Sean Kilpatrick Interview

In an era of safe spaces and trigger warnings, a kamikaze troubadour persists as a last bastion of transgressive literature—Sean Kilpatrick. For nearly a decade, Kilpatrick has churned out unflinching tales of depravity. He’s earned no shortage of critics in the process, but also a devoted cult following.

Kilpatrick shows no signs of slowing down. This year alone saw the release of Shock Test, Twitterfinder General, and his latest The Goliards. All three are written as scripts, a mode that proves fitting for Kilpatrick’s phantasmagoric wordplay, which demands to be read aloud. The author himself describes his new book as “scripted verse in sloppily encrypted, consecuted non-metered rhyme.” Think Marat/Sade written by Sarah Kane on bad acid and you’re only halfway there.

The Goliards combines painstaking research, slapstick comedy, and outrageous violence. A gaggle of historical figures wander a European wasteland plucked straight from a Bosch painting. They fuck, fight, drink, and rhapsodize poetic, much like the actual goliards of yore. Told in a series of monologues, this is some of Kilpatrick’s sharpest work to date.

I corresponded with Kilpatrick via email to probe the inception of his delightfully vitriolic plays. We discuss avant-garde theatre, what it means to copulate with language, and the perks of insanity. Check out more of Kilpatrick’s maniacal oeuvre on his blog and purchase his books here. This interview also appears in the print edition of The Goliards & Shock Test.

For the uninitiated, who were the goliards? What attracted you to exploring their ethos?

After the manic asceticism of early Christendom, a bit before portly affluence squandered every promise thereof, presaging how the sciences and social niceties of our day replaced God with lamer inquisitions, despite these belated stabs at His cultural comeback (maybe faith is becoming rebellious again in the age of entropy, analysis spoiled rotten by theory, because science in the last thousand years had its ascendancy, its martyrs, its glory, and is now as corrupted by doctrine as clergies were (and are) – art found shade in the coma of Freud and Marx – swell for believers, but the poet is crushed by both sides of that coin, creed and category are his nemeses, two of many reasons he hates himself foremost: the human mind can’t avoid systems), trends of martyrdom switched from Christ to Giordano Bruno, converting the joy of being killed for gods and god to magic and blood under the microscope (platitudinous concepts of wide-scale death for environmental conservation, and a volley of jurisdictional mass shooters, bankrupted nihilism). Simeon Stylites established the ideal, roping himself to a pillar amongst ruins until its yarn grew as one with the flesh of his stomach, setting maggots that fell away, gorged fat off his wound, back to their meal with stoic acceptance (life is agony in orbit), all food an immaterial surplus to him, Christ’s other cheek writ large with autoerotic scar tissue (a feat unimaginable via the amenities available most places today), and at the height of this wholesale ecstatic rapture of death intellectualized into a condensed axiom passed around to stave off sacrifices for harvest (our commie beard in the sky, an upstart inkling of the individual looming brightly, one brain doing paint-by-numbers over everything, the sole entity and creator parsed from his cloud, dictating will to the worms in his coffin), there warred Plato’s mystical realists (pantheism, the universe) with Aristotle’s analytical nominalists (materialism, the atom – again, both hate poets). The realists (not as the word is used today) said nothing’s real but the universal, the idea is a reality distinct from the individual constituting it: universalia sunt realia. Nominalists retorted: universals are mere notions of the mind, individuals alone are real, universalia sunt nomina, denying celestial abstractions. In the mid-12th century, your nominalist, like Peter Abelard, was often a castrated kook decried as a heretic (this has been flipped by now and will likely flip again, fatalistically, uselessly, with better tech available during each revolution). People of his order read the Greeks (half in defiance of church sanctions, half to improve them), drank their knowledge pickled at overcrowded and ultimately useless universities (thank goodness things changed), learned vast quantities, being autodidacts, and better yet, viciously mocked the overfed, anti-Christian Christians who ran the orders and schools that they, the goliards, and their kind, swiftly abandoned to go wander the big marsh Europe was, before the word Europe (or any such prattle about uniting nation states thronging with countless dolts) existed. Anyway, as the literature of our time is bedraggled by the self-same etiquette catering to a socialized clump, alongside ubiquitous ploys at academic advancement, it seems bureaucracy is still the language necessary for the masses, standing at their new mass of the traffic light, of the palm-glimmer magic window, buds in their ears about how hell ain’t real, and that we’re not in it. The latest authority relies on whichever precept gave them power, sitting on the gains flourished thereby, using that answer against every challenge, and is then ousted, most deservedly, but pointlessly, as the next junta will be a temporary solution at best. We’re perched on a series of ephemeral panaceas, rigged alive, broken over Fortune’s wheel: Carmina Burana!

