Joseph Clayton Mills
Zyxt (EP3, 2010)
195mm×135mm; paperback; 40 pages
Printed by Ditto Press
Available at No One (London) and Quimby’s (Chicago)
An anthology of alienation from A to Z, Zyxt consists of 24 brief
and darkly comic tales of idealism and despair; friendship and self-
loathing; murder and madness. An unnamed narrator recounts
a series of anecdotes about his dearest friends — a collection of
misanthropic academics, misfortunate composers, and melancholy
astronomers — that together form a mosaic of parables, fables,
and paradoxes for the bitter and disaffected.
Joseph Clayton Mills is Chicago-based artist, writer and musician.
His text-based paintings, assemblages and installations have been
exhibited in Chicago and New York, and his work has appeared in
numerous publications, including The New Yorker. His fiction and
criticism have been published both in the US and abroad, most
recently in the magazine Joyland and the architectural journal Log.
He is also an active participant in the improvised and experimental
music community in Chicago, where he has performed and collabo-
rated with such notable musicians as Adam Sonderberg and Steven
Hess (as a member of the band Haptic), Tony Buck, Mark Solotroff,
Sylvain Chaveau, Fred Lonberg-Holm and Olivia Block. His record-
ings have appeared on numerous labels, including Entr’acte, FSS
and Bloodlust!.
From Zyxt
Nightingale
I have a friend who, as a lifelong devotee of Bizet,
harbors great hopes that his young daughter might
one day make a grand success upon the operatic
stage.
Although she is still a mere toddler and is thus far
incapable of forming with any facility even the
simplest words in English (to say nothing of Italian),
my friend insists that, even from the moment of
her first postnatal cry, he has been able to detect
in her voice the sure traces of a divine instrument.
In order to encourage in his daughter a proper love
for all things sonorous, my friend installed in her
bedroom a beautiful nightingale in a gilded cage.
Its melodic trills, he hoped, would serve as a suit-
able influence upon his daughter’s as yet inchoate
musicality.
When, some days later, my friend discovered that
his young daughter had smothered the nightingale
with a silken pillow, he was, much to my surprise,
neither horrified nor discouraged. On the contrary,
he was transported with delight, and his face
beamed as he related the story.
“After all, is not the foremost ingredient in the
soul of any artist,” he asked rhetorically, and with
an expression of perhaps justifiable pride, “an in-
satiable lust for the blood of one’s rival?”
First edition of 100 copies
£8
The stories, which are all quite brief, most of them running to
less than a page, are reminiscent of Borges in their playfulness,
Calvino in their precision and concision, and, most important,
Bernhard in their wry misanthropy.
The book fairly runs over with the under-appreciated joys of
misanthropy mixed with a fundamental love of human strange-
ness. The Randall Jarrell of Pictures from an Institution would
have loved this book.
The back cover of Zyxt is taken up by an index. If I haven’t
yet convinced you to order a copy, perhaps the index's four
subdivisions of ‘Suicide’ or its nine subdivisions of ‘Murder’ will.
Or its entries for Spinoza and Preston Sturges — if those twin
brilliants of the pantheon, wild opposites even at the same
time as they are both utterly indispensable, don’t do it, then
perhaps the misanthropists have the right idea after all.
Levi Stahl at Ivebeenreadinglately