Barbelith Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing

16:10 / 09.02.05

“Every book I’ve ever written begins and ends with Lesley Ann Downey. Every single one. Every thing I’ve fucked has been a stab at the idea of her somehow in my pathetically empty hands. Not as flesh and hair and precisely examined childhood but as simple, personally degrading pornography. It’s the only way I know her. It’s the only way I know of her. Almost all of it in badly reproduced black and white. I have more color photos of her mother than I do of her. It’s nothing to say something has value as pornography. The universal possibilities are rudimentary. I’m not really working backwards, I’m trying for more. I’m getting better at it and I’m finding her little worth increases constantly. How ugly it would be to say my life changed inexorably after seeing the photos of her darling little smiling face juxtaposed to the details of her torture and murder and burial. And how thin my excuses and denial would sound… I don’t want to talk about what was. About my first time fucking some willing same-aged thing or the first time I saw a photo of a naked child being sweetly molested. I’m not interested in trawling backwards so that you can point out where I’ve been locked all these years… It must seem like I’m trying to explain myself. It must seem like I’m desperate enough to finger hypocrisies and social inconsistencies. I’m bored with remembering my low-impact arrest. Much more then you are. I know what Andrea Dworkin sounds like when she talks about her rape in every fucking book. I am not bored with Lesley Ann Downey’s very careful positioning on the bed of some stranger’s shitty dilapidated house.”

“I wanted more and more drool and blood and physical mess. These pigs would slide out of my ass and I’d hear my own blood drip out onto the floor. Feel trickles that remind you of ants running up and down the hair on your fat naked pimpled legs. Crabs were not uncommon in here. Ants would not be a surprise. I could smell the cum they pissed and dribbled into me. I’d shit it back out. I’d press on my gut and hole and fart out spittle of blood and cum clumps. You’ve smelled the way cum stinks when it mixes with your own shit. Just your shit. My shit was pitch black and slow from all the antiseptics and anusol I swallowed and couldn’t puke back.”

-From “Selfish, Little: The Annotated Lesley Ann Downey”, by Peter Sotos

“Selfish, Little: The Annotated Lesley Ann Downey”, was released last year by Void Books. It is, of course, the new book by Peter Sotos, after a 3-year drought of no new material. Many people I know who have read it claim it his best work. I agree, to some extent. Though one of his shortest attempts at 180 pages, this is perhaps Sotos’ most explicitly personal books yet. Some fans didn’t like this book due to all the self-loathing involved, but this is because they don’t want to see Sotos as a human, just as some kind of perverted monster (Just like how some Poppy Z. Brite fans keep bitching for a sequel to “Lost Souls” and refuse to read her newest books, which is a shame because “Liquor” is a really great novel and I’m looking forward to her next book due out next month). Just like how a lot of people don’t like Whitehouse anymore because they’ve begun talking about transcendent noise and abstract lyrics and things like that rather then sing about rapists or serial killers or Nazis. People change, and often these changes go against what fans expect. But a true writer must follow his or her obsessions, and to do opposite that would be a disservice to their readers. Without further adieu then, my analysis of “Selfish, Little”. First off, like all of Sotos’ books it’s in the first-person, follows a certain structure (in this case, 3 long chapters, each split into 3 parts), has no apparent plot, basically just Sotos ranting about whatever’s in his mind at the time and contradicting himself like crazy. Like many of his other books there are snippets culled from TV talk show transcripts, newspapers, magazines, and the like.
Chapter 1, part 1, naturally, opens up with Sotos fantasizing about sticking objects up a boy’s asshole. He also rambles on about his obsession with “Boys Air Choir” CDs, how he masturbates constantly yet is often unable to cum, how he likes to jerk off listening to the voice of Jon Benet Ramsey, and the usual glory hole antics. However, the most crucial aspect of this section appears on page 12, in which Sotos writes: “But you’ll be next to me and you’ll look much better by comparison. If not simply by youthfulness and general attractiveness. I couldn’t fucking believe I looked that fat and old. I wish it weren’t true. But I’m not aging well and the shit coming out of my mouth doesn’t help. I don’t think I ever aged well. Since fucking high school. At one point I’m talking about this child being raped and the photos I’ve seen and it all looks just typical. Like exactly what you’d expect. Later, when I’m talking about having sex with some guy when I was younger, it looks so much worse. It’s either that I’m so far removed from any of these possibilities that I’ve become a revolting lizard going over his dirty little sad mementos or because it’s just this gross beast just munching and bragging and belching out fuzzy fantasies rather then histories. As if it’s all lies just slithering out all over the bored fuck in front of me. I wish it looked more sinister, even. It looks tame. Lame. And this bit where I’m talking about it will, I guarantee you, be even more depressing. Like I’m only pretending to know what I’m doing. When I’m really… fucking… just bathing in it. The attention and your polite bother and arrogance.” This statement, it should be said, is especially revealing, as it’s one of the first times that a theme of self-loathing begins to creep into Sotos’ work (though some was evident in “Tick”, his last work. It also contradicts anyone who has ever said that Sotos is unconflicted about himself or his work (including himself!), and the narrator who is present in all of Sotos’ books (that is, Sotos himself), will continue to become more and more pathetic in our eyes. This began to slowly occur during the three books Sotos did for Creation Books (“Index”, “Lazy”, and “Tick”

