...in the bombshine

New story up at Short, Fast, and Deadly in the "Revolution/Revelation" issue.

Look! a book review

Got a new review up on The Rumpus -- Mike Young's story collection Look! Look! Feathers. As much as I'm a writer and a reviewer or whatever, I'm hesitant to recommend anything for people to read. Maybe because most people only read books about vampires or zombies. Maybe because I'm one of the last pretentious dicks who thinks you should read poetry on a regular basis. Maybe I'm hungover. Definitely hungover. Anyways, if you read one book that's come out in 2010, read this book. It's awesome. It's funny. It's not about vampires. It captures the zeitgeist, whatever the fuck that means. That's my spiel, take it or leave it. Just take it.

Omne Vivum Ex Ovo

We got high and watched the morsel of tinned apricot sink between the broken recesses of heaven, the streaky clouds burning in golden veins. Actually, we were at Wendy’s. My brother didn’t like me. He was older and had a shitty case of acne, the only kid in our family who did. Because of this, his mind was untroubled by philosophy. He bathed in antifreeze. He ate lard like air. His girlfriend had scabies and he liked to “tongue-punch her meat wallet.” Seated across from me in the red pleather Wendy’s booth, he flicked that same tongue, hurled a dollop of Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger onto its wrapper and slid the wrapper toward me. “Piggy,” he said, “tell the scarecrow-assed bitch at the counter that this is cold.” I just sat there, staring at the gray, half-chewed glob. My brother tightened his knuckles, gave me that look. He knew what I wanted. I wanted to wriggle in it like a slug drowning in salt rain.

Hello, Small Awesome Book

Hello, Darkness by Howie Good

from Deadly Chaps

pub date: July 2010

33 pages

Though Howie Good’s recent chapbook, Hello, Darkness is advertised as a collection of both poetry and prose, the distinction is a superficial, almost pointless question for Form 101. Good is a poet, a damn nice one, and his book is no slouch either.

It’s a disturbing and sublime jaunt to the brain’s bleary edge, the spaces in between, those gaps in the synapses that are only illuminated by “the sort of stuff you think about late at night.” That dark, naked hour before the dreams set in. The book’s 31 pieces (ranging in size from a ten-word pebble to a Facebook update) drip with quiet tension and an Anthrax-dipped apprehension of all the random shit that might go down. Of what usually does.

Unforeseen happenings drown in the chaos of an anything-goes half-awake where the scope of what’s contemplated ranges from the pleasantly esoteric (the length of a pig orgasm, a circus strongman who quotes Kafka) to the paranormal (rabbis flying in mini-vans) to the incredibly eerie (a famous historical figure’s genitalia impaled by an arrow, a former student’s body is found because of the odor emanating from it). The specters that are supposed to remain along the edges have crept to the forefront of the heretofore familiar.

                                     

But the journey to darkness isn’t just a passive one. The book’s longer poems are possessed of a distinctly self-aware personality that plays the dual role of imaginative observer and deadly participant: “Down in the street, terrible dreams pass each other with a nod. I wouldn’t trust someone like me either.” To follow the voice is to entertain the possibility of an evil that may not be the lesser of two (or three), but one that surely offers the best chance at revelatory potential, a long look at the sun without glasses, at tasting what’s really behind the curtain. It could be worse. This glimmer of morbid clarity is summed up wonderfully in the concluding lines of “Dance of the Iron Shoes,” one of the collection’s best: “Sunlight clanged against the window. Flies crawled around inside my mouth. It was often like this back then, the sky brightening enough just for me to see what wasn’t there.” And enough for the reader to see what is.

Yet Good, in my opinion, excels most brilliantly on the smallest of canvases. That one super-packed moment, unsprung like a shockwave, a zen-slap to the spinal cord: “Bombs Kill 95 / the headline says / beside the sunflowers / in a milk bottle”.

Hello, darkness. I think I’d like to hang out with you, too.

2010?

Got a new short story up at Short, Fast, and Deadly called "American Hubris." The theme for this week's issue is "The Year in Review." When I thought of 2010, three images came to mind. Oil, flashing computer screens, and people being self-centered dicks. Let's see if all that comes through. The dick part probably will.

Four Poems

*

the bottle makes its slow trek

across the table

and I let it fall

quietly to the floor

*

chewing gum, popping it loudly

iPod static

I thought I might kill him

*

we waited

in her bedroom,

smoking

*

trucks, black trucks

bellowing across the shit-towns

bearing loads

Don't Look At The Cameras!!!

