The guiding principle of Six Ridiculous Questions is that life is filled with ridiculousness. And questions. That only by giving in to these truths may we hope to slip the surly bonds of reality and attain the higher consciousness we all crave. (Eh, not really, but it sounded good there for a minute.) It’s just. Who knows? The ridiculousness and question bits, I guess. Why six? Assonance, baby, assonance.
1. Say you’re a zebra. Well, OK, say you’re an anthropomorphized zebra with the power of speech living in a world populated primarily by anthropomorphized zebras. Not all anthropomorphized zebras are created equal; nor, it seems, are they all the herd-focused equines we might imagine. Take you for example.
Owing to your lack of focus on the herd as a whole, semi-nefarious nature, and perhaps most of all your employment on zebra Wall Street, you committed various financial crimes for which you were charged, tried, and convicted. Yes, apparently, the zebra justice system functions a bit more reliably than ours does. Having bid a tearful goodbye to your ten(!) calves, you show up at the doors of zebra prison ready to pay your debt to zebra society. What happens next?
Are you hoof-printed? Forced to wear stripes? Forced to wear solids? What are the gangs like in zebra prison, anyway? Sure, this is zebra white-collar prison but there must still be gangs, right? How about the guards? What are they like? I mean, you know they’re not “nice,” they’re prison guards, but what species are they? Or are they, too, zebras?
Go wild on this. You know you’ve been cooped up as an anthropomorphized zebra WAY TOO LONG. Actually, you’re going to be cooped up a lot longer, but you get the idea. Bonus credit for a description of visitors’ day. I mean…ten calves? Do they visit in shifts?
You know it’s funny, was years ago, in Spain, near Franco’s tomb, my junior year of college, and I was there with two friends Karina and Kristina… Kristina is a professor of anthropology now, apparently, and Karina followed through on her solemnly vowed intent our freshman year to marry Jeff Ament, the bassist of Pearl Jam, but instead of Ament she really did pair off with a jazz performer who lives in Amsterdam, which seems like maybe the next best thing, or even potentially a better thing. Nothing against Jeff Ament, whose bass-playing and hip self-awareness I also once felt an affinity for myself. There was something nun-like our freshman year when everybody was feral with hook-ups about Karina promising herself to Jeff Ament, which she seemed to take pretty seriously, at least for a while, and even though she was laughing about it. But a few years later, as I was saying, we were talking, in Spain, about which animals each of us are, or rather the two of them were talking, and I was being the guy in our trio, quieter, vigilant, adding my own laugh when needed. It was a beautiful day. There really wasn’t anything to be wary of. At some point, they both turned to me and wanted my answer, and Kristina said with absolute conviction, “You’re a zebra.” I laughed again. She read as completely confident about that statement. It was the overwhelmingly obvious answer that had just then occurred to her. I didn’t really know where she got it from, except that I had a black fleece jacket with gray and white stripes that I wore sometimes in winter where we went to college in Vermont. But it was like she was anointing me, and no other answer could ever have been possible. Now, all these years later, I read this ridiculous question, and there it is again, the moment returns. So, thank you for that. This past summer I interviewed the short story author Zach Williams, and after the interview proper, we were talking over a beer about whether there really might be something like low-grade telepathy, or thoughts and feelings that travel like radio signals from mind to mind, and so I do wonder a little bit, as you reflected for a second on which animal to change the animal placeholder in your question to, whether ‘zebra’ reached you because of the force with which Kristina first posited it in the universe. And like it was reverberating through the years, on some faint frequency, until zap, there it was lighting up the brain of Kurt Baumeister for a second or two, and nothing was ever the same, ever again.
With respect to prison, what it’s like, I was listening to a podcast episode tonight featuring the author Matthew Specktor and his father, venerable Hollywood agent Fred Specktor, and with regard to Matthew’s recent novelistic memoir, The Golden Hour, which I do sincerely recommend for anyone who hasn’t already read it—our entire era of corporate monopolies and monopsonies may or may not have been born in a backdoor agreement between Ronald Reagan, then president of SAG, and Lew Wasserman, his former agent and then the most powerful mover-and-shaker “in the industry,” as they say. A sort of ripple effect from that one moment. Why am I talking about this? A quotation from the book that host Kevin Goetz reads on the podcast, and that I was just listening to a couple of hours ago while cooking soup in the kitchen: “Fame is a prison. It traps you inside other people’s perceptions until you can’t help believing in them yourself. Until your own lonely effort to be a human being, to be nobody, is extinguished.”
