Alessandro DiFrancesco, despite their name, is almost painfully American. When they read a character of Kurt Vonnegut’s description of the failed sci-fi author Kilgore Trout in Slaughterhouse-Five (“I don’t think Trout has ever been out of the country,” Rosewater went on. “My God—he writes about Earthlings all the time, and they’re all Americans”), they felt horribly implicated. They’ve traveled a tiny bit, yes, to countries like Canada and Mexico and the UK, but their knowledge of this vast earth is limited to the people they met from all over it while living in New York City for nearly 16 years. Once, a friend said of them, “I can’t believe you haven’t traveled much. You seem worldly.” Alessandro DiFrancesco laughed.
“Alessandro” is neither the name they were born with, nor the name they go by. They go by “Alex,” and the name they were born with is so horrible that I won’t repeat it here. But they are a transgender person, and when they began to transition, they went by a shortened version of their then middle name, Alexis, and when they realized they were one of billions of trans Alexes, they promptly legally changed their first name to Alessandro. They say it is a reclamation, of sorts, an act of taking back the very Italian name their father changed for his career. But I digress.
This story begins when Alessandro DiFrancesco was drunk, as they often used to be. They went to a Philadelphia dive bar called Dirty Frank’s. Dirty Frank’s is, in fact, dirty, but less in a health-code-violation way and more in a lived-in-for-decades kind of way. They ordered a dirty martini and the ancient bartender called them a pain in the ass.
They sat at the bar and, as such situations go, began chatting with the guys next to them, and before long they all went to another dive bar, and another, and AI, which had been in the news for its writing prowess lately, came up again and again. The tech guys were enthusiastic. Alessandro DiFrancesco was not.
“What about art?” they asked, in their often overblown way. “What about Van Gogh?”
“Who needs Van Gogh?” one of the tech guys said. “You can create anything you can imagine.”
“But it doesn’t feel! Art translates the inexpressible. Art exists to communicate humanity!” they said, drunk. The tech guys merely looked at them.
Alessandro DiFrancesco woke up hungover and in their bedridden boredom, googled themself. First they looked for their books, written under Alex DiFrancesco. Was there anything worthwhile here at all? Anything that couldn’t be done by AI? Anything of their hopes and dreams?
Then they googled their full name, and that is when they found Alessandro De Francesco.
*
This story begins again.
Alessandro De Francesco is an experimental artist, poet, and teacher. Alessandro De Francesco was born in 1981 (the same year as Alessandro DiFrancesco), but he was born in Pisa, Italy. He was born the gender he stayed, lucky man that he was. He attained a Philosophy degree from the University of Pisa, and a PhD in Poetics and Literary Theory from the University of Paris-Sorbonne. Alessandro DiFrancesco can’t even pronounce Sorbonne. He has lived and taught all over Europe. He speaks multiple languages, and his art is all language-based. He plays the bass professionally. He is educated in electronic music, as well.
His most recent book, published in 2025, is an experimental art and writing book called Looop, which purports to push AI to its artistic limits.
In short, Alessandro De Francesco is everything that Alessandro DiFrancesco is not.
*
The story begins again.
A few days before Alessandro DiFrancesco found Alessandro De Francesco, the former Alessandro’s friend Vivien J Ryder (the J stands for nothing in particular) sent them a video of John Cage performing “Water Walk” on the television show I’ve Got a Secret. It was filmed in January of 1960. In the video, Cage carries a stopwatch as he walks around pouring glasses of water, turning on blenders, pushing radios over. When the audience laughs, the viewer gets the sense that Cage has carefully timed their response into his piece.
“I want to make experimental art,” Alessandro DiFrancesco told Vivien Ryder after watching the video. “But when I do, nobody likes it.”
“Nobody liked that either!” Vivien Ryder said.
“I liked it.”
“You’re a weirdo.”
Alessandro DiFrancesco is secretly using AI to create an experimental art book based on Nabokov’s synesthesia and his book Lolita. Nobody likes it. Nobody wants it. They are not sure they will ever finish it.
Years ago, an organization funded by and catering to experimental artists reached out to Alessandro DiFrancesco to give them a secretive grant. They could not publicize it. Someone had nominated them in secret, and they would never find out who. Somewhere, with no fanfare, someone believed in their weirdness. They tried to figure out who, they tried to figure out what piece it may have been that caught their attention. But they never did, and the feeling of being secretly approved of by someone who was in the world of the abstract faded rather quickly.
When Alessandro DiFrancesco thinks of that, they feel the way they felt watching “Water Walk.” They feel that maybe they can be the artist they truly wish to be.
But they can’t. That artist already exists. That artist is Alessandro De Francesco.
*
Imagine what it would be like to find that there is someone with your name, doing everything you wished you could do in life. Imagine they are living your dreams. Imagine that all that separates you, even down to the year of your birth, is one changed letter and a little space. Imagine you have worked so hard to become the person you wanted to be, even changing your gender, and you realize that someone else got there first. You were never even in the running.
And, so, Alessandro DiFrancesco sent Alessandro De Francesco an email.
Dear Alessandro De Francesco,
I AM GOING TO KILL YOU.
All my best,
Alessandro DiFrancesco
215.668.0925
pronouns: they/them
“An immediate, compassionate voice.” ~ Publishers Weekly
“DiFrancesco breaks the speculative fiction/social commentary divide.” ~ Lambda Literary
“At the affective core of “Transmutation” is the question of how we can offer shelter for one another’s pain, real and imagined.” ~New York Times
*
There was no other way, really, Alessandro DiFrancesco reasoned. This man, this man who taught university-level creative writing in Turin, this man who had studied philosophy before literature, who quoted artists and philosophers in his poetry, who did word installations and avant-garde word-based videos, and sound poems, and experimental art pieces with AI, and who had a philosophy and a craft and who was celebrated and lauded – he had to be killed.