I've got a new review/essay up at The Brooklyn Rail. Check it out. In it, I detail why David Bajo's newest book "Panopticon" isn't the best thing I've read this year, but why it also freaked the shit out of me. It's all about surveillance cameras and how sinister nerds can basically steal your life and make a twisted movie out of it. I did some research and found out that not only is the technology very real, it's probably happening to you, to me, to the guy on the subway with two different sneakers, right NOW. The world is quickly becoming like Minority Report. Oh well, 2012 is coming up. Can't get too much worse before then, right?

The Return of the Lord of the Deathly Hallows

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Warner Bros. Pictures

Release date: don't care, saw it last night

An epic and scenic quest through the wilderness to destroy a dark lord. A few invisibility-producing magical items (i.e. cloaks) used to thwart that evil being's cronies who happen to be chasing the good guys. A powerful evil talisman that contains a part of that same dark lord's soul, and that, when worn around the protagonist's neck, produces negative feelings and pisses everyone else off. An ancient sword reclaimed by one of the good guys (not the protagonist) that is used to defeat the evil things. A dumbass but lovable sidekick who eventually proves valuable. A friendly wizard who gets killed. Gnarly dudes in black who fly around and try to maim/destroy the good guys. Annoying British accents. A lot of character names, places and jumps in continuity that would be much easier to understand for viewers who have taken the time to read the book that the movie is based on. Elves. 

I haven't read any of the Harry Potter books, so I may be a little late on this one, but doesn't this latest Potter movie seem a lot like another popular series of books/movies about good triumphing over evil in a world that isn't our own? It looks to me like J.K. Rowling might have had a little writer's block when she sat down to write Book #7, which is understandable. But it also looks like she pulled down her favorite J.R.R. Tolkien edition from her bookshelf and did a little more than draw inspiration from it. Maybe that's what happens when you live in a castle, I don't know. Like I said, I haven't read the books, but if I were to draw a comparison with this to Lord of the Rings, the entire Harry Potter series would be like if Frodo and his buddies chilled at Rivendell for like six years learning a bunch of useful stuff before setting out on the final quest thing. I don't know, maybe not. I fell asleep halfway through the movie due to a turkey hangover.

And I'd take Hermione over Liv Tyler with elf ears any day.

                                                    Thanks emmawatsonon.blogspot.com!

My uncle and dad looking gangster in 1968

This is Jersey. This is Good Writing.

The Suburban Swindle by Jackie Corley

So New Books, 2008

99 pages

I haven't been reading enough contemporary female writers. My bad. It's not intentional. I won't bother with the lame excuses -- women speak to an experience and a perspective I'm just not interested in, I can't think of the phrase "contemporary women writers" without picturing Curtis Sittenfeld, J.K. Rowling, and that Mormon chick who wrote Twilight. Puke. Even though that's partially true, there are some badass ladies whose work I eat up whenever I get the chance, two of those writers being Lydia Davis and Anne Carson. Anyways, the point I'm trying to make is that books like Jackie Corley's 2008 short story collection "The Suburban Swindle" remind me that there are a lot of younger women writers out there putting out raw material with teeth (and not fangs). 

Corley kicks the reader out of her beat-up Nissan and immediately skids off, leaving him in the wrong part of town. A battle-scarred suburban wasteland, that circus of human dregs otherwise known as New Jersey. Everyone knows that the Turnpike is gross, but the book suggests that what lurks off the exit ramps might be a little more harrowing -- a white-boy gangster who carries a butterfly knife and takes pleasure in kicking the shit out of punks at the local diner, a drop-out drifter who engages in a sexually abusive relationship with her cousin, a filthy alcoholic that only gets off on being speared by a used-up stripper's high heel. These are fractured souls, wonderfully splintered post-school waste-cases who have been molded as much by who they've been hanging out with as by the landscape they inhabit, a place they grudgingly know they'll never leave. The wild-eyed boy held back from the prospect of adventure by the violent shards of a masochistic high school romance. The Manhattan reporter who wakes up on the bathroom floor of her ex-boyfriend's apartment as he's absentmindedly pissing on her. The Jersey tractor beam, Death-Star-strong, always pulls them back.