And damn, right? Kind of an undertone of Beckett there, I think. I don’t know if I totally agree, but it’s an excellent formulation, a fine provocation, and no doubt true in moments, in places.
As far as prison, I think about cliques. I think about tribalism. About how being a free radical becomes a difficult, even dangerous posture in our monopolistic age. I think about a manuscript I edited this past summer by a southern white guy who made a bundle selling large quantities of pot in the ’80s until he was busted, then served around a decade, and got out to pick up more or less exactly what he was doing before, but now it was legal. The manuscript is a memoir. I’d like to say more about it—specifically, some wisdom he shares about doing time—but I don’t think it has sold yet, so I’d better not. Ask me about that wisdom if you see me at the bar. I’d definitely recommend somebody pick that manuscript up.
And zebras? The stripes are on their very bodies. They carry the prison with them.
2. Why are the colors of house paint given such extravagant names like, y’know, Butternut Biscuit Beige and Pearl-Lustered Tangerine? Is it simply to sell more paint by appealing to the whimsy of the apparently quite whimsical paint-buying public? Are the name-givers frustrated artists or, still worse, frustrated marketing MBAs? Or is there something even deeper and darker than art and MBAs at play here? What’s your theory?
I’m writing this winter at a 200 year-old farmhouse in Vermont, a place to live more frugally while subletting my spot in Brooklyn. It’s been both great and challenging — I’m daily confronted with how addicted I’ve become to the prospect of going out, for book events or just to socialize, which New York City offers in spades. There’s always something if you want there to be something. You can live centrifugally, sort of constantly absenting yourself from yourself because there’s always something else to do to occupy your mind and your voice. Vermont, especially in winter, is much the opposite, and that is a good thing for writing. Concentrates the mind. In the house where I’m staying, though, the owners have been gradually renovating the place, tastefully, but mostly through their own labor, room by room. This past week, they’ve seen to repainting the walls in the upstairs bathroom that I use. There were color swatches on the walls, maybe four different options they were looking at for each room. I tend to avoid corporate language, marketing language, like the plague—I just sort of blot it out in my mind, overwrite it before the words have even passed through my awareness—and I guess I think of those color names as branding exercises of that sort. So even to retain the language around those colors just feels unnecessary. Why? Why would anybody? Look at the color. Is the color right for the room? Great.
I’m reminded, too, about all the discourse around slop, which mainly has to do with “A.I.” I know. But I’d argue there’s all kinds of language usage that constitutes slop. Even a few novels too.
And, sure, OK, I recognize there might be those who’d advocate for paint names as the most exquisite type of commercial language there is. Bespoke, right? A name that compliments you, the viewer, for being able to discern how subtly the color is inflected. But I guess I prefer my poetry not be subjugated to paint brands. Take me to court, if you must.
3. Please solve the following unrelated set of simultaneous equations using only sentences:
(Entropy – Mount Everest) / (Blue + Potato) = (Milan Kundera x Land Shark)2
Vanity + (Hunger / Love) = Turing Test – (Napoleon / Big Mac)
JTP: Gotta say this question does feel pretty inspired. Maybe let’s all just step back for a moment and admire it.
What it gets at, ultimately, I think, is the question of what lasts. What lasts? To whom and by what means are our deepest commitments made? And why and to what end? And may that end just be beauty? And if all of our pain serves our art does that mean it was for the best?
4. What are you thinking?
Private thought.
5. You’re sad because yesterday you lost your job as a first-year barista. However, owing to the kind ministrations of techno-capitalism, you’re already been contacted by an executive recruitment firm tasked with finding a new Thanos for the Marvel universe. No, I don’t mean a new thespian to play Thanos. Josh Brolin, all his body paint, prosthetics, CGI and whatever are safe. I’m talking about the real Thanos.
Negatives: If you get this role, you’ll be forced to become a two-dimensional being in more ways than one.
Positives: The compensation and benefits package is simply incredible, otherworldly if you will.
Verdict: You want this job. Nay, you NEED this job.
At the end of a battery of interviews, personality and intelligence testing, and other borderline Orwellian processes you sit down with the firm’s CEO for a final interview. This CEO, let’s call her Z, is so well regarded in the field of executive recruitment that if the interview goes well enough, you’ll get the job. You will be Thanos.
