Cosmogony Read online

  Praise for Cosmogony

  “I recommend Lucy Ives’s inventive collection of complex, deadpan, analytical, interrelated, controlledly wandering stories about divorce, lies, fear, parents, memes, the Internet, art, artists, information, and literature.”

  —TAO LIN, author of Trip and Taipei

  “Rare and fearless, Cosmogony’s high-wire formal playfulness forges a circuit of human connection blinking at unlikely nodes. Even in moments of alienation and hurt, Ives’s characters find themselves inextricably tethered to each other through philosophy, systems that fail them, art and love and searching. The puzzle pieces of this collection notch together, assembling a picture of the mysterious intelligence of coincidence and the sad, funny faces with which we meet it.”

  —TRACY O’NEILL, author of Quotients and The Hopeful

  Praise for Loudermilk

  “This clever satire of writing programs exhibits, with persuasive bitterness, the damage wreaked by the idea that literature is competition.”

  —The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice

  “Ives’s interests point toward the philosophical, even the mystical. Loudermilk is not just funny; it becomes a layered exploration of the creative process . . . Ives approaches the students themselves with canny tenderness, and their work (which the novel excerpts, delightfully) with grave respect. Her own language is prickly and odd, with a distracted quality, as if she were trying to narrate while another voice is murmuring in her ear.”

  —The New Yorker

  “Ives, who once described herself as ‘the author of some kind of thinking about writing,’ examines the conditions that produce authors and their work while never losing a sense of wonder at the sheer mystery of the written word.”

  —Bookforum

  “In a literary critical flourish, [Ives] combines elements of libertine novels, realist novels, social novels, inherited wealth lit, postmodern novels, period pieces, poetry, satire, and revenge plots . . . A funny and cutting novel whose critiques of inherited wealth and its effects on culture in the aughts will keep being true until a full redistribution of wealth, beginning with reparations, occurs.”

  —The Nation

  “Readers expecting yet another referendum on the MFA will be pleasantly surprised to discover a much stranger and more ambitious book. In Loudermilk, Ives has taken a subject notoriously difficult to make interesting—the difficulty of writing itself—and narrativized it into an elaborate plot peopled by avatars of the types Sontag enumerated decades ago . . . Sontag says a good writer must be a fool and an obsessive, that the critic and the stylist are bonuses (so, inessential). But Ives—not just for her own erudition and syntactical artistry, remarkable as they are—counters that it is the critic and the stylist who are indispensable, for they are the ones who interface thought with language.”

  —The Believer

  “Hilarious . . . A riotous success. Equal parts campus novel, buddy comedy and meditation on art-making under late capitalism, the novel is a hugely funny portrait of an egomaniac and his nebbish best friend.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Hilarious, pointed, perfectly executed . . . Ives manages to subvert all expectations, and offers up one of the slyest, smartest looks at what it means to be a writer I’ve read; her every sentence sings, and they’re songs I’ll return to again and again.”

  —NYLON

  “Loudermilk, a satire, explores a complex web of plot and episodes, thick descriptions, biting character arcs, poetic and philosophical precision, stylistically different stories/poems within stories, the nature of time, and the mirage of power (or the possibility of unveiling politics, and cracking open agency). By employing a classical theatrical technique of dramatis personae, rather than ‘realistic’ novel characters, perhaps Ives is able to move between so many registers that enable her unusual ‘mash-up’ to excel as at once philosophical and planted in the mud . . . Ives’s style of satire shatters the dichotomy between meta-narrative and human empathy. Breaking such a distinction requires rare observational skill, patience, and multi-genre flexibility and curiosity.”

