The Self is a Giant Problem: Essays and Fictions by Brad Phillips – Manuel Marrero
December 2, 2024
I read this book well over a year ago so bear with me. You’re not here for a synopsis. You’re not invested in my vivid and incisive criticism. You read these reviews because I write them. Books are intimate. What you see is what you get, and my copy of this book is dog-eared and smudged with lyrical marginalia, drug resin and bodily fluids, blood, sweat, tears and more. And a book in the bag is an emotional index of how it made us feel. From Essays and Fictions, one gets the sense that there is no relief from relentlessly inexorable and numbing, eventually eroding existence. It’s hard to be the author. A parade of self-maintenance. “My daily life is plainly factual and full of things I know are true. I know each day I take 180 milligrams of M-Eslon(slow release morphine) and 10 milligrams of Nortriptyline. I know every night I must take a chalky mouthful of Milk of Magnesia to combat the chronic constipation I endure due to my enormous opiate dosage, and I know every night I take 100 milligrams of Trazodone without which I would never sleep. I know each day I take six milligrams of Clonazepam without which I know I would be paralyzed.” It’s painful and not shy about it. “Unexpurgated Craigslist Ad” is the jewel, a technological romance about a vanished woman. There is just one small barrier to entry. Everyone I recommend it to can’t stand the guy online. He covers that in here, the curated exhibitionism of his art. But this book is good pure use value. Use your subject matter for a common cause. A fun book. There’s some really great shit in here. Frail, surreal, mindblowing shit in a cavernous, sonorous tenor like a howl without end. Wayward but cleaving to a hallucinatory, confabulating coherence that makes it difficult to put down or stop thinking about, like quilting points and gestalt. I would say it’s like one or two of those nightmares you had in childhood that you’ve never forgotten for some reason. “I used to take innumerable medications for these disorders, and now I only take one, which I will never stop taking, because life without it would mean life inside a room I never leave, garbage bags over the windows, not eating, rarely sleeping. That drug is Clonazepam, or as I refer to it sometimes, Saint Clonazepam. Or tenderly, on a moonlit night, Pam.” I read an article where he said he was weaning off. The subject is the dissolution between fiction and non, but make no mistake, this reads pretty much colossally front to back not as an experiment but as tour de force digression, and there’s everything in here between the ruination of sex and drugs and loss that its transgression barely register as extremophilic when its strongest, most thunderous parts are about love and much of the power lives in subtext and suggestion. In 2024, this Rorschach of values is strikingly germane to a posterity of personhood alienated by language.