, but here in particular, it comes to the forefront.

Chapter 1, part 2, is done in a Q&A format Sotos sometimes employs, in which he takes questions from porn magazines or sex books or child abuse textbooks and answers in his own replies (not always related to the question though). In this part Sotos spends a bit more time discussing how much he masturbates, how he sometimes does it in alleyways and eats the cum afterwards because he’s paranoid about leaving his DNA around. More whining about how old he’s become, how tough it is for him to climb the stairs of his apartment building, the strings of cum and yeast he needs to remove from his mouth each morning. Chapter 1, part 3, is basically a long bit where Sotos looks at a picture of a girl and describes it in minute detail, and eventually the reader realizes he’s known that girl most of her life and has had sex with her when she had grown-up. Sotos appears to contrast the innocence of the girl in the photo with that of the grown-up version, who has become a wreck. Sotos doesn’t want the girl to grow up, wants her to stay forever innocent, doesn’t want her to be hurt by life or society. This part is very odd as very rarely does Sotos appear to show compassion for anything at all.

Chapter 2, part 1, is another Q&A, this time with questions taken from interviews with Sotos himself. This part is very revealing. He talks about his nearly lifelong obsession with Lesley Anne Downey, the cuts on his cock from his newspaper masturbation fetishes, the epilogue he wrote for Ian Brady’s book “The Gates of Janus”, his “pathetic obsession” of masturbating on newspaper photos of abducted children, and so on. Some choice extracts: “Can you imagine sobering up to find that you’re doing exactly the same regressive act that you did twenty fucking years ago. Can you imagine being sober and continuing. Perhaps an audience will accept the work as an adequate replication of, or vivid foray into, the mind of someone tragically overrun by aged corruption and lunacy-inducing self-denial. An artistic and brutally honest interpretation of the schizoid and cuckolded would-be child molester.” Or, “You have to be a gay man to understand Francis Bacon’s paintings. No other understanding is possible. He was painting in perfect lieu of fucking and fighting and praying and masticating all at once. There is no tragedy there aside from it not being capable of capture. There is an intense desire to have everything at once. To have the parallels made explicit and satisfying.” Or, “My art, my work, rises directly from these facts that I have to pull together so desperately. Real life is what comes after. So much trouble getting to the truth. And I’m the only one that thinks it’s important.” Or, “You can’t do this any other way. It has to be on paper and it has to be a length that forces the words to move and explain each point. It can’t be a song or a stage play. It has to be specific. And it has to take place in an extended length of time. And that time has to be recorded and the artist held accountable. Bacon is the only painter to go beyond these words into recognizable forms. The best art is in words or photos. All the rest is marketing and advertising.” This section is fascinating as very rarely does Sotos discuss the thoughts and processes that go into his books and very rarely does he analyze his own work. It’s also interesting that he calls Ian Brady a moron and a vain dolt: Contrast such opinions with his “Pure” fanzine (or, for an easier to find example, his interview in “Apocalypse Culture 1”