But what ultimately makes the stories so addictive is not in the misery they project, but in their inherent holiness. There is religion here, maybe not sainthood or even catharsis, but certainly a form of transcendence through martyrdom. A secret joy in clinging to the beaten (and beaten down) path. As much as the characters gripe and grimace at their everyday circumstances, you get the feeling that the unbearable ball of energy that governs the minutiae of their lives is also what sustains them, lets them shine with a light that, if nothing else, is their own. It's what makes the characters, as the narrator of one story puts it, "not attractive, but compelling."

Regardless of the stories' geographical setting, the plight of the early 20s small-town burnout, of being too young and too old and caught in the intertia, is universal. Maybe you're the coke-bruised and booze-weary native son whose face is melting into the same cup of coffee at the back of the diner. Maybe you're his now-prim ex-girlfriend who's broken the tractor beam -- degree, job in the City, banker fiance -- but has come home for the weekend and decided to walk into the diner to revisit the ghosts of a life you forfeited. We all know soldiers in both camps. What Corley's suggesting is that the wreckage of home is far more interesting and vital than the gem-like sheen of "out there." That the wreckage is the gem.

Short, Fast, and Awkward

Got a new story out on Short, Fast, and Deadly. It's called "Recurring Childhood Nightmares 16 & 17". It's weird so I thought I'd explain it a little. For those who haven't checked out the site, it's comprised of really, really short poetry and prose pieces, "literature for the ADD generation." The site's fiction pieces are shorter than a Facebook status update and the poems are shorter than a tweet. The story itself started as an assignment for this poetry class I took in grad school. Basically we had to write a poem about recurring dreams we'd had. When I was a kid, I always had nightmares about having a sibling, usually an older sister. I say 'nightmares' because, being an only child, I never wanted a sibling. Who would want to actually have to share toys and Christmas presents with someone else??? Not to mention your parents' undivided attention. I think it would be cool to have a brother or sister now, but back then I was a spoiled little shit. In the dreams, Sibling A or B and I would go on adventures that always ended with random, creepy events like a dog I didn't own in real life getting smacked by a truck. Lovely. I'll shut up because this post is now 158 words longer than the story itself. Later.

Jack the Pumpkin 2010 - 2010

Warning: the following images are pretty messed up!

It was only a matter of time. Two days, to be exact. Yesterday morning I went to the store to pick up some Very Vanilla soy milk to complement my Lucky Charms (marshmallows only). Having just done the dishes, I'd forgotten to lock the kitchen cabinets.

Jack was already gone when I returned. The damage was done. I followed the trail of empty Windex bottles and cracked whippits from the living room to my bedroom. The debris ended in front of my open laptop. Two windows were open on the screen: One showing Sasha Grey doing something unmentionable to Bree Olson, and the other showing my most recent blog post: The Twisted Tale of Jack the Crackhead Pumpkin.

My breath caught in my chest and the panic and fear set in, the same way I imagine it does at the end of a date with Chris Brown. The mentally unstable pumpkin had read my unauthorized biography. He'd seen how many hits the post had gotten, knew that his sordid exploits had been broadcast across the world. And the world was laughing at him.

I quickly started thinking about which local PCP den Jack might have wandered off to, when a sound from the back patio silenced my thoughts. The sound was brief, but LOUD. What could best be described as a cross between a cherry bomb and a weak Oprah fart. The sound of a life ending too soon.

It was then I knew that Jack must have made his way to the roof of my building. That the escape he needed couldn't be achieved by any amount of sweet, sweet embalming fluid. He needed a permanent solution. I ran out the back door of my basement apartment and saw what was left of poor Jack. As you can tell from the above picture, it wasn't pretty. The next few minutes were a blur -- paramedics, sirens, police tape, old ladies tearing their hair out, children weeping -- but luckily (or unfortunately) a local Manhattan Valley slimeball named Brad had been trying to videotape his neighbor in the shower and accidentally captured Jack's fall in its entirety. The following video is extremely upsetting.



Reports of a suicide note are unconfirmed. If one surfaces, I'll be the first to report it. Until then, though, Jack really is gone forever. A cold lesson for pumpkins and pumpkin enablers everywhere.

***

A few hours later, E! News heard about the tragedy and sent Ryan Seacrest to interview Paris and Lindsay. The two were hanging out at their friend Khloé the Gator's house, slurping down White Russians by the pool. 