Your response, and the book itself, make clear that you are as well versed in history as you are literature. Abelard and Heloise, Simeon Stylites, Prester John, etc. Most of your principal characters seem based on figures from antiquity as well. How did you go about conducting research for this project? What were your main sources?

Severe abuse of the local library’s inter-library loan system, as a good bum should – time made available having accomplished, with aspirational gusto, an ignored, anathema-status from any and all potential networks – starting with the works of the six historical characters depicted (including Abelard’s penis), then branching into brilliantly written studies of the era by Jane Ellen Harrison, Helen Waddell, Will Durant, and selections from many others. I list them on goodreads, marking which books were preferred, or read fully and again, studied more than others. The play I wrote on Waco blurts its sources outright, but that might give the impression of didacticism, greatest of sins for Americans, or imply I have any IQ. I limit my inventions to the unit, less the ambient ideas. The words fuck, primarily. Inciting fluidity is often a conundrum for high IQ types. High verbal IQ is about fucking well, achieved via natural or eventual means.

I’m curious if you would speak more about the idea of “fucking language.” I’ve followed your work religiously since Gil the Nihilist and this is an aspect of your work that has always excited me. Despite having written reams at this point, you still find inventive ways for language to copulate. The language fucks itself, as you noted, but I also feel the writer and reader both participate in this fucking, sort of akin to the wonderful orgy sequence early in Goliards. For me this promiscuity permits the propagation of strange, mutated wordplay on the page. From your perspective, what guides this linguistic fuckery?

Others are welcome, even appreciated, at times, to join my circle jerk of one, but their participation is not necessary. Where two words rub together, I have directed those appendages into a growing frottage, and hopefully the puppet ends up well-hung. I burned my life down for this assemblage. But we are in an ascetic epoch again, eating plastic in caves, many banished (self-banished or otherwise) to their basements. Post-post-post-postmodernism, you don’t have to travel to find art, you don’t need the overrated and disappearing wilderness to achieve adventure, all that is readily available. There exists an infinite amount of high quality work to study, at the end of a button (likewise all sort of treasure and pussy), for better or worse (better for a misanthrope, though the sacrifice ends bloody, because earning money is the only hamper against winding up a homeless ghost in the street, which is forthcoming for many a millennial, and we deserve worse). It’s okay: they made being burned at the stake just as lame. I grew up with the Gen X transgressive masterworks, the Enlightenment’s best and loudest dying caw against the church, before it sloppily replaced mass with another plugged in communal (meme’d) corniness. We were taught the meanest forms of instinct, and to laugh at references before knowing to what they refer, so that each layer stayed funny the more you grew and knew, and this art all holds up, perhaps better than any generation has experienced – the power of an influence unsurpassed. But now we’re suffering the passive aggressive, bad girlfriend humanities, the playing of mind games concerning one’s expectations, schizoid hire / firers toting yuppie for-profit handbooks. Can’t be gate-kept in if you’re not concerned with office politics and politics at large (even community colleges), for fear you’ll alienate the fucking customers. With my doily degrees, I hereby offer my services to any junior college, for a whopping ten grand a year, to replace the typical, overpriced zombie eking by on whatever cynical program was stuck in them. MFA’d bricklayers with a headshot more worked on than their sentences, as toothless as their agents, they are trained in the semi-literate phenomena of relatability, a salesmanship of originality, an X-factor affiliated beyond any hint of the biblio-onamnism that might wound profit. Few creatives are allowed to teach anything aside from this countertop fallacy: that quality equals readability, well-rounded minimalism, and expository intrigue, or, failing this con, try dry theory-jargon-gibberish meant to pick Abelard’s testicular gauze. I exceeded my transparent pathos with prose and am old enough to have lived through tyrannies right and left. No interest in the uber-nominalist enigma-text that ousted the belles-lettres system. Romanticism rejected God in favor of the artist’s innards and found we could remain sublime, but the mechanized slaughter of the twentieth century put the atom too high on its throne.