A grueling six-hour interview ensues in which you are refused everything from water to Kleenex to a phone call. You feel like a prisoner. You, in fact, feel so much like a prisoner that you say to Z, “I’m really starting to feel like a prisoner here.” Z assures you you’re not a prisoner, that you can get up and leave any time, but leaving will impact your eligibility for this coveted role as 2 D supervillain. You get up to leave anyway. You’ve really had it with this Z’s bullshit at this point. However, she raises a hand to cut you off before you can go. “Just kidding,” she says. “There’s only one more question, and if you ace the answer, you’ve got the job.”
You sit back down. “What is it?” you ask.
“Instead of being able to blink half the beings in reality out of existence, the Infinity Gauntlet allows you to select one famous dessert to blink out of existence. You must choose the famous dessert, the absence of which from our timeline would have the most far-reaching negative effects on reality. Which dessert do you choose? Please describe the effects corresponding to its nonexistence in detail.” Please be comprehensive and convincing. Your future career as a wealthy, famous two-dimensional supervillain is on the line.
Readers, especially readers online, seem extremely sensitive to word counts. Maybe because, as readers online, it’s like we’re all polyamorous, all multivalent. Whatever we’re reading at any given time, there’s always something else we could click thru and read, or scroll, or hit ‘play’ on the video, or whatever. I was speaking to centrifugal living in an earlier answer, and I guess there can be centrifugal reading, too, where the goal isn’t to synthesize, to live with and really deeply absorb and process and just reckon by, but to cut through like a knife does room-temperature butter.
As an editor—editor of newborn lit mag Big Score—sometimes, although not necessarily in the context of submissions, sometimes I’ll encounter a writer using the phrase ‘just desserts.’ And so as an editor, if I’m editing the prose, I’ll go in there and mark that. But the funny thing is, probably until my early 20s, I, too, thought the expression was ‘just desserts,’ in the sense that dessert in some midwestern sense—the Midwest being where I grew up—is essentially what you live for, the end goal, the infinity stones you collect by dint of living well among loved ones, and so someone receiving their ‘just desserts’ was understood by younger me as a way of saying, No desserts.
‘In the end he got his just desserts.’ Think of Boss Tweed, having dropped all that weight, alone in his cell. I was wrong when I was younger, although I probably spoke confidently on the subject, and at the same time, I may have been kind of right. (Editor’s note on further research: in the expression, ‘deserts’ is apparently used in the sense of ‘what one deserves’ and not in that of a sandy, wind-swept nothing below an unrelenting sun, although, once again, there’s a chance here for it to be both.)
What we’re doing with Big Score is the purist thing, reading submissions with the writer names removed, and appearing in print twice a year, with each issue an eminently readable 75 pages or so, and we have nice cover artwork, and pay writers halfway decently. $400/narrative prose & $100/poem. $400/criticism which can be pitched over the transom (name included) by writing to us at bigscorelit@gmail.com. The email address is for criticism only. For the other avenues, check out the ‘About’ section on our website. Each issue, as of now, is printed in a numbered edition of 200. Spring and Fall. No. 2 will release at the beginning of March. The best way to support what we’re doing is by subscribing at about the cost, each year, of two months of Netflix. This is a nice thing. You don’t have to, but goddamn it, you should.
6. Is God real?
Assholes who say ‘no’ are real. You can usually tell if they’re assholes or not by how they go about it. We’ve probably all had our moments, some of us more than others. People who get off by dangling other people over a figurative abyss. At the same time, dangling over the abyss, as I believe the author Julian Tepper said when I interviewed him for BOMB Magazine a few years back, is the truest state of being that a writer knows. Or Julian may not have said exactly that. But something like it. That interview was originally 12k words, and we cut it down to 2500 in the editing process—and so Julian became in the rendering, we both probably became, much pithier, for the reader.
Vanity is real. The jaded exercise of power is real. A broken sort of self-serving narcissism is real. Operators. You’ll encounter a lot of ‘operators’ out there on the writerly scenes. People who have a hard time extending empathy beyond the question of Do you serve my ends or not? It’s hard to be in New York City, with all the galvanic pressures of capital weighing on us, and not get a little bit that way. The old sharks, they’re watching, they’re circling the tank, and the water may not have been cleaned in a while. They want you to be like them, to join them in jadedness. They grin and show off the sharpness of their teeth. And you gotta be like, cool teeth, bro. Where’d you get those done?
