JL: I wasn't planning on it but now that you mention it maybe I will. I think if I saw a different tone of light I would write The Embassy. The Embassy is under ground, or sand rather, and so I feel like it would be difficult to situate it within the parameters I typically work. Which is usually a response to ratios of ambient light in movies. I mean, that's usually my jumping off point.

From a macro standpoint, I get the theoretical framework of Glory Hole. I wonder if we could talk about the details. Stuff like "I don't mean to be a black box" from "Arizona or Florida," and the general attitude of Glory Hole. Like, you mention The Hot Tub as having a fuck-it-all attitude. I'd say Glory Hole has a who-gives-a-fuck attitude. What do you think? What were you reading a lot of while writing it? And also, how do you think these two books relate to this time and culture generally? We could talk about surface culture like fashion etc. or deeper shifts in the way people think and communicate maybe.

DH: I basically quit reading. I could stomach Agamben and one or two others and that’s about it. Mostly I watched serial TV on the internet and listened to the most brazen pop music I could find. I worked 10-15 hours a day, sometimes more. I was anemic as fuck and had been for years. The bright spot of my week was going to the oncologist to get tanked up on intravenous iron. I felt like a fraud sitting there with the chemo patients but I was basically the walking dead so whatever. I had no patience anymore for the kind of poems I’d written for a collection called Power Ballad, these long, wandering persona pieces, mostly dancefloors and celebrity, political conspiracy, sci-fi, ruined love. It’s like they were pop but not pop enough. I wanted something no bullshit. If the poems in Power Ballad are a critique of the world, Glory Hole is against even the concept of a world. So like the cruelest poems possible, but at the same time pop songs. Every line is a hook. It’s like some b-boy doing nothing but power moves. Only assholes do that. But it’s also the truth, like that line from “Kill the Lights”, “I drive like an asshole because it’s the truth.” I’m only speaking the truth from here on out. I think the line you quote from “Arizona or Florida” speaks to that also: “I don’t mean to be a black box / but I’m also not apologizing.” You could read that as the poems asserting themselves as emergent little death mechanisms. They’re not afraid to be a recording of the voice of God pulled from the wreckage. I’d say most poets are afraid to swing for the fences, if we’re allowed to use sports metaphors here. They risk nothing, when really you have to risk everything. Every poem is your last chance. I’ve talked with Ariana Reines about this in relation to Mal-O-Mar and I know you feel the same way: I’m interested in masterpieces, or miracles, and that’s it. I don’t have time for anything else.

I don’t know if I’m answering the entirety of your question, but my question for you is similar: I’m wondering if you could talk about how the surface referents of your work operate relative to the essence they evoke. I feel like the tactical strategy of your poetry and also Glory Hole is similar to advertising in its understanding of an image’s capacity to evoke a state of being or way of life, and how that reflects back on the actual thing attached to the image. Like the title of your poem “A Beverly Hills of the Mind”: it’s about the idea of Beverly Hills, not Beverly Hills – but there’s an implication that this idea of Beverly Hills is more Beverly Hills than Beverly Hills is. Badiou has this great quote in regard to Deleuze, a kind of conciliatory eulogy, that consolidates Deleuze’s thought down to one negative prescription, “Fight the spirit of finitude,” along with the affirmation “Trust only in the infinite.” I feel like your poetry is similarly aligned, and that to ask how the image functions is really to ask how reality functions, but that’s high level – I want you to talk brass tacks. What are you drawing from? What do you respect? I feel like a lot of the poems in your recent book Drain You and also Right Now the Music and the Life Rule are reminiscent of user-generated content, specifically online product reviews. I’m guessing this is because product reviews are all about trying to get at the experience of a thing, or its essence, to be truthful, to the point, and useful. The review itself is a product. I have a fascination with reviews of movie theaters on sites like Citysearch. There’s a lot of crazy class and race shit that comes into play, where the review mutates into a review of the audience. The audience as product. But I’m getting off track – What are you drawing from? What do you respect? How does it all come together?

JL: I was lounging in Beverly Hills very recently and I felt like it was kind of like the inside of my hot tub, which is like shapely and wishful, but I thought simultaneously that right now you can't be inside of anything. We live in a borderless society. It is the deep mix of externalities that one communicates with, and the external: the people, the places, the objects, the feelings, and the desires are indeed comprised within the product, they are the "core product" -- what you want it to do for you, so all writing that's about external things or images is about how reality functions, the right now reality that isn't ruled by the past.

I like to perceive going beyond the frontier of production. In economics, the transformation curve presents a defined limit based on the factors of production available. I think art expands the production possibility frontier to an indeterminate and possibly limitless rate. There is no end to the replication of feelings and their consequence. I believe in miracles as well, and to trip the boundary of the transformation curve would be an authentic "miracle," scientifically impossible, though a metric could be formed to account for the effect. This correlates, tangentially, with what you see as the user-generated aesthetic of Drain You and Right Now the Music and the Life Rule. User-generated content gives the audience focus and high control, it is also viewed as entertaining. Consequently sites that have these user-generated qualities have the fastest rates of growth, therefore accelerating the breakout from the production possibility frontier, and bringing us all closer to miracles.

DH: I don’t think reality functioning as an image is something specific to right now or the age of “the spectacle”. It’s fundamental. The universe is the image of nothingness. The world is the image of the universe. It’s the world we’re talking about here when we talk about macro-trends and the way we live. I think the shift toward user-generated content is part of a larger evolution. In marketing what’s happening is the brand and customer are becoming one. People create word-of-mouth campaigns at no cost to the brand. They beta-test and give feedback. They create actual marketing campaigns (like with video contests) and development code in the form of crowd-sourcing. This is all free labor that would normally cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in billable time. And they do it because they want a better product, a better user experience. It’s an inclination toward efficiency, and it’s the primary drive of the world in its current incarnation. It spills over into the relationship between the state and citizen, or the media and consumer, with the phenomenon of self-surveillance and monitoring your image online. You carry a GPS device so you know where you are at all times. You leave digital traces of yourself everywhere so you know what you’ve done and can forecast what you want to do next. Everything is connected. What this means is that all regulation is internalized. The state has effectively been replaced by the individual. This is an ironic, endgame scenario way beyond the New World Order of conspiracy theorists. It’s like what Debord says about how exile is impossible in a unified world. What’s terrifying is “We are the world.” But at the same time it’s not terrifying, or not any more than life itself. The impossible is always terrifying, and that’s what life is: its own impossibility. The challenge is always to embrace this impossibility, that is, to live life.

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Order Glory Hole / The Hot Tub here.

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