in which he rants on about how Ian Brady is a genius and a master.
Chapter 2, part 2, deals once again with Lesley Anne, extracts from the Brady/Hindley tape in which they abuse the girl along with Sotos’ commentary, thoughts from his time in jail years ago, more on Jon Benet, his thoughts on pornography, his obsession with photos of abducted or murdered children (he tells us he used to like to go around with these pictures in his pocket imagining himself to be a pedophile. Or as he says, “This is a grown man.”

. This part ends with Sotos saying “Nothing is as terrible as child pornography. Just like they said. I still absolutely believe that.”
Chapter 2, part 3, deals with Wesley Allen Dodd, more on Sotos’ pedophile friend who had gotten arrested, Sotos recalling how amazed he had been by the film said friend had shown him in which the friend had sex with his own son, Sotos fantasizing about fucking a boy, Sotos dissing Max Hardcore films, and so on. More sexual adventures: “I fuck shit and polyps and warts and always wish I could go deeper. And I like it when I stop pumping like a sewer drain and seed inside the latex inside the warm slack hot hole that they forget is severely ugly. And when I slide the feces and ointments out and peel back and start kissing or hugging or saying thank you or whatever it is their midget personality requires. I just drop it on the floor and leave it for the next pig.”
Chapter 3, part 1, begins with a long bit where the narrator keeps referring to himself as Peter and we appear to be literally in the head of Sotos himself, as he tries to justify his fantasies and motivations. But after a few pages you realize he’s just imagining himself to be Peter Lancaster (some British pedophile?). Sotos writes about him for a bit, then Luke Sadowski, then goes into yet another Q&A session, this one in which he answers that he almost never masturbates and hasn’t had sex in years, which contradicts almost anything he’s written about over the last twelve years or so! The section ends with him saying how he used to fantasize about killing hippos at the zoo with a baseball bat, then ends off by writing how he hopes that one day someone who is a fan of his work will send him a homemade video of a child being beat to death with a bat in a hotel room. Just when you thought he was getting loveable… Chapter 3, part 2, is fairly uneventful, mostly extracts from the John Walsh show mixed in with snippets of dialogue from a (fictional?) porn film, and Sotos’ remarks on seeing some play in England called “ecstasy + Grace”. Chapter 3, part 3, is the final section. Here we get Sotos recalling how once at a glory hole joint he fucked a “gargoyle” with Down’s Syndrome, how he likes Tim Roth’s film “The War Zone”, some of his favorite artists such as Frank Bauer and Thomas Frank, how he used to imagine himself as an artist and how in art school he used to make giant charcoals of screaming children, stretched-open assholes and razorbladed mouths, more glory hole antics (“It’s the same thing over and over again. This is not a gay space. It really is heterosexual architecture. It is rejection built on hypersexuality and is a construction meant to facilitate and not celebrate.”

. We also get ramblings about how paranoid he is, how he knows that the government inspects his mail and how he once complained to the ACLU, and how they told him if he was so worried about being arrested again, just stop writing (which he agrees is good advice). It ends in a typical anticlimax with some more glory hole reminiscing.