"It's like, totally sad," Paris squeaked. "Jack was super cute, I guess, but now he's almost as irrelevant as my career."

Lindsay lifted her head out of her drink, gave Seacrest her best Botox pout. "Who the heck is Jack?" she asked, clearly confused. "And why don't you look like my usual dealer? Where's Julio?"

What Seacrest didn't realize was that he shouldn't have done the interview at all. Because Khloé the Gator hadn't had anything to eat in almost an hour, and her trainer Lamar was too busy playing basketball to feed her. So while Seacrest was busy with Lindsay, Khloé slid her massive, Jabba-like body out of the pool, snuck up behind him and screamed "Garghghghghahhh!!!!" in the creepiest baby voice imaginable. She swallowed his head in one gulp, then spit out the plastic pieces. 

RIP Ryan Seacrest. He never saw it coming. Sort of like Jack. But not really. 

The End (maybe)

The Twisted Tale of Jack the Crackhead Pumpkin

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This Is A Cry For Help (and Tweets)

                                                      from http://twitter.com/#!/MikeFrancesaNY

You should be my friend on Twitter (@ChrisVola). Or follower, whatever. We may not know each other. Maybe you hate me. Maybe we sucked face and I never talked to you again. Maybe you're a 14-year-old Russian hacker trying to access my personal information through the blog (good luck, won't find much there you commie bastard!). I will embrace you all. Even Mexicans. Especially Mexicans.

What do you have to look forward to as my follower? Oh I don't know, a couple to several tweets a day, ranging from links to useless crap I find interesting, links to assorted junk that other people think is worth putting on other Web sites, links to blog posts like this one! Pretty much a lot of links. Also, an array of provocative, authoritative nuggets of truth about my favorite sports teams and any media object (book/movie/CD/concert/foxnews article/porn movie) with which I may have interacted that has been momentarily worthwhile in the glorious scheme of my life. And some weird conversations with my boys Willie aka Primetime Slimetime and the Party King. Things that make me no different than any other pale sucker wasting his time on Twitter.

Actually, I thought Twitter was pretty damn dumb until recently. But it's actually cool for news updates, following comedians and fake celebrities, sending direct messages, keeping up with your favorite band/writer/politician, finding interesting people, wasting time in cubicle-land, what you do already. Also, a bunch of other reasons that sound lame until you try them out. ALSO, publishing companies and presses are starting to ask for how many Twitter buddies you have when you submit a manuscript. I have 25 friends. Which sucks. It's kind of like the kid who brings cream of corn soup or steamed brussel sprouts to lunch and expects to trade them for my chocolate AND vanilla Handi-Snacks. And he has a cleft lip. And he smells like rabbit pee. Fuck that kid. Stay away from him! Some of my friends aren't even real people, they're just advertisements for porn sites disguised as sweethearts with big boobs.

So, in the end, this is all about ME.

If you're not convinced, here are some more reasons why you should join Twitter/follow me:

- If you follow me, I will follow you (sounds like a gay 80s jam), giving you one more friend follower, and thus increasing your popularity!

- If you're new to Twitter, you can follow me (thus giving you one automatic follower). Some porn advertisers will probably take notice and follow you, too. You'll have more friends! You'll be on the road to success! In Twitter!

- You can get a book/movie/TV/music/stripping deal!

- MikeFrancesaNY, GaryJBusey, SarahKSilverman

Oh yeah, I carved this pumpkin. This is what it looked like before it started to rot and resemble a toothless Corky from Life Goes On:

And I tweeted it.

Poetry the poison, poetry the lie, poetry the venom shot through rattler fangs

The Essential Numbers 1991 - 2008 by Gordon Massman

Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2009

182 pages


There's a lot of hyperbole on the Internet: Lindsay Lohan is the MOST fucked up stupid coke-whore EVER! OMG I have the coolest friends EVER for writing more birthday shout-outs on my wall than ANYONE, EVER!! This Jimmy Johnson-endorsed penis enlargement pill will transform you into a FUCKING SEX GOD and allow you to conquer third-world countries!!!!! 

