On Shame by Wolfe Margolies. On Shame in Gwen Hilton – Gwen Hilton
January 6, 2025
Shame written by Wolfe Margolies is the new book being pushed by Infinity Land press. It received its own featured post on Dennis Cooper’s blog and a glowing back cover blurb placing Margolies in conversation with Genet and Celine. Genet, of course, being one of our greatest writers that wrote while imprisoned. Celine is revered to this day because of his use of vulgar period accurate slang and ability to capture the lives of lower class denizens previously unreflected back at the world.
Wolfe Margolies wrote Shame in prison. He is serving a fourteen year sentence with a five year supervised parole. Margolies sold heroin that killed a person, had his phone seized, and child pornography he had filmed was found on his phone. Part of this book’s marketing is the celebration and uplift of prison writers. Lydia Lunch, No Wave movement founder and legendary artist, and collaborator with Drrty Pharms (Wolfe’s now defunct rap project) has also been vital in bringing the novel to life. Conversation is already being shaped inside the text and around the book to compare Margolies to the Marquis de Sade for his unparalleled ability to describe illicit fantasy and societal hypocrisy from inside the womb of one of humanity’s worst inventions.
Drrty Pharms rapped about chasing girls like R. Kelly, having child soldiers fight for him like Kony, raping people and beating cases, and the isolation and alienation that stemmed from his troubled youth. Some of these lines were quoted back to him at his trial. Drrty Pharms used estrogen recreationally and dressed like a girl. He explicitly claimed he was only a man. He rapped, “Can we get back to the cuck now. Got a young boy like a cub scout.” He rapped almost all of this over Shwayze-style beats. Some of the lines are menacing on the page, but do not translate in the music. Often he sounds like the Casey Frey “all men are friends” video.
Shame in execution is a boring text. Similar to his rap style the book is a nonstop deluge of filth that winds up blunted and ineffective because it is the sole note hit. The book opens with pseudo-philosophical musings about the nature and function of shame in individuals and society at large. Then we get the classic Iowa Writers Workshop beginning. A man wakes up. Not any man though. This man pounds old graying cunt and has memories of performing at CBGB. Before the man woke up last night’s partner, “He sighed, knowing he’d drink again tonight.” This is Margolies’ first and least egregious act of overwriting. The character had already felt shame about his inability to recover. I was not concerned about knowing whether or not he’d drink again.
In this chapter titled “INSIDE HER MOTHER’S ASS” the aging punk can only work himself up to ejaculation by imagining the disgust and arousal of the fourteen year old girl listening to her mother screaming for a creampie. Margolies writes that the girl must imagine how large the punk’s cock is to make her sound like that. I believe that Margolies only injected estrogen recreationally, because even I know that some women are loud just for themselves, or maybe in a richer wrinkle, as its own act of social hostility.
I am reminded of Catherine Breillat’s Anatomy of Hell and how the woman describes the tampon being a pleasureless insertion. She talks about how the size of the penis is not what matters and the slightest movement from the man’s hand on a cold stone is what really brings the woman closer to an orgasm. The movement is minute and the scene is beautiful.
Margolies then commits a large chunk of the rest of the book to meemaw racism, taboo sex or rape, and the intersections of those acts and ideas. Vignettelike exploration of these pet ideas are almost the entirety of the text. He does not advance any conversation past the release of Birth of a Nation. Margolies describes a character as a sophisticated Aryan cuckold, but his own writing of the scene uses terms like “snowbunny” and “getting blacked.” A black woman sexually abuses her starved child after he calls protective services by making him take nude photos of her for her prison lover, including kinky photography with a whip. After child protective services is conned by the mother the young boy is whipped with the crop he photographed. There is a flashback to one of their oldest relatives getting whipped on a plantation for looking at the wife of the “massa.” The mom then yearns for her prison boyfriend thinking that she hadn’t whipped anyone like that since him.
If an intergenerational trauma isn’t the source of the perversion, some other trauma explicitly is alluded toward. One character is jokingly described as too traumatized, no, too brilliant for sex. This leads him to orchestrate the rape of a child by a large black teen framed as a man. Another wonder is expressed about what kind of trauma could make someone want to watch a trans man fuck an intersex woman.
Margolies’ sense of shame expressed in the book fully consumes and internalizes the dominant ideas of the world and regurgitates the exact same notions back out. None of this sex or rape or rape as sex or sex and rape rises above the world these people have to live in. They can’t even have a shameful sex imagined for them that feels new or different or shocking. This writing about sex brick by brick builds the cell around a mind that has completely accepted the psychiatric and police state. One character compares a whore he sees to a bad therapist and then desires the ability to castrate himself. Has Wolfe’s psychologist mother finally emerged?
There’s some helpful interstitial art like a corporatized drawing of a vulva for readers that haven’t seen one.
The book continues in this direction until a self-insert character is introduced. I felt ashamed for assuming it was a self-insert character and then even more ashamed when the character broke the fourth wall after comparing the creation of child porn to the creation of an MP3. This character wonders if “Rape was perhaps the only honest action left.” The character thinks rape is more honest than state violence. After the fourth wall break the self-insert expresses that it’s most important for characters in a book to be good characters only. These are not good characters. These characters talk like one single essay, not people in a novel, and they do not behave in ways that allow the reader to come to the same interesting idea expressed explicitly and ultimately neutered by Margolies.
Margolies is not versed in the real conversation brought up by the names he drops. Just because it happened or it replicates one’s case does not make it good writing. It has to be an entertaining or worthwhile novel too. Shame doesn’t lead the writer to ask interesting questions about the text. Is this a confession in a novel? What’s the function of releasing this now? Why this prison writer over any other? Is this a meaningful pivot away from music or something born out of limitation? The text is a series of acts of sexual violence and street jokes written with a dictionary, thesaurus, and medical text book on hand.
If this book is shocking for you it is because you cannot move beyond puerile titillation. Nothing is distinct. Everyone acts as a voice for the author. No inner monologue stands out. The theory-like elements collapse in on each other. If Margolies could trust his audience to infer what he painstakingly and poorly lays out there would be maybe fifteen pages of text.
When I was 12 the song “Buzzin’” by Shwayze and Cisco Adler was released. When I listened to it I imagined getting my first blowjob. A few years later in high school a white rapper I knew asked, “when do we get to the Four Loko and fingering?” I was a child and she was a child, in this kingdom by the sea, when she first sucked me. She was 17 and in Illinois that made it statutory for her. I put on Wagner, just like in the final chapter of Shame. She gently sounded me with the back wire of her braces. From one failed rapper to another (and all others), if you’re going to pivot to literature you have to leave the past behind. No tourists. It must be hard to be Wolfe Margolies, stuck in federal prison, with an imagination this limited.