By J. S. Latham
But the true Nut Jobs Author does not live in the past. They are publishing right now, on obscure presses or Amazon Kindle Direct, sending screeds to literary magazines that delete them unread. nut jobs author
So raise a glass to the paranoid, the grandiose, the delusional, the obsessive. Raise a glass to the author who replied to your polite rejection email with a 10,000-word treatise on how you are a pawn of the psychic vampires. They are annoying, exhausting, and often wrong. They are publishing right now, on obscure presses
Of course, there is a dark side. Not every nut job is a Burroughs or a Pound. Many are just bigots with word processors. The line between “outsider visionary” and “hateful crank” is thin and bloody. The manifesto of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski ( Industrial Society and Its Future ), is a perfectly logical, brilliantly argued, utterly insane text. It is also a blueprint for murder. The literary world has a hard time with this. We want our crazies to be lovable, like crying about the Dharma Bums. We don’t want them building bombs. They are annoying, exhausting, and often wrong
This feature is not about the mentally ill writer as a tragic figure, nor about making light of genuine suffering. It is about the aesthetic of the unhinged: the moment when a writer’s personal cosmology becomes so intricate, so obsessive, and so resistant to consensus reality that the resulting text becomes something other than a novel. It becomes a revelation —or a hallucination. Sometimes, both.
The reader of the nut job author is an anthropologist of the extreme. We are looking for the boundary where belief becomes art and art becomes madness. We want to touch the electrified fence.