i am alt lit

‘billie the bull’ by xTx // Mudluscious Press, 2012

96.0

xTx is a literary hero

she’s been publishing on the internet since 2005, steadily building a list of work which includes more than 120 published stories and poems, 2 ebooks, 2 print chapbooks, and one short story collection which is so good it makes other short story collections cry

by all accounts, she is a stable member of society with a career (and a family??? – I’m just guessing because I don’t know for sure, but children and parents both play a large role in many stories I’ve read by her, particularly Billie the Bull) who writes in her spare time

her stories are imaginative and dark and transgressive

examples:

this from a story called Yesterday I Cut Myself With Blood and Watched It Leave My Body and All I Could Do Is Agree

I have so many friends my life can only be 100 percent better than yours. All of my dildos are actual dicks. Horse dicks with pulses and veins that don’t bulge too much attached to men who find me attractive. Men who think I am the fucking hottest shit around. I have a bag full of fake fucking dicks I pretend are men that want me. I fuck them with my pussy and no, I never cry. I AM NOT CRYING.

this is from a story called ‘I Love My Dad.  My Dad Loves Me.’

 

It is difficult to masturbate about your father, but not impossible, as it turns out.

 

this is from a story called ‘What Naomi Says’

 

They didn’t find the body until weeks later. Its hands chewed off, the rest of it torn through like an old sheet. Naomi said it smelled exactly like death should.

her stories are genuinely original

after finishing one of her stories, I usually think ‘no one but xTx could have written that’

over the years she has created a literary universe which feels sharply distinct and different from everything else out there

she has done this by blogging and publishing things online

without resorting to literary gimmicks and attention-grabbing pranks

without ‘acting a fool’ by engaging in over-the-top Vice exhibitionism (aka ‘do Peyote and write about it’ aka ‘take a bath in chocolate syrup and write about it’ aka ‘spend a year going to Silicon Valley gangbangs and write about it’)

without deluging the internet with smoking hot selfies and live-tweets of ‘exclusive’ literary cocktail parties

without starting pointless shit-storms and dumbass kiddie literary ‘feuds’

without bragging or complaining

she’s been doing her work consistently, doggedly, for years

and the prize she gets for all that hard work is being able to write a book like Billie the Bull

which is unlike any other book I’ve read in a very long time

//

‘Billie the Bull’ is a tiny 60 page book

definitely ‘pocket sized’

shouts out to the design crew at Mud Luscious Press, this looks sweet

you can read the whole book in an hour or two

but it is complex enough to think about for a long time

the sentences are thoughtful and deliberate

the story structure is really interesting

one of my favorite things about this book is how the story gradually unfolds

you figure out a little piece here and then another piece there

until you start feeling like you’re in a dream, an alternate world

it’s a good book to re-read and sit with

I read it 3 or 4 times over the course of a week

Bille the Bull is about a woman named Billie who is equal in approximate size to:

6.73 standard sized garbage cans
2 hospital beds
26.87 No. 2 pencils
38.4 soda cans
a smallish telephone pole

one day she has twin boys, one really big and one regular-sized

the story is divided up 38 different micro-chapters that talk about Billie growing up

being abused and harassed for being gigantic

and her life as a mom, raising a gigantic son with similar problems

while neglecting her smaller son

the giant characters suffer horribly painful ‘growings’ which distend and break their bodies as they grow ever larger and larger

‘normal’ people attack and fear and shame them

they outgrow their homes, they outgrow everything

inserted throughout the chapters are parenthetical descriptions that describe what happens in a bullfight:

(While the crowd waits, the bull has wet newspapers stuffed into his ears and Vaseline rubbed into  his eyes to blur his vision and cotton stuffed up his nostrils to cut off his respiration and a needle stuck into his genitals.  A strong caustic solution is also rubbed onto his legs, which will help to throw off its balance.  In addition to this, drugs are administered to pep him up or slow him down, and strong laxatives are added to his feed to further incapacitate him.)

(The picadors are the men on horseback whose job it is to exhaust the bull.  They cut into his neck muscles with a pica, a short knife, and the bull begins to bleed to death.)

bull fights are dependable, you can know for sure what will happen

maybe the bullfighter will get injured, but the bull will always suffer and die

there are a lot of suprises in the book which I don’t want to spoil

a lot of the fun of this book is discovering everything for yourself

the second to last chapter is fucking badass, oh my god

did u ever see that movie Akira

//

this is my favorite thing I’ve read by xTx so far

I’ve thought about it, and the best way to describe this book is like when you have a really long, really vivid and intense dream that you can’t stop thinking about, that you spend all week thinking about in the back of your mind

a lot of xTx’s stories are like this, but that effect is heightened even further in this book because the story is longer

all of the story’s weird ass tentacles and fangs and fingers have a chance to fully unfurl and stretch out, creating an even bigger world to get lost in

which makes me excited because I’ve heard she’s working on a novel

eff yeah