While we’re on the subject of language, I’d like to dig into the singular diction you’ve developed. Particularly in Goliards, much of the word choice is archaic. For the uninitiated, this could make for a challenging read. Take this sentence I plucked as a random example: “Opprobriously concupiscent, commodiously flagitious, our alarum was orgulous!” Admittedly, I had to look up every other word. Someone fixated on concrete meaning might struggle here, but if you’re like me, the actual meaning is secondary to the feeling evoked, or even simply the sonic effect of the words. Is obfuscation ever a concern for you? Or clarity be damned?

To flex a poetics apart from our analytic lingual trap, but sloppily aimed at becoming a constructed language closer to an agglutinative, hyper-inflected synthetic one, euphuism post Aldous Huxley’s smug causerie comparing genius John Lyly (the English language’s whipping boy because he dared tamper with its simplistically crowning order) to purple amateur Amanda McKittrick Ros (who hit floral heights by rare, adjectival accident), then Shakespeare sneered in, like Kurosawa reduced to George Lucas, telling Lyly to fuck himself for his trouble. A true maximalist first incorporates minimalism into his panoply. Everyone forgets to mention that Edward Dahlberg and Alexander Theroux are maniacs. They only comment on how hard the reading is, and I want revenge for having never stumbled onto those two before my dead-bodied thirties, though I’m sure I wasn’t ready, and am not. What we have is the humanization of gods into God. The jungle so traumatized our ancestors that they ran right to bread for safety and, more often than not, desire the same sponge-comfort from a book. Ritual becomes domesticated. Now even chemistry is brought to you by the dishwasher. People love like a chore, and the chore has been exposed as a needless, sadistic pastime. I’m trying, impossibly, for an art that transcends dogma to become its own dogma. It starts with a word pool of any relevant argot, feeding on the drown-bubbles. The pruned rest is a zygote of style cannibalized bigger (polyphonous stew). Writing can either be the usual over-remunerated raw flow (all speed gets is quantity) of reader connectivity that gets you blacked out in the making, or the excessive ongoing edit that’s a jerkier (the fear of inadvertent article repetition), but equally fulfilling, action coma. You can’t master one approach without sacrificing the other. Ideally both are in play simultaneously for a final draft. If anyone could be great in lit today, and none can (lit’s not a thing), but I imagine this person with a Bruce Lee ability to combine styles (or to bricolage postmodernism itself as a tool that might surpass understanding, or lay it to one side, to be deployed upon the senses willy-nilly). My word count is merely meant to show-pony its choke, and for the goliards to trash-compact each other in an anachronistic imitation of Middle English, with its improvised, mealy-mouthed, usufruct war tribe origins, and the autistic and schizophrenic nature of all language, according to Weston La Barre. Sonic effect is meant foremost, but my bias here can bring lines into a clarity only I, at times, often enough, perceive (the particular line you quote above is meant to funnily cramp up in the mouth of its nervous speaker and would be stricken if it wasn’t in the middle of situational emphasis via hyper-monologue and following a random rhyme scheme dictated to me by Satan). Everything I published, or will publish, is in the process of being edited. Death’s the final STET. My tooth worms do the talking. Even Black Mirror went soft. I try to stay scary. Easy task when you have only your bowel movements left too loose.

To your point about staying scary, there is some fantastic Miike-level gore in Goliards. The scene where the Knight eviscerates the Highwaymen and brutalizes the pig is ecstatically bloody. What are your thoughts on the relationship between violence and art?

There is no difference between violence and art.

Much of the violence in Goliards is pure slapstick (or maybe I just have a sick sense of humor). Likewise, the player’s trash talk had me laughing throughout (“Who knew manure came with prayers?”). In much of your work, acerbic wit abounds. How do you approach balancing humor and horror in your writing? I’ve read of your affinity for Tim and Eric and The Eric Andre Show (perennial favs of mine as well). Who are some of your other comic influences?