  —The Brooklyn Rail

  “Ives’s new novel is one of the funniest in recent memory, stuffed with jabs at writers and toxic masculinity, bluntly yonic allusions, and feuilleton-esque prose that prances on page . . . What Ives is playing with here is not just beautiful sentences and humorous situations, it’s the disharmony felt at the core of our experiences . . . Though the empirical distinctions between prose and poetry are often illusory, Ives finds a way to make her prose both a kind of communication—as is expected—as well as a construction of satire. Her words linger longer than normal trade, and find ways to avoid their disintegration, as if the must of a punchline is more lasting, more fragrant; words this eloquently framed and humorous imprint, and, often enough, hold us in their absurdity.”

  —The Adroit Journal

  “Loudermilk may best be read as a contribution to a growing body of literature that both historicizes and critiques the MFA program . . . Loudermilk suggests that MFA programs are only incidentally committed to the production of great writing, that their true purpose is the cultivation and maintenance of power. In this, they have been perversely successful—as successful as Loudermilk himself. And yet, paradoxically, their very success in cultivating such power has led the MFA into crisis.”

  —The Georgia Review

  “This send-up of contemporary graduate writing programs and the characters they attract and create is sure to highly amuse any reader, especially those with a penchant for academia-set hijinks. Reminiscent of Michael Chabon, this highly original satiric novel is sharp-witted and adroit. Brava.”

  —Addison County Independent

  “Lucy Ives mixes genres with unusual abandon in her second novel, Loudermilk. The narrative could be regarded as a campus novel, a portrait of the artist, a scam story, a retelling of Cyrano de Bergerac, or a farce . . . Loudermilk is a novel about the tension between art and life, and the conflict between labor and power.”

  —On the Seawall

  “The nuanced subversion of tropes and full-throttle self-indulgence of Ives’s writing lend a manic glee to this slyly funny and deeply intelligent novel.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Ives’s satirical masterpiece follows poet Troy Augustus Loudermilk, a shallow Adonis recently admitted to the nation’s premiere creative-writing graduate program, located in the heart of America’s starchy middle . . . Laugh-out-loud funny and rife with keen cultural observations, Ives’ tale is a gloriously satisfying critique of education and creativity.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “A book where profound poststructuralist meditations on language, chance and creativity are deftly spun through with a myriad of jokes about farting, sex and male anatomy . . . With the Bush presidency and invasion of Iraq playing out ambiently and calamitously in the background, Loudermilk perfectly captures the strange cultural ethos of the early 2000s . . . With razor-sharp prose and a plenitude of linguistic strangeness, Ives has written a novel about American college life that is both philosophically gripping and exceptionally hilarious.”

  —Shelf Awareness (starred review)

  “Lucy Ives is as deeply funny and ferocious a writer as they come. She’s also humane and philosophical when it matters most. I love Loudermilk.”

  —SAM LIPSYTE

  “With Loudermilk, Lucy Ives tears down the curtain to unveil the wizard—and here all of the characters are implicated in operating the clunky machinery that creates then lionizes the concept of merit or talent in the academic/literary world. The result is this wildly smart novel that hilariously exposes its characters as they try to vault or cement themselves into some literary canon and/or
ivory tower, unaware that the canon/tower is an ever-vanishing mausoleum wherein living writers go to get stuck, or lost, or to scrawl their names and draw butts and boobs on the walls.”

  —JEN GEORGE

  ALSO BY LUCY IVES

  My Thousand Novel

  Anamnesis

  Novel

  Orange Roses

  nineties

  The Worldkillers

  Human Events

  The Hermit

  Impossible Views of the World

  Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or The Origin of the World

  The Poetics (with Matthew Connors)

  The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader (editor)

  It is supernatural to stop time.

  SIMONE WEIL, notes for Venise Sauvée

  Contents

  A Throw of the Dice

  Cosmogony

  Recognition of This World Is Not the Invention of It

  Scary Sites

  The Care Bears Find and Kill God

  Bitter Tennis

  Louise Nevelson

  Trust

  The Poisoners

  Guy

  The Volunteer

  Ersatz Panda

  Notes

  A Throw of the Dice

  When we were first married, he went out and bought a ball gag. It wasn’t something I asked him to do. He wasn’t a tall man but I suppose he was reasonably strong. He had a construction job, at the time. It was the sort of work he claimed to prefer.

