Description
Against a densely imbricated skein of documentary fragments and confessional annotation, Mine advances a sustained, interlocutory investigation into the ulterior etiologies and malignant narcissism of underground pornography. “How dare you cling to the idea that there’s something to be understood.”
An excerpt:
I have to pin the words down, cut them out and place them as far as possible from the dunce economy. I’m not an exegete. But I take the words and ideas and stutters and stick them somewhere far more successful. You’ll understand this, finally, when I demean myself enough to tell you what I do with the words that these mouthy pigs just repeat often enough to tell you that they stand behind them. It’s not what I take, or who I take them away from. But where I put them. Not rewrite them. Not change or charge the context. I identify them. I don’t, idiot, masturbate with them. I can’t imagine wanting to do anything without having these words fully included. I wouldn’t even consider doing anything without them. The cunts that make cartoons out of their ideas. Little collages and signatures and slack versions. Strippers and songwriters and female’d max factors. I live all over them. I write through them, use them, come away with little more than a dangling possible.
…
What I do is inescapable.
__________
Peter Sotos is one of those rare writers who can say, ‘The words I write are me,’ or at least as close as anyone can come to communicating who they are in words.
—Thomas Ligotti
We do not find in Sotos the customary delusions about childhood misery and wounded lives. For this latter-day homo sacer, wounds are not to be healed but poked and worried until they bleed. Sotos is literature’s outcast, carrying stigma like a rat carries plague.
—Mikita Brottman
