Persona Cracked is a series that explores the intersection of artists, their work, and social media. My next guest, Mike Sauve, is author of five novels whose work contains strong elements of literary experimentation, social commentary, and humor. I first become acquainted with Sauve’s work after reading I Ain’t Got No Home in This World No More, which Publisher’s Weekly in its starred review described as a “time travel farce” that “reads like a Philip K. Dick plot as channeled by a delirious Hunter S. Thompson.” My own review can be read here. Sauve’s latest novel, How to Market Your Grief Blog, is set for a Dec. 19^th release through Montag Press. Sauve lives in Toronto where he sells brassiers at La Senza.

When I read and reviewed I Ain’t Got No Home in This World No More, I was struck by the power of your prose while telling an amusing, modern story of time travel involving Sam McQuiggan, a thirty-something bachelor who works at a gym and extols his insights about the world while paining away about the one who got away. In How to Market Your Grief Blog, the protagonist, David Astaire, also suffers a loss, the death of his sister Catherine. To what extent do the conditions of your protagonists motivate your stories and you as the author who write about them?

 “I am the protagonist.” –the guy pulling the marionette strings outside of time at the end of TENET.

My initial impetus was the drear old Will to Validation driving all of we whom Michael Shermer, President of the Pseudoskeptical Stage Magicians Society, denigrates as “pattern-seeking, story-telling animals” to collect our thoughts in patterns of mixed preening: Myself, Andre ‘Dinner’s on me,’ Gregory, Friedrich Nietzsche, but then too his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, and then on to her husband Bernhard, until soon enough Bernard’s work friend Adolph Hitler collects his own thoughts and elbows his eager path to the podium.

While I Ain’t Got No Home in This World No More is a straightforward tale told in a non-linear manner about a man trying to reconcile his past, the story of How to Market Your Grief Blog is conveyed in a series of blog posts with comments provided by an online community. Unlike blog posts in real life, however, in which narrators tend to use common, accessible language, David Astaire is fond of writing itemized advice guides that imbed philosophy, science, and theology, that when taken in sum reads more like a literary diary and manifesto. Take, for example, this early entry in the novel, Some Tips Towards the Monetization of a Grief Blog:

One: Avoid what is known as direct marketing. Do not Facebook message an acquaintance to ask if they count themselves among the stricken. Do not ghoulishly troll the obits.

Two: Be yourself. Do not emulate grief bloggers who have already achieved traffic and remuneration. The stricken will smell a rat. Avoid books like Chicken Soup for the Grieving Soul lest you imitate the tepid style therein, a style that has already oversaturated the grief marketplace.

Three: If Eisenstein wrote in The Structure of the Film: “There is no such thing as grief ‘in general.’ Grief is concrete; it is always attached to something; it has consumers,” means you must avoid wishy-washy tenses. Employ the imperative tense! When necessary, employ the counterfactual.

Four: Like and share other grief bloggers. Unbecoming as it often feels, sharing ten consecutive articles from Grievin’ Gary’s Grief Refuge will capture Grievin’ Gary’s attention. Sharing one will not. Sharing one will make you no more estimable in Grievin’ Gary’s eyes than some grief-stricken mark.

Five: Don’t put too much pressure on yourself. As Daniel Johnston famously sang, “Millions and millions of people have already died.” Thousands will die today. To say nothing of pets, catastrophic brain injurees, and those enduring a type of living death due to opiate dependence. Among the scant few not yet grieving, you can count on anticipatory grief, e.g. ‘father ridden with cancer.’ There is also a sort of nameless dread: a fatalistic grief for the unknown sorrows to come, such as the prospect of worldwide pandemic, a new Philovirus, for example.

Satire as a genre often produces characters that are interesting but not necessarily compelling. In this excerpt, you begin to establish David Astaire as a folksy narrator who can be believed and embraced by his audience (i.e., his simple reminder to ‘be yourself’). You also start to show how his repository of knowledge may not be of interest to his readers and thus, perhaps, he may lack some market awareness or does not truly qualify to be the voice of reason/perpetuator of sound advice he presumes (i.e., his tangential aside, ‘Thousands will die today. To say nothing of pets, catastrophic brain injurees, and those enduring a type of living death due to opiate dependence …’ is David talking in general, or about himself?). Considering that this duality between the believable versus false narrator plays throughout the story, what is the best attitude for the reader (of the novel, not the blog) to have to enjoy and gain the most insight from this tale? Besides the fact that David Astaire has a way with words, why should readers care what happens to him? Or should his sheer eccentricities along with the overall structure and format of the novel, be enough to keep readers vested?

