Do you know someone who when they say “Right now I’m reading…” they really mean “Right now I’m listening to…” ? Then this is just the thing for them! Be a good friend and switch them on to DESPAIR PRIORITIES.
See the previous post on this website to download a free pdf of the novel!
Eugenio Negro built a $75 Survival Hut and a $750 Survival Hut!
FREE DOWNLOAD COMING NOVEMBER 2023 FROM THE AUTHOR OF BYEBYE AND SHLORT
“I do not want to acknowledge the pain.“
Whether Nagamatsu’s eagerly-awaited (at least by me) novel is meant to be a “quarantine novel” or if he just had good timing within his obviously long-planned trajectory of climate-catastrophe fiction, it certainly worked on me, hoping to leave my own quarantine chaos after 2 years and unable to let it go, as a catalyst for a fair sight of reflection and catharsis.
Catharsis if that’s what happened when I broke down in shaking sobbing despair twice in chapter 2, but I didn’t kill myself after finishing the chapter so I guess that’s an artistic failure for Nagamatsu on this one. Also, with all the accurate place-names, what’s with San Jose General Hospital, it’s Valley Med, come on man.
After some deep breaths (I read the book in one go on a flight, just what I needed, nerves already shot), I found lots of truth and beauty in the characters. One huge theme was feeling, balancing the different needs and circles in one’s life, that one has not done enough for one’s kid or family. Personally I have a huge problem with this and will probably never recover from it, so that’s another reason why the first three chapters had me such a mess. The guy next to me on the plane watched Fox News on the chair-back TV the entire three-hour flight. I don’t think he noticed me hide in my shirt while bawling in despair, both times.
Not to spoil anything, but the talking pig, especially after that intense beginning, is worth the price of admission by itself. It’s the stand-alone short story that PETA staff never had the culture to write, when they were still relevant. One of the book’s great artistic strengths is that it finds space for sections that totally stand on their own. By the time Laird is exposing what I hope is Nagamatsu’s music taste (I’m desperate to find fellow bitter punk rockers), I’m thinking thank gad, only adults are dying in the rest of the book.
Marketing comparisons to Cloud Atlas are fair enough as all such are useless, but I found the coda that ties the book all together a little out of place. Watch, he planned that bit first and then the book got away from him. More effective were the sudden third- and flipped-around first-person later chapters in which we meet who was only narrated by other characters earlier. Nevertheless I appreciate his spiritual approach to his writing and I have to give respect for the Tiptree-like elements whence he derives the book’s title, particularly reminding me of Up the Walls of the World in subtle ways.
So, if you got into “cli-fi” five years ago and found many books labeled such lacking, this is something better, it’s something in motion. I put it next to Fifth Season. Smarter than cli-fi. Nagamatsu first puts us through the adults watching their world collapse, then gives us the perspective of the kids who survived it, and for whom luxury funeral skyscrapers are just a granted part of the environment, what’re you gonna do. It’s not hard-science optimism like Kim Stanley Robinson, it’s the optimism of little details by which families keep on. Again, as with his story collection, those interested in Japanese culture will get many lessons, never stereotypical, always well-placed.
I really don’t have any criticisms, only a few matters of taste like the note above on the ending: though I really can’t stand singularities and near-lightspeed human salvation junk (excepting Robinson’s Aurora), I must say that this book’s singularity/wormhole is the freshest one I’ve read, accounting for Fiasco, Aurora and Altered Carbon. A solid, sometimes punishing, beautiful piece. If I had to comparatively mutate it into a Swans album, I think it’s somewhere around White Light from the Mouth of Infinity. Thanks to my friend L for showing Nagamatsu’s stuff to me.
After seven years of holding down the rowdy and fascinating Drunken Odyssey, literature professor, drinker and writer John King, lately of Florida, has released his novel Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame upon the summer reading market. This writer thinks shame like walk of shame, like you’re wasted. It’s a story about a decadent goth band’s journey to get a decent gig that involves reliving the legend of Gilgamesh for this weird-ass superfan in his fortress in Tennessee that must be modeled on Adrian Belew’s house.
King’s site is full of truly interesting and mostly-useful perspectives on literature, including an entire series on Shakespeare films. Also discoverable is a tender longitudinal document of King’s friendship with Orlando’s Nathan Holic. His name is Holic, people! John’s like breh, I’m a holic too, wenn du weisst was ich meine. I can imagine them together, drinking or eating opium or what the hell King does, and discussing the tough choices of writing novellas.
Where Guy Psycho comes in is its connection to King’s noteworthy love of comic books and B movies, documented on the site under “curatory of schlock.” The reader gets a strong sense when reading down Guy Psycho‘s relatively slender spine that the novel, far from being one of those “serious” books, is to be read as a comic-book ride, which is appropriate since Gilgamesh began as the comic book of its day, as did Faust.