Clearly there's enough of this kind of stuff going around on a daily basis, which is why I'm not going to review Gordon Massman's quasi-recent collection of poetry, The Essential Numbers 1991 - 2008. Because if I did, I'd be tempted to write that the book is the MOST viscerally disturbing, psyche-jarring jumble of words my young, impressionable eyes have EVER analyzed. That this is possibly the MOST IMPORTANT work of genre-bending literature to come out in the last five years, and if you read it, your blood might congeal and give you the BIGGEST, MOST HARDCORE brain aneurysm anyone's EVER documented. That your eyes might dislodge and your legs turn into rat shit as you crumple before its SHEER AWESOMENESS like a slug drowning in salt rain. But I don't want to sound like a bigger tool than I already have. And I have a hunch that Massman really detests assholes like me who get off on the worthless task of writing about writing. 

So I'll let him tell you about the poems himself, in the form of an interview he did a year ago that appeared on Trickhouse's Web site. It's some really interesting stuff. Sort of like taking the line between genius and insanity and shoving it up god's ass until it bursts into a pinata laden with candy. But what do I know. If you feel prepared to be enlightened, you can check out the whole thing here. Or here. Or maybe here. Choose wisely.

However, if you lack the attention span or the give-a-shit to read the entire interview, here are some of my favorite chunks:

- I throw as best I can, as believably as I can, the billion colors of human existence through the prism of myself. Over long and intense personal interior struggles I have unearthed my otherwise unspeakable capabilities and visceral dark emotions: rage’s boiling mud, shame’s hot cauldron, the alligators of self-loathing. Not only am I a beautiful child, I am a hideous monster.

Like us all. 

- I want to insist that my sometimes disturbing visions are more or less within everyone, with slight variations. Hasn’t every father fantasized infanticide? Doesn’t every husband want to binge on lovers. Doesn’t murder and suicide lurk in every man?

- This kind of clinical monster does not back down or mutate into something else. My clinical obsessions have numbered over thirty at any given moment, which I had to perform in a specific order at threat of having to repeat them beginning with number one, ad infinitum, through the night without sleep or rest. These involve locks, clocks, ovens, toilet seats, numbers, body lotions, dental floss, defecation, urination, noises, bottom sheets, light switches, hunger, toilet paper, and edges of desks.

- Surely “form” solidifies subject, is in fact subject, as subject is in fact form. My “form” is the brick of terror, guilt, shame, pain, horror, hope, rage, love, and innocence jammed into my head, square, compositionally shifting, and lodged like a bloody bludgeon I can only exorcize it by duplicating it on the page, repeatedly and, perhaps, eternally.


- The confusion is this: I am my poetry.


I discovered Massman's opus while perusing Tarpaulin Sky's Web site, because they tend to put out rad books. I was rewarded for my absentminded mouse-clicking when I stumbled upon The Essential Numbers' back cover:

  
 Not giving a fuck is all in good fun, as long as you can back it up. And Massman does, in a big way. 


And finally, some favorite lines from the book:


Dear God, I wish to register my unhappiness about a few things: mortality is a crock of shit, I could pop you in the mouth for that; genocide sucks, you deserve a penitentiary gang raping


I exacto-knife toadstool tip of penis, lift it off, the pee-slit forms a lovely salt-shaker

I masturbate to fashion photos of anorexics, Auschwitz ladies hips crooked outward slathered in blue cotton panties, elbow pelvises, furrows and funnels, cheeks like eaten stone, imagine fucking grasshopper bodies so close it rubs bone, wire sculpture of horror harboring a wet pussy

I petrify through the regal and towering land, the mesmerizing eyes, the vitality strands, the royal cataracting blood gorges of the beautiful and sad, once a breathing gaping hole, I grey among the statuesque


Hi, I'm Gordon, I'm a sex addict

Have a nice day.

Mitchell Heisman: A Review of an Obituary

Suicide Note by Mitchell Heisman

Self-published, 2010

1,905 pages

I don’t know how this stuff finds its way to me, but such is the Internet. For those who haven’t read the story, a week or so ago this 35-year-old bookstore worker with a psychology degree named Mitchell Heisman shot himself on the steps of Harvard’s Memorial Church. It was Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement. Which meant it was crowded – lots of students, lots of old people. But it wasn’t so much what he did that makes Heisman unique, or even interesting – it’s what he left behind.

Five hours after his death, 400 people – Mitchell’s friends, family, coworkers – received an email containing a link to http://www.suicidenote.info/. The site contains a PDF file titled, you guessed it, Suicide Note, Mitchell Heisman’s 1,900-page treatise on his own self-imposed extinction.

Yes, this crazy asshole really wrote a 1,900-page suicide note.

