(cont.) "When I was a kid I loved plants and flowers, but I didn't tell anyone about it."
"Instead, like most of my classmates, I got interested in animals, which was somehow 'safer' if you know what I mean (laughs)."
"You don't know what I mean? You're kidding, right? Well, let me put it this way: for a boy to be be interested in flowers was like being interested in musicals or dresses or anything else that made it pretty clear that you were planning to move to fag city."
"So I kept my love of flowers on the 'down low'. Sometimes I would check a book out of the library or just thumb through the pages and it was really like pornography to my young mind."
"Thinking back on it, I would say there are a few reasons why I liked flowers and plants. For starters, they weren't people (laughs)."
"No but seriously, I remember the first time my mother took me to a real garden. It was near Philadelphia, not far from where I grew up, and there were just acres and acres of these plants. On some level I knew they wouldn't have been arranged so beautifully without people, but at the same time I felt like they were the rulers and we -- as in the humans -- were their servants."
"I know a lot of people feel awestruck when they see the ocean or the desert or maybe the mountains for the first time, but for me it was this garden, for the very reason that it wasn't completely divorced from civilization, but instead showcased our highest impulses or ambitions."
"It made me optimistic about life, which was a strange feeling for me. Walking through the garden, I begged the flowers to read my mind. I knew they wouldn't judge. They didn't admire me, either, but their ambivalence made them even more beautiful."
"They were also so unapologetic. They lived and they died without any shame. Who knew that life could be like that?"
"The trees were a little more judgmental, as I'm sure you can imagine (laughs)."
"Trees live for a long time, which means they don't have the patience for people. They know that their age -- or era of dominance -- is in the past and they can't believe that they lost to a bunch of termites, which is how they think of humans. It's hard to blame them. Trees have suffered a lot over the past few thousand years and nobody really talks about it except in the most general way, like we're burning down the rain forests or whatever. But trees are individuals too. Imagine what it would be like to live for three hundred years and watch your family get cut to the ground and chopped up so that your insides can be used for a conference table in some big city office building. You can see why trees hate us."
"But flowers are too young to hold grudges, which I guess is why I feel most comfortable around them. I love the trees, too, but they make me feel so guilty."
"But I also know that the trees are connected to the gods. That's what you're here to talk to me about right? How do I know? They told me, that's how. I saw them and I asked what they were doing here, and one of them told me about the trees. Nobody believes me, but that doesn't make it any less true."
Pictures taken in Fort Tryon Park on July 2, 2016. Text excerpted from The #Gods Project: A Training Manual (Section 2, "Interviews with the Institutionalized.")
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07/08/2016
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.