Lines like “Be yourself!” satirize what I consider the unclean language of blogs, social media, and marketing. The imperative tense grants a false authority undermined by the conditional tenses where the protases (ifs) and apodoses (outcomes) obviously only apply to David’s increasingly-pathetic world, e.g., “If nothing less than human sacrifice is required to maintain an accord with the Infernal Serpent, ask Ronald Majthenyi to “Keep a lid on it in front of the Uber driver will ya? Think of my rating.”

A Ricouerant problem with writing Oneself as Another is publishers and readers harumphing in their seance of authority, “I didn’t relate to the characters!” to which I try to occlude my rejection sensitivity dysphoria by splurging out, “H-had hoped you would not, Tracey, for nor do I relate to your Submission Call’s claim that you “champion unique voices” when that claim is contrasted against your actual publishing output of Tiffani Amber Thiessen’s second book on how best to reheat one’s leftovers.” I am not trying to denigrate Tiffani Amber Thiessen. I am denigrating a mealy-mouthed industry claiming to be about literature or even stories but their only re(t)a(i)l going concern is selling pillows, reading socks, and Fahrenheit 451 bedroom sets inflagrante at Indigo in the market called (arbitrarily as the Richard Ford novel) Canada or at Burns and Noble in the southern 50 states.

Consequently I’ve come to wonder how vested I even want these putative readers to be. It may be that, seeing how #cozy they’ve grown in their reading socks, I want them divested if not gorily degloved.

I am amazed at your willingness to explore forms as a writer, not only in How to Market Your Grief Blog, but also samples you’ve shown me from your works in progress and on your substack, The Causal Tentacle. At a time in which publishing is geared toward sales, is risk-averse, and very much caters to an audience’s expectations, you are playing with structure and tropes in ways that force readers to think, conjecture, and investigate everything from the vocabulary that is being used to the obscure informational references woven into your tales. (Luckily, there is this wonderful thing called Google that keeps me informed of your story’s most astute allusions). Considering the breadth and depth of your own interests in philosophy, science, and theology—and are timeless topics of interest to others besides yourself—what will it take for your books to reach their intended audience? Do you see your audience growing over time? Would you consider adjusting your writing’s format in the future if it guaranteed you a larger readership? In other words, what is your intent with your own body of work? Who is it you are trying to reach?

To cleanse the palate after the crankery of that last response, I try not to complain that the market doesn’t reward quality writing because if George Saunders can top the best seller list then it can be done, and if it can be done, then one can outwork his rival pillow case salesmen. Unfortunately, however, even those “who’ve selected their vocations for the express purpose of apprehending perfection,” to quote William T. Vollmann, can work all their lives and never “rocket us heavenward,” might never write so much as the first sentence of Copernicus’ Six Books Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs, “What could be more beautiful than the heavens which contain all beautiful things?” and that is a Cosmic Shame.

And so instead I’ve deigned to do only what I want, alienating readers hither and yon until “I’ve found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning” as Tom Stoppard writes in Arcadia, so that I can “be alone, on an empty shore” which is ironic, because the whole writerly enterprise is fundamentally not about being but about being liked.

How have I adjusted my format? The basic premise of The Introductions, then: a doomsday cult hosts a film festival to convince people the looming intersection of AGI, computer brain interfaces, and quantum computing will puncture linear temporality along with all the causal certainty we’ve grown so fond of. The narrative plays out through the titular film Introductions, allowing for the films themselves to carry much of the ideological weight. I needn’t spell out how A Clockwork Orange is about the dangers of impinging upon the mind and free will, as that’s self-evident to those who’s seen it. From there, there’s a nesting of references from film, literature, wrestling, philosophy, and elsewhere.

Here’s an example:

And now the fun part of the reading experience: the droning explication! ERAS and SWIFTness should be familiar to the reader of popular culture, but then SWIFT is also the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications. Collapse is the title of Jared Diamond’s book subtitled How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Wired for War is similarly subtitled—The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, but also references an issue of Wired with The Future of Reality as the theme on the cover promising a feature asking the new MATRIX film’s star about his memories of the franchise. First-remover voisinage is a multi-lingual pun on first-mover advantage, with voisinage meaning both “in the vicinity of” and also “neighbourly proximity.” First-remover speaks to the character Ron Q.’s role as a Temporal Auditor responsible for collating TIME CRIMES so that causal revisions can be instantiated with sober second thought before and after The Date of Anticipated Reality Collapse.