Recently someone posted a review of this book (it’s linked to at Void Books I believe) in which he said that the impact of this book can only be felt by those who have read all of Sotos’ work up to this point. Because it is in this book that Sotos finally comes off as a human being, when one looks past the slime and the shit and the cum and the piss (of which this book, like all of Sotos’, overflows). You can look back at his nazi/serial-killer fanboy rants of the 80’s and, as the years go by, see a transition of sorts, not only in his writings but also in the man himself. Indeed, it is very hard to read this book without feeling a bit of pity for the man, despite the fact he chose to live the life he did. What makes Sotos’ work have such an impact, I think, is that one can’t just dismiss him as a cartoon character or an inhuman monster, as the man is obviously intelligent, even witty at times, albeit in a black fashion. I, like many Sotos readers, am drawn to it because, in a way, I want to understand him and why he thinks the way he does. There is humanity here, though it could be classified as septic humanism. When I think of Sotos, I like to think of the mocking laugh that haunts the narrator of Camus’ “The Fall”: Someone nailed it up there when they said that for all humanity’s hopes and dreams of utopia and peace, there’ll always be individuals like Sotos who laugh at such a notion and wallow in their own shallow fantasies. Perhaps, were one to read Sotos’ entire literary output, we’d be faced with a “The Fall” for our times, a confessional for today’s over-sexed, at times nearly pornographic society?
Although the hardcover edition is expensive, the paperback was released by Void recently for an affordable price (Void’s releasing Sotos’ next book sometime this Spring I believe, but the title escapes my mind). Creation Books is currently accepting pre-orders for a Sotos anthology that includes the books “Tool”, “Special” (the only Sotos book I haven’t read yet), “Index”, “Lazy”, and “Tick”. In other words, the majority of Sotos’ literary output, excluding “Selfish, Little”, “Pure”, and his 15 issue newsletter “Parasite” (the latter two of which can be found, along with “Tool”, in Jim Goad’s Sotos anthology “Total Abuse”, which unfortunately is out of print and very hard to come by these days at a cheap price). For anyone interested in checking out Sotos’ work the Creation anthology would be a great starting place, followed by “Selfish, Little”. Really, if you’re a fan of Dennis Cooper or people like that, you’d probably like Sotos’ work: It’s a lot more brutal, metafictional, and not as funny (or transcendent) as Cooper’s work, but the two do have quite a bit in common.

“I wanted to… rub the human face in it’s own vomit… and then make it look in the mirror.”

(J.G. Ballard)

Well, rakehell (and thanks for the compliment at the end of your post), it seems that the only exposure to Sotos’ work that most people can name is that small interview in “Apocalypse Culture”, which is a little bit much, even for that book (I’d be willing to argue that Sotos was still young and immature when he did that interview, and I don’t believe he’d say similar things now… Or at the very least, the serial killer/Nazi stuff would be toned down. I mean, at the interview at the start of “Total Abuse” Sotos told Goad out and out he found white supremacists stupid and tedious, to say the very least, and he didn’t associate with them). ‘Course, Sotos’ writings are filled with racist slurs, but that may just be him trying to be “controversial”. That Apocalypse Culture interview does pretty much sum up the 80’s extreme music scene, though: Trying to shock by hyping up mass murderers, Nazis, death and all that. I don’t know about “rotten.com”, never been there, and I’ve never seen any “Faces of Death”: For the most part I can’t bear the sight of real-life blood or violence. Textually, I can handle it, but when the text is translated into flesh, then it usually just sickens me. “American Psycho” is a great book, mainly because it’s very funny.

As for tainting, I’m always reminded of that great scene in Cooper’s “Frisk” when the narrator “Dennis”, at the age of 13, is shown “snuff” photographs that haunt him the rest of his life (even though he finds out later on that the photos are fakes). Certainly the theme of people becoming contaminated by exposure to “evil” is common in Grant Morrison’s work. Like how Quimper was an innocent spirit until he was pulled into the world of matter and perverted (or as Fanny so eloquently put it, “Did they use our pain to bring you down from the light into the heavy? They crushed your poor, skinny body into the world of weight and measure. They twisted you into flesh and they showed you the gutters of the human soul”

. Certainly you could say the same about Sir Miles (seeing the fox torn to pieces as a boy, encountering the Outer Church during a bad LSD trip). Or in “The Filth”, where the landfill workers at that trash station gradually become obsessed into insanity by all the pornography they get exposed to. Mother Dirt tells Slade regarding Spartacus Hughes: “Our people are often exposed to sick places, bad people, unnatural things. As a result of his dedication to duty, one of our finest officers has become… contaminated.” And later on when Spartacus confesses to Slade “I saw too much on the job, Ned, that’s all. I became infected with understanding.” The “Filth” analogy is apt to me because I began reading Sotos around the same time I was reading “The Filth”, and that was also around the point where I began exploring “heavier” forms of magic, by people like Kenneth Grant and Co. In a way, you could compare Sotos’ creative output as a novel version of “The Filth”.

