TRAVIS JEPPESEN in conversation with SLAVA MOGUTIN
The Whitney Review, Issue 002, Winter 2023/2024
According to Travis Jeppesen’s latest novel Settlers Landing (ITNA Press, 2023), the beneficiaries of extreme inequality are compulsive wretches. They believe only in their right to limitless wealth and wish to be as remote as possible, not only from social responsibility, but from society itself. Across 822 depraved pages, Jeppesen charts the fictional trillionaire Mrdok’s journey to achieve this by founding an island nation where the global elite are free from surveillance, taxes, and anyone who isn’t them. Mrdok grifts a plane, monopolizes the minerals that power phones and laptops, discovers an infinite-release opioid, and drugs, fucks, blackmails, strong-arms, and negs anyone who crosses his path. If J. G. Ballard had lived to write Succession fanfic, it might’ve read like this.
Jeppesen matches Mrdok’s recklessness and employs an entropic narration that zeroes in on the internal monologues of housewives, addicts, sex workers, and suits caught in Mrdok’s web. All “blubber on unconscionably” (as Mrdok’s wife quips) in Tolstoy-televisual detail that gives the novel a naturalistic edge and grounds in the plausible the spectacular excess. But the strongest moments hinge on Jeppesen’s talent for dialogue. In lengthy passages of it, he brings humane insight into bit characters, dispatching the reader into the nebulous consequences of contemporary anomie. If there is a moral vision that elevates Jeppesen’s farce, it’s in these conversations where characters grapple with the meaning of their pain and perseverance before an inevitable crash and burn into catty obscenity. Their inabilities to imagine a path out of their respective quagmires lead to schizo neologisms — algorithmic colonialism and necro-phallic accelerationism among them — that propel the plot through dizzying descriptions of Shinjuku sex clubs, harsh noise-rap, and opioid-fueled assault-gun pump frenzy.
This is Jeppesen’s eleventh book, and while he’s shifted from fiction to poetry to criticism to memoir, his writing often dwells on the subjects of addiction, surveillance, and global travel that Settlers Landing frames in an epic scope. Here, the Berlin-based author caught up with longtime friend Slava Mogutin, best known for his fetishy portraits, but who is no stranger to vengeful webs of power and greed, having caught criminal charges for his openly-gay journalism in Moscow in the 1990s. — Miles Pflanz
Slava Mogutin Your latest novel, Settlers Landing, is over 800 pages long.
Travis Jeppesen I don’t know if any writer sets out to write a very long book. That wasn’t my immediate idea with this one, though it became very clear early on that it was going to be much longer than anything I had ever written before. Different stories started to sprout from the main thread.
SM Is your ambition to be the new Tolstoy or Joyce?
TJ My biggest influence is writers who elevate spoken language to the literary, and vice versa. So much of this novel is dialogue-driven, and there’s so little dialogue in my earlier fiction, that was one of the challenges I set for myself. I was afraid I’d forgotten how to write it. And every book, I want a new challenge. I went back and read a lot of David Mamet — his early plays, before they became these tedious exercises in right-wing propaganda, from Oleanna on. His early plays use a lot of vernacular, junk language, like conversations you overhear when you’re alone at a restaurant or on a bench outside. I like the challenge of making a kind of music out of language. I was also influenced by these streaming drama series. I didn’t set out to do this consciously, but the novel has this episodic structure that mimics the ways these series unfold. And these series, when they’re written well, mimic long, complex novels. I mean, I remember watching Breaking Bad when it came out and thinking, “Whoever wrote this really knows their Dostoevsky.”
SM Do you recall the moment when you realized that you had literary and artistic ambitions?
TJ I don’t know if there was ever a precise moment. When I learned to read as a child, I immediately started rewriting the books I was reading, writing my own stories and songs and poems and plays. It’s like I didn’t realize there was a difference between reading and writing, and I’ve somehow managed to prolong that confusion.
SM We met over 20 years ago in New York where you became one of the fixtures of the downtown gay scene. I was introduced to your work by Bruce Benderson who considered you a literary prodigy. How old were you when you first got published?
TJ Yeah, Bruce Benderson was my mentor, as was Dennis Cooper. As a teenager, I was publishing in zines and I was a theater nerd. At 15 I started my own theater company so I could produce the plays I was writing. As I got older, I discovered a lot of avant garde theater — Richard Foreman, the Wooster Group — and my plays started getting wilder. When I was 16 or 17, I wrote this kind of violent play, and when we were staging it, things got out of control. There erupted a fist fight between one of the actors on stage and someone in the audience, and the police were called and the play was shut down. Around this time I grew sick of theater, I thought it had too many limitations. So my first novel Victims came out when I was 23. It was published by Dennis Cooper in this series called “Little House on the Bowery” that he edited for Akashic Books, before that I was self-publishing in zines but it’s thanks to Dennis that I started being published in a more professional context.
