“To be so old and still on the prowl,” muses the narrator of Nate Lippens’s second novel, Ripcord, the follow-up to his debut, My Dead Book. Ripcord is older, hornier, angrier. It’s published by Semiotext(e) in the US and Pilot Press in the UK.

I had a conversation with Nate over Zoom about the book and then emailed over some questions.


Matthew Kinlin: If you could travel back in time and witness one work of performance art, what would it be?

Nate Lippens: Jesus, this is like Sophie’s Choice for me. I would’ve loved to have seen one of Jack Smith’s performances, even though by many accounts they were marathons that started ridiculously late and were glacially slow tests of the audience’s patience. Or Karen Finley performing “I’m an Ass Man” at Danceteria, getting heckled as she ranted and smeared chocolate and canned yams on herself. But ultimately, I’d choose Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano’s Rope Piece, where they spent an entire year bound together by an eight-foot rope tied around their waists. The rules of the artwork stipulated they wouldn’t touch each other. I’ve read essays about the work that talk about collaboration and race and interdependency and gender. I’m sure that’s all there. Mostly, I have a visceral reaction to it. Being restrained, adapting, suppressing your will and freedom and privacy to a set of rules. What fascinates me is that you wouldn’t necessarily know what you were seeing or understand it as art. Two people tied together wandering down the street in 1983. Would you think you were just seeing another sad product of Ronald Reagan’s drastic cuts to social services? There but for the grace of meds go I.

Kenneth Anger’s venomous Hollywood Babylon features a photograph of Judy Garland with the words: “Judy: old, old, old.” In the opening of Ripcord, we are confronted with a narrator at a much later stage in life than My Dead Book. Sat in a gay bar, he is no longer the young twink passing judgement. How does the novel approach the relationship between gay men and getting old, old, old?

I wanted to show a single older gay man navigating his aging, feeling in some ways irrelevant and obsolete. He’s lost the sense of himself. Not just physically but socially. Most of his values have never been shared by the wider world. Now they aren’t shared by the queer community. He’s a queen without a country. When I was coming of age, the drumbeat was that being gay was a lonely life, without significantly addressing the social forces and religious bullshit that created and enforced that isolation and fear. Between that message and gay relationships being treated as inferior or grotesque and sex as a killer, a lot of us put up walls we later struggled to topple and some of us couldn’t. Also, coming from an era when so many died from AIDS, there’s the freighted sense it’s a privilege to age—and it is—but it’s also difficult. The sense of cultural disorientation can be disturbing. I don’t always know how to situate myself in the world, or if I even want to.

As well as aging, Ripcord confronts themes around work and class. The narrator is working catering jobs and constantly hitting up against these cognitive dissonances with friends and artists that fail to grasp the lived reality of his working life. There’s the line: “How do I talk to a person who’s never been so hungry they’ve considered mugging someone?” Can you speak more about these social realities that are often and conveniently overlooked?

The narrator has always struggled; he’s lived paycheck to paycheck since he was young and first out on his own. He’s done sex work; he’s worked every type of odd job. He’s what’s sniffed at as unskilled labor. There’s a desperation and a numbness that sets in when you’re always cobbling together a living, always trying to stretch a limited income, when you understand where you are in the economic order. And with age, there are no illusions. You know it’s unlikely to change. He’s single so there’s no second income, there’s no family inheritance, no sudden windfall. He’s on his own. And he’s bombarded with gentrification and wealth and assimilation. A quick scroll of Instagram is full of travel photos and destination weddings and pool parties and Bear Week, and you think, “How the fuck do these people afford all this? Do they have jobs?” There’s so much dissonance in the way many of us live and what is projected at us and what the expectations are. Class is still taboo. Distasteful.

The cover of Ripcord features a photograph of Stephen Varble performing outside the Chemical Bank in his gutter couture, encased in a gown of fishing net with sequins and fake dollar bills. What is your relationship to this strange and striking image?

I’ve loved that Peter Hujar photo since I first saw it. For Chemical Bank Protest, Varble wore a costume made of netting, fake money, breasts made from condoms filled with fake blood, and a toy fighter plane as a codpiece. He went in the bank and claimed someone had forged a million-dollar check in his name and demanded reimbursement for the money stolen from him. Of course they turned him away, so he punctured the condoms with a fountain pen and used the blood to write checks. It’s bonkers and campy and righteous. Now that’s art.

I enjoyed the inclusion of the characters Greer and Charlie, an artist and writer that haven’t made it but continue to follow their ideas. The book contains multiple red herrings of art and culture that you seemed fascinated with, whole underground scenes where one or maybe two will be ordained and historicized. Can you expand on this?