The queasy aspect of Sotos’ books is the undeniable fact that he is, often times but not always, writing child porn. Sometimes he describes to us, in vivid detail, the type of child porn photos he’s seen. In this manner, you could argue that this is almost worse then real pornography because, not having an image to attach to the words, your mind is capable of creating images which have the possibility of being much worse then they actually are (and generally with porn photos, what you see is what you get: There’s no ambiguity. I’m talking about porn in general, not child porn, which I’ve never seen and have no intention of ever seeing). In this underhanded manner, Sotos makes you think like a pedophile by having your mind create the visuals on it’s own: You become complicit. That’s where the disturbance lies, I think… It’s what I was referring to when I said above there were some things I didn’t want to know (like when the scorpion loas wanted to teach Morrison how to become an assassin and rip off people’s auras, and Morrison realized he had made a huge mistake, that this was bad shit and that he didn’t want to know this stuff). Of course, the difference between this and real life is that a lot of Sotos’ writings is fantasy, in which case no one is being really exploited (except perhaps the wallet of the person buying the book! )

unlike real kiddie porn, in which obviously the child is being exploited for someone else’s monetary gain/pleasure.

On one hand, one could compare loss of innocence as being important to the process of growing up and maturity, but on the other hand, it can really suck at times. Phil Hine writes that very often magicians may feel nostalgic for times when things were simpler, before they turned to magic: I realize that I was much happier when I was this extreme left-wing anarchist and I lumped everyone in the world into convenient categories. But you get older and you explore these altered frames of mind and things become more complicated, people become more complicated, and everything you knew is wrong. I understand why they say “ignorance is bliss”, but I wouldn’t want to go through life ignorant. There’s this children’s book I’ve always loved, “Counting With Calico”, a book to help you learn numbers. It’s illustrated with these beautiful, happy looking cats, chasing moths and drinking milk and giving each other baths and sleeping in paper bags. I wish all cats could live lives like that, free of pain, and I wish the same for humans, but at this moment at least it’s unrealistic. I suppose the only option available to me is to assimilate all the shit I’ve exposed myself to and try to find some worth in it, that I can maybe use to benefit myself or others in some way. But even Sotos must have some kind of moral attitude somewhere inside him, because if he didn’t, then wouldn’t he be a pedophile or a serial killer himself, instead of just fantasizing and writing about it? He claims the only thing that stops him is cowardice, laziness, and fear of the law, but I think that’s a cover-up. If he really wanted to hurt someone, he’d have done it by now, regardless of the law. Certain impulses are usually impossible to constrain forever.

I said age might play a part, that one eventually outgrows such interests (I’m referring to serial killers and sex crimes here, not bugs or monsters or horror), and I see some truth to that. Poppy Z. Brite is a great example, actually. If you read her early books they’re full of sadistic vampires, cannibalism, serial killers, boy-on-boy sex, and so on. I mean, “Exquisite Corpse” is one of the most stomach-turning things I’ve ever read from a mainstream publishing house! Yet now Poppy Z. Brite is 37, married, writing quirky slice-of-life, realistic stories about gay chefs (and other people) living in New Orleans, trying to portray the city in a realistic manner rather then drama it up with Goths and vampires, books with almost no violence or angst or sex perversions. Some of her old fans have accused her of selling out (even I was horrified at first), but I don’t think so: Her obsessions and priorities have changed, yet she’s still a good writer, and I find myself fascinated with this change of direction and her exploration of a culture I probably would never have explored on my own. I hope that’s me one day… Just stable, I guess, a sane occultist, a change from my turbulent twenties, which have been a maelstrom of emotions and weirdness. But maybe you need pain to appreciate pleasure, sadness to appreciate happiness, insanity to appreciate sanity. Otherwise, you end up taking such things for granted. I will say that at this moment I’m getting a little bit sick of the angst and nihilism. I really hope I’m not coming off as some sort of black magician here, because trust me, I’m still vanilla and there are occultists who’ve encountered much worse then these silly little mental exercises I torture myself with. It’s one thing to say that by reading someone like Sotos you’re working with the Qliphoth… It’s another thing, I’d presume, to work with the Qliphoth in an undiluted form, if you catch my meaning.

