This is a stranger one– part of the (failed) Brown MFA writing application circa late-2002. Brown’s program is notoriously tripped-out, having (or had) a gigantic VR cave and other faddish early-to-mid 90s ideas and technology. (The word hypertext was thrown around.) Had I been accepted, I probably would’ve gone, but there was a realization well before rejection: the application had been a pretext for moving to Providence. After the long years of New York, I couldn’t conceive of relocating without an academic purpose. My brain had been hard wired all student-like.

The application created two or three very funny incidentals; one of which was showing up, unannounced and at the urging of other faculty, at the office of Robert Coover and having one of the most pained conversations of my life. Another was the Writing Sample itself, which I had conceptually divided into thirds.

The first third was the worst post-adolescence prose writing that I’ve ever done. The second third was an enormous flash demo that auto-loaded a bunch of stuff, including mp3s of Arafat “johnny khalud” Kazi hollering about the fictitious English blood-libel of the Thuggee. The final section was what we have here: an incredibly complex attempt at marrying my Boston paranoia to an intentionally ill-designed and non-functional Tarot deck by structuring a narrative on the traditional back of the cards and, in theory, having the shuffle determine the way in which the tale was told.

Sometime in the Summer of 2002, I had started thinking about the Boston Strangler murders. I have a morbid streak of mind– a combination of my parents’ influence & my immediate childhood proximity to a series of serial murders. I had also been reading a bunch of London psychogeographical works. Inevitably a bad influence. And I was living in the Fenway, so I wasn’t that far from the locations of most of the murders that had been attributed to the Strangler. One day, I road my bike to the site of the first official Strangler killing on Gainsborough-street. The door to the building was open, calling me in; I took this portent as ominous.

The other thing: I had been in Boston long enough to realize its fundamental unpleasantness. At the time, I blamed much of this on exceptionally poor city planning– there’s nothing like walking on Boylston-street and nearly being blown over by winds generated from the Prudential and the cleft gully of the Turnpike.

I did what I always do whenever I become fascinated/assaulted by the place that I reside– I read about the history of Boston’s development. Somewhere along the line, my brain connected the fact that nearly every major construction project of the mid-century– which I believed were responsible for the city’s unpleasantness– had been erected close to the site of a Strangler murder. From there it wasn’t hard to make the intuitive but impossible link that the murders had been a builder’s sacrifice, a blood offering for the beginning of projects and the birth of a new city.

While this gives some sense of the motivation behind the Tarot deck, none of it explains the deck itself, nor why I would include this in an MFA application to a self-consciously Experimental program (which means, ultimately, a program focused on failed non-narrative schemes filtered through the inherently stodgy veneer of the Academy.) I have no explanation for any of the particular aesthetic decisions– why the faces of the cards feature a mixture of maps, pop stars, close personal friends and pulp art. Or why these are rendered in an intentional bland fashion. I can’t explain why I invented two trump cards– The Hill of Dreams and The Great God Pan– titled after the works of Arthur Machen, nor why they’re aesthetically so much more pleasing than the rest.

I’ve included the Instruction Sheet that I included with the deck– it’s the last image. I recommend reading this first, as it at least gives some sense of my intent. But not much.

Incidentally, sometime in… late 2005? I read a massively modified version of the story at the National Arts Club in Gramercy Park. It was there that I learned a very important lesson: don’t drink before you read.

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(Technical note: this is the first time I’ve used the Wordpress Gallery feature, so if you’re reading this via RSS, I’m not sure the images will show up.)

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