The Brooklyn Rail

Or: when loss is never lost. Nate Lippens’s work reinscribes the past that no one else remembers, all the while embracing the obsolescence of existing under the conditions of commodification and the landscapes of territorialization and tokenization, in which outsiders pretend to be insiders and vice versa, until the outside and the inside are vanishing points, fungible signifiers, rendering each as dubious as the artistic motto of authenticity. With Semiotext(e)’s dual publication of Ripcord and reissue of My Dead Book (originally published in 2021), a finalist for the Republic of Consciousness Prize in 2023, Lippens has inaugurated a literature of refuse, of refusal, scraped from memory and anecdote, reassembled through somber ceremony and caustic insight—a counter-monument to a version of queer life and queer art heretofore snuffed out by archival entropy and material decay; by pop culture’s affinity for cooptation; by the institutional impulse to categorize and codify; by the hypocrisy and impotence of the artist, the slippages between the worlds and practices of professionalization and poetry; by the elasticity of “art” and “commerce”; by the tendency for the underground to become the empire’s new clothes. Weary of worldliness and resistant to the narratives of networking and societal norms, Lippens’s speakers aspire to the glory (hole) of shedding the self, reduced, or elevated, to the machinic cadence of pure abandonment, porous sensation, where feeling doesn’t necessarily mobilize thinking but provides the means to evacuate thought—finally and all at once. Lippens might begin by cataloging his protagonist’s dead friends, but his project of intermittent accounting is interested, moreover, in identifying the ways in which we are made and unmade by those around us; that, like the characters that populate Genet’s simulated “balcony” knew well, only “through you I re-enter myself.” The proxy of subjectivity is mediated through another, for whom, nevertheless, the only agency that exists is the possibility of living in a struggle that is one’s own.

Amidst our everyday and often obscured entanglement within technological systems that shape our material and emotional states, Lippens accounts for an intimacy channeled in the frictions of touchscreen consumption prone to screen grab browsing—the intervals of daily boredom and deep focus measured in the dot dot dot suspensions of digital intercourse—while, in the same breath, scorning the perpendicular contours of desire; the incommensurable vagaries of wanting this, seeking this, and living this. If we might read My Dead Book as memorial and commemoration, then Ripcord is a self-reflexive search for a form of art, which is also or could become a mode of living. As if daily life and workaday rhythms could not merely be grafted onto the art object but become the thing itself: its material and methodology, its kaleidoscopic horizons. Nate Lippens knows that any notion of advancing, advancement, can also be achieved through retreating and withdrawal—“a way not to be human but still alive”—and to write a book whose logic of momentum follows the natural trajectory of nothingness can serve as the paradigm for this literature of refusal.

Chris Campanioni (Rail): I’m interested in your enthusiasm for documentation: both My Dead Book and Ripcord suggest that accounting can also be a form of witnessing. At the same time I’m struck by your recurring acknowledgement that the conditions of being seen—being seen by others—might require a mutual debasement. That unless and until I have fallen into a similar state of disrepair, I cannot recognize the other. That recognition depends on the fiction of resemblance—or the friction of resemblance—being mobilized for similarity: an assumed commonality or community propped up and ossified by likeness. In Ripcord, I noticed a formal turn toward the notebook—the space between your asterisks is shorter; the passages tend toward itemization and cataloging; the narrative prose and lush scene construction of My Dead Book is reconfigured in jump-cut sequences scaffolded by terse, koan-like assertions—a riposte to the industries of wellness and happiness, its new age platitudes—infused, still and all, with a startling lyricism, fragmentary and diffuse, that reads as poetry. 

Nate Lippens: Yeah, documentation is central to both books. In My Dead Book, it takes the form of anecdotes and vignettes, those kinds of observed and honed personal stories we share—the recognition and being seen you mention. In Ripcord, there’s a lot about disappearances and unseen performances that have a minor mythic quality, like photographs of art happenings and performances that are the only documentation of them: it’s counter to everything now, the glut of photos and video. The form I was especially drawn to was aphorisms. A favorite is E.M. Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born and also the classic fragment book Joe Brainard’s I Remember. I wanted to replicate in some way my notebooks and notetaking, which is how I write everything, and the way that’s integrated into my daily life. I love lists and catalog sentences. Poetry influenced the style a lot. Actually, the formatting of The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara was on my mind for some of the more fragmented sections and the kind of declarative pileups that Alejandra Pizarnik soars at. It’s like a seductive manifesto of refutation, pulling you in with a message of negation. The narrator feels his way around those edges of difference and seeks to define himself in or against others. Sort of like how he uses artists and writers as echolocation.