As a student of literature (morbid nerd), I was actually fascinated when I first read about this epic work. Many writers have been driven to suicide, but I’d never heard of one who’d completed something of this magnitude with the end goal being suicide. Heisman didn’t work very often because he had been living off an inheritance from his father, I thought to myself, which must have meant that this clearly well-read guy had had plenty of time to create an attention-grabbing and thought-provoking, if seriously delusional book.

I was wrong. 

Skimming through the nine-page table of contents initially gave me hope. In it, Heisman promises to tackle a vast array of complex, far-reaching and (for me) prescient topics – transhumanism, nihilism, the relationship between the rise of Nazism and the Battle of Hastings in 1066, “The seditious genius of the spiritual penis of Jesus” – en route to some kind of radical, pause-worthy justification for his suicide. However, after having floundered through the prologue and the first section, (An Experiment in Nihilism), and having barely reached the halfway point of the second section (God is Technology), I was well into skim-mode. 

It’s not that the ideas aren’t interesting, it’s the way he presents them. The prose, at best, is a vaguely coherent slush-pile of academic jargon and references. At its worst, it is the incomprehensible psycho-babble of a pseudo scholar with a penchant for big words that signify nothing. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve enjoyed plowing my way through some heavy academic texts, but having to deal with gems like – “If the hereditary or genetic inclinations of humans are looked upon the bases of a political-sociobiological ‘system’, then God represents the ability to ‘joots’ or ‘jump’ out of the ‘system’, i.e. the Egyptian political-sociobiological pyramid-hierarchy system” – on a sentence-by-sentence basis is way too much for me to deal with, no matter how fascinated I am by the author’s death.

Sorry Mitchell. 

Even the note’s conclusion, the place where I thought I’d finally get that “Ah ha! So that’s why he did it!” moment, was vague, unsatisfying, what amounts to a sort of cop out. In the most direct portion of this segment, Heisman gives his real reason for blowing his brain-matter on the steps of a church in front of children:

“But wait a minute. Why am I doing this? Ah, yes, now I remember the punchline: I’ll try anything once!”

Obviously this statement is meant to be sardonic. It’s a tone that pops up periodically throughout “Suicide Note” – “What good suicide note would be complete without a bibliography?” – a dry humor that, instead of providing a degree of levity, only serves to remind us of just how mentally twisted and lonely this guy must have been.

Naturally, “Suicide Note” has attracted a good deal of chatter on Internet comment boards. As expected, the responses range from the sympathetic: “We all bear our own crosses. May he find love and healing in Paradise” to the angry: “Can’t [you] kill yourself in the woods or something so people are not traumatized by your moronic behavior and thank all for him just killing himself” to the mocking: “At least he went out with a bang!!!”. One particular comment of the funny-because-it’s-true variety caught my eye:

DOUBLE_CHINNED_PUPPETEER (09/25/2010 8:29 PM): Heisman was very foolish as no one will read his long note. He should have posted a video on YouTube instead!

The book may be the longest suicide note ever written, but it’s far from the best. In our visual-crazy, ADD digital world, Hesiman would have reached, I’d guess, a whole lot more people if he had condensed his manifesto into a Youtube video, or a series of them. No one is going to read 1,900 pages of anything today, let alone a garbled plea for death written by someone whose greatest accomplishment was apparently not leaving his room for inordinate periods of time. In his prologue, Heisman predicts that, for whatever reason, his manifesto will be “repressed,” perhaps by the coalition of evil, scaly old men who control the Internet. More likely, it will be forgotten. Mitchell Heisman will be a moderately popular Google search for a couple weeks until he, and the brain-matter stains he left on the church steps quickly fade into digital and actual obscurity. 

(I poured my existential guts out for 1,900 pages, shot myself, and all I got was this lousy Wikipedia page???)

I guess the reason I’m spending this much time on Suicide Note is that even as a writer, I still possess enough empathy to believe that someone who’s spent years of his sad life spewing his deepest, most honest analysis of himself and the world as he knew it should at least be acknowledged. And, as a writer, I can relate to Heisman in that I understand self-imposed isolation, of spending hours and days locked in your room, hell-bent on discovering something less than tangible. But I also know that books, philosophy, and the lonesome (and ultimately impossible) search for truth and self-actualization aren’t what make life worth living – It’s the smell of woodsmoke and the flutter of yellow leaves on the first crisp day of fall. It’s a shitty bottle of bourbon shared among friends who know all the words to the Phish song playing in the background, a song that conjures its own memories of past glory. It’s the tiny soft fingers of a beautiful girl at 8am, rubbing away the hangover gremlins coaxing you toward another skin-filled embrace. The hushed magnitude of a moonlit snowscape. Porn. Whatever.

