No Bullshit Reviews |
by Christian Prozak |
|
NO B.S. REVIEWS: Maddox, Alleman, CÈline, Bukowski, Kerouac & Burroughs I hope it's not over, and good-by, by Everette Maddox University of New Orleans Press, 166 pp., paperback These selected poems by tragic Alabama poet transplanted to New Orleans (dead from esophogas 1989), exude the swampy citified Chukkery South. From the narrative launch of a semi-drunken stolen boatpoem (immediately aligning Maddox with Rimbaud) exhorting "Huck's terrible integrity," the float is on. From the subtle traditional rhyme-scheme that's hardly even catchable, to a cache of characters whose profiles form a familiar human topography, a personal poetics evolves from the elegance of the street, exploding later into "the memory trace of an older idea of form" (according to foreword by Adamo). Suicide rings throughout, as does a love for the ladies, "in the accidental harmony of the world." A metaphor for publication is submitted: It's not what you expected. Little black ants of print climb up onto the stiff page of the literary mag and form a man. Horrible! Ants arranged in the shape of a bent old man with a bottle of Tequila between his knees . . . Nothing on the page is true, only the failure." Poem "Republican Toast" also deserves a shout-out, especially for these five lines: "Here's to the goddam/Motherfuckin' shit-eatin/Ball-bitin'/Crawdad-cornholin'/Republicans." But wait! Another toast is in order . . . to one of the most colorful intriguing poets America ever lost too soon . . . thank you Everette, for yr lovely gut. Babyfucker, by Urs Allemann Peter Smith, trans. Les Figues Press, 133 pp., paperback This extremely controversial, bilingual, good-looking, pocket-size work of transgressive lit first freaked readers out in '91 when it won second place in the Ingeborg Bachmann Competition as a German text alone. As the intro explains, "Der Spiegel magazine includes the 'Allemann affair' as one of only three cultural events on its list of the top forty-five scandals between 1949 and 1999.'" And no wonder: It's all about baby fuckingóin a very Story of the Eye kind of way. It's witty as shit, but you never really like the author personally. You do, however, enjoy his whimsy. It's like Gertrude Stein meets Jean Genet. Or Sam Beckett crossed with CÈline, but strung out on oxycot all the way to the knee-slapping end. Where there's a whacked out popcult click-in-synapse that brings it all together, prompting reader to beslap forehead with Satori. But is this revelation worth it? Noóbut the highly literary super-surreal side-splitting sojourn is . . . through creels of trippy infant-fucking fun. Normance, by Louis-Ferdinand CÈline Marlon Jones, trans. Dalkey Archives Press, 370 pp., paperback CÈline's last novel has finally erupted into English . . . a monumental manifesto of hilarious prose just published by Dalkey Archives . . . who deserve no credit for this masterpiece! Vile Swine! Scumbags! Backstabbing crooks! CÈline translator MSpitzer originally swung the deal for this book, even did all the preliminary permissions research back in 2005 . . . contacted Gallimard, contacted the Estate, the whole shitarito . . . and Dalkey Archives said "You bet" . . . but when it came time to talk standard royalties, they tried to screw him over, offering a flat fee, those bastard weasels. That's when they shared their true colors . . . said the board had "reconsidered," when they'd given the job to somebody else. Someone they could rape more, fuck over, bugger with butter while reaching around! Which was a good thing for MSpitzer, who (I have it on good authority) feared the nightmare of all that argot, and being a prisoner of the process . . . lost language & obscure medical lingo . . . historically specific, technically political! What a mess! But ol' Marlon Jones was up to the task . . . striving for a Manheimian interpretation (unlike Fable for Another Time, that last crock of heavily footnoted corn-infused log put out by U of Nebraska Press), he hit the ground running and succeeded. The narrative flows organically, humorously, piss-your-pants hysterically! Only seven damn notes in the whole damn book, KAPHLAMMING with momentum, an explosive steroid-fueled phantasmagoria of strippers and dancing amputees, annoying whores, and that trademark paranoid RAT-A-TAT-TAT of Mad Doctor Revery! Bombs exploding, walls VRRR-SMASHING, Fireworks, Shrapnel, Bloody Mobs! But unlike the other "war novels," in which CÈline and wife and cat scramble and scratch through bomblasts and hellfire (i.e., North, Castle to Castle, et cetera), this barrage is