As Alessandro DiFrancesco read Alessandro De Francesco’s art portfolio, they felt sure in an unknowable way that the two of them were a vessel split down the middle, only the mouth of one side was larger than the other, and so everything the universe had to offer had poured into that side alone. The unfairness of it all! Education in Europe’s elite schools, curated art openings, deep thought about the underpinnings of literature while they blundered around hoping for divine intervention. Their life shrank and became foolish. Everything they wished to be, he was.
They sat and watched a video on his page. A ball with HELP written on it. A flash of illumination. A thump, the ball rolls off. He was not only making such things, he had been encouraged, awarded prizes and tenured professorships for them.
Oh, yes, there was no way out of this. The scales had to be balanced. Murdering Alessandro De Francesco was the only way for Alessandro DiFrancesco to proceed.
*
When Alessandro De Francesco got the email, he naturally looked Alessandro DiFrancesco up. He googled them first, and what he found was alarming. They seemed to be fundraising for lawyers fees. They had bad finger tattoos. They’d published a story about a Pennsylvania Dutch legend in a book with a maudlin cover.
But then he clicked on the website attached to their email signature, under the name “Alex.” They had written some books which were somewhat well-received.
Alessandro De Francesco decided the email must be a joke. He found himself standing in his office on campus, his phone clenched in his hand. They were not a criminal, despite what he’d found first. They were some boring fiction and memoir writer who had never left the United States in their life, had gone to a sub-par public university, and had a job as a book editor. They were not coming to Turin to kill him.
So he wrote back.
Dear Alessandro DiFrancesco,
NOT IF I KILL YOU FIRST.
Alessandro De Francesco
“La poesie ne s’impose plus, elle s’expose.” -Paul Celan
*
What Alessandro De Francesco didn’t know was that Alessandro DiFrancesco had a flight booked to London for the next week. The coal-mining-valley-born, public-university-educated American had somehow landed an international job a year before that was flying them to the UK for work. Alessandro DiFrancesco had been planning to stay in London for a week afterwards, to enjoy shows and see where their art-hero David Bowie had been born, but upon reading Alessandro De Francesco’s email, they canceled their hotel reservations and booked a flight to Turin. They found themself an Air-bnb near the city center.
*
Words are fragile things. You’ve read Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea? Early on in the book, there is a scene where the narrator is paralyzed by the glass in front of him on a table, imagining all its possibilities. Imagine, if a glass has such endless corridors and trails, the possibility of words, these delicate constructs of emotion and semantics. Imagine the insect wing fragility of something we call a poem, at this moment darting towards this end and at another towards that.
Imagine, then, all the possibilities of those words sent to Alessandro De Francesco by that blundering purveyor of definite “meaning” – I AM GOING TO KILL YOU. And imagine what a mistake he made in pinning it down to one meaning, to “joke.”
It was not any more a joke than the butterfly effect of Alessandro De Francesco’s echoing voice installations, his typographical manifestations, the overlaying and overlapping maximalism of them all. He took minimalism to mean simplicity, and he was so very wrong.
*
After a week of workdays in London, where they kept their murderous plans to themself, Alessandro DiFrancesco boarded a plane for Turin, Italy, where Alessandro De Francesco lived. They didn’t have any weapons, but as an American, they knew they could be resourceful about rage.
They were sweating a little in their cramped seat as they put their phone in airplane mode and put on their noise-canceling headphones. They had three downloaded albums that they used as a soothing device on every two-hour flight: Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, and Leonard Cohen’s Songs of Love and Hate. By the time they had listened to all three, the flight was over, and they were in Italy.
They had always imagined a trip to Italy in romantic terms – returning to the homeland of their ancestors, meeting long-lost relatives, breathing in the sea air their family once breathed. This would be none of that. They were going there to destroy Alessandro De Francesco, to destroy the self that never was.
*
Carl Jung wrote extensively about the shadow self, the self that does not align with our moralistic view of ourselves as creatures of light. The act of murder of the idealized self we long to be seems as if it would be the ultimate act of defiance the shadow self could commit. How often does our shadow self have such an opportunity?
We sat at an outdoor cafe in the brisk spring air, Alessandro DiFrancesco and Alessandro De Francesco (of which I am one). There was espresso on the table, and on the cobblestones around us, birds landed and took wing. We sat in silence.
Alessandro De Francesco said to Alessandro DiFrancesco (of which I am one), “You’ve made such a shallow attempt at me. Do you not realize the possibility of words, of selves, of the infinity of them both? Do you think I live in words and awards? Do you think I don’t love? Do you think I don’t have thoughts about AI and David Bowie? Do you think I never watched John Cage on YouTube? Do you think through the faulty funhouse mirror of the internet you can fathom me?”
Alessandro DiFranesco said to Alessandro De Francesco (of which I am one), “Do you know the unpublished works that make up the body of my desires, the infinity of the unspoken? The things I was never allowed to be?”
They sat into the night in stalemate – we sat into the night with our kings in check. There would be no murder, and the world would roll on as it does, shaping vessels, moving words and objects in just one trajectory. The shadows that grew around them were not to be feared, the shadows we cast were two-dimensional – roughly the same dimensions as the echo of words on this page.