Right away this writer liked how the story is about a fictional band, because fictitious music is some of the best (see hatestep). In the front of the book we get the members of the band conveniently listed, followed by the admonition “style is meaning.” Thanks, professor! The book then drops us into a wheel of speeding events that definitely give flashbacks of harried nights on tour, all arranged to a sort of ritual importance that should not be overlooked just because it’s a crappy band on a crappy tour. Did King play punk rock? “Oh, but Beto O’Rourke did. Did you know he can skate too?” Fuck right off.
Early on in the text we get something of Douglas Adams’ ability to render the prose itself scaled to its significance, oscillating within painstaking precision and hyperbolic decadence, though this attenuates as the plot thickens. King writes to write, and his affinity for comic book slapstick backs up against all kinds of cultural signifiers and name-drops disguised as hallucinations. This writer bets that such economy is probably what he was going for in terms of technique in Guy Psycho. What Carl Hiaasen would read like if he weren’t a boring normy.
The text is at turns cleverly satiric, intentionally “psychedelic,” as some commentators have named it, and often claustrophobically jumbled. Without giving anything away, the whole story is in a series of interiors, and there are times when this writer stopped reading to imagine both how all these vistas would render to the naked eye, as well as how stressful some of these leaps of imagination physically would be. Keep in mind that I did Cumberland Cavern once and am still traumatized. Did King squeeze through Cumberland Cavern before he set this son of a bitch somewhere beneath Rock City? I’ll keep my comments to myself.
Besides our mutual love of Tennessee, ziggurats and made-up bands, I noticed that I easily could grab King’s references to ancient literature, but part of me wonders if the lay reader would get some of the characters’/settings’ intentions/functions. My only critique would be for King to slow down and let us feel it, and to let the characters really work things out. There are some feelings expressed inwardly by the guitar player, but by way of late-placed exposition, instead of an opportunity to test Guy’s ego in front of the family, or make an in-your-face parallel to the relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu that many readers might need. Or not! Just thinking on the keyboard here.
As Gilgamesh and Guy Psycho run on epic running-gear, I don’t expect Hamsun’s psychological clarity, but I would like to see the band members really come up against each other’s abilities, will and personalities to provide some kind of tension in need of decision. Without it the book only really pinches at the band members’ high-heel-tortured feet, and reads like one of my 2-Strats comics, where the reader is just along for the ride and doesn’t get to touch.
All in all Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame is filled with hilarious visuals, insightful gags and a brief lesson in ancient epic. What Guy has to be ashamed of is up to the reader. Don’t download it, dickieeeeee, buy a copy and then give it as a gift after you read it!
Time to visit www.exitosngnosis.com and pre-order your Byebye and Shlort, recipient of a 4.5/5 score from IndieReader! It’s much cheaper before May! Or be smart and tell your library to get it for you!
Review here: https://indiereader.com/2019/03/byebye-and-shlort/
DEAR MALAE: I swear I offered this to a bunch of publications in the straight community but no one wanted it, at least not from me, so here it is on an insignificant blog. I tried! Feel free to use. –N
Peter Nathaniel Malae’s new book Son of Amity begins with themes familiar to his readers: violence, incarceration, cultures tangled and erased by poverty, hatred for the consumer and the less-dedicated, and perhaps the Californian writer’s greatest contribution to twenty-first century literature: an identifiable search for the use of masculinity in our time.
As before, the economy of description is refreshingly socio-economic. Malae’s mission to portray common people brings us undernourished, overfed, jelly-spined poor whites, but also dignified and convincing portraits of men forgotten in prison and in Bush’s Middle-East conflict, and women rejected, imprisoned, by the ignorance in their environments.
But this is no rerun of What We Are: like Jimmy Baca before him, the author’s own evolution since he disappeared into the “Pacific Northwest” makes the reader an attractive offer to evolve according to his characters’ examples. There are three males in this dialect-rendered story. Which is the titular Son of Amity?
Here Malae repurposes his previous characterizations to disarming effect. For a start the writer’s voice, mercifully, is separating from the narrator’s. Malae always demonstrates an ear for specific slang, something that really impresses academics, but in Son of Amity, especially the memories of prison, we finally get to observe what this slang, in its various pressure and quantity, really means between characters.
Central to the three adults’ seemingly-doomed cohabitation is a highly-realistic evolution of characters’ wills and desires, something unfit in What We Are’s immediacy. Starting with revenge for a rape, the characters’ common ground shifts under them as the victim of the violence takes the will to both choose forgiveness and transform the violence into a child: Malietoa to his Samoan uncle, Tophat to his veteran father, the latter crippled by the former.