  We were living in San Francisco and through some act of god managed to find an apartment we could afford in an occasionally fancy neighborhood. It was just two rooms with a kitchen, the bathroom memorable for its coordinating sink, tub, toilet, and floor-to-ceiling tile, all a click shy of Pepto-Bismol. Outside, in the mornings and at dusk, an oddly shaped vehicle I learned to call the Google Bus rolled darkly by.

  He was up at five, cycling into the East Bay. Around seven, when a neighbor made her daily foray, the garage door screwed into the ceiling that was also the floor beneath our bed (a mattress) went into action. It was a braying sound, accompanied by copious vibration. During this process, I envisioned what I believed to be the exact fashion in which the building would collapse during an earthquake. I saw myself mangled in rubble. I lay, intact within the intact building, in bed, possessed by vertigo.

  I did not work in tech, either. I worked full time for an employment agency. I had originally gone in to temp but had been hired as the front-desk girl. An Australian man with outrageous good looks, benefiting from the immigration policies of President George W. Bush, had hired me, citing my unusual abilities as a typist. Although I insisted that I preferred something with fewer hours, the agency maintained that it was low on contracts and could I please take them up on this offer, seeing as I was unlikely to receive another.

  Yes, I said.

  Great, they replied. Wonderful.

  “I am so pleased!” announced the Australian, glinting hugely. He really was astonishing, ranching in his family, eyes and teeth like polished rocks. He began telling a long, long story about his very young wife.

  I thought all the time about how much I loved him. It would come to me as I was walking down the street. I loved him, the man I was married to, and, as well as being afraid of earthquakes, feared that one of us might die in a plane crash or be pulled down by a rogue wave. I thought of meningitis, serial killers, war. Fog rolled up the hill. It was night again.

  I minced cilantro. We sat at our table by the window and had a beer.

  He went on several shopping excursions. He returned with bags stuffed with violet tissue. He quietly reentered the house.

  It was a Sunday.

  He restrained me.

  He was, as I was saying, not a large man. He was a relatively small man, and he was full of a searing rage, an odorless, colorless flame, unknowable to the naked eye. We’d take the BART to a party and pass card tables set up by proselytizing Scientologists, and he would explain that they believed all humans were animated by the souls of aliens long ago subject to genocide.

  I wanted to take the stress test, but he wouldn’t let me. “L. Ron Hubbard was like, I’m going to invent a truly stupid religion. Look at these people,” he said. He seemed not to want to get too close to them, but I noticed a week later two novels by Philip K. Dick in his open backpack, The Man in the High Castle and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Dick having allegedly inspired Hubbard to devise his intergalactic creed. There was something vaguely gothic about Dick, I thought, something sharp and in bad taste. He was paranoid yet flavorful, industrial strength.

  We had a friend who’d grown up Mormon but renounced the faith at seventeen and ran away from home. He had lived in a basement in Oakland for a few years before going to college, then grad school. He had about twenty tattoos and a gold front tooth and loved antique furniture and cocaine. He and the man I was married to went through a period of binges, and somehow I associated it with Scientology. I’d listen to them discuss the unusual activities of the Angel Moroni and the irony of Abendsen’s The Grasshopper Lies Heavy before we parted ways for the night, they to a fortress maintained by an eccentric dealer on Potrero Hill, I to my translations and, more importantly, Craigslist.

  There were two main things I was doing during the time I was not working at the temp agency, or sleeping, or eating, or experiencing married sex, and these were: (1) translating French Symbolist poetry, and (2) trawling Craigslist for employment. Specifically, I was interested in Stéphane Mallarmé, whom I considered glamorous as well as difficult. Anyway, it was something I could talk about in mixed company. It was something that got people to leave me alone. “She’s translating Mallarmé,” the man I was married to said. After this, I was left to my own devices and at liberty to navigate over to some listings.

