Writing
Fiction, poetry, a screenplay, and nonfiction.
Oroluminescence
Ovid’s Metamorphoses, reimagined in a near-future empire that has learned to manage the stars.
In a world where Rome’s gods never lost their thrones, the Unified Empire has spent fifty golden years mastering light itself. It dims the sky on command, hangs new stars for its holidays, and casts a shimmering net over a planet that, in the golden cities at least, no longer seems to be burning. On the night of the Golden Jubilee in the imperial capital of New York, a disgraced poet named Avi is offered a commission that will save his career and send him far from the one person he wants to stay near. At the empire’s far edge, on the Black Sea, Corinna, who was carried across a dark river as an infant, is trying to warn her oldest friend, the Karaoke Queen of Tomis, about a visitor from the capital who might be Apollo, or might just be rich. Then the net fails. At opposite ends of the empire, two strangers who happen to be looking up see real stars for the first time in their lives.
Oroluminescence reimagines Ovid’s Metamorphoses for a near future in which the old gods survive as the ruling class’s vocabulary, and may not be as tame as the empire believes.
Oroluminescence is the creative arm of my research on mythological modernism: the argument, from Hölderlin to Celan, that myth survives modernity not as ideological ground but as interruption, the thing no empire, however brilliantly lit, can fully administer.
It was the Golden Age’s Golden Jubilee. So all the stars were gold. They dimmed the sky early that day. And for the evening’s celebrations they’d put out a gorgeous display of extra stars in the firmament, a bright, additional spiral rotating out from the Milky Way, a staircase that led — depending on one’s perspective on the relative importance of the heavens and earth — down to the complex where the Jubilee would soon take place, or up from the complex’s giant dome back into the dome of heaven.
Customization comes with its costs. Not even the best, newest, most stunning stars can be seen from everywhere, so the effect had to be approximated in each of the Unified Empire’s principal cities, different staircases tracking not to the titanic palace whose grounds stretched from the Hudson to the East River, but to the largest of each city’s temples dedicated to Jupiter, each of which shone with such grace as would have made earlier, more primitive people tremble with desire. The luster was optimized for the eyes of their inhabitants staring upwards, though satellite images also broadcast the oroluminescent net they cast across the planet, reminiscent, so the intent went, of that in which Vulcan caught Mars and Venus. And there was light enough to spare to wash over the Empire’s argentine suburbs, its innumerable regional cities and towns, even the chalcedon countryside, where everyone’s face was lit by the screen on which they watched the Jubilee. On any of these smaller screens, held in palms, shared on tables, stared at on walls, viewers could watch footage from any number of the celebrations where the Empire’s star-studded elite had turned out to give thanks for these fifty fat years, scores of purple carpet ceremonies, hundreds of breathless on-air personalities narrating every detail of the stars in the skies, the stars on the ground, the airplanes, the helicopters, the hovering flotillas slowly processing towards the heart of any and every great city.
But the real luminaries were all in New York.
So how had that poet whatshisname finagled a verified invite? A few of the night’s more observant viewers might have thought to ask, but really who cares, because here comes the Emperor’s youngest, darlingest grandchild, Julia. Julia was preceded by a river of columbines, stately floating around the large open air conveyance that carried her down the purple avenue leading from the Imperial heliport towards the Complex itself. Julia alighted with her husband from her carriage. The river of columbines continued its flow behind her. A swarm of dove-like drones captured her from every angle.
Whatshisname almost forgot himself too.
His name, for what it’s worth, was Avi.
What Tarquin the Proud Said With the Poppies
A man finds his best friend’s body before the police do, mutilates it to disguise how he died, and spends the rest of his life explaining why. A novel about faith, secrecy, and what a community can do to its own without anyone giving an order.
When Isaac Smith is murdered in New York, everyone thinks they understand why. Isaac and his closest friend, Cannon McKay, have just published the secrets of the Mormon temple ceremony — including the gruesome penalties once attached to revealing them. Isaac is not only an apostate critic of the Church; he is a descendant of Joseph Smith, and his death looks designed to make him a theological spectacle.
But Cannon reaches the body before the police do, and what he does next is indefensible. He cuts away the bindings, shoots the corpse through the ritual wounds, and turns a symbolic execution into an ordinary American gun murder. Then he disappears, leaving a box of papers with his ex-wife Faye: part confession, part apology, part existential autopsy of a friendship, a marriage, and a faith.
Faye is more than his reader. A physician who converted to the church her husband spent his life fleeing, haunted — literally — by the brother who died when she was six, she notices what Cannon’s confession keeps hiding, and answers it with an account of her own.
What Tarquin the Proud Said With the Poppies is a novel about faith, secrecy, inheritance, and what the members of a sacred community can make one another do without a word being spoken.
Light Pollution
Abtrünnig erst bin ich treu.
Ich bin du, wenn ich ich bin.
Only faithless am I faithful.
I am you, when I am I.
-
{{ p.num }}
{{ p.title }}{{ p.pubNote }} {{ p.title }}
Diary of a Seducer
A screenplay adaptation and extension of Kierkegaard’s Diary of a Seducer.
Anders steals and copies a diary belonging to his friend Johannes, a methodical record of the seduction and ruin of Cordelia. He doesn’t know what to do with it. His sister Anna does.