by Zack Kopp

Originally from England, John Tottenham has made Los Angeles his home for over two decades. A sharp critic of both writing and visual art, he has published reviews and essays in numerous publications, including a long-standing column in the art magazine Artillery. Tottenham gives his acerbic instincts free reign in his creative work as well; merely to read the titles of his four books of poetry to date—The Inertia Variations (Kerosene Bomb Publishing, 2004), Antiepithalamia & Other Poems of Regret and Resentment (Penny-Ante Editions, 2012), The Hate Poems (Amok Books, 2018), and Fresh Failure (Hat & Beard Press, 2023)—gives one a sense as to why he was dubbed a “magnanimous misanthrope” by the Huffington Post.

Tottenham has now published his first novel, Service (Semiotext(e)/Native Agents, $17.85), and if the title of the book seems a bit restrained, rest assured that there’s plenty of invective in these pages. A deadpan satire about life as an underpaid, jaded bookstore clerk, the book follows hapless narrator Sean Hangland as he rails against an illiterate society; Tottenham’s prose strikes a tone of deliberate unconventionality that manages to come off as self-deprecating and arrogant at the same time.

Zack Kopp: Before we get into Service, I have to note that you began as a poet. Which of your books of poetry do you recommend most highly, and why?

John Tottenham: My first book of poetry, The Inertia Variations, consists of 125 eight-line poems on subjects such as work avoidance, indolence, and failure. It was the fruit of many fruitless years and was subsequently adapted into a film and recording of the same name by Matt Johnson, the singer-songwriter behind the band The The. The Hate Poems is the most popular volume I’ve published, although that’s possibly owing to the photograph of a cute cat on the cover. The most recent and probably final collection, Fresh Failure, came out last year. Any of those will do.

ZK: I remember seeing The Hate Poems in bookstores when it came out. Who conceived of the cover?

JT: The cat cover was entirely my idea, as has been the case with the jacket designs of all my books. I don’t know how to use Photoshop, so I stand there and direct people who have mastered it and give them the credit—until now. I rifled through thousands of cat postcard images online and elsewhere to come up with that particular one. I used to be a keen deltiologist.

ZK: How did you come to work with Matt Johnson, and how did you feel about the translation of your writing to another medium?

JT: Matt was introduced to The Inertia Variations by a mutual friend while experiencing a long creative drought. He took it upon himself to interpret the work, producing a full-length CD and using my verses as a sort of soundtrack that was woven throughout an auto-documentary chronicling his own years of inertia. The film is mostly of interest to hardcore fans of The The, who want to know what Johnson was up to during the decade when he wasn’t producing any new work.

ZK: Turning to Service, how long did it take to write the novel?

JT: The novel itself was actually completed five years ago, although I’ve tinkered around with it since then.

ZK: Your main character works in a bookstore, as you yourself have done. In the age of auto-fiction, what makes Service more than autobiographical?

JT: Some people might recognize the novel’s setting and assume it’s entirely autobiographical, but since I don’t have much of an imagination I used a recognizable reality as the basis for a flight into fiction. Ninety-five percent of it is invented.

ZK: You’re one in a long line of writers about modern life in Los Angeles. Who among your predecessors, if anyone, has been most influential on your development as a writer?

JT: I read John Fante’s Ask the Dust at a young age and it was responsible for some of my formative impressions of L.A. It was recommended to me by Charles Bukowski, whom I corresponded with for a while. Although Bukowski was popular in France and Germany, his books were only available as imports in England at the time, and it was a novelty for him to hear from an English reader, especially a teenager.

ZK: Trying to make a living as a writer usually involves a lot of freelance work, and that usually involves reviewing the work of others. What’s your best, worst, or most significant memory related to your involvement with Artillery?

JT: What comes to mind is that it was painful to do editorial work. The main problem with a lot of aspiring art writers—and this also applies to literary criticism—is that they desperately want to be taken seriously, so they try to make things sound more complicated than they actually are. By spouting theoretical jargon and art-damaged nonsense, they strive to be difficult, but they lack the chops to pull it off with any conviction and wind up sounding like idiots. Editing that stuff was excruciating; I often felt it was giving me brain damage. Critical theory can be a lot of fun, but that’s all it is, fun—precisely what it’s supposed to not be. It’s an elitist game played by the affluent and the overeducated. Nobody’s going to go there for wisdom, guidance, or solace; at the end of a day’s work, nobody’s going to want to come home and read theory. It’s only for people who want to feel smart about art they don’t understand. In the end, the tedium is the message: aesthetic rigor mortis.

ZK: Who’s your favorite contemporary author, and why?

JT: My favorite living author is probably the English prose stylist and psychogeographer Iain Sinclair. I like the way that he constructs sentences. But regrettably, I haven’t been reading much lately. I enjoyed Hans F. Wagner’s latest poetry collection, The Vegas Layer (which was published by a small press out of Colorado, Lithic Press, earlier this year). I picked it up in the same week that I finally bought a copy of Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger and found that Wagner’s collection delivered what I had been disappointed not to find in the Dorn book: a richly impressionistic evocation of the mysterious Western landscape.