  When the American poet Frank O’Hara was pretty young, he made a translation of Mallarmé’s poem, “Un coup de dés.” It was something I liked to look at. I could contemplate the nature of fame. This was, by the way, before Meditations in an Emergency appeared in a scene in Mad Men and became, if briefly, a bestseller. O’Hara was one of the few poets the man I was married to had read, and he seemed to have romantic feelings for him. There was, leaning in an alcove near the entrance to our apartment, a bent postcard featuring a black-and-white photo of O’Hara: one of the only decorative additions to the place not made by me.

  The man I was married to returned catatonic from his excursions with the ex-Mormon. He tapped his fingertips against his thumb in his sleep and ground his teeth.

  I got out of bed. It was 2:35 a.m.

  Beside my computer sat O’Hara’s Early Writing. I admit there’s a way I look a little like him; we have the same sad eyes. His translation begins, “A THROW OF THE DICE Even when thrown in eternal circumstances in the midst of a wreck BE It that the abysm whitened displays furious. . . .”

  “‘Abysm,’” I thought.

  But I was only pretending to think about literature. I was on Craigslist and responding to an ad.

  I wrote:

  To Whom It May Concern,

  I am a recent graduate of ____ University (20__) and the University of ________ (20__) who would love to craft some gripping, sentimental, and definitely erotic diary entries for you. Please find a resume and several recent movie reviews (www.flashfilm.com) attached.

  Thanks!

  The next day I went to work and in the evening there came a reply:

  Hello

  Thank you for your interest in our little project. We are developing a small artistic website where we shoot some erotic pictures and erotic videos of a few girls. Each girl has 5 or 6 photo shoots with some video and an interview. We need to create a diary for a few of them. This diary would consist of 2 parts:

  1. Actual blog (e.g. day 1 . . . day 2 . . . etc. . . .). Some days should have some connection to the photo shoots, but generally it’s a very creative job. The only other condition is that there shoul
d be quite a bit of erotic content.

  2. Also all the photos (and some of them could be repetitive) need some description. However, you can be creative here as well. Your description doesn’t necessarily need to describe the picture . . . (e.g. if a girl drinks coffee you might right something about her memories of the past, if she kisses you can talk about texture of her lips etc . . . etc. . . .).

  The total work is about 10 pages (up or down 1 or 2). Total pay for one diary is around $100.

  Website is www.fotoconfessions.com

  login: confessor

  pwd: first

  (it’s operating only partially at this point but you’ll get the general concept, take a look at the timeline on top of the page that allows you to go over to different entries. Also it’s better to use explorer than firefox) Most of the girls need a diary. Please write back if you are interested.

  Sincerely,

  Lev

  I held my breath. I had that feeling I had so often had in high school, as of a tracking shot.

  Dear Lev, I began typing.

  “I want,” I thought that night, “to be free. But freedom is an intellectual demand and, as such, has nothing to do with pleasure.” Far, far below, there was some sort of silvery substance. I could see it glittering there. Truthful, perhaps. Perhaps eternal.

  I was not a man.

  When I was with the man I was married to, I sometimes wanted him to stop.

  “Don’t come,” he would tell me.

  Pleasure was a tiny wall in the void, yet the void inhabited it.

  In the midst of an unspeakable orgasm, I felt panic, then what I believed was the nearness of god.

  I sometimes wondered what Mallarmé knew about this. In 1874, Mallarmé had pseudonymously written all the articles for eight issues of a women’s fashion magazine called La Dernière mode (The Latest Fashion). He became a variety of fictional authors of occasional prose, some male, some not. He was, among others, a Marguerite de Ponty, a Miss Satin, someone named “Ix,” and Le Chef de bouche chez Brébant. These endeavors seemed completely ecstatic.