He was an animal by his very savage upbringing

Homo Thug by Asante Kahari

Harlem Book Center, c. 2005

246 pages

I was walking home from the bar a couple weeks ago at 4am, post-work, McDonald's sack dripping with burger sweat that would serve either as delicious artery padding or as a handy talisman to thwart the occasional rabid subway creature, when I noticed a book protruding from one of the city's lovely sludge-gray snowbanks. No book, even something written by James Frey, should have to suffer this kind of rotten fate. So, risking bed bugs and/or hepatitis, I rescued the paperback from its filth-choked grave, much to the chagrin of a pair of Hudson River bound Vietnamese (or Thai?) trannies wearing translucent heels and a pleather Hello Kitty mini-skirt, respectively. These methed-out he-shes couldn't possibly understand how apropos their appearance was at this moment, reader, because the book I'd saved was none other than that classic coming-of-age tragedy of a young man gone wrong, a man whose circumstances force him to dabble in the most taboo and "unnatural" aspects of his psyche and his sexuality. As you might have guessed, I'm writing about Asante Kahari's tour de force, Homo Thug.

I'd often been intrigued by some of Harlem Book Center's other titles -- The Lesbian's Wife, Mandingo: The Golden Boy, The Streets of Harlem, Tamika: The struggle of a Jamaican Girl -- sold by street vendors on 125th Street and Malcolm X Ave (the scene of my weekly White Castle fix). Needless to say, Homo Thug did not disappoint. The novel rehashes the sordid young adulthood of Michael Fraser, a street tough whose abusive Caribbean-born mother, together with a childhood surrounded by the poisonous environment of New York City's projects, cause him to succumb to a life of crime. At 15, he is convicted for a "robbery gone bad," from which we can infer that murder was the case that they gave him. Instead of street code, Michael must now familiarize himself with the prison system, because he "had a long time and I wasn't about to live like a bitch being bartered out for goods and services by every swinging dick in the joint." In order to avoid getting his ass beat (or plowed) he joins a group of Muslims led by this dude Mustafa who will protect him as long as he remains celibate. But after a few too many trips to the showers, his hormones kick in...

...and that's as far as I got. Because as interesting as I found the book, as fascinating as I found Kahari's searing psychological portrait of a gangster ass boy-toy surviving the confines of his debilitating circumstances in the best way he knows how, I honestly had a lot of better shit to do (and read). However, I did skim through the novel's final 150 or so pages, and from what I can tell, Michael falls in love with a tranny named Dee Dee, who doesn't want to keep their love a secret. Mustafa puts a hit out on Michael but somehow he serves his sentence without getting injured and after having a lot of freaky sex with Dee Dee. When he's free he starts selling rock and that he'ron with his old crew, has sex with a lot of women and men before realizing his true calling as "Michelle." There's also a beef with another rap/drug-slinging crew named "G-unit" led by guys whose names are strangely familiar: Half Dolla, Stop the Bank and Young Gun. Hmm. Maybe I should have read the rest of the book.

 
I did manage to extract a bunch of great quotes that I've included below, as well as a few that were lovingly copied onto the book's back cover by an anonymous (most likely female) hand. Which leads to the question of why, if the book was seemingly so appreciated by its owner, did it end up rudely tossed into a snowbank in the West Village? Was it a conflict of ideologies? A forced rejection when the sheer homo-thuggery became too much? Maybe just an unfortunate misplacing. Maybe the trannies knew more than I did. Also, it's clearly evident that the fine people at Harlem Book Center wanted to maintain Homo Thug's authenticity, it's raw emotional gravity, it's "realness," so much that they felt it unnecessary to perform a basic spell check or employ a copyeditor. They're/their/there? Who gives a fuck, son? THIS SHIT IS HARD.

 --

 "I would jerk off so much that I would not have enough strength to make it through the rest of the day."

"I think he would have killed concrete for that little Spanish red pepper."

"Their rationale behind that is, why should I have to suffer when this mother is in here fresh to death and he can't hold his shit down?"

"Too add to that, she was a plump heifer and very unshapely, with her fowl odor."

"No one likes a n----- that falls from grace. All of the people you stepped on, on your way up will certainly be waiting for you on your way down either to kill you, or to use you."

"A secret can be agony on the soul, if allowed to swell up to the point that it blossoms on the spirit like a cancer."

 "Even though I wasn't thinking about no faggot shit, those fags made me feel a little uneasy, uneasy in the sense that I was getting hot flashes thinking about Dee Dee. That alone told me I needed to get the fuck out of there."

"Each passing day fueled my perversion, and I was increasingly becoming my own worst enemy. I felt like I was losing myself. The heavy burden of jerking off so much took a toll on my balls. They started to look disfigured and saggy. I had exhausted all of the semen from my testicles to the point that I was ejaculating blood. It was a truly sickening experience."

"My gums was as red as sugar cane."

"As soon as the door to her apartment opened I commenced to taking off her clothes like a reckless wild animal...I had to see if she would let me top the night off with a little ass shot." 

"I am sorry I had to lose two people to find that out. I am saying goodbye to Michael and hello to Michelle. See ya'll in Baltimore!"

**Also: Apparently Kahari's autobiographical first novel, The Birth of a Criminal, was based on a guy committing bank fraud and was actually used to convict the author for the same crime that he actually committed. Completely badass or dumbass depending on how you look at it. Funny nonetheless. More here.

And for more information about the Street Lit movement, here's an interesting article from PopMatters.

And a review by someone who actually read the book.

The Deadliest of the Deadliest of the Deadly

Short, Fast, and Deadly released its 2010 Anthology, "Deadlier Than Thou," a couple days ago. Edited by Joseph A. Quintela, it's an 88-page collection of the weekly e-mag's deadliest two pieces from each of its first 55 issues, as well as a poem and a story representing each month of the year. A story of mine snuck in, and I contributed the June poem. You should buy it. Seriously. Don't be a douche, support indie lit. Also, it makes a great roach swatter or 40 oz coaster.

I'll write a review of the other stuff in it besides my own (which is obviously awesome) when my copy comes in the mail. Hopefully Amelia in 1B won't be keeping it and not letting me know, as she's been doing with my rent checks (and probably the last 6 books I've ordered that mysteriously haven't arrived) for the last few months. NYC postal system is wack. This anthology isn't.

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.

...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.