Both Tony Trigilio’s The Punishment Book: The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood), Book 4 (BlazeVOX) and Jack Skelley’s Myth Lab: Theories of Plastic Love (Far West) were published in 2024. What follows is a discussion by Skelley and Trigilio about the ways these books converse with each other: share similar themes, draw from unusual sources, and engagingly play with genre and form.
Jack Skelley: On the surface, The Punishment Book and Myth Lab seem far afield from each other. The Punishment Book employs goth/camp TV soap Dark Shadows as a kind of endlessly fertile frame for a (fractured) personal and societal timeline. Myth Lab—nominally a novel but also fractured—intertextually plunders pop culture and high-brow theorists to explore possible sexy futures. But the more I think about them, the more attributes they share—especially in their hybrid experimentalism. So, let’s highlight some of the ways the books overlap. Somewhere in The Punishment Book you define it as “this impossible object of a poem.” I love that sense of high-wire ambition and writerly peril. How did you arrive at The Punishment Book’s mash-up style and its many disparate themes?
Tony Trigilio: What could easily be the dead-end kitsch of Dark Shadows becomes endlessly fertile for me as it’s super-charged by memory, autobiography, and poetic form. But even as I mine the fertile ground of memory, I’m constantly humbled by what I forget. When I began the first volume, back on Memorial Day 2011, I assumed for some reason that Dark Shadows had run for only 300 or so episodes. But thirty-eight episodes into Book 1—that is, thirty-eight sentences into Book 1, since I write one sentence in response to each episode—I learned that the show actually lasted for 1,225 episodes. Here I was, thirty-eight sentences into my memory-palace poetry project, and I already was forced to accept how faulty my memory is. I was intimidated by the thought of writing something that would take years, and multiple volumes, to finish (if I lived long enough to finish at all). But at some level, I also was thrilled that the project was hijacking my life; I got excited by how this hijacking was indebted to my interest in conceptual art and all the “high-wire ambition and writerly peril,” as you so wonderfully put it, that comes with conceptual writing. As much as the project is a multivolume experiment in poetry, prose, and autobiography, it’s also an experiment with writing as an act of radical endurance. I’m writing a life-poem, as I’ve come to realize, and this is as joyful and scary as my own mortality.
Like any poetry or prose form, the restrictions of form actually have become expansive rather than constraining. And working in hybrid forms, as I started doing with Book 3, serves to open up the voice even more. The first two books were composed in rolling couplets, and I could’ve just continued with this form as a safe, familiar vessel for the project. But I wanted to give myself structural challenges with each new volume. I wanted new procedural constraints, new hurdles, that would produce linguistic and conceptual surprises during the writing process and would, I hope, lead to new discoveries for myself and for readers. In Book 3, Ghosts of the Upper Floor, I started working in both poetry and prose, and before long, I found myself creating eccentric new forms of my own, catalogued as the book’s appendix. These self-invented forms included, among others: “Paragraph Slabs Linked by Fragmented Verse Line Trajectories,” “Skinny Full-Justified Prose Block Centered on Page Like a Thick Tube,” “Claustrophobic Box of Prose,” and “Verse Blocks with Em-Dash Interruptions and Interjection from Liz” (I have an informal agreement with my wife, Liz, that I try to put her in the poem when she watches an episode with me).
Skelley: And yet, it seems, paradoxically, the more you cross-fertilize and beget new prosodic strains, the more your project sprouts with the emotional nutrients of good-old autobiography, at least in the new book.
Trigilio: For this new volume, The Punishment Book, I wanted to keep writing from a place where poetry and prose collide. But I didn’t quite know what this collision would look like until I was several pages into the writing of the book. I’d been re-reading Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, a book whose formal inventiveness I love, even though, as a whole, it’s a bit emotionally distant for my tastes. I decided to try grounding my book in prose blocks like hers (some of my prose block titles borrow from her language in Bluets, and some are inspired by conceits in her book). But as my autobiographical material got more emotional—no choice there, since the composition of The Punishment Book coincided with a fraught marital experiment in consensual nonmonogamy—I realized my prose blocks needed to be more playful and less cerebral than those of Bluets. The hybrid nature of The Punishment Book helped loosen my voice, which in turn made the book’s emotional palette more expansive. And more fun. Since the couplet is my “belovèd” ur-form for the project, I decided to return to that belovèd structure periodically for significant milestones, such as when I watched the 500th episode for the book, or when I somehow—with a potent mix of excitement and writerly peril—reached the tenth anniversary of the project as a whole. I also turn frequently to quatrains and quintains in the book to create a language for the show’s bizarre wardrobe choices and its technicolor kitsch (and its incessant bloopers).
