FEATURES
Interview with Peter Sotos
/ Brandon Stosuy
01.19.06
This interview originally appeared, in a slightly truncated form, in The Prague Literary Review Issue 4
Bataille, Genet, Sade and company do swift business at the local bookshop, but some of the most adventurous readers I know tell me they haven't gotten around to Peter Sotos. Distance renders depravity digestible, so cast the burly Chicago author in terms of his precursors––imagine Sade slopping through Chicago gloryholes; Bataille looping the audio of murderers, victims, and media whores into powerful sonic whirlpools; Genet diligently clipping/fleshing out/resuscitating news stories about child abductions (and abductors). Another turn-off to some: His books aren't novelistic (and he doesn't intend for them to be); instead, frame each as an ethics course steeped in cum shots and crime sprees. And for newbies, the texts are, in his words, "severely connected," i.e. the more you read, the more complex the repetitions, shadows, echoes, reverberations.
Sotos' personal history also threatens to obscure his work. Because of the insistence on a narrative first person, he’s been vilified as a misanthropic pedophile. (His mid-80s kiddie-porn arrest for the possession of the zine, Incest #4, is often what folks know about the author.) Due to his history with seminal noise group Whitehouse, some view him as a part-time writer. Regardless, Sotos continually proves himself a rigorous thinker (sentences shot through with Nietzschean quivers) whose brutally spare prose and complex inquiries into desire make him one of a handful of contemporary authors justifiably worth their "transgressive" salt.
As of late there's been a lot of activity surrounding Peter. Creation books published Proxy, a collection of books from 1991-2000: Along with Tool, Index, Special, Lazy, and Tick, it includes a cut-n-paste introduction by the author and a collagist CD (w/ Steve Albini). Last year Brooklyn-based Void Books published Selfish, Little and more recently made available Sotos' strongest work to date, Comfort & Critique. Creation recently published Predicate: The Dunblane Massacre, Ten Years After (and, in fact, parts of this discussion show up in Waitress, released by Creation Books as a limited-edition accompaniment to other Predicate pre-orders). He edited and wrote the introduction for Jamie Gillis' Pure Filth, out on Feral House in October 2006.
Comfort & Critique looks at, among other things, the 2000 abduction and subsequent murder of 8-year old Sarah Payne by prior sex-offender Roy Whiting in Sussex, weaving-in the author's everyday discussions about soup, Annabel Chong's The World's Biggest Gang Bang (Chong fucked 251 guys in 10 hours), the "Name and Shame" riots in Paulsgrove UK (at one point a pediatrician was attacked when locals misread a sign). Check out also its play on timelines and Wordsworth's child to the man (vice versa), etc.
I interviewed Peter Sotos this past summer. Since then, we've kept in touch, most often about music. There's the temptation to say something nice about the notorious author, but instead of selling you on Peter the person (admittedly a great guy to get drunk with while discussing the finer points of Shellac), why not read his responses in the following interview and formulate your own opinion.
Bataille, Genet, Sade and company do swift business at the local bookshop, but some of the most adventurous readers I know tell me they haven't gotten around to Peter Sotos. Distance renders depravity digestible, so cast the burly Chicago author in terms of his precursors––imagine Sade slopping through Chicago gloryholes; Bataille looping the audio of murderers, victims, and media whores into powerful sonic whirlpools; Genet diligently clipping/fleshing out/resuscitating news stories about child abductions (and abductors). Another turn-off to some: His books aren't novelistic (and he doesn't intend for them to be); instead, frame each as an ethics course steeped in cum shots and crime sprees. And for newbies, the texts are, in his words, "severely connected," i.e. the more you read, the more complex the repetitions, shadows, echoes, reverberations.
Sotos' personal history also threatens to obscure his work. Because of the insistence on a narrative first person, he’s been vilified as a misanthropic pedophile. (His mid-80s kiddie-porn arrest for the possession of the zine, Incest #4, is often what folks know about the author.) Due to his history with seminal noise group Whitehouse, some view him as a part-time writer. Regardless, Sotos continually proves himself a rigorous thinker (sentences shot through with Nietzschean quivers) whose brutally spare prose and complex inquiries into desire make him one of a handful of contemporary authors justifiably worth their "transgressive" salt.
As of late there's been a lot of activity surrounding Peter. Creation books published Proxy, a collection of books from 1991-2000: Along with Tool, Index, Special, Lazy, and Tick, it includes a cut-n-paste introduction by the author and a collagist CD (w/ Steve Albini). Last year Brooklyn-based Void Books published Selfish, Little and more recently made available Sotos' strongest work to date, Comfort & Critique. Creation recently published Predicate: The Dunblane Massacre, Ten Years After (and, in fact, parts of this discussion show up in Waitress, released by Creation Books as a limited-edition accompaniment to other Predicate pre-orders). He edited and wrote the introduction for Jamie Gillis' Pure Filth, out on Feral House in October 2006.
Comfort & Critique looks at, among other things, the 2000 abduction and subsequent murder of 8-year old Sarah Payne by prior sex-offender Roy Whiting in Sussex, weaving-in the author's everyday discussions about soup, Annabel Chong's The World's Biggest Gang Bang (Chong fucked 251 guys in 10 hours), the "Name and Shame" riots in Paulsgrove UK (at one point a pediatrician was attacked when locals misread a sign). Check out also its play on timelines and Wordsworth's child to the man (vice versa), etc.
I interviewed Peter Sotos this past summer. Since then, we've kept in touch, most often about music. There's the temptation to say something nice about the notorious author, but instead of selling you on Peter the person (admittedly a great guy to get drunk with while discussing the finer points of Shellac), why not read his responses in the following interview and formulate your own opinion.