Rail: Right. I like echolocation and echo-locutions; one of the reasons why I’m so drawn to notebooks is because of their absorbent cell structures, their susceptibility to infection as vector and receiving body, all those itinerant glimpses of other artists and objects and their attendant drift that is flowing through the writer’s consciousness and thus the text. Susan Sontag once called it, in her own notebook, “notebook thinking,” and whether what I’m writing is actually being published as such, I consider everything I write to be a notebook. Any project of accounting necessarily implies the charge of what elides or defies documentation; the mythic quality of those queer art performances that Ripcord’s characters re-mark in the text remind me of Hannah Arendt’s idea of “good works,” which are necessarily forgotten about, the work that begins and dies in the body. It also reminds me of something I wrote early in the poetry collection Windows 85, that “not everything one writes has to be written down”—which, of course, was advice I’d written down, overheard in class. Nevertheless, I remember showing up to the first day of school with binders full of printed notes on the material we’d be discussing with Wayne Koestenbaum in seminar—all the looks I was getting from classmates. Maybe they were thinking, “How strange this procedure: to copy out words that have already been reproduced not once but multiple times?”

I think there’s an alchemical quality to copying things out. That especially the repetitive task of tracing is prone to productive accident or lapse, exhaustion of the hand, iteration as the staging grounds for discrepancy. And maybe we can imbibe the original or perhaps read beneath its paper layer by producing, with our own hand, a CC marked by the annotative act. I think we’re both drawn to the excesses inherent in any exercise of recording, the omissions, too. I wonder about the connections between the “mythic” and the “sacred” and the points at which they diverge. Both your books function as a scathing critique of fakers, in all their many incarnations, in a time of hypervisibility and curated vulnerability. I remember when I began working as a model, every other model I met on shoots or go-sees would ask me: “So what’s your story?” The same question, slightly different wording, upon first trespassing into the literary-art world of New York City ten years ago, the mythic qualities of a good history carrying weight in the studio as on the stage of Bowery Poetry, without people ever asking about the privilege of having a past. What, today, remains sacred?

Lippens: It’s hard to define what’s sacred now. Or profane. Mostly I see them as the same thing with different lighting. Maybe the private mistakes are the most sacred. I’ve long felt like I had much to prove, and it only occurred to me a few years ago—I mean that’s a long haul—I was the one judging it, because largely no one cares beyond the initial impression. “So what’s your story?” is so unplayful. It’s like a job interview or an elevator pitch—hit the alarm. I used to freeze at those kinds of questions. I thought about getting a business card with the Fran Lebowitz quote on it: “After I didn’t finish high school, I decided not to finish college, too.” It’s strange how we are expected to situate ourselves and how we internalize that. I’m drawn to the idea of tracing and rewriting and copying. I’ve known writers who typed up favorite passages from novels to get the rhythm down. I think Joan Didion talked about doing that with Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad. Copying a rhythm is entering their machine. It’s really intimate. Notebook thinking is in some ways that, but the copying is the world around you. It’s such a specific but generous category. I carry a tiny pocket-size one with me everywhere and I adore its physical restrictions. The notes app or voice app will work in a pinch, but the fact of the page size and my messy handwriting creates a rhythm suitable for epigrams, eavesdropped dialogue, weird digressions. Restrictions appeal to me because they force a format, right? Windows 85 has so many of those gaps, the unwritten writing becomes a sensibility that both generates and edits itself. I’ve always been drawn to misquotes, misheard song lyrics, not getting it right, because it says a lot about the person recording or singing along: the longing for what you want on the page or in the song. And I should say Wayne Koestenbaum’s trance notebooks and David Markson’s so-called—not by him—“notecard” series inspired me to push more in the direction I did for Ripcord. 