I agree, our books are more similar than they might look at first glance. We’re both interested in impossible projects—both drawn to “high-wire ambition and writerly peril.” We’re both delighted by, and a bit suspicious of, the Society of the Spectacle (more on this later in the interview). And we’re both Blakeans of the imagination, obsessively deploying the language of mythmaking to imagine new worlds to rival the same dull round of our own.
I’m curious to hear more about the origins of Myth Lab: Theories of Plastic Love, especially given its wonderfully vast constellation of influence. The book’s tapestry of voices is seamless, ranging at any moment through Blake, Lacan, Kristeva, Bataille, Jung, Acker, Cixous, among others, including material remixed from your excursions into the dark forest of QAnon. I appreciate how you stitch together this range of influence into wildly imaginative polymorphous narratives of resistance to the predatory oligarchies of our time (while also resisting the self-created autocratic bastards who live inside our own psyches). Like Blake’s prophetic poems, Myth Lab creates a concrete narratable landscape out of its phantasmic mythos. I’d like to hear more about the subterranean roots of the book, the ground from which your own endlessly fertile mythos arises. Myth Lab creates its own neural web of narratives—a kind of “Das Neurocapital,” as you describe it in the book—and I’m wondering if you can talk a bit about the origin story of its narrative web.
Skelley: A life-work of quasi-infinite remembering/recreating, The Punishment Book is also your Proustian magnum opus pocus, isn’t it? I want to read the previous volumes, especially as I hear of your catalog of verse and prose formats. Also, I celebrate Maggie Nelson’s Bluets—a catechism of a poetic soul in anguished redemption—as an inspiration on your latest.
So, Myth Lab’s origin story is intertextual. It filches from the thinkers/writers you list, all of whom explore “sexual personae” (Camille Paglia’s term and title of her hard-rocking art history treatise). But also invoked (and related to The Punishment Book) are a constellation of pop icons, including Madonna, Ariana Grande, Kate Bush, Cynthia Plaster Caster (1960s groupie famous for her plaster casts of celebrities’ erect penises. ), Star Trek and Disney characters, and transexual porn stars. These join “real life” loved ones whose personal stories warp into many mini-plots and epiphanies of sex. (Especially in the central chapter, “The darkness of the nightclub was an airborne aphrodisiac.”) Hovering over all seven of the book’s “theories” (chapters) is late psychedelic magus Terence McKenna, whose thoughts on eschatology magnify in relevance as our culture careens to who-knows-what technological singularity.
Trigilio: This specter of who-knows-what technological singularity seems to be inseparable from contemporary fascism—something that Myth Lab anticipates.
Skelley: Myth Lab was published prior to the world’s (and the U.S.’s) collapse into blatant fascism, but already had much to say about it and how to maybe thwart it. (Fascism has long accreted to this moment, so nobody should be surprised.) Regarding “neurocapital,” I recently rewrote one Myth Lab theory (“Walt Disney’s Head”) as “Das Neurokapital.” It begins:
As hyper agro-rithms plunge toward broligarchy techbrocracy, and imperial carnage marches cliff-ward, the species now (again) faces a choice—A: coalescing trans-binary leaps of cyborg feminism, post-humanism, and other eschatological adaptations, or B: snowballing XY-ego trips toward many mini-Gazapocalypses. Are prospects grim or just dim?
Can technology—a prosthetic of language—outrun its own metastatic “urban wildfires” (an oxymoron!) when they flare everywhere? Can a planet Kickstart or Go-Fund-Me its own space and time travel?
And everything in Myth Lab points to an ethos of sexual liberty—especially in the Blakean context of the transcendent yet revolutionary unity of genders in “The Human Form Divine.” Let’s talk about The Punishment Book’s approach toward sex. While comparing autobiographical plotlines with episodes of Dark Shadows, the book periodically punctuates this theme: “Adventures in polyamory, reduced our marriage to rubble.” Obviously, you are not a “sex-negative” writer. (Hard to imagine any poet as such!) Do you care to make clear The Punishment Book’s attitude toward sex?