The laughs, perhaps, are layered in, and elude me, because poets fare better in the field of unintentional hilarity. It’s hysterical all at once, or none of it is. I romanticize and am enamored by our modern stretch of extreme theatres stumbling up from Punch and Judy commedia dell’arte, through the shock of Sturm and Drang, madmen individualists skewing their own matter like Strindberg and John Davidson (trying to be their heir here), Maeterlinck’s static dramas, turning vile with Jarry’s pataphysical black humor, decked out German expressionism, Grand Guignol’s genre tinted crueler between the Schopenhauerian realities of Henry Becque and Artaud’s metaphysical mania, Nikolai Evreinov’s theatre for oneself, a style of troll heralding Andy Kauffman, Witkacy morphing toward absurdism, the demented silent film slapstick of Beckett, Ionesco’s cartoon language, and Pinter’s cringe comedies of staccato menace (my favorite), fracturing further into Panic Movement riots, the precise, insane whisper of Howard Barker’s Theatre of Catastrophe: The Wrestling School, veering kitsch with the Theatre of the Ridiculous (though the concept of kitsch would likely be aimed at me derisively, because I mean my meanness more), the way David Lynch and Kafka have a sublime humor far from the belly laugh, because if you started, you’d yes yes yes yourself to death like Faulkner’s Darl Bundren, and our Gen X to millennial versions transitioning these styles to TV, alongside Damon Packard’s smash cut culture in overdrive, Tim and Eric’s anti-comedy branching further into dada, punk Eric Andre (Tom Green and Jackass further toward art) and leading to Sam Hyde, who brought all this into a such refined diffusion that he can describe an episode of My So-Called Life and it is the funniest, most disturbing thing imaginable, and you cannot laugh out loud about it, for fear of having to claw your own dick off, and apply it as makeup, to quit.

The spirit of all those great artists you mentioned teems beneath the surface of your work. Still, you’re not aping anyone. The voice is wholly your own. We’ve touched on the influence of drama in your writing. You’ve long utilized a script format. For me, the text begs to be read aloud. There’s a performative aspect. Why do you prefer to operate within this mode?

I used to perform ghetto vaudeville in second grade and had designs to do standup. Unfortunately (widening my lotto against success), the dependencies and pathologies at play were unrelated to a need for affirmation from crowds (disdain on the other hand…). Being something below an online troubadour (scroll-keeping is no longer elite, and Dahlberg sent his readers to the library, but obscure references and big words are instantly searchable today, yet all I see are more and more excuses not to use them – all I see are movie trailers with mini-trailers stuck in front) allows one to accost an audience and remain ignored. I’m a hesychast who values silence, especially in my thirties. I began to openly decay at twenty, and, by thirty, decay was the basis of every intermittent operation (my forties will be spent infirmed, perhaps, and my fifties are out of the question). According to the societal valuing that has teased me through experience after experience: a bum musing bipolar revelations to his fleas is at least treasured enough to be, now and again, sheltered by strangers. So the poet’s pride favors hate relations over pity (when those relations are live, outside a book), hence the magnitude of suicides (a way to pass into the page, even if that circulation falters too). Though I was never acclimated enough to work a room, or fashionable enough to be an ultra-ironic above-it-all dandy, cunty beyond cold (to revalorize Goethe’s astonishment with Barbey’s acerbity, at the same time, dialogue spoken with one hundred percent belief, the 90s type of irony built in with little concern for its volume, with no campy wink (the opposite of McKellan and Stewart hamming up Godot, not a fucking play to play crowd-catered, not a rip-roarer of a yuckfest, even when it is funny)), or self-pleased enough to run a cult, or shark-eyed enough to pursue power, or fool enough to support a spouse, or sane enough that any authority will do. But this addlepated phrase ‘closet drama’ anyone bandies about snags my prepuce. I absolutely write to be read aloud. Preferably by Patrick Magee. If no money ventures near (none has or will), I stake my futility against the dollar’s caprices, and have planned which convictions I favor croaking for, which cubbyhole they’ll scrape me out of. Regarding religion, I’m a cold customer (a Ligotti, Mainländer type), but nothing explains for me my mystical Galway Kinnell experience. His Book of Nightmares was published in the seventies. I had never read the man. Walking outside, into a field behind the library where I worked, I encountered his poem Little-Sleep’s-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight: “And you yourself / some impossible Tuesday / in the year Two Thousand and Nine, will walk out / among the black stones / of the field, in the rain,”) – As I read these lines, on a Tuesday, in the year 2009, black stones were under my shoes (a big field), and it just then began to rain. Fun coincidence, but no less proof of the power of the word, because to touch that book feels holy to this day. So my blasphemies and the blasphemies of my goliards are not for their own sake (or that too, as taboo is needed), but aspects against anyone’s sake, coasting by as we often are, especially those who lack compulsion and become overconfident about it. Never understood anyone who isn’t a thousand percent fixated with getting to the runniest bottom of their trade.

