Pillow Talk: Incurable Graphomania by Anna Krivolapova – Manuel Marrero
December 9, 2024
If you’re like me, you’ve been waiting for a collection angular, severe, and ethereal like this one since oh, Theresa Smith’s L. Fellow roadies Apocalypse Confidential deliver something more freewheeling and loose. Incurable Graphomania’s tenor is stretched between murderously matter-of-fact and emotionally baroque with incidental pathos nested in a fantasist’s designs. It beguiles and captures modern unease in fifteen hauntingly elliptical stories with an almost vaporously ‘noided fixation on America’s subacute infrastructural features— a cult of economy where people don’t eat and are entitled to debt and well-being—and an arresting talent for piercing imagery and pointed observation, from “creamsicle sunsets, dyed to confection by the smelters down the valley” to pop culture-literate dingers in dialogue replete with quirky colloquialisms – “You bet, I even found myself parked next to Jack and Diane. Those neckers would’ve made John Cougar proud.” Best enjoyed with a view of the skyline. It’s a spiritual, liminal business deep in the American idiom of abstrusion and titillating yet menacing erotism, where beatific lines abound to carry water for elusive plot rigmarole, all letter games and fever dreams (pardon the cliché but there’s never been a more fevered dream). “As if Russians aren’t the most superstitious people on the planet.” Life and death, self-terminating agitpropagandistic nonsequiturs serve as choke points amid the generalized disorientation and addling of this conspiracist’s mass, head spinning from too much information, too many characters and exotic nomenclatures. Voyeuristic espionage pregnant with the corporate and biopolitical security state blues. Still waters run deep to use another voluptuous cliché, Krivolapova sticks a hard landing on a dirt path, water off a duck’s back in the style realm. Defamiliarizing parapolitics, the speculative, dystopian, intimately personal and hyperstitionally interpersonal gives it the starkness of distance.
Leap years ahead in ambition, Krivolapova in the acknowledgments hopes “you never find a cure.” This agrees with me, having forwent neurofeedback in my teens. Writing normalized the world. The dread of a forlorn loam, diagnosed stowaways sailing for clinical oblivion. She doesn’t have to imagine the damned unimaginable. It’s all written in the sky. Synchronicity, signs and symbols, patterns, setups and hoaxes juiced on tactile mysteries and esoteric wisdom. If I were betting on culture, I’d find the appearance of such a subversive, plugged-in work auspicious, bucking trends and eschewing algorithms. Intellect and mesmerism you can’t medicate away, with a sardonic edge and roots deep in a blur of literary traditions. Krivolapova cut her teeth before she ate. “He kissed her forehead three times, turning off every burner one by one.” On bended knees to the sensation of being alive or barely alive enough to ruminate vividly. “A Sensualist is not merely a hedonist. A Sensualist is a man who is sentimental to the point of wickedness, a sanguine melancholy that becomes its own weather system. Pleasure, joy, and rage ferment inside his chest, to a level that can only be tempered with Education.” A precariat of dissociated savants and flâneurs entangled in macabre exploits and intrigue from the entrapped to the intel-squeezed useful idiots fatally mistaken for credulous and guileless populate the landscape. Sexual revolution-calibrated mavericks active in charity, psychoactive unknowable opaques radiant in advent driving you to the koanic outer limits of your mind. Shocking in perverse diabolism and pagan invention, erudite and ecumenical with morality. A panoply of startling beauty firm in faith, force, and depth by way of cooing gloom, wit and tenderness. There’s a vigorous sense of writing through the parameters of what can happen in a book, of what can be revealed where sensation is supreme. A payoff both too earnestly rendered to care for symmetry and congruency of its quantum microcosms and so tautly finessed I didn’t even notice what was being done to me. It has its reasons, however oblique.
In a time of cloak and dagger assassinations in broad daylight, illicit backdoor liaisons, advanced MK, auraless social pathology and its venal contagion, you could be a lot less prudent with your escapism. A psychedelic sideshow of abductions, telepathic comedies of errors and whatsits.