The New Quarantine – Johannes Göransson / Sara Tuss Efrik – Inside The Castle, 2023

The New Quarantine
Johannes Göransson / Sara Tuss Efrik
Inside The Castle, 2023

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So I'm just going to start in the middle, or the end. I have kids who can't laugh. They press button after button. I draw a smiley face on one of the buttons. I'm an uneducated vandal, you should know that. I don't know what happened. I got drunk before I got drunk. A week ago I started The New Quarantine by Johannes Göransson and Sara Tuss Efrik. It is an overwhelm. For some reason, the first thing I wrote in response to it was "A movie about three paper cuts." The thing is, I didn't follow that up, so I don't know what I meant by it, or what it was supposed to trigger in me. Anyway, THE BOOK, it seemed all heart and guts and inside joke and even more inside absolute immaculate un-fingerprinted leapfrogged footfalled sorrow. And I thought I was okay. But then, I got to the end of it tonight and all of those things are true, but also, everything is vividly falsified and now I am grieving a beginning. Look, explanation is a nostalgia. I try to make myself pristine. I was sick for six months this year and am better now but it fucked up my teeth. And people still want to read what I write. Hell is wrong with them. I am so not pretty but kind of able to film stuff in fake poems in between capitalisms. My youngest son doesn't make me think of death, but he should. He is not well and his not wellness isn't appropriate. I am all over the place and I am nowhere. I did not expect a week ago that The New Quarantine would childhood me back to now. I am a very basic lover of obsessions such as orphan and widow and mirror. Well, fuck. I am just going to say right now that I know for a fact that you're not going to stay with me this whole time because I am about to go so much more south SO RIGHT NOW if you love me or believe me or think my brain is worth the salt I turn it to, go buy The New Quarantine and while you're there or away, check out Haute Surveillance by Johannes Göransson and Toxicon and Arachne by Joyelle McSweeney and basically anything else written by them as one or all, etc. 

I am a prophet with zero thoughts. This book was written before my memory kicked in. It builds collapse. All my words toward it will move away. I think it's right that things disappear. Right as rain that falls on one whose language lets me have mine. I don't believe I can scratch this off, even if I do. It's a lottery ticket that hell gave to apocalypse. It's a trap. Thirst escapes me. I cut up magazines about self-harm. I am trying to respond to these rejected sober closures of dead attractions. Arrogant, but belonging is an exile I abandon forward. In the reading, it is strange that I heard things advertised that no buying would solve. What dares violate the secret americana. Who. There is so much blood in the work that I can't tell whose blood is the silent alarm. I might have died for the laughing of the resurrected. Caught sex from a diseased script description of the exterior. In the reading also I felt like I was impressing god more with each spider I removed from my picturing of spiders. I unpeople. My suicide has no entry point, only penetration. Don't die, omg. This work is a love story, and I am glad I waited. It made me read it too quickly. I don't feel like I reached the end. 

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reflection by Barton Smock

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book is HERE