At Necessary Fiction, Steven Dunn talks Potted Meat, Selah Saterstrom, Nas, Outkast, grammar, and privilege.
Here’s an excerpt:
Selah Saterstrom’s novels The Pink Institution and The Meat and Spirit Plan shook the shit out of me. I said to myself aloud, “Goddamn, you can say this in a book?” So this was a lesson in trying to write the impossible. A lesson in being vulnerable. A lesson in getting out of the way of the work and letting it speak its dirt, ugliness, beauty, truth, lies, and whatever else it needed to say.
Rappers Outkast’s forms evolve within and between albums. They let things grow and decay, and give space to both through distorted vocals, whiskey-sounding guitars, songs from 95 beats per minute to 155, and the juxtaposition of Andre’s and Big Boi’s styles and concerns. This was a lesson in letting a story grow or decay into what it is, and to write it as such. A lesson in dissolving binaries and acknowledging the spectrum of things/people. And a huge lesson in self-acceptance, like sometimes I’m on some street shit, and sometimes I’m on some introspective-space shit. And it’s fine. The (human) (artistic) form can hold both and what’s in between and outside.