Exhausting right? And yet, to return to Arcadia, “It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing….”  

Perhaps the worst fate to befall me was finding a copy of Finnegans Wake early in the process, and getting a sense of just what could be done with portmanteaux, nested references, and other aspects of Joycean brinksmanship. The problem is I am not James Joyce, neither in terms of talent or acclaim. So there is not exactly a cottage industry of academics waiting to Skeleton Key all this stuff out for the reader. The absurd gamble I have undertaken, which may well prove to be the end of me, is that I can make the book good enough that such skeletons emerge from their closets. And nor will I be hanging around to break all this down for everyone. The hope is that the novel teaches you how to read it well enough that its reader(s?) intuit some of the more densely-layered meanings.

Since the increasingly baroque Font System I’d be happy to send you my pamphlet on—which allows me to make dozens of references per page without requiring endless italics and quotations to indicate what is a book title (Book Antiqua) or a line from Finnegans Wake (Arial MT Rounded Bold)—doesn’t translate to the web, I use links when I post excerpts on Substack. I can see what links are clicked in Dashboard, and so with that same appalling SWIFTness it becomes clear that very few are clicking the links, let alone Googling anything themselves. So to answer your question: my ideal reader is someone who wants to put such a capriciously-constructed puzzle together.

What are you looking forward to in the near future, besides publication of How to Market Your Grief Blog?

I’ve been doing more editing with Montag Press and have launched my own imprint there called ghosTTruth which has just started publishing books at the intersection of conspiracy, philosophy, and epistemics. There’s a Zoom launch at 7 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday, Dec. 9 for its first two books, my own Grief Blog as well as Andrew Brenza’s Pod. I’ve always had a lot of conceptual ideas for books but neither the resources or the impetus to write them. So projects like the forthcoming anthology of philosophy and fiction, Time and Propinquity, that I co-edited with Dr. David Mathew, or a high-concept book I’ve been planning to edit on Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence are good ways to keep me grounded in reality. Also, I’ve been working on a screenplay for a director/producer team with a laudable track record, so that might offer me an entrypoint into the world of film, and ideally bring my novels to a larger audience, though I’ve had d’alliances with film and television before and know better than to get my hopes up.

Writers nowadays face the odd challenge of desiring private, sometimes introverted lives while being compelled to act as extroverts publicly promoting themselves and their work. Can you tell us a little about your own love-hate relationship with social media?

I was logomanic long before I was graphomanic, and so I learned early how easily everyone is wearied by the bloviational speaker. So, essentially, I took my bile and went home.

Regarding social media, I used to be quite hurt with how literally unliked I was. There’s nothing worse than the best line you’re capable of writing receiving less than 1 percent of the likes earned by a more relatable person’s (Tiffani Amber Thiessen’s) Tweet containing what she must consider the mot juste describing her pork tenderloin au jus smoothie. So then it’s like “Okay, I’ll work really hard to build a home for these unliked sentences of mine.” I’ll spend some time (a year on the early books; going on 4 L with The Introductions) building this home, but then tragically, because I’m not out there beating the drum, when the book is finished, I’m all set at the vestibule with the pork-flavoured champagne, but only a small percentage of even the low number of the original Liekerts scale the increasingly inhospitable gates to check out my reflecting pool’s abysall twilight blue (to paraphrase Heidegger describing the poetry of Georg Trakl, another secret to my popularity!) So what was the purpose? Rather than resort to hopelessness, I will defer here to Andrei Tarkovsky’s father, the poet Arseny Tarkovsky,

If you live in a house – the house will not fall.
I’ll summon any of the centuries,
Then enter one and build a house in it.
[…]
The future is being accomplished now[.]

Though again, this is not advice I’d give the subject of Tenacious D’s Cosmic Shame…who wouldn’t be me, right, not if I so vehemently tell myself that I must be some kind of meaningful protagonist?

Thank you for sharing your story!

Ryan Hyatt, December 15, 2023

Categories: Reviews

Tags: #cosmicshame, #mikesauve, #montagpress, #satire, #sciencefiction, #thelalalander, book-review, books, featured tag, fiction