Systems and institutions only have room for a few people to act as stand-ins for entire scenes and movements. Most of that comes down to what is marketable, but some of it is the need of the viewer or listener or reader to relate and project on someone. It’s part of us wanting heroes, and those tend to be individuals. A one-on-one relationship. I’m fascinated by the ones who don’t make the official history. Because that’s the majority of people. I have many friends who make art and music and write to very little attention. At a certain point you must decide if you’ll continue and do it no matter what. I recently watched the documentary Queercore: How to Punk A Revolution and it had that quality. I was thrilled to see that scene covered, but I immediately thought of so many people I could have seen in it. People who were vectors for all kinds of art and performance and zines. They may have integral to the time but are unsung or left out of the official history. Maybe that’s another documentary.

From April 11, 1980 to April 11, 1981, Tehching Hsieh performed his Time Clock Piece where he punched a clock every hour on the hour and took a photo. As in all your work, Ripcord has this porous relationship with the past. At one point the narrator states, “No way back and no way forward. I can’t get started because there are no endings. Everything loops.” How does the novel and its older narrator relate to time?

Tehching Hsieh really is one of my favourite artists. His work is extreme but not in the typical transgressive or provocative way. It’s programmatic. He sets up rules and lives them out. He’s said that people think his work is spiritual but it’s not, it’s just about consuming time. He has a quote: “The day will end, with or without me.”

Time is my subject and my medium—who said that? It could be any of us, I suppose. My relationship to the past is that it’s right here today. It’s the sidecar to the present. Sometimes it’s the driver. We’re all affected by our experiences and histories, unwitting secret ops of our training. So, when people say that all we have is the present, I think sure, but also that present is very capacious to me, and it takes in all the rest. I’m reminded of when a friend worked in a head injury clinic and told me about patients who had no memory—nothing beyond the last few minutes sometimes. Pema Chödrön in extremis.

Holly Hughes performing her dyke noirs like The Lady Dick at WOW Café, states: “It’s time for perverts to take a good hard look at themselves.” Ripcord is definitely more X-rated than your previous work. An example: “Bathroom graffiti: Do you love me? Or am I a fantasy? Underneath: Open wide fag.” What was the decision to include more hardcore material?

I like smut. I wrote two stories that were just sex and I ended up using them in Ripcord. I was thinking about Nathalie Sarraute’s Tropisms, which is just sensations and was trying to write a sexual version of that. And I wanted it to reflect what I see around me, on social media, on apps. It was also a reaction to a trend I saw of young queers who are anti-sex, anti-porn, no-kink at Pride. Basically, they sound like conservative Christians. They’re people who think of queer as an identity that’s desexualized. I saw someone say it was gross for older gay men to still be expressing being horny. It’s immature. I thought, hold my bathtub gin, kid. So, I wanted the book to have that Mae West, Moms Mabley filth factor. That crepey-skinned, kidney-stoned, liver spotted, sun-damaged, +3.00 readers fuck-me-fuck-you energy.

The narrator is trying on his daddy costume and navigating hook-up apps. At one point, a younger guy comments, “Daddy, I love your moustache,” to which the narrator thinks, “I didn’t tell him the way it curls down reminds me of Jeanne Moreau’s downturned mouth.” Can you expand more on the narrator playing with these sexual roles?

He’s aged into masculinity, something he sees mostly as a disguise and kind of a joke. His young life was shaped by being hated for being effeminate. And he finds himself older, bald, and bearded and treated as an object of lust. He knows it’s a just a two-dimensional role and is trying to figure out how that works. This came out of me growing a depression beard several years back and discovering I was treated completely different than I had been. It was shocking. I mean, when I opened my mouth and spoke, the illusion was ruined, but otherwise I was a guy. Of course, I felt like Helena Antonia, but it was a fascinating social experiment. I kept the beard but started to lean more into the bearded poofter, like Edward Gorey. Maybe it’s time for big jewelery and a floor-length faux-fur coat.

The cover of Kate Bush’s The Dreaming album features her as Harry Houdini’s wife Bess with a key in her mouth. How does Ripcord relate to ideas of flight and escape?