Goliards concludes with a time-hopping epilogue. We move rapidly from one era to the next, ending in a postmodern nightmare. Different men state their case—a one-eyed Marlowe, a suicidal Davidson, a baby-faced Andreyev, among others. This final scene traces the lineage of the goliards (I think). We see what would not be possible without their hedonistic contributions to the arts. How did you select these descendants? Was there anyone else you thought to include that didn’t make the cut? Do you see any contemporary artists touched by the goliards, or has technology spoiled our craft by making everyone an artist? I do wonder what the goliards would’ve made of Twitter.

I belong to the order of the hypodermic hypotactic paratactic paratrooper sawing at his own strings, senses awry since cave gas bonked each shadow epic, Roman wine-heads high off lead poisoning, dehydrated desert ascetics, troubadour rakes diddling farm daughters, courtier perverts periodically banished, salon rejects hanging from a sewer grate, and cenacle patrons at a Dinner for Schmucks (a prank described by Evreinov in the nineteen-tens that probably existed forever). I considered Lord Rochester, but preferred the heavier overlooked. The Cavalier Poets I circled, and a rollcall of tributes paid to these insane or acute portrayers of the insane: John Perceval, Witold Gombrowicz, Stefan Grabiński, John Rodker, Lucian of Samosata, Francis Saltus, Benjamin de Casseres, Ladislav Klíma, Géza Csáth, Charles Fort, Alfred Chester, Sarah Kane, Luis de Góngora, Gottfried Behn, Frank Wedekind, Georg Kaiser, James Thompson, Léon Bloy, Miguel de Unamuno, Virgilio Piñera, Maurice Gilliams, Darius James, Maude Hutchins, Roberto Arlt, Horacio Quiroga, Henry de Montherlant, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Vladimir Odoevsky, Ernest Brawley, Nina Hamnett, Fyodor Sologub, William Sansom, Rubem Fonseca, Francis Thompson, Par Lagerkvist, Karel Capek, Denis Diderot, Hanns Heinz Ewers, Jens Peter Jacobsen, Mikhail Lermontov, Leigh Hunt, William Hope Hodgson, Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, David Halliwell, Charles Stevenson Wright, Frank Walford, Ray Bremser, George MacDonald, Joseph Hergesheimer, Robert Canzoneri, Leslie A. Fielder, Leonard Cline, Jules Michelet, George Barker, Tom Mallin, Jack Womack, Yasutaka Tsutsui – their tradition was never vaunted (some a little more than others), and has now nearly petered out.

A recent release I’ve been recommending is Grant Maierhofer’s Clog. His books continuously astound me. He’s one of a few active writers who never fails to push literature into new boundaries. You were Maierhofer’s editor on that project. How do you approach editing another writer’s work? Is the process any different when revising your own text?

I’m bred in dada, Burroughs and other stochastic binary cutup cyberpunk experiments, and admire the work of Kenji Siratori, so appreciate tweaking the start of the Clog apparatus, but never personally accomplished abstraction on that scale, if you see how the opening I torqued is a bit more anchored and line focused. The Butler collaborations were wild, but done on instinct, not process (his being the fastest instinct in the game). The Sam Pink I never finished due to my struggle in the other technical direction with concrete narrative. My ex’s we left incomplete due to her and other sperm. A sci-fi novel with a recently dead pal edited together from his ideas floats about. A Lish consecution edit of Ben Spivey’s Black God got released a while back. There’s an unproduced giallo screenplay with Jamie Grefe. Andrew Lundwall (have to love melancholia’s tremulous dreadlocks, despite a once-hot Lena Dunham being in it with us) and I started a long poem together long ago that fell by the wayside. Collaborations are good training for instinct and humility, and I can relate to those of a different style because what unites us is the same thing that propelled humanity into and through its many conundrums: obsession. With editing, I edit others the same as I edit myself, with extreme prejudice. I’m rarely approached to edit. Most beginners just want a polish.