Rail: Koestenbaum and Markson—what lively company. I think a lot about the materiality of our media, about how the limitations of our screens, for instance—I, too, compose on my notes app—leak out into the language, tempo, and organization of what it is we write; that any sense of a “defect” or “imperfection”—the passed-around mondegreen you admire—offers unforeseen and unforeseeable possibilities. How we retain that mobile verve in the process of publication through different strategies, inklings of which you illuminate here. I like the notebook because it almost moves outside the world of branding, as well as the predetermined rules of the game that genre, for better or worse, unfolds. I’m uncomfortable with professionalization because I’m uncomfortable with the idea of pledging allegiance to anything; also: I am uncomfortable with thinking of myself as having a determinant position. I like indeterminacy. I like straddling, revolving chairs, a promiscuous diet. I think I can be greedy. In Windows 85, I want to align the stage sets of trust fund aesthetics and pissing on men for money to think about the prismed valences of capital and the barter economy of social media, of selling out and selling one’s self; it also helps, I think, to acknowledge that underneath the things we say we hate is ourselves, the self staring back, or averting its gaze. That in every critique is the residue of self-disgust, a fear, maybe, of complicity or complacency. Case in point: I’m aware that, although I claim to hate branding, I’ve just offered you up as the vanguard of a certain literature of refusal.

Lippens: Refusal literature and dismissal literature, and side-eye mumbled sweary literature too. My books have come out at a moment in publishing when there’s a push for narratives of queer trauma or queer joy, a distinct binary. The trauma narrative has to end in redemption and the joy narrative in empowerment. Not that there isn’t trauma in my work, but it’s kind of the long tail of these characters coming of age during the eighties and nineties during the height of the AIDS epidemic and vicious homophobia, and then aging in a world of assimilation that doesn’t have a place for people who aren’t part of the triumphal story.

I share your discomfort with professionalization. Terms like “literary citizen” and “career narrative” have me searching for the exit. One thing I learned through the publication process—maybe the only thing since I’m not good with lessons—was how important it is for me to have my writing integrated into my life, that it’s a habit of noticing and noting. Sometimes that’s immersive, and sometimes it’s like I’m annotating an observation. But it feels less formal. And I write longer work in bed. I guess anything to avoid sitting at a desk.

The barter economy of social media intensifies all of this while offering illusions of freedom. There are times when I’m scrolling and I’ll count the number of ads and then I’ll look at how many posts are about promotion. Mine included. It’s so interesting to hear you talk about selling out. A friend was saying the concept of the sellout doesn’t exist now, but I think we’ve just internalized the judgment. It’s something we fear in ourselves.

Rail: Yeah, I mean one of the many things I admire about your work is that your narrators aren’t attempting to reconcile those divisions between wanting, seeking, and living; they don’t accept the value systems of art and celebrification of the artist under capitalism but they don’t try to abolish them either. They acknowledge that the marketplace exists and everyone and everything is available to be had or remade in an image shaped by globalization’s logic of brand legitimation that absorbs the artist’s life in their work until one is read for the other; they acknowledge that everyone is capable of lying to themselves and each other and that everyone is in on the game. If there’s a movement to which your books aspire, it’s one that rebuffs any idea of enlightenment. Instead, we encounter a lot of talk of disidentification, dissociation, dissolve; the ways in which we slip in and out of being, the escape hatch signaled by Ripcord’s title. 

Another poet recently asked me if I enjoy modeling. I told them I enjoy modeling in the way it removes me from my body. Your writing is so physical, so bodily and carnal. I relish the inter/play offered by the aforementioned glory hole; the body, in your work, is in the way and it is the way to escape. 