I grew up at a time when illusionists, magicians, and escape artists were regularly on network TV, and it was a time where people truly could go off the grid and not be found. There weren’t cell phones or CCTV and surveillance everywhere. An atlas and a car and you could take off. The narrator craves escape, willed disappearance rather than the kind of slow-fade invisibility he feels being older and poor. He knows it’s a dream but also indulges it. He’s moved a lot in his life, had a lot of chaos, and there’s a part of him that is restless and nomadic, but he can’t just hitchhike like he did at seventeen. He’s an outsider or an outcast but without even the rebel caché that suggests. He wouldn’t call himself marginal because that’s jargon. He’s one of the half-forgotten, but he still has to make rent.

Lydia Lunch on stage at the Performing Garage in 1987: “Everywhere I’ve been—and by the looks of me you can tell I’ve been everywhere—it gives me that same empty feeling, that same old ugliness, that same old nothingness. . .” and later screams at the audience about this “fuckin’ stinkin’ world that tricks you into being born in the first place.” Ripcord feels an angrier work and often nihilistic. Can you speak about its anger?

Lydia! I bought her spoken-word cassette The Uncensored Lydia Lunch when I was a teenager during a fucked-up summer, and it blew my little mind. That hyperarticulate, almost-speedy stream-of-bile was so liberating. And funny. It was nihilism as illumination.

My Dead Book was about loss and isolation, which entails anger, but with Ripcord I knew I wanted to explore that more. The narrator is working, struggling, failing to connect, measuring his losses, and trying to find a way to be in his life. Anger has gotten him through some hard years. Not just anger at the world—lashing out—but self-excoriating anger, the kind that burns through calcified beliefs and behaviours, through numbness and stasis. I’ve always loved John Lydon chant-singing “Anger is an energy.” We imagine anger only as a negative, as a destructive force, but it can be a motivator, it can shake you free of a life that isn’t living. In Ripcord, his anger is a force of frustration and freedom.

Ripcord is threaded with unsettling humor throughout. You like to pick at language like a scab you can’t stop touching. It’s painful, but when it comes away there’s a physical release. Lines such as, “I nodded, but I knew better. Motherfuckers never pay. Motherfuckers take. If they give, it’s with their cocks. Only us mothers get fucked.” How do you use humor and is this informed by any comedians or actors/actresses?

I knew from a young age that language was a weapon and I wanted to be able to fend for myself in that realm. Not merely defend or rebuff what came at me, but to draw blood. With a smile. And that came from paying very close attention to the way people spoke, the absurdity in how we choose to express ourselves, and the ways we talk past each other. Cliches, slang, and colloquialisms especially. And now it’s corporate and academic language, political speech that’s neither, and HR lingo.

Richard Pryor and Lily Tomlin were huge for me when I was a kid. I checked their comedy albums out from the public library. Jane Wagner, who wrote Lily’s material, is one of the best comedy writers ever. Lily Tomlin On Stage from 1977 is a classic. The second side of the album features “Glenna—A Child of the 60s.” It’s one long portrait of a young woman’s evolution from a Beatles-loving teenager to a pot-smoking radical to young motherhood and marriage. It’s sharp social commentary and really funny. Pryor was like nothing I’d ever experienced before or since. It was shocking. I would wait until everyone else was out of the house and listen to his records on our Montgomery Ward stereo in the living room, and even then, with headphones on. I also listened to Mike Nichols and Elaine May. They have a telephone routine I’ve used when I have to spell my name “L-I-P as in pneumonia . . .” Pryor was radical truth, Tomlin was incisive and generous. Later it was Sandra Bernhard’s Without You I’m Nothing, her collaboration with John Boskovich—he also directed the film version, which is truly strange. That show was cerebral and arch and mean and hilarious.

Jack Smith held a performance in Toronto in October 1984. The performance went by three titles: Dance of the Sacred Foundation Application, Brassieres of Uranus, and Impacted Croissants from Outer Space. If you could stage an accompanying performance piece for Ripcord, what would it be called?

Fagguette Cluster Migraines and Assorted No Wave Ballads. Or: The Ice Palace Incarceration of Gareth Judith Meredith.

Lastly, what’s your favourite Paul Lynde joke?

There are so many from Hollywood Squares. I quote two of them in Ripcord. But here is one more I love:

Peter Marshall: Nathan Hale, one of the heroes of the American Revolution, was hung. Why?

Paul Lynde: Heredity! 

Matthew Kinlin lives and writes in Glasgow. His published works include Teenage Hallucination (Orbis Tertius Press, 2021), Curse Red, Curse Blue, Curse Green (Sweat Drenched Press, 2021), The Glass Abattoir (D.F.L. Lit, 2023) and Songs of Xanthina (Broken Sleep Books, 2023).


 
 
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