SM I remember spending time with you at I.C. Guys, a dive-in East Village gay bar that became a popular bohemian spot despite its minuscule capacity. I recently found this obituary HX Magazine wrote about it when it closed: “No bigger than a shoe box and one-fourth the size of a backroom, it epitomized everything that was grand and garish about the East Village: simple, smutty, and painfully, wonderfully ridiculous. Goodbye, wee bar, goodbye.” Coming from a fairly conservative place like North Carolina, how did you end up in New York?
TJ I grew up in Charlotte, the biggest city in North Carolina. By the time I was a teenager, I hated it, so I applied for early admission to the New School for Social Research. To everyone’s surprise — my grades in high school weren’t great — I got in and moved to New York when I was 17. I got a job at I.C. Guys in my sophomore year. I was bartending and go-go dancing, even though I didn’t know that I wasn’t old enough to be doing either. It was between 6th Street and Avenue A and was probably the tiniest bar in Manhattan at the time, people used to call it a broom closet as a joke. It was owned by this trashy older Swiss guy with a mullet who also owned a boy brothel somewhere in Chelsea, and he was fucking some older rich woman. I think that’s how he got the money to run these places. Will Monroe, this Canadian artist and nightlife impresario who I think you also knew, was visiting New York one night and he had made the T-shirt I was wearing. It was black and had the word “SHITLOVER” across it in diamond studs. That night, the owner of I.C. Guys, who we hardly ever saw, decided to come in with the rich old woman he was fucking. I remember the woman saw my T-shirt and she said, “Are you really a shitlover?”
That was the last gasp of, if not New York, then definitely of the East Village. Working at that bar I was able to become friends with people whose work I read and admired from afar. I met you there. A lot of legends were regulars, people like Ishmael Houston-Jones. Bard Cole was a great writer who launched a reading series at I.C. Guys and he invited me to read there on several occasions. Recently someone uploaded a video of one of those readings to YouTube. Bard also published my first chapbook, Terminal Illusion — three of my early short stories together with his beautiful ink illustrations. I also met the Bruces, Benderson and LaBruce, whose work was super influential for young me, and who I’m still friends with today. Isn’t I.C. Guys where we had the after party for Skin Flick [1999], Bruce LaBruce’s film that you starred in? I remember bartending and all of a sudden at midnight, a massive crowd led by Bruce pours into the bar. I remember Nikki Uberti, Terry Richardson’s ex-wife who starred alongside you, crowd surfing from the entrance to the bar just to order her drink. Skin Flick — talk about a movie that couldn’t be made in 2023. Anything that uses irony or satire to critique social ills has become completely verboten. I’m actually surprised my novel hasn’t been preemptively cancelled.
SM In my mind, your first three novels, Victims, Wolf at the Door, and Suiciders, belong to the American renegade tradition of Dennis Cooper, Gary Indiana, Samuel Delany, and even JT Leroy AKA Laura Albert. They have the distinct nihilistic post-punk emo aesthetic of the 90s. Do you feel nostalgic about the time before the internet and social media, when writing seemed so much more pure and sincere?
TJ I think there’s this whole undercurrent in Settlers Landing which is sort of mourning the 90s, and is both ironic and sincere, depending on where in the book it comes up. Those of us who came of age back then are really the last generation that remembers what life was like before the internet. I mean, this was the last time that there existed such a thing as an underground. Take music, for example. If you were growing up in a relatively marginal, provincial place like Charlotte, North Carolina, where I grew up, and you were interested in punk, noise, indie music, stuff that was more experimental than what got shown on MTV, then you really relied on printed zines in order to inform yourself. This is how I’d discover bands like Royal Trux and Dinosaur Jr. and Harry Pussy — you relied on writing, actually, quality descriptive music journalism — stuff you’d read in zines and some of the higher caliber magazines like Spin at the time. Then, if you were sufficiently intrigued, you’d have to order the albums or singles, usually by mail, and wait for them to arrive, listen to them, and see what you liked. Today if you hear about a new band that’s come along, you go online, and within five minutes you’ve become an expert, and within ten minutes, you’re bored. There’s no longer this lore, this sense of mystery that artists had back then when it was much more difficult to get information and you really had to do the legwork. And yes, there was a rawness in a lot of the art and the music and the writing, which I think is very tied into the whole underground way the work circulated. This sensibility was formative to me and is still in my work, something I probably couldn’t change even if I tried — not that I ever would.
SM Your second book was titled Poems I Wrote While Watching TV. To what extent does Western pop culture influence your work, and how much of it is a critique and reflection?