The saddest part of this whole story is that had Mitchell Heisman taken a couple minutes to escape his books and the nightmare visions that swarmed his head, he might have found joy in one of the things I just mentioned, or five billion others like it. He might have understood (through experience, and not some arbitrary human creation like nihilism) the basic principle of existence, not just for humans but for every organism trying to eke its way along on the planet: That life is good.

Do Not Read Before Bedtime

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The Most DISTURBING book of the year! (Probably)

Just wanted to let y'all know that John Reed's long awaited Tales of Woe (MTV Books, 2010) is now available for purchase!

Already being described as one of the most disturbing books to appear in recent memory, Tales of Woe, in simple, stark language, recounts several true stories united by a feeling of absolute misery without any prospect of redemption. Cannibalism, rape and incest are the norm here, along with a sense of unrelenting terror and disgust. Each story is accompanied by an often-gruesome, anime-like illustration. Sounds like a great Labor Day beach read!

John is an indispensable chronicler of postmodernity (Snowball's Chance, The Whole, All The World's A Grave), as well as an invaluable professor and mentor. I was able to get a brief glimpse at some early proofs of the book, and can't wait to check out Tales of Woe in its entirety. More to come soon!

Less Than Negative One

Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis

June 15, 2010

Knopf

169 pages

The harrowing and sublime sequel to 1985’s Less Than Zero, Imperial Bedrooms fast-forwards 25 years to a movie-industry-obsessed Los Angeles that, because of its author’s maturity, outshines its previous incarnation as a grim and deeply effecting dystopia, one void of compassion and saturated with a sense of distrust that seems frighteningly universal. This smoothly rendered thriller may lack the scope and wit of previous works like Glamorama, but Ellis’s portrayal of Clay, now a successful screenwriter, and his increasingly despicable circle of friends, cuts satisfyingly to the core of a bleak tunnel with no existential light at its end. In an era where blond bangs and Ray-Bans have been replaced by Botox and botched eyebrow lifts, Clay must ask himself what it looks like to be aging in a city that exists only for the young. The answer: not pretty. Ellis reaches his usual quota of (real or imagined?) squirm-inducing torture scenes and ultra-depraved, drug-fueled sex trysts. But the book’s quietest moments – the vibration of an iPhone, the digital billboards beaming images into the desert night, the condo lights left on when no one’s supposed to be home – are often its scariest, perfectly capturing an odor of uneasiness and of time being frozen, of a middle-aged man’s struggle with, and eventual acceptance of the darkest moments that have come to define his sad, plastic life. Equal parts Raymond Chandler L.A. über-noir and spot-on postmodern satire, Imperial Bedrooms is Ellis’s most polished, succinct novel to date, and his most disturbing since 1991’s American Psycho.

Philip Roth Is A Dirty (Awesome) Old Man

The Humbling by Philip Roth

November 2, 2009

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

140 pages

Although it lacks the scope and detail of Roth’s masterworks like The Human Stain and American Pastoral, The Humbling presents a convincingly haunting – albeit too brief – glimpse into the complex darkness of a decaying star at his lowest and most vulnerable. The prose is disturbing, the characters more so, and the brusque plot is generally riveting. For his thirtieth book, Roth departs from Newark, his longtime muse, to impart the novella-length tragedy of Simon Axler, an aging stage actor who, at 65, finds himself unable to act, and engaged in an invigorating yet confounding affair with an ex-lesbian 25 years his junior. In much of Roth’s most recent work (Everyman, Exit Ghost), the dialogue appears unrealistic to the point of being distracting. However, in The Humbling, this self-aware (in true Roth fashion) “soap opera” speak, far from seeming stilted, embellishes the suffocating sense of the primary characters only being able to exist and function in scripted roles that are either ill-chosen or unknowingly thrust upon them, roles that can only be renounced by carefully conceived deception or spontaneous violence. Also featuring some of Roth’s raunchiest (and best) sex scenes since Portnoy’s Complaint, The Humbling is a late-career bright spot that deserves a larger canvas.