Lippens: It’s fascinating thinking of modeling as removing you from your body. I guess mistakenly I imagined it as being the opposite. But it makes sense, in a way turning the body into a screen. I mean, we all have those moments, often inadvertent or habitual. But the conscious process of doing it is different. I’m glad the physical stuff in the book resonates. Sex as escape—and especially anonymous sex as a way to kind of erase or deface oneself—has always been central to my idea of being queer. Of course, I came of age when AIDS and sexuality were synonymous in most people’s minds, and that shaped a lot of my thinking, and being an effeminate kid did too. For many years, I experienced my body as just the vehicle to carry around my mind. I moved wrong, my voice was wrong, my presence was either a joke or ignored. I wanted to write about sex in Ripcord in a way that revealed some of that. Not as anything new—more like the home key in an improvisation. And also, the transition for the narrator from a kind of street sex life to an app/phone-driven sex life. There’s humor in those inherent misunderstandings attached to desire that ties into the irreconcilability of the divisions between wanting, seeking, and living. It’s a bit of a mental and emotional stutter for me when I attempt to synthesize or make sense of those categories. The culture absorbs and diminishes artists, especially dead ones. The potency of their work is vitrined and cataloged. And the ones assessing the work—curators, academics, critics—congratulate themselves for their efforts and we line up to see it. And, of course, I’m happy to see this art in the world getting attention, so I’m part of the loop too. There’s no escape from that—maybe acceptance, which sometimes shades into fatalism. Ripcord’s narrator rejects the canned enlightenment and redemption narratives that people lean into. He’s seen enough to know that meaning is what you make up, and it changes—sometimes day to day, sometimes from day to night. Personally, the times in my life when I’ve had the most fixed beliefs and certainty are when I’ve been trying to bury my pain.

Rail: Yes for indeterminacy and incompletion and incompetence. If people ever care to ask what the thing is about, I’m always on the verge of telling them that if I knew what it was about, I wouldn’t have written it. I get off on impropriety, but Wayne—whenever we see each other—remarks upon my good manners. Was it the way I was raised? Maybe also my desire to learn by looking and listening, a mimicry I attribute to migration, of always entering a space in which I do and do not belong; would never belong all the way. I search Google, like at least once a week, to learn how to say the words I’ve already written; to make sure I’m saying them right before I have to say them in public, pretend to be who I’m not. When I showed up in the poetry scene, I had to teach myself everything: looking at the way people talked and what they said and who they were talking about. Mostly Ashbery, because he was still alive and everyone wanted to latch onto him, maybe hoping that his aura would rub off like dust. Death of Art (2016) was like a send up of the NYC art world, but then the book was embraced by the same folks I thought I was critiquing, so the book must have been a failure. I very much feel a resonance with the characters of My Dead Book and Ripcord—people dislocated spatially and thrown out of time; the odd jobs and side jobs and temp jobs and rimjobs that sustain them. How your project then isn’t even about remembering or forgetting, but living; the ways in which we survive in order to make art, maybe also the ways in which we survive in spite of our art.

The narrator of VHS (2025) claims that his greatest gift as a reader is that he’s never lost the curiosity of a three-year-old, and I, too, believe it’s a good trick to have—but one that needs constant practice, scenarios in which to continue exercising one’s curiosity. I always tell my writing students interested in pursuing a career: do something that doesn’t suck the life out of you. I’ve been fortunate to do a lot of different things for work; “fortunate” being a positive spin on a life of part-time positions, seasonal pay, and institutionalized precarity—frequenting the toilet at Starbucks for the better part of my life so I could bring a few rolls of toilet paper home in my backpack—but all of it has found its way into my writing, and I often also tell my students, and sometimes even believe it, that if I became an accountant in my twenties, I would have written about that. Now that I say it, though, maybe that’s what both of us are, if we’re anything. Noticing and noting, as you mentioned earlier, taking accounts, keeping a score, which is both a copy and an indefinitely large number; also: a grudge; also: a reckoning. The variegated sites of labor and service populate each of our writings, and alongside a literature of refusal I want to project onto your literary hologram a genre of work, a working-class aesthetics, which some people might take as a kind of paradox.

Lippens: Keeping score, reckoning, and grudges are all crucial to me—partly absurd and partly dead serious. I have been known to keep a shitlist. The tallying of hours, iced knees, tips, rip-offs, and rent hikes are so essential to a working-class aesthetics. Probably people not in the know equate that term with taxidermy, arena rock, team sports, and grill-outs; but collage, pastiche, and fragments are working-class art. Using what’s available, making and remaking something, using scraps and leftovers, telling a story quick on a cigarette break. I was talking about this recently. Someone praised a writer whose work I like and his long, snaking sentences and leisurely pace. I realized his writing is done on a completely different clock than I experience.