character- and dialogue-driven . . . thereby joining the ranks of Death on the Installment Plan, London Bridges, and The Church . . . the most rollicking human and beautiful novels kicked out by CÈline. And FYI . . . Normance is a big fat murderous fatman; no doubt a metaphor for Industrial Western Expansionist Stupidity! All the action takes place in one day, in one apartment building, during a massive bombardament . . . and Normance is huge pain in the ass! He attacks CÈline, loses his mind, gets in the way, bleeds from the head. And while all this is going on, a legless cripple dances in the sky, tracers flashing all around him, while Paris buckles, bends, bursts and seizures: BABOOOM! There are tensions between CÈline and spouse, brainwashed zombies screeching for a pound of flesh, secret horders of booze, the works! A real fiasco, no tragedy at all! With some of the most outrageous CÈlinian self-analysis on record. For example: "I'm telling you just how it happened . . . think I'm not very modest? . . . so what? . . . modesty doesn't pay! only mindless, phony garbage does! . . . the truth is obsolete . . . it takes a big gust of wind, stuffed with fine phrases, to set the world on fire, to drive your boat to the golden fleece . . . . and those are the facts exactly . . ." The Continual Condition, by Charles Bukowski Ecco, 127 pp., hardback This thin stew is definitely the bottom of the barrel. Not one resonating line. Twenty-six bucks shat away. What a flaccid disappointment. Go for The Pleasures of the Damned: Poems, 1951-1993 (2007) instead. That one's memorable, and damn well worth the effort & time. Very dark and existential, humans being described thusly: "that warm bucket of/ intestine,/bladder,/kidneys,/ lungs,/salt,/sulphur,/carbon dioxide/and/phlegm" and "we are all little forgotten pieces of shit/only we walk and talk/laugh/make jokes." Plus lots of reflection on the Void, i.e.: "death enters my mouth/and snakes along my teeth/and I wonder if I am frightened of/this voiceless, unsorrowful dying that is/like the drying of a rose." But, of course, there are lots of miniskirts, bare assess, fingerfucks, puking, crappy cars, and meat-and-potatoes meditations on what he has always termed "The Word"ósuch as: "as the/spirit/wanes/the/form/appears" & "(but Hem was correct in maintaining that F./Scott couldn't write)." Meanwhile my copy is all dog-eared. Mucho to revisit here. And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs Grove Press, 215 pp., paperback A lost collaboration 1945 Kerouac and Burroughs messing around with prose this hard-boiled thriller-nov is full of bohemian NY nights crafted preVoice, preBeats, preMeatWheelTurningInTheSky so therefore intriguing in a preKinda way but also avec its own magneto of Realism, see a surprisingly easy read but worth it? The verdict is still out on that NO BULLSHIT REVIEWS: by Christian Prozak Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook by Charles Bukowski David Stephen Calonne, ed. City Lights, San Francisco, paperback www.citylights.com Most quixotic Chinaski yet kicks off w/ academic offturning intro regarding lost & obscure chunks painful at first in search of voix but then full-throttle blunt drunk we luv: "I walked into the other room and there was Constance, naked, stretched on a leather couch, her eyes closed. All the lights were on, which only made it better. She was milk-white and all there, only the hairs of her pussy had a rather golden-red tint instead of the blonde like the hair on her head. I began to work on her breast and the nipples became hard immediately. I put my hand between her legs and worked a finger in. I kissed her all about the throat and ears and as I slipped it in, I found her mouth. I knew I was going to make it at last. It was good and she was responding, she was wiggling like a snake. At last, I had my manhood back. I was going to score. All those misses . . . so many of them . . . at the age of 50 . . . it could make a man doubt. And, after all, what was a man if he couldn't? What did poems mean? The ability to screw a lovely woman was Man's greatest Art. Everything else was tinfoil. Immortality was the ability to screw until you died . . . Then I looked up as I was stroking. There on the wall opposite . . . hung a life-sized silver Christ . . . He was watching me . . . . I missed a stroke." [i] read it three times (engrossed enrapt) the beauty of this plumer vulgaris flowering in Fantemoir but plenty flammable litcrit as well: "Back in the '20s and '30s there was not an abundance of littles. A little magazine was an event, not a calamity. One