time, this loser who was like four years older than they were. I think he sold drugs. I don't like to judge, but the whole thing was weird."
"They thought I was weird because I liked to spend as much time as I could in the library. It was like the only place I knew that was quiet. I didn't read a lot of books, but I read the same ones over and over, mostly the ones by Madeleine L'Engle and Ursula Le Guin. And Watership Down. Because I always believed that animals could talk. And obviously I wanted to escape, even though I couldn't have really framed it in those terms at the time. That's how it is with kids, I think. You just know that there's another world out there because someone's written about it, and slowly it occurs to you that in order to get there, you have to leave where you are now."
"When I finally left home -- I was sixteen -- I thought that escape was more a question of geography, whereas now I would say it's more a question of psychology."
"Life in the city wasn't the fantasy I had imagined. It wasn't an escape. People still looked at me like I was a freak and animals still didn't talk. It began to dawn on me that the things I wanted most in life weren't ever going to happen."
"But I still went to the library as much as I could, like whenever I wasn't working, that's where I would go."
"One night as they were closing, I decided that I wanted to spend the night there, so that's what I did. I wasn't that hard. I just hid under one of the chairs as they were closing up, and a few minutes later, I was alone in the dark, except for a few lights they kept on in the hallway. And there were security guards, too, but they made the rounds in very predictable ways, so it was easy to avoid them. I don't know if you've ever spent a night in a library, but it's very different than during the day. There's no rustling or footsteps or coughs or whispered conversations, it's just you and all these books. There are so many words, and all of a sudden it was like I could hear them. It was like this explosion or cacophony of awareness, almost like that second when someone walks into a surprise birthday party and the lights go on and there's mayhem, except this mayhem was in my head."
"I couldn't stay in that room, so I ran down the hall and ended up going down some stairs into the basement, which was a maze. It was frightening but I felt like I needed to be there. It was the reason I had heard the books."
"I went into a small room and just sat in the dark next to some old cabinets. I wasn't scared anymore. I felt like I was waiting for something."
"And that's when I saw them. There were two of them. They opened the door, came into the room, took something out of the file cabinets, and left. I was watching through a crack in the closet, where I went when I heard the door start to open. And they weren't librarians or guards or any kind of person I had ever seen. They were wearing clothes, but their skin -- like what you could see of it -- was glowing."
"Did I tell anyone? No, I never told anyone, because I knew that nobody would believe me. But I never forgot, either, which I've come to think of as a gift and a burden, the thing that truly sets me apart. Maybe it will be different now that I know that there are others like me, but maybe not, if we're all living in places like this."
Pictures taken in Fort Tryon Park on June 4, 2016. Text excerpted from The #Gods Project: A Training Manual (Section 2, "Interviews with the Institutionalized.")
« Our Democracy Might or Might Not Be Fading Like the Flowers of a Spring Azalea (Op Ed) | Main | Notes on Institutional Conservatism Accompanied by Pictures of Beautiful Plants »
06/08/2016
ORDER HERE
A RADICAL NEW MYTH ABOUT SEX, FAITH, AND THOSE OF US WHO WILL NEVER DIE
A young boy wanders into the woods of Harlem and witnesses the abduction of his sister by a glowing creature. Forty years later, now working as a New York City homicide detective, Gus is assigned to a case in which he unexpectedly succumbs to a vision that Helen is still alive. To find her, he embarks on an uorthodox investigation that leads to an ancient civilization of gods and the people determined to bring them back.
In this colossal new novel from the author of The Metropolis Case, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice collides with a new religion founded by three corporate office workers, creating something beautiful, illogical, and overwhelming. Part sex manifesto, part religious text, part Manhattan noir—with a dose of deadly serious, internet inspired satire—#gods is a sprawling inquest into the nature of faith and resistance in the modern world. With each turn of the page, #gods will leave you increasingly reborn.
Praise for #gods
“#gods is a mystery, an excavation of myths, an index of modern life, a gay coming-of-age story, an office satire, a lyrical fever dream, a conspiracy. One of the most ambitious novels in recent memory—and a wild, possibly transformative addition to the canon of gay literature—it contains multitudes, and seethes with brilliance.” —Mark Doten, author of The Infernal
“Matthew Gallaway’s #gods is a novel so brilliant, so funny, so full of strange and marvelous things, I couldn’t stop writing OMG WTF I <3 THIS SO MUCH in its margins. It’s rare to find a novel that so dazzlingly reinvigorates age-old meditations on faith and f&!*ing, art and eros. Luminous, enterprising, and sublimely cheeky, #gods tells the story, the myth, the dream of the human soul in all its glorious complexity.” —Suzanne Morrison, author of Yoga Bitch
“Matthew Gallaway’s storytelling manages to be both dreamy and serious; lean and luxurious. His words carry an incantatory power of mythic storytelling where beauty and savagery wrap around each other like bright threads in a gorgeous tapestry.” —Natasha Vargas-Cooper, author of Mad Men Unbuttoned: A Romp Through 1960s America
“If the ancient gods were just like us, only more so, then the same could be said for this strange, wonderful book, in which the mundane sorrows and small triumphs of very ordinary lives glow ever so slightly around the edges, sometimes quite literally. At once an oddly romantic send-up of dead-end office culture and an offbeat supernatural procedural, #gods is terrifically weird, melancholy, sexy, and charming.” —Jacob Bacharach, author of The Bend of the World
'It’s to the credit of Matthew Gallaway’s enchanting, often funny first novel that it doesn’t require a corresponding degree of obsession from readers, but may leave them similarly transported: the book is so well written — there’s hardly a lazy sentence here — and filled with such memorable lead and supporting players that it quickly absorbs you into its worlds.'
-- The New York Times
Music: Death Culture at Sea and Saturnine
Listen or download songs and records from my indie-rock past with Saturnine here and Death Culture at Sea here.
Music Video: Remembrance of Things Past
Watch the rock opera Remembrance of Things Past written and performed by Saturnine and Frances Gibson, starring Bennett Madison and Sheila McClear.
Video: The Chaos Detective
The Chaos Detective is a series about a man searching for 'identity' as he completes assignments from a mysterious organization. Watch the first episode (five parts) on YouTube.
All photographs on this blog can be purchased HERE in many formats including tiles :)