As for the “edge”, I just have a curiosity regarding what some people stray away from. There are many mainstream things I enjoy, but at the same time I’m also interested in subcultures, alternative stuff, and things of that nature. Generally I’ve always gravitated towards the “dark” or the “macabre”. As a child I liked to make cemeteries from building blocks, I loved those little rubber insect and monster toys, and so on. I really shouldn’t call it “dark” though as I tend to see monsters, bugs, reptiles, and so on more as familiars then something evil. Part of the reason I’m curious about stuff like (Sotos’ writing, or other dark writers like Lovecraft, Bataille, Cooper, Genet, Ballard, Burroughs and so on) is that one day I want to look back on my life and say that, in terms of literature, art, music, movies, whatever, there was almost nothing I shied away from, that I had explored these things rather then try to hide from them or pretend they didn’t exist. Of course, you need to drawn the line somewhere. However, I often like to imagine a situation where someone would offer to show you the worst thing in the world, something so vile that no one else has ever seen it or ever would, something that could potentially destroy whoever saw it, but the sheer temptation to say that you did see it… One last quote, this one from the “Voudon Gnostic Workbook”:

"Somewhere deeply rooted in the consciousness of humanity there exists the absolute objectification of psychic terror. This point is the basis for the total and unyielding pervasiveness of man's instinct for cosmic horror... Humanity is in the grip of a violent power of primordial chaos, which continually emerges and as yet is continually avoided by our sciences, arts, and all cultural systems of valuation. There is nothing which can keep the mind of man from finally coming to this experience of horror, yet paradoxically we seem to survive... Rather, in opposition to all humanistic culture, we are lured ever to the brink of chaos. We want to go where we are forbidden. We want to know what has been denied to us. We seek, in a word, the 'more'. And so the magician seeking the limits and then the limits beyond the limits will constantly move closer and closer to the brink, and so he will necessarily become more and more endangered by that same brink, which is the limit to all sanity, all harmony, all order, all reason, and even all mysticism. For we cannot trust even mysticism beyond the limits of reason alone. And as the magician stands on the brink of the final mystery, encounter, or total experience, he will find that there is nothingness before him. He will experience the fundamental fear of all being, which is the fear of the totally unknowable. He will fear because he cannot come to grips in his mind with any energies, structures, ideas awaiting him. For it is only the nothingness of the absence of all the contents of consciousness which presents itself to him."

Bah, enough of this metaphysical bollocks! Sotos is a bloated ‘tard who can’t get it up, doesn’t know what love is, probably never has been loved and never really matured and grew up, and that’s why his body is the disgusting, decaying, diseased mess it is today. And there’s really no reason to attach so much significance to his work. I mean, really, there are so many writers out there who are more worthy of such scrutiny, like Lovecraft, who will never bore me. My final thoughts on Sotos is that what makes his works worth scrutinizing is that, at the very least, they make you think uncomfortable things, they challenge you in some way and you can’t be objective about it. I like books that get reactions, more so then books that just pass the time. On my very first day of college ever I got a syllabus at my English course which had a Kafka quote on the cover, a quote I’ve never forgotten, that ended with the line “A good book should be an axe for the frozen sea inside of us”. A description that one could compare to Sotos’ writing, though perhaps a ball-peen hammer would be more appropriate then an axe.