TJ I wrote that book when I was living in Prague. I was trying to learn Czech, so in addition to taking classes and studying on my own, I would watch Czech television, which was really bad. I’d get bored, and so in addition to “watching” in a half-assed way, I’d pick up the pen and write these poems — also in a half-assed way. I haven’t looked at that book in years. I suspect most of the poems aren’t any good. The best part of that book is the paintings that were included by my friend Jeremiah Palecek.
SM One critic called you “the bard of American exile.” I understand it was a self-imposed exile.
TJ Well, considering the fact that you’re an actual exile, it would be terribly pretentious and insensitive of me to make any claim that I’m living under the same condition. I can go back to the United States without any threat to my existence, whereas I’m not sure it’s the same for you and Russia. You know, I’ve now lived the majority of my life outside the United States. I left right after college and I’ve lived all over Europe and in a couple countries in Asia. I was craving adventure, but it was also an economic decision. When I graduated, New York was so expensive but also the only place in North America I could fathom living at the time. I was afraid if I got a job to pay my rent I wouldn’t get enough time to write. Moving to Europe was somewhat impulsive and naïve of me, but I was able to find cities that, at the time, were very cheap to live in. I was mostly in Berlin and Prague in those years. It really enabled me to make writing my job. I’m also a dromomaniac, which feeds into my writing. I try to write every day, regardless of where I am or my state of mind, though if I stay in the same place for too long, I get bored and that makes it difficult to write. I really need the constant stimulation of new environments. I think there’s also something to be said for writing about your native country as an expatriate. Seeing the place from the outside allows you to see things that those living in it don’t see. If you look at Modernism, arguably the great period of American literature, almost all of those writers were expats. Hemingway, I think, wrote all of his novels outside of America. Gertrude Stein. Ezra Pound. T.S. Eliot. Joyce had to leave Ireland in order to write about it.
SM Your travelogue about North Korea, See You Again in Pyongyang, is a rare personal account about one of the most secretive and oppressive countries on earth. What brought you there in the first place, and what made you come back time and again? Did you ever feel that you were in danger there?
TJ My friend Tom Masters is a travel writer who had been there several times, and talking to him about it really made me curious. This was around the time I first started going to China, in 2011, and because of how isolated North Korea is, one of the only ways of getting there is through China. So I went for the first time with Tom and the artist John Monteith and some other friends. I developed an obsession, you could say. Because of the nature of its politics and society, it is an extremely secretive place. You’re so limited in what you’re able to see and do when you travel there, and I think this mysterious aspect is what drew me in. I started reading every single book I could get my hands on about North Korea. In retrospect, it makes sense that my first novel, Victims, kind of grew out of my obsession with that religious cult Heaven’s Gate, and there’s certainly a cultishness to North Korea’s ideology and the way it is propagated. So while I was doing all this research, I also visited the place fairly frequently over five years — from just after Kim Jong Un took over until the Trump years. Shortly after my last visit there, the U.S. Congress banned all Americans from any further visits to the country, so I’m probably one of the last Americans to have gone there. Well, other than that soldier who recently ran across the border, whose name also happens to be Travis.
I never felt myself to be in any danger while I was there. During the visits, you have to be accompanied by North Korean guides the entire time. It’s not like a normal travel experience where you’re allowed to wander around on your own wherever you want. In retrospect, they could have detained me at any moment if they wanted to on some flimsy pretext. It happened to my friend Alek. He went back to do a Master’s degree in North Korean literature at Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang, and at the end, just as he was about to graduate, they arrested him for some bullshit non-reason. Luckily Australia, his home country, sent in some negotiators, and he was freed within a week. I don’t know this for a fact, but I suspect money probably changed hands. You know, a lot of insiders, people in the North Korea travel industry, were speculating that Otto Warmbier, that kid who died, probably could have been saved if someone had bribed the right people early on.
SM Did you have any sex dates or encounter any signs of gay life while you were there?
TJ Homosexuality is a very taboo subject in North Korea, There’s actually no law against it, but that’s because the whole Western notion of a homosexual identity just doesn't exist. But even though homosexuality is not illegal, it doesnt mean that if you were caught engaging in gay sex you wouldn’t be arrested. You would be arrested under the pretext of engaging in un-socialist behavior. It’s the same reason they arrest or detain men who wear their hair too long or women who violate the strict dress code. Obviously, this is a subject I was interested in while I was researching See You Again in Pyongang. From what I could gather, gay sex does take place, but usually in the context of the military barracks. When people go into the military they typically have to serve for ten years and it could be the case that you don't see another person of the opposite sex for ten years. So from what I understand, some hanky panky goes down in the barracks.
SM There’s a heated debate about the use of AI in creative writing and art. Early on, I experimented with the first word-processing apps like Robopoem and got some interesting results resembling the cut-ups by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs. I even published a book of Spam Poems. What’s your take on this whole controversy?
TJ I’m afraid my answer is going to be boring: I’m against it. I just don’t see how anyone could embrace this without being nihilistic to the point of being anti-humanist.