The use for masculinity is found in a shared faith in family centered around the child Benji, and not in an act or a gesture. The outcast’s longing for a family to serve –and worth serving –in previous work has arrived. As What We Are’s exasperation before an expanded mind rouses similar feelings to Immigrants in Our Own Land, so this meditation on refocused life approaches the glorious beauty of Black Mesa Poems.
Throughout the book, Malae turns his previous work’s conceits against themselves using time and natural renewal: here we hopelessly serve our past even as the future offers us a ride without reservations, in this case the innocent child at the lead. The book’s greatest charm lies in watching the three adults reluctantly choose the boy’s inspiration over their baggage. Who, then, is the Son of Amity? I would argue that it’s the boy, and I propose that the narcissistic masses of this country read this book and follow their own Malietoa, their own Tophat.
Malae never neglects the portraiture of people trying to both live up to the past and make some way of living in the present. Perhaps the clearest symbols of this are Pika’s Samoan umu Thanksgiving turkey at the book’s finale and Michael’s worship of the Vietnam vets. But the conceit and the dignity lies in Sissy’s internal monologue throughout, in which the urban, feminist, progressive reader must coexist with the fact that Sissy’s post-rape decisions come from a need to move forward without any plan.
Highly recommended for those needing an immediate dose of reality.
Now this is poetry, people. I should have this on regular rotation on my nightstand. And more Heine, too, I suppose. Few poets’ language really speaks to me, and Baca’s has always gone straight to the heart.
As part of the Progressive Asshole Tax, there ought to be a Form JB1: whether you’ve read some Jimmy Baca this year. Would read approximately as follows:
If YES, thanks for filing this form. Please itemize the poems from this year in the space below and return; notice will be filed that no further action is required.
If NO, one percent up on your taxes, jueputa!
If WHO’S JIMMY BACA?, two percent up on your taxes, asshole!
Thanks to computers, failure to show progress could be set to automatically interfere with car registration, smog certification, credit rating, passport, probation status, whatever it god damn takes to get people to spend some time with this stuff.
Dhalgren is the fucking bomb. A friend told me to read it like 15 years ago, and I should have then, as part of the Ballard-Burroughs-Other-Next-Level-Stuff trip I was on about then, but I’m just reading it now.
Every sentence is like a poem. William Gibson says he doesn’t understand it, but that’s beside the point. It’s about memory loss, dyslexia, time, all the important stuff. The story is just the medium. Certainly not a “difficult book” like these blogger dorks say. Nor is it particularly long: he just breaks paragraph a lot. And it’s punker, bummer, scumbagger, than anything. Read it now!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhalgren
If you’re one of the 150 million American males who refuses to read, here it is put into tweets: http://www.conceptualfiction.com/dhalgren.html
Video by Nick Taplin, Post-Consumer Records
Saw a video a few months back of Brontez Purnell reading from his up-and-coming book Since I Laid my Burden Down and had to get a copy as soon as it came out. Tried to read it with his voice in my head. The book has been doted upon with a marvelous thick library jacket by New York City University’s Feminist Press.
The punk rocker, performance artist and otherwise notable Oakland figure, whom I remember as one of the few interesting people on Earth in the vacuous universal hell of 2005, published the zine Fag School beginning in 2003. He has also published the Cruising Diaries in 2014 with the collaboration of Janelle Hessig, from whose Tales of Blarg I first heard of his exploits, as well as 2015’s diary-style Johnny Would You Love Me if my Dick Were Bigger. Since I Laid my Burden Down is sort of a Bildungsroman framed in a memoir. Is there a word for that?
DeShawn, blessed with the emotional receptivity that marks a faggot amongst his church-centered community, reflects during a funeral trip to his Alabama hometown of his trajectory in making his life meaningful, and not wasting his faggot people skills in the office of a rural preacher. Regardless of his shifting relationship with his mother, there is the feeling that he thinks his mother has limited her life becoming a preacher herself.
DeShawn is drawn as a product of generations raised by women, with men absent or devoid of father quality. The protagonist seeks mentorship and trust naturally, nevertheless, through his everyday channels, even through an older married lover. Despite making his own way, fleeing Alabama for California, DeShawn never really feels like he can stand the weight of his life on his shoulders, and has problems with memory and scale. Like a lot of us.
The book is full of family, church, death, sex, and the perverse distortion of time and place unique to being in one’s early thirties. Particularly rewarding are the terse but deft descriptions of family members, such as “DeShawn’s mother always spoke recklessly when it was unnecessary, and coolly when it was greatly needed.” Wait –how do they ever know when is which? Does the narrator mean this in hindsight or…?