Wrapping up, what’s next for Sean Kilpatrick? You mentioned filming some selections from Goliards. I fantasize about mounting a stage production one day. Any upcoming readings or events to promote? Care to divulge the details of new projects for our faithful readers? Bonus question, if Goliards had a theme song, what would it be?

I have obtained a ten year old camera on eBay that shoots a gorgeously rich and sharp image, when manually manipulated to, and if the ISO is at its lowest. I plan to, with severely limited resources, make a dialogue-free film akin to Besson’s The Last Battle meets Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (also aspiring to the Texas Chainsaw dinner scene and the American Werewolf in London home invasion) and then undergo the first truly millennial noir film. (Perhaps shooting some play stuff in there, would love to see a team do one of my tongue-tiers. I held Metallica’s Leper Messiah close in scope while composing Goliards.) Filmmaking is nearly impossible to accomplish, and I’m not smart, technical, or social enough to be a good director, but I like how cinema has a universality untainted by appreciation and is sometimes shot by shamanistic and tribal means that contradict the industry selling them. I’ll still likely be committed to the disease of literature, but an obsession can swap formats, especially when its initial format has half-assedly expelled one over needless electioneering. Audiences (hypothetical to me) need a sliver of art that tells them to fuck themselves at everyone’s expense, even if the practitioner of said art must spend forever gnawing off his wool to assemble a wardrobe, the sacrifice of revealing the lowest human faculties, proving how blood muses can exist, and anyone who denies this has either never experienced agony, monotonous or otherwise, or has been run down by so much pain that art is none of their business anymore, because all they can feel is the buoyancy of their own nerve endings as they continue to erode, which is what I care to share, with matter by itself, if need be. Speaking of obsession (whoever doesn’t have one, leave the arts): When I was young, I fell in love (not knowing love’s just a control chemical) with a real Natasha Leggero prissy ice queen rich bitch nineties dream girl with sharp taste and sharper hatred, all fucked up, forever diddled, harboring a fair bit of self-destructiveness and mucho wit. She had that runt princess, tiny product-of-incest bend to her beauty: my type. To add to that, she’d lift a vintage blouse and poke her tummy extra pale with diabetes needles, if you can imagine. I imagine insects tried to lip her track marks in slow motion. Strong sting of an impression and we hardly hung, a handful of months, but the years to follow – the absurd shitty behavior of exes, the cheating parade of one’s twenties, matter little (my heart came pre-destroyed, ha ha, the others were playing hopscotch in her shadow, thus she helped me cheat my hustlers, and this is why I keep painting her lovely needlework across so many of my words – the fact that she existed is inconsequential to me now: she’s just an homage that became art). Her fading kind (she was my age but raised by excessively Gen X siblings) remind me of the old cycle of a soft generation breeding a mean generation ad infinitum (it’s the petty astrology (as Jim Goad says) of categorization, but more fun because it’s nasty: boomers and millennials: generally soft (hippies, save the world, safe-spaces, etc.) and Gen X and zoomers (wiser to the game, ironic, based). At least boomers gave us the great seventies cinema and Michael O’Donoghue. What the fuck have millennials left behind after killing art with kindness? Take the most ironic composure in existence: Faith No More’s “We Care a Lot” (see their later virtuoso Mike Patton being interviewed eating a burger, or Gen X Paul Thomas Anderson’s pizza interview: too cool to care), an American apathy routine, not trying (passion or desperation offends fellow scenesters), schizoid voices, mocking advertising language, transgressive cross-dressing (back when that was taboo), smarmy, smartass, insulting peers to sell yourself harder, not that you’re for sale. But Gen X at their worst (“everyone’s a poseur!”) was still miles ahead of millennials at our best. How brutally horrifying for me: artists all sing those We Care a Lot lyrics in the most literal and meant sense today, and no one talks about Dan Zukovic’s The Last Big Thing. Millennials really aimed a cannon at the wall and climbed in (in a way that’s far away from intentional). Sometimes circling the drain is worse than going down it. Soon beliefs won’t be manifested, they’ll be liked. The printing press didn’t come with a shock collar the way the internet did. Our next major advancement will look like sterility in lingerie and feel like a handjob from a doctor. We will be the disposable constituents for a cause too blank to identify, and I’m glad it’s passing me by. I’ve always been severing my tail so the knife wags in its place.