Tony Trigilio: The intertextual ripples of Myth Lab feel, delightfully, almost endless—and necessary, given the world’s eschatological rush of “snowballing XY-ego trips toward many mini-Gazapocalypses.” As I was reading Myth Lab, I kept hearing echoes of your poem “The Gospel of Elon,” from Interstellar Theme Park:
But now the angel Metatron
Woke-up the Adam nodding inside,
Thrust awareness back into flesh,
And, no longer constrained by org charts
Or restrictions against eating shellfish,
Jetted among the spheres at will
To reconfigure assets from the
Splinters of heavens within.
So it was he who horizontalized the globe….
I feel grim about the choice we face now, between an ethos of freedom or end-times ego trips. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists recently set the hands of its Doomsday Clock to their most perilous proximity ever to the end of time, eighty-nine seconds to midnight, though this doesn’t seem to faze the death-trip consciousness our culture is stuck in—an emanation of what you perfectly describe as our “broligarchy techbrocracy.” If we’re going to re-envision our collective XY-induced self-sabotage, we’ll need a language that can help us construct a reality beyond XY containment. Myth Lab provokes us to imagine that alternative. (As Blake wrote, “What is now proved was once only imagined.”)
I think you’re right on the mark in your observation about sex and The Punishment Book: as the book’s autobiographical plotlines dance with Dark Shadows episodes, everything comes back to the theme, “Adventures in polyamory, reduced our marriage to rubble.”
As for The Punishment Book’s attitude toward sex, it’s rooted in the project’s deep-dive “Proustian magnum opus-pocus” of remembering and re-imagining. (Proust had his madeleine; I have my vampire. But vampires are sexier than sponge cakes.) I’m an autobiographical writer who is also, paradoxically, an extremely private person. This is probably the most vulnerable book I’ve ever written. I felt incredibly exposed writing about how the excitement at the beginning of our adventure in polyamory eventually became a disaster that, for about a year, ruptured my marriage.
But this writerly worry, this anxious feeling of being exposed as I wrote the book, can’t be separated from the writerly pleasure I also found in the vulnerability of exposure. This fusion of anxiety/pleasure is central to how the entire multivolume project approaches sex, ranging from my memories of taboo childhood sexual fantasies about my babysitter (and about Lois Lane), through memories of the weird, erotic undercurrent of Catholic ritual that the Church didn’t want me to enjoy as much as I did in childhood. I converted from Catholicism to Buddhism in my twenties. But the stylized discipline-punishment-pleasure waltz from my Catholic childhood had already shaped my desires by then. Though I’m happy that I’m no longer Catholic—happy to have escaped that particular “I-am-not-worthy” death trip—writing The Punishment Book evoked an unexpected sense of gratitude for the erotic charge that the Church’s anxiety-inducing rituals generated in me as a child. The Patty Hearst game in The Punishment Book, for instance, wouldn’t have been as fun to write about if I hadn’t been rewriting my childhood Catholicism in the process!
I didn’t plan for sex to be so central to The Punishment Book. But given the nature of my life-poem, its effort to write/revise/shape a memoir in real time, I didn’t give myself much of a choice. The project is, after all, my autobiography of ongoing ordinariness—my memoir of the continuous present. I wrote and revised the book from 2018-2023, and during the first two years of writing, nearly everything I experienced and everything I wrote about seemed to be a consequence of the naiveté and hubris that had prompted me to open my marriage. Writing about such a personal rupture while still experiencing the rupture was difficult at times, like trying to throw a baseball with a broken arm. Still, writing the book while mired in post-poly rubble also helped me imagine how to build something new from the rubble. (“What is now proved was once only imagined.” There I go, Blake again.)
As we begin to wrap up the interview, I’d like to return to something you mentioned earlier: “Everything in Myth Lab points to an ethos of sexual liberty—especially in the Blakean context of the transcendent yet revolutionary unity of genders in ‘The Human Form Divine.’” It could be easy to pay attention only to Myth Lab’s electric fusion of sex and pop culture. While this fusion is vital to the book, it’s part of something much larger, as you’ve mentioned earlier in the interview. Reading only for the sex or the pop mythos—as fun as both are in the book—would be like going to a concert only for the pyrotechnics.