could trace the names from the littles and up through literary history; I mean, they began there and they went up, they became. They became books, novels, things. Now most little magazine people begin little and remain little . . . Every jackass in America pumps out countless and ineffectual poems. And a large number of them are published in the littles. Tra la la, another edition. Give us a grant, see what we are doing! . . . Arid vast nothingness . . . the miracle of our times is that so many people can write down so many words that mean absolutely nothing." and "Poets, of course, aren't the only ones to suffer in our world, they just talk more about it. And the critics, my friend, the critics, what a rotten lobsterflesh they are. Forgive me this, it's all that I know in my pitiable way. Basically, all I have to say is: Ezra, yes . . . . Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes." plus "moments of total flaming hell" (shoulda been the title) injected with hilarious Célinian hate: "The Dolly Sisters sit in that large window all day talking and drinking tea and eating tiny cookies. They are heavily rouged with stupid, hard faces and their grey hair is dyed red and they wear four-inch false fingernails; their lips are very heavily caked with magenta lipstick. They look at me as I walk by and I nod like a country gentleman. They think I am a retired circus barker . . . All three of them view me and one of them gives me a big smile, it's like a leper's kiss of death. The moment the sun goes down, a huge purple curtain is pulled across the glass window. The Dolly Sisters are afraid of being raped." or "Right now there's this huge glob approaching New York City and there's nothing that can be done about it. When I read this article I wasn't exactly too unhappy because if any city deserved to be drowned in mountains of shit, that city is New York." for this is some really guerrilla stuff high in polemics & graphic scat what might've changed our attitude two degrees but so what? stock standard lesbo smackdowns and barfights galore permeate avec spontaneous absurdist fic bottomline: there are three strange off-the-chain bks by Buk no pensive collection shld be w/out: Pulp, Pleasures of the Damned and this mofo right here. Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel by Edmund White Atlas & Co., New York, hardback www.atlasandco.com très readable and condensed chrono from élitist pompous texts like G. Robb and autre Rimbaudallaires yet critical of Starkiescheiss and investigative betwixt analysis of life thru verse am mucho pleased with this history context & narrative but EWhite's traductions suck ie, "In order to touch one of my dad's bits—big, black and hard—" is not only inaccurate & slovenly (see MSpitz From Absinthe, "that fat hard dark dick/of my dad") but just as misleading as plethora of guesswork preceding Fowlie, Varèse Still, this study is thick w/ sticky nugs such as "One night when [Verlaine] was blind with drink and wanted money from his mother so that he could continue his rout into the dawn hours, he became so angry with her for holding out on him that he attacked with his cane the jars containing Madame Verlaine's miscarriages, smashing the glass and dismembering the tiny rubbery fetuses and scattering them across the floor—and remarking soddenly that they, like him, had been macerating in alcohol long enough." and "Most humiliating, Verlaine was visited by two doctors, who examined his body to 'see if he was a homosexual.' The doctors remarked on the small penis and its particularly small, tapering head. More significant for them was the anus." and w/ das "boat" under the microscope (following influence of JVerne James FenCoop and EdAlPoe) offerings of insight acute: ie, "Critics often claim that creative sparks fly when the themes and techniques of genre literature are elevated to the status of high art—and Rimbaud was one of the first poets of the modern era to understand this principle." nevtheless, despite puny piddlies this portrait is most comprehensive flash of madpunk tragi-spiral into his mythic Abyss. Skip Fox Delta Blues Ahadada Books, Tokyo/Toronto, paperback www.ahadadabooks.com this is nitro-packin' Pomo plumin' to the POW degree just can't get past "Lili, a Hurricane," Squealin' and Screechin' and Scrawwin' out its surging oceanic cry while shakin' with the wrath of Gawd: "a monstrosity, worlds within worlds of air and water and wind: torrents of doubt, fugues of the sheer, winds rising thousands of feet in a few seconds then suicidally throwing themselves off their own cliffs to plunge thousands of