I applaud anybody who finds a way through to love on the other side. I want that for anyone I’ve ever cared about, and even some people I don’t so much, just because it’s a better world for everyone when fewer people are completely fucking miserable. ‘Beam me up’ is what all of us are probably saying on some level, the way that Karina once did as she prayed to her future husband Jeff Ament’s poster on the wall.
The fear that we have no collective future is real, that the tragic story of the collapse of the United States of America will be told on some future Epstein’s Island (perhaps called [billionaire name here] Island)? and hence, the disinclination to read, to invest the heart and mind with a belief that this or that book, this one in your hands, a voice you are encountering for the first time, really is something special, enough to transmit those radio brainwaves that might change your world, their world, our world, together.
The thinning out of the American middle class is real, and so, too, is that of the vast reading public, and the acutely attuned minds hungry for questions of taste that aren’t determined solely by the marketplace, or by publishing tribes. In our monopolistic world dotted as it is with modern incarnations of kings and queens, having the courage of your conviction can feel suicidal when so much is determined by going along to get along. Easier, by far, to defer judgment to how many followers someone has, or how much the idea of that person excites you, as opposed to judging by reading the text in question and putting the text first. Which doesn’t have to be perfect either. Writers, like everyone else, grow better by doing. Or so we can hope. I’m all for talented imperfection if the chord struck by the work is promising. Great art is great by virtue of how that art is distinctive from that of the work’s peers.
You have to believe there is such a thing as quality to the work, no matter what road a text might have taken to reach publication. I’m a believer both in the notion that authors oftentimes require long runways to get to the truly great novels they have within them—the kind that Don DeLillo or Cormac McCarthy had (meaning both the great novels and the long runways)—which is somewhat anathema to how things work on the remunerated “career”-oriented side today. It’s all ‘sink or swim.’ Boom or bust. Not controlled growth, gradual expansion, the so-called midlist. “No more middle class movies,” Matthew Specktor quotes a Hollywood power player as declaring some time, I think, in the early aughts, about halfway through The Golden Hour. Just, Give us White Noise or give us nothing! But would DeLillo ever have gotten to White Noise without that runway of earlier novels? Therein lies the question.
Personally, I’m excited about what the author Alexandra Kleeman is doing. Big hopes for her next one. Last I knew, she is a writer who writes late at night, which is when I am writing this response to your ridiculous questions. I started off doing my fiction-writing that way, too, but have since become more of a ‘coffee during the day’ guy, because when I write at night it’s not so easy to shut the brain off when the writing is over.
As I said, I’m holed up in this old bedroom in Vermont for the winter, and a ladybug just landed on the bare skin of my elbow as I was typing. The ladybugs have moved inside for the winter, they cluster in certain spots on the corner of the ceiling. That is the kind of rustic old home this is. The former owner lived to be one hundred and he passed away here. His name was Rodney. A nearby road is named for his family, and what was once their massive farmstead. My nightstand is stacked with books, and there are maybe three or four ladybugs winding and wending their ways through the maze of that stack right now. Is God doing that?
J.T. Price’s fiction has appeared in The New England Review, Post Road, Guernica, the Heavy Feather Review, Fence, The Brooklyn Rail, Excerpt Magazine, and elsewhere; nonfiction, interviews, and reviews with the Los Angeles Review of Books, BOMB Magazine, The Scofield, and The Millions. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of Big Score Lit, and formerly of the Brazenhead Review, Epiphany Magazine, River Styx, and Electric Literature. He maintains a blog currently placed at https://beyondtheframe.substack.com/. His novel manuscript, A Leading Man, set in World War II-era Hollywood, is looking for a home.
Kurt Baumeister is the author of the novels Pax Americana and Twilight of the Gods, which was nominated for the National Book Award for Fiction. His work has been covered by Los Angeles Review of Books, Chicago Review of Books, The National Book Review, Literary Hub, Rain Taxi Review of Books, The Millions, Catapult Magazine, F(r)iction, Big Other, Bending Genres, BULL, [PANK], Lit Reactor, and others. Baumeister’s interviews, essays, fiction, and reviews have appeared in Salon, Guernica, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, The Brooklyn Rail, The Good Men Project, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Nervous Breakdown, The Weeklings, and other outlets. An acquisitions editor with 7.13 Books, Baumeister holds an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and the Authors Guild. Find him at kurtbaumeister.com.