Myth Lab pushes beyond the too-familiar claim that we can liberate ourselves simply by liberating our desire. Instead, it creates a new language for how we can move through the world—which, in turn, challenges us to envision an entirely new world to move through: “Hers in him, hers in her, hers in thems in hymns of sensation without passive perception, but actively mighty microscoped and magnified into transverberation and inundation,” you write in the “Cuties of the Universe” chapter. In the revision of “Walt Disney’s Head” that appears in Divacorp, you describe technology as “a prosthetic of language,” an idea crucial to the book as a whole. As you say in Myth Lab, “All science, all technology, all culture are prosthetics of language, itself a prosthetic of Imagination.” I’d love to hear more about the book’s techno-erotic, prosthetic-embodied language in the book—its physicality, its politics, its pleasures. The poetics of collage and cut-up are vital to this language. But your poetics unfolds in service to something much larger: a post-human, cyborg feminist vision that seems to turn the Society of the Spectacle back on itself.
Skelley: Yes, the Society of Spectacle can be hijacked by, for example, transsexualism, auto-eroticism, and an infinite range of body and brain modifications. Buttock augmentation and hormone replacement therapy are prosthetics, technological adaptations speeding evolution of the species, as are all cultures and languages. But, alas, you’ve caught me suddenly soured on much of post- or transhumanism. As late as a couple months ago, obsessions with cyborg feminism and other techno portals to a positive eschatology mapped another year’s worth of writing ideas. They even seeped into my latest book project, a “fake memoir,” lending it stylistic freedoms such as time-travel and identity-plasticity. But today the related cyber crap of AI, for example, feels like perfume masking the stench of techno-fascism. Actually, it’s long been there: Even back in my ’80s novel Fear of Kathy Acker, I was riffing on media-administered mind control. And yet, I can’t stop drinking these ideas. Amy Ireland’s Xenofeminism consciously inverts capitalism’s “dark Satanic mills” (Blake again!) of exploitation and imposed gender roles (for example) while embracing sex-technology. These competing approaches to prosthetics compete in a race. Control versus liberation. Which will win? The stakes are high. It seems we are a plane speeding to the end of the runway. “It’s liftoff: Do or die!” as I say in another Myth Lab theory, “TikTok Alarm Clock,” in a way much like the Doomsday Clock might be saying.
May sex redeem us. They can’t take that away, can they? So let’s conclude with your reference to another form of sexualized mind-control: Catholicism, its centuries-long mission to warp desire. That, too, is a slavish negative that can be inverted and reclaimed if one is conscious of one’s warping. In my “fake memoir,” the narrator recalls a boyhood living across the street from the church, the convent, and the Catholic school playground—all settings for his “sinful” eros imprinting: “God bless those sick fucking nuns and priests who make sex dirty, because they make sex hot in an alchemical equation that extends the sublimity of hotness through the years. Not just your years but the human millennia of Bataille-ographic taboos, and now transmuted to post-humanism dimensions.”
Thanks, Tony!
Trigilio: AI, yes, is hijacking the hijacking of the spectacle. My own excitement about post-humanism has taken a pretty bleak turn these days because of AI. Doesn’t anyone remember Battlestar Galactica (the twenty-first century version, not the clunky Lorne-Green, late-’70s yawnfest)? We’re getting tranquilized every day by “enriched privation,” as Debord describes the spectacle. Or to put it another way, summoning your Myth Lab theory, “TikTok Alarm Clock”: influencers are eating our feeds while “an AI voice elevates the comment section to whisper headphone quality milking and cooing.”
I took a break from our interview this morning and went down to the mail room in my building, where the April 7, 2025, issue of the New Yorker was waiting for me with a Dr. Strangelove knockoff on the cover: a cartoony caricature featuring members of the current White House riding yee-haw, cell phones in hand, on a thermonuclear missile streaking through the sky. It doesn’t feel like “satire” if a magazine appropriates the satire of another era to make its audience comfortable with mechanisms of fear, control, and compliance. Feels like just more “enriched privation.” Or to put it another way, from Luis Martín-Santos’s novel Time of Silence, his satirical indictment of life in Madrid during the Franco years: “Hurrah for our chains.”
Thanks to you, too, Jack! We’re living in bleak, self-sabotaging times, but talking with you about Myth Lab and The Punishment Book has been a reminder that we can still find radical hope—however provisional it might be—in the imagination. I agree that even though the oligarchs are casting witchy spells that outsource the imagination to AI, they can’t take away sex (for now, anyway). God bless those sick fucks, the nuns and priests who cultivate our dirty little minds. Desire and pleasure may redeem us yet.
