The Source of the Leak is the Leak Itself

On vulgarity, putridity, and violence in contemporary fiction, written for an introduction to James Nulick's Lazy Eyes

This essay was originally published as an introduction to Lazy Eyes by James Nulick (Expat Press, 2023).

I don’t know anything about who James Nulick is. His name appears attached to language I accept as formally attributable to him, but really, he could be anybody. I could Google him, try to trace lines that lead me to a safer understanding of why he writes the way he does—frequently nasty, attracted to sick sites, though also even-tempered, deceptively symphonic, unafraid—but I don’t want to learn about things I can find out anytime on the internet. I want to be tapped in the center of my forehead with a wand that makes me forget how I got here, what I must do.

These days, at least as much as ever, most people don’t actually read; they brandish mirrors. Most certainly they don’t want to be reminded of their problems, much less the sorts of trauma that might be the reason they’re not who they wish they were yet, as if to speak of it alone is the work of Satan. We just want something new to click on, motherfucker! An anesthetic primed to remind us of the funhouse mirror of our own constrained imagination of how it would feel to be truly, uncontrollably in love; or at least a coherently relatable parable for dim times in an era where nothing sticks, nothing’s quite as titillatingly literary as watching someone else go down with what they thought must be a ship. That’s why I’m writing this introduction from inside of a potato sack, dosed with drugs that make me think I have something to say that isn’t what will end up getting read.

When I try to think about what happened as I read Lazy Eyes, I find my mind tapping Bill Hicks. How angry he’d get about the New Kids on the Block, gesticulating violent sieg heils as he apes them performing their preteen hypnosis music, the culture’s pulse. “I want my rock stars dead!” he’d roared into his microphone, hunched over like he’s passing a kidney stone in front of an audience who only laughs because they don’t know what else to do. That’s a sacred sort of laughter, fundamental really, but not a gift; a mark of narrowing of the gap between each person’s present and their past. I don’t hear people laugh as much as I used to anymore, I think, mainly because they don’t want to resemble what they look like while getting fucked except by choice. “Play from your heart!” Hicks begs, almost as an aside, by now too sentimental a request to even need to be denied. Maybe the kind of cancer that eventually killed him comes from something we wish the world was that never could be, an actual conspiracy against articulation of everything we wish we didn’t need to say to mark it known. I can hyperbolize cancer like that because my mom died of cancer suddenly, after I’d convinced myself she was going to die from Alzheimer’s after several further years of dissolution of her mind, but I also don’t need your permission, nor am I asking for your help.