11 words makes a --

New super short poem at a handful of stones.

Dirty, Smelly, Devout Punks

The Gospel of Anarchy by Justin Taylor

Harper Perennial

Release date: February 8, 2011

256 pages

Justin Taylor’s The Gospel of Anarchy slices deftly through a pop culture haze, extracting some of its juiciest vapors – extreme spirituality, politics, alienated youth – and congealing them into a gripping mosaic that is both monstrous and sublime. It is a beautifully dark first novel about the need for genuine connection, both human and holy, in an era that too often seems cold and sterile.

Set in pre-Y2K Gainesville, the book follows the listless exploits of David, a University of Florida dropout who works at a brain-numbing office job and trades Internet porn at night. A chance encounter with a group of local punks convinces him to abandon his old life and shack up with a coterie of neo-Luddite loafers and pseudo-cultist anarchists who get the inspiration for their anti-establishment lifestyle from a mysterious, recently disappeared former housemate named Parker.

The characters are not particularly groundbreaking or interesting in terms of the ideology they represent, as the young, grubby, hyper-opinionated libertine is by now somewhat of a clichéd persona. However, Taylor’s highly polished and deeply psychological prose breathes fascinating life into the heretofore familiar, revealing a dark and poignant yearning, a dire scream for transcendence in a McMansion wasteland and its always-tragic prospects. And while long segments devoted to the actual text of the “gospel” the punks worship seem a bit like overkill, the book remains impressive for instilling a paradoxically religious fervor in characters who have shrugged off the chains of all higher powers, both spiritual and secular. The reader is left with a profound respect for their earnestness in a fog of late 90s cynicism, for “how they give credence to ultimate concerns, the rhetoric a little windy, sure, but the passion undeniable, the attraction intense. They lived as if the fate of the very universe were perpetually at stake and in their hands.”

Yet Taylor’s greatest asset may be not only his ability to cannily craft a series of vivid, perfect post-postmodern moments, but also his power to imbue otherwise mundane scenery, this seen-it-before suburban milieu, with a somber weight of Biblical proportions. Half-finished housing developments, an unassuming pizza spot, frat bars and cul-de-sacs. To David, these are the totems of a Gomorrah fueled not by any devil’s pleasures, but by the brain-dead, Wonder Bread machinations of traditional American dogma. A sugar-dipped squalor that eventually becomes unbearable. Though the novel takes place before the true proliferation of the Internet and the ubiquitous cell phone explosion, images of technology’s potential for the perverse and the mind-numbing (pornographic pictures of an unknowing ex-girlfriend electronically traded by sleazy chat room voyeurs, the soul-crushing hospital glow of a telephone survey taker’s cubicle) are equally ghastly. Perhaps more so given the cultural developments of the last decade.

Ultimately, Taylor’s intense and thorough characterizations and his superior writing chops are what make The Gospel of Anarchy a timely and potent read.

The refrigerator's glow

New (depressing) story up at Short, Fast, and Deadly.

Naked and Honest

Naked Glances by Carl-Henrik Björck

Deadly Chaps

Pub date: August 2010?

34 pages

Carl-Henrik Björck’s debut collection of 29 micro-stories and poems condenses an impressive amount of the universal stockpile of post-postmodern “human-ness” – nostalgia, love and its inevitable demise, an eerie sangfroid in the midst of disaster – into a series of glaring snapshots that are captivating, revealing, and occasionally disturbing. It’s a stark sequence of images whose focal points are made more compelling by what’s left blurry beyond the edges.

A native Swede writing in English, Björck employs a crisp, direct prose and a simple straightforwardness that belies many of the stories’ complex, ghostly tension. These transitive “glances” offer the reader a glimpse at the middle of the photo album. We know things have happened, we know more things are going to happen. What we’re given is the pregnant glimmer, the crux of the affair. The most common theme in the collection is intense and gnawing remorse at the inability (of anyone, it seems) to maintain any sort of connection, romantic and otherwise, a fundamental miscommunication of the body and mind. A phone number not given. A fly stuck to a window. The girl in the shop who can’t utter what she wants to say. The unrequited echoes of an infinite number of squashed possibilities. This underlying current of intense emotion endows the most heretofore passing physical details – raindrops on a dead-end road, “a blue stone necklace hanging down deep”, the reflection of streetlight in a woman’s hair – with a bruising importance.

This is not to say that Naked Glances’ narrators are engaged in a constant attitude of passivity. The collection’s best stories benefit from wicked twists that are shocking not only for their unforeseen abruptness, but for the deadpan, nonchalant way in which they are described. A woman is crushed by a car moments after a happy rendezvous with a lover. The unanticipated insertion of a child’s plea at the critical moment of an argument between his parents. Each time, a bomb has been dropped. We don’t know why. All we can do is watch the second of impact and imagine what happens next. There is also a call to the future, death to sympathy and tradition, a need to forget and move on. My favorite example of this grit is also my favorite story in the collection, “Saturday Night”, which concerns an encounter with a smelly bum: “…he says that God will bless me if I help a blind man who has nothing to eat so I kick his can over and keep on walking and I hear the coins clink against the gutter and now that also belongs in the past.”

I will say that the majority of the book’s 10 poems didn’t do it for me. Many employed a loose ABAB or AABB rhyme scheme that I feel distracts the reader from the stark naked ironic realism Björck so skillfully conveys in his prose, and adds an unwelcome element of juvenilia to an otherwise sophisticated collection. Other major ish? This might be a little MFA workshoppy nitpicking, but the stories’ titles (McDougal Street, Wedding, Short Love Story) are often greatly outdistanced by the quality of the stories themselves. Maybe it’s no big deal. Maybe it is. What is clearly evident, though, is that like that other finely crafted Swedish import, Björck has produced a durable, aesthetically sparse and pleasing, and emotionally charged piece of literary furniture. It’s a quick read that will stay with you long after you put it down.

I left it open

New poem up at a handful of stones.

A black hand clutching a bottle of el mundo!

New poem, Ticklish Yuppie, up at Clutching at Straws. Really cool site. Also, below, is a really cool tree.

You fell asleep being aliens.

New story, "Tonight is Losing Teeth," up at Snow Monkey. The story is creepy, like the above sweaters. Maybe more so. The holidays got weird this year.