Page 39

I’M RIDING SHOTGUN, breeze-happy in the Automatic Climate Control. Billy’s chiefing on a joint in the back, bobbing along to Big L’s “The Heist”.

The plan is to spend the night in Southwest Harlem – four blocks from Columbia – at the apartment of one of Davis’ friends. A pit stop on the nostalgia train for me, and, more importantly for Billy, a sweet squirt of debauchery in the Lecherous Apple. It just feels good to get out, to be moving again, like running downhill. No more vibrations in my pocket.

I-95 South is an asphalt hell-hole, suffocating, fume-laden at the tail-end of rush hour. A twenty-foot black-and-white Derek Jeter eye-fucks his new Movado timepiece. McDonald’s crucifixes coax their congregations with promises of the holy trinity– High Trans-fat! High Sodium! Free Happy Meal Toys!

Billy tosses the roach out amidst a thick cloud. An elderly couple in a Lincoln glare. “At least we’re not going to die soon!” he screams at them, clown-smiling. They pull off the highway. Davis’s CDs cycle endlessly through his unique brand of nineties minutiae – Mobb Deep, Smashing Pumpkins, Weezer, Nas, variations of alternative, jangle-pop, post-hardcore punk, trip-hop. The Ghosts of Genres Past. I drift in the familiar guitar chords, the middle-school-dance mystique. A breath of old-fresh air.

Traffic crawls.

Davis keeps checking his iPhone. Just after we pass Exit 18 in Southport we see the cause of the congestion, across the median in the oncoming lanes. A truck has skidded perpendicular to the road, four huge tracks of burnt rubber streak the asphalt. The cab is facing us, windshield smashed. Gobs of blood, gray and brown pieces of clothing are splattered across the white hood, a messy abstract canvas. A compacted heap – what might have been a yellow Nissan Altima – rests against the median. Pieces of glass litter the road like parade confetti. People are talking on two-ways, drinking Dunkin Donuts iced lattes. Two paramedics rush past, wheeling a man in a stretcher toward a nearby ambulance. A third paramedic, his sleeves and latex gloves soaked, tries to hold in the strings of glistening hamburger meat seeping out of a gash below the man’s ribcage. Billy rolls up his window, lights another joint, keeps saying Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ between hits. I rifle through my backpack, open a few of the orange bottles, swallow what I hope are a Zoloft, a Percocet, and a Prozac. Davis gives me this look in the rear-view mirror and I know what he’s thinking. In front of us, an old beige Chevy truck with a navy blue bumper sticker that says, I’m Gonna Miss Me When I’m Gone…


…and I’m walking past the baggage claim at JFK two-and-a-half years ago, talking on my cell phone to Lauren who’s at school, trying to avoid the young couple that had been sitting in front of me on the flight, making out the entire time, exchanging handjobs under the complimentary blanket. Lauren’s trying to hold it together, but she’s sobbing, telling me she loves me and I’m not crying and I can tell she’s really drunk.

Maybe it’s because, given what’s happened, she feels extra bad about fucking Archer Hamilton on the back seat of a charter bus headed to a Young Democrats formal the night before, something I won’t find out about until I get back to school two weeks later.

Lauren’s saying that everything is going to be fine in between sobs and swallows of what I’m assuming is a mixed drink involving watermelon vodka or something equally sinister. Aunt Susan’s on the other line. She’s calm, sticking to facts, mapping out the next couple of days, the lawyers, the medical examiner’s office, the funeral director in East Fairport, which of my cousins are staying with me for the service and I’m not really listening to any of it and the couple in front of me is sweaty, gleaming, making out roughly on the escalator.

Davis is waiting outside the automated doors in a dark gray suit, leaning against his father’s Maserati. He tucks away his cell phone, smiles sadly, takes my bag.

“Thanks,” I say, “I really appreciate you coming to –”

“It’s the least I could do,” he says. “Your parents, you know how much they meant to Dad, to the whole
company. It’s…” he trails off, looks at the ground.

“I know, it’s been –” I stop and realize everything. I’m starting to fall, not faint, but toppling against the weight of my own legs. Davis is pulling me up and saying I’m here, I’m here, don’t worry before I feel the taste of tears running down my cheek and neck, staining my tee shirt and Davis is taking three Lexapros out of a bottle he’d had in his pocket and is feeding them to me and I’m swallowing and the ride back to East Fairport takes no time at all.