Throughout the story DeShawn visits two funerals and relates cleaning out several dead people’s houses, visits the gracious and lovable mother of both an early lover and an early abuser, and wears out the patience of a girlfriend in New York, all the while taking stock of the relationships he put on hold or fled when he left Alabama. Along the way he sees some ghosts that grow more vivid and some that thankfully fade.
The prose is unadorned and direct, more diary-like in the beginning, with creams of sly humor beaten in. The back of the book features quotes that I personally found a little hysterical, such as “foul-mouthed and evil.” Perhaps these refer more to Johnny. Purnell’s narrator swears a lot, but only in that the book irreverently records the living language, and is meant to be read out loud. This, in my opinion, is one of the book’s greatest strengths. Anyone obsessed with Pitchfork-level simile-spraying could find any great oral art in corners of Brontez’ sentences, from beat literature to Henry Roth to … I don’t even know, I hate that phony free-association name-dropping stuff. Altogether I appreciated that the prose, though steeped in contemporary slang and naturally-occurring humor, betrays none of the lascivious revelry of Johnny but rather a deep and true affection and understanding for most of DeShawn’s characters, regardless of whether he gets along with them.
He knew feeling good was a setup
Reading the sexual escapades and mentions of a youth steeped in punk rock, it was kind of hard for me, at least, not to place Brontez himself in for DeShawn –as he placed himself as close to the fictional glass as can be in Johnny –so I recommend the reader enjoy the book first and then go cyber-stalk the poor, highly-exposed author. The night their post-Loma Prieta freedom punk warehouse gets closed down, even a fictional lover tells DeShawn “everyone knows who you are.”
I also appreciated how Purnell manages to fit the realities of Deep South life into the story in tiny but excellent bites. This stuff is unimaginable for us west-coast types with our Hollywood-deadened intellects, and the author even points that out in a funny moment. He relates how the principal at the school would remind DeShawn, when he got in trouble, that “your great-granpappy used to raise chickens for my family…” This is the medium of DeShawn’s family’s story that must never be overlooked: in the south there are these horseshit relationships that can be evoked as if to show loyalty, but are really just threats of force. In turn, the protagonists internalize this doublespeak and wield it on each other with varying degrees of purpose (we’ve got this out west with Latino immigrants too). Maybe I just found this insightful and brilliant as a dumb Californian beach bum. What am I gonna school the reader with, the abusive roundabouts of various pelagic fish?
It’s probably clear by now that my only challenge for Purnell for next time, should he decide to do a next time, is to work out before writing who the narrator is. This way the key emotion, be it sex-crazed enthusiasm or reflective love, can really shine through consistently. The reader also could really get cozy within the work’s world if Purnell takes the above decision, moving on some from the format that seems to have begun with Johnny. Finally, this will doubtlessly also address some nitpicky tonal issues I have with some parts.
Since I Laid my Burden Down is a document of a unique life within its unique time and place, an effective and efficient balance of the personal and the universal. Cut that self-conscious crap out about “I don’t recommend every book to everyone.” Get Brontez’ new book and have everyone you know read it!
I have to say, for myself, that I feel that more of these kinds of stories are auspiciously coming into my life. Not necessarily being written, but coming to my attention. Maybe I just don’t get out enough, I don’t know.
But anyhow, when I read Since I Laid My Burden Down, I enjoyed it in one way the same as I so immensely enjoyed Malae’s What We Are: in that the books are full of people I would be friends with. It’s not so simple as “an outsider,” because the question would be, outside of what? Rather it’s a member of a certain socio-economic group who has made certain socio-economic choices within the flush of cash of the Bay Area, a consciously growing and becoming, empathetic scumbag, with no time for the oppression of success, health or other bullshit. Stuck in a phenomenological spiral. The kind of people whose extinction I constantly fear after years of living in Santa Cruz and San José. When I read these books I feel like they were written for me!
Incidentally they both dropped Bukowski’s name, who may well have been highly empathetic besides being a scumbag. Some scholar can comment below about that.
I feel, further, that this book’s approach belongs at least in part to the great tradition of “pack all my youth into some stories so I can stop trying to remember every last bit of it and get ready for the all-out fuckery of maturity.” Brontez certainly demonstrates in Burden the wisdom and ability to handle time and memory necessary to do so, and he certainly has a fascinating maturity and decline ahead of him, unlike most of us. The Savage Detectives is also a great example of this approach, and even I myself, at least as concerns dialogue, am dumping all the silly shit I ever heard from fifth grade up into the mouths of my characters in Byebye and Shlort, the thing I’m working on. I’m excited to see what Brontez comes up with next.
Eugenio Negro Comics 