"Fourteen Questions with Michael Templeton" by Alden Nagel
"Fourteen Questions with Michael Templeton" by Alden Nagel
An Interview, with an NHP-Associated Writer
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alden Nagel is the founder and editor of Nut Hole Publishing, and also a writer. You can find him on Instagram @alden_nagel_. His debut novella FAG SYMPHONY is out now, via us.
Alden Nagel: Tell me all about “the awaiting of awaiting…”, your upcoming book through Nut Hole Publishing.
Michael Templeton: “awaiting” is part of a larger project that grows out of a number of interests. I have become especially interested in the ways digital capitalism is creating an artificial imaginary space that has taken on more power than the material lives we lead with our flesh and blood. The image of myself, generated by the legal realm, both civil and criminal, medical histories, both physical and psychological, and economic status, along with social media are all working to create another person who has more validity in the world than the person who is made of flesh. My credit rating, background, educational status, social media optimization all have more force than my actual being. And these digital mechanisms can and do destroy people. In the case of the novella, I wanted to explore one person who seems to have been disposed of in life by the systems of value and validation generated in the digital world. He did something; we don’t know what, and it doesn’t really matter what. This transgression has left him utterly invalidated in the world. He simply wanders and waits. That is all that is left to him. And if you think this is implausible, look around you on any city bus. You will see them. They are living breathing people, and they will never talk about it because there is no point. They have learned, and my character, Leos, has learned, that there is no escape from this. Besides the novella, I have written a collection of what I called apoems that will come out next year with LJMcD Communications. I am working on two plays that will be performed with my musical venture with my songwriting partner, Jamie Taylor. I am also writing a much longer work of nonfiction that addresses all these issues in more direct ways.
Alden Nagel: What have consistently been the best ways for your writings to be released? Do you find that it depends more or less on the contents of the texts you write?
Michael Templeton: Shorter works, poems, works of nonfiction, and experimental works, all seem to do best when released online. That is just the way of the world now, and I don’t know any way around that. Longer works are better in conventional formats. I do not like reading books on a screen, and I don’t think many other people like reading that way. Other than a few things, I don’t write anything with an eye toward how it will be released. For instance, every essay I have published I wrote because I felt the need to write it. I did not write any of them for a specific magazine or website.
Alden Nagel: What are your thoughts on graffiti as an art form, and a sociocultural praxis?
Michael Templeton: I often wonder if graffiti is the only art form left in the world. Everything having been recuperated into the image machines before it ever comes into existence. Vandalism is the last legitimate art form.
Alden Nagel: Tell me all about your band, Paranoid Systems.
Michael Templeton: P.S. is really just me and a friend, Jamie Taylor. We write songs and record them in his studio. Jamie is a drummer who has switched to guitar. I have played guitar for decades. We are both older rock and rollers who are no longer interested in the old bar scenes and nostalgia-punk crap, and now we just write music that sounds good to us. I don’t honestly know how to describe our sound. I think that is up to others to say. We’d love to find a drummer and a bass player and play a show, but that is proving to be a tall order.
We will play live as part of the performance mentioned above, but we might be using a pre-recorded rhythm section. You can listen to Paranoid Systems on Bandcamp.
Alden Nagel: What should the Nut Hole Publishing’s readership know about your hometown?
Michael Templeton: Cincinnati is more Kentucky than Ohio, if you ask me. We have a great old Appalachian life-blood in the city, and it makes its way into almost everything. The city used to be a great place for artists, musicians, and the like, but gentrification and the banalizing of the digital has homogenized my hometown like everywhere else in the U.S. I moved away two years ago because I could not afford to live there anymore.
I got gentrified out of the city where I was born. Think about that…. But I still get down there to go to a great bookstore called Conveyor Belt Books (that is actually in Northern Kentucky). Sidewinder Coffee is a great stop (the Turkish Latte). And Findlay Market is a very old urban market where you can still find some great things. The Vietnamese store has the best selection of noodles, and he sells these little knives for five bucks that are great for chopping vegetables. If you are a drinker, Cincinnati is a fine place to get shitfaced.
Alden Nagel: What should Nut Hole Publishing’s readership know about the town you currently live in?
Michael Templeton: West Milton, Ohio is nowhere. Nothing happens here, and nothing ever will. However, West Milton is the birthplace of Charlie Furnas who has the distinction of being the first passenger on a plane after he flew with the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk. In later life, he ran a speakeasy in an old theater in West Milton.
Alden Nagel: As we’ve discussed before, you are a fan of, and take inspiration from the work of Maurice Blanchot. What about his work connects with you, and inspires you?
Michael Templeton: Blanchot’s work spans decades. He wrote about literature, war, politics, language, forgetting, Nietzsche, Beckett, insanity, and death, to name just the things I thought of in answering this question. His work is elusive and always remains just beyond me, and I love that. I can and will chase Blanchot’s meaning for the rest of my life. His books, and the works of Samuel Beckett, are not meant to be understood. They are meant to be experienced over and over again. His use of the fragment is what I aspire to most. If I could write a long work in the form of Blanchot’s fragments, I would feel like I am the writer I need to be.
Alden Nagel: If you could go back in time and have dinner with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, what do you think that might be like? What would you ask of them?
Michael Templeton: I don’t smoke anymore, but smoking French cigarettes with Deleuze would be cool. Just drinking coffee and puffing away. I think I would ask them if their theory of the rhizome is ultimately grounded in the culinary versatility of the potato.
Alden Nagel: Tell me all about your past experience with, and writing about, the work of Jacques Derrida.
Michael Templeton: I have generally not written much about Derrida. I read Derrida in the same way I read poetry. I read The Postcard over and over again. I had a friend in college who was obsessed with Derrida. He has since gone completely insane. He got kicked off Facebook for repeatedly denying that Covid was real. Like… it didn’t even exist. That said, I have read a lot of Derrida. I keep going back. It’s irresistible somehow.
Alden Nagel: What are your thoughts on the future outcome of the 2024 presidential election?
Michael Templeton: I’d rather not say. This is a can of worms.
Alden Nagel: What do you think about Bruce Springsteen?
Michael Templeton: I was a teenager when “Hungry Heart” became a hit. It became ubiquitous and you could not escape it. I have hated Bruce Springsteen’s music all my life—passionately. I found that Springsteen fans are generally the worst kind of bros; the kind of dudes who think they are radical but are basically just suburban rednecks. I am sure Bruce is a nice guy. Unfortunately, he makes music for jackasses.
Alden Nagel: Do you have any spiritual beliefs which you have not expressed publicly, which you would like to?
Michael Templeton: I am an atheist who is mad at God for not existing. I fill the hole with neo-paganism.
Alden Nagel: Are there any writers or philosophers whom you are grateful you have grown out of adhering to, in any way?
Michael Templeton: When I was young, I read the existentialists. Mostly Camus. I loved that stuff, and it sent me in the direction of things I love now, but I don’t think they have much to offer the contemporary world. Slavoj Žižek formed an important part of my research for my doctoral dissertation. He is now just a parody of a philosopher; somebody who plagiarizes his own shit and keeps recycling the same tired old song. Žižek is still around in the same way people still listen to “Louie Louie.”
Alden Nagel: What’s your favorite dance style?
Michael Templeton: I like the Cossack dance scene in Fiddler on the Roof.