Curiosity and restlessness are essential. I’m imparting english on this cue ball by saying my odd-jobbed existence and—how do I put this politely?—varied experiences have been crucial to my writing and sensibility, but I do believe it’s true, or at least truth-adjacent. I completely relate to you about mimicry, observing a scene, figuring out how people speak and present themselves, and I frequently check out pronunciations online for words I’ve only ever read but have never heard spoken. When I was younger, I felt a lot of imposter syndrome and insecurity. At some point I realized my fear about it was class anxiety, and that pissed me off enough that I just stopped caring. In situations where people attempt any of kind of shaming or putting me in my place, I lean hard into my Sconnie accent. Wa-SKAHN-siN. Wisconsin is, after all, my anti-muse. It’s where I was forged, where my mother’s buried, where I’m flamboyantly invisible. Alien in a familiar way.

Rail: “I realized his writing is done on a completely different clock than I experience.” I want to read that book: the different temporalities of writing. I used to refer to my preferred style of composing as “writing on the go.” What gets picked up, what gets lost in the commute; what alters through every mediation. So sometimes I think of my books as a ledger of not writing, of all the non-writing that will become the text, which is a text, apparently, composed of written words. I’m lately interested in probing the question: Who speaks? And then insisting that any answer is beside the point. In my work, there’s this giddy collapse between the story and its being told and retold, scene of narrative and narrative scene. Windows 85 and VHS are both characterized by that ecstatic imbrication of memories, moments, speakers, bodies—everything written into presence. Despite their unmistakably solitary narrators, your books perform a similar gymnastics; I love the ways in which My Dead Book and Ripcord float across disparate timelines and spacetimes, always on the edge of appearing or cutting out on the punch line of anecdote, anecdotes that subvert any semblance of narrative chronology. As with the side jobs and sidekicks that are so central in your books, I like being in your various side stories, back stories, peripheral views that would have otherwise been excised for the fact of the frame.

My Dead Book and Ripcord each turn on moments of breakdown, breakup, disintegration; but also integration, the ways in which folks assimilate and absorb or become absorbed in their environments. Both books are marked by connections and disconnections but especially the conditional frictions between the two, the frictions and the translations—between histories and the present, between Wisconsin and New York City, between past lovers and past lives, between the many selves we keep in a single body, between openings and exits. When I’m reading your books, I’m alternately thinking: how will this end? And: I don’t want this to end. On dawns and denouements, I want to retrieve your speaker’s clarifying reply to their friend Charlie, early into Ripcord: “There’s a first time for everything, especially last things.” When the length of a story is provisional, the tempo of narrative is discontinuous, and plot is subject to recurring dis/appearances, how do you know where to leave off? Knowing, again, that what you’re building isn’t one novel, but a whole archive—or anti-archive—of queer Midwestern being.

Lippens: “Writing on the go” is where it’s at—in transit. A lot of mine happens on the bus or on my way to work or in stolen moments. The laundromat is great too. The act of it can feel urgent and secret, but I know most of it won’t become anything. I prefer that sense that half of it is just keeping up a long sentence I can pick over later. To me, the term life-writing is redundant. It’s all life—especially the made-up parts, the distortions, and the erasures. They have more life than anything.

I usually know the end of the novels before I begin. There’s an image, a last line. And I have a first line, and then everything moves between those. It’s intuitive. I don’t use flashbacks or traditional backstory. They’re hauntings, rewinds, intrusive thoughts, and ruminations. Chatty ghost stories. Or like gay fortunes without cookies.

Nonlinear writing is being against the natural order. It’s my extended reply to “get your story straight.” It feels queer to have too many characters, too many stray thoughts, several timelines leapfrogging—people who pass through lives in a moment and are gone. Promiscuous. My sense of time is porous. This morning, I went for a bike ride and was thinking about a Welsh farmer’s post about wildflowers as I passed a house gutted by a fire, and I remembered two fires I saw in Detroit years ago with a friend that is long gone, and his sister who became a survivalist on a ranch in Wyoming, then William S. Burroughs’s bunker, and John Giorno incanting “I don’t need it, I don’t want it, and you cheated me out of it.” All in a matter of moments. Some people have practices to still that chatter, but I love the noisy flow and the rapid jump cuts. I’ll have a quiet mind when I’m dead.