feet below, psychotic dervishes, deep unbinding swells . . . tumultuous towers, parapet in neural collapse (these result in blind spots), electric spasm in back currents, dark swirl, the black flatulence of eddies, abeyances of thought, little soda jerks running from table to table, cataracts of unholy pleasures . . . crescendo of blank racket, her brow at 30,000 feet as she slows, stretches and contracts, opens an eye at last, blinks, spies Cuba, and turns, bellowing, to wipe her ass." talk about "generative writing" this bitch makes you wanna scrawl, squall rip the throat from a fashion god "Death amid the petulance of nations. Death in disregard. Death for its own sake. Stupid motherfucking death!" howling all bellicose, "tearing at her hair, clawing her face, ripping at nipple rings . . she spots the anus of the nation" goes charging in like a pack of jackals, lashing at the "the stupid chewing hysteria of the populace . . . [and] fat fucks fighting at five o'clock." no other hurricane prose can match the gnash of the storm Skip Fox has unleashed this super-hyper-organic-destructo-twister of pure Incandescent Blazin' Brilliance!!!-- dissolving like battery acid the flesh of all we think know. Killmeyer, Dana Pendulums of Euphoria Six Gallery Press, Pittsburgh, paperback www.sixgallerypress.com Pendulum "smudges the seams between the abstract" in a world where "science is nascent" and newborns know "existence before form" deliberately broken down: "s ing ing s ing ing s s ing s s ing ing s s ing s s ing ing" unto Mobius silent whys, "tips of pubis" & "the hot white beyond." so put that in your pipe and smoke. SANDERS, BUKOWSKI, SNYBERG, BEACH & SCHNEIDERMEYER Poems for New Orleans Ed Sanders North Antlantic Books www.northatlanticbooks.com Not yr typical investigoetry by our Fugsly bard: mucho mas lyrical in span of three centuries from ye olde French & Choctaw trade to murky surge of "kill-swill down over 80% of the Polis.... And the bodies! Oh my God! like an image from a suicide bomb" with plenty of that semi-Gonzo omni-bias, ie: "Low life of course defines high life and the perfect and imperfect alike are shat into the crypt by the partisans of Sky Slime!" while shipping "these rotten Democrats to the morgue or disperse them like twisted seeds across the Red Beyond" Oh yeah, this is epic bloody song of tragedy, history, desperation & all thy shameful weasle-tools, Amerigo sponging off the Mississippi's most dismissible genocide The Pleasures of the Damned: Poems, 1951-1993 Charles Bukowski (John Martin, ed.) Ecco Press www.harpercollins.com/imprints/index.aspx?imprintid=517997 Simply best Bukowski poetry collection ever good shit! end of discussion For To Skip Fox BlazeVOX [books] blazevox.org SFox adds a sense of humor to suicides at Christmas along with uber contemplative vision-meter like "Rockets' red glare burning its way... [to] visual cortex" mental derelicts converge with pond scum green herons, monkeys and meat to imprint upon the senses a quasi fuckyou on the dying process très existential for ol' Skip noiry, chunky, songy & reflective his most human(e) alchemy yet and "if the tale be mad does that concern the tongue ? " The Selected Letters of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder Bill Morgan, ed. Counterpoint www.counterpointpress.com these indices are always best fer wordbytes on myriad flashes of flesh & that's it Neurotica Elva Maxine Beach New Belleville Press www.newbellevillepress.com Holy Testerotica, Batwoman! What do you get when you cross Bukowski Anais Nin, Diane Di Prima and America? the answer = Neurotica an unapologetic bonefest for feminists farmers doctors and albatross inseminators (the whole dang self-destructo chuckwagon) this is Gen-X bitchslap balling this is a true euphorimoir burning from the breast of anyone ever been burned but going for another Skronk Memorials to Future Catastrophes CD by Davis Schneiderman and Don Meyer Jaded Ibis Productions Inc. jadedibisproductions.com crazee crazee cacophony of broken spoken K-zanging techo-sympho-politico riffs strange with perpetual jesus epidemics synergizing sex w/ brando tom cruise pynchon blitzer one bold callabo mozaic of muse gone wild in studio and media on roids Man—this is digital Dope! NO BULLSHIT REVIEWS: Hunter S., Ed Sanders, Bukowski & Missy Suicide Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century by Hunter S. Thompson Simon & Schuster, NY though vainglorious and nascent of old gonzód hat Kingdom is most smoking nug of nitrobiased journalcy cured w/ crystal fiction to aggravate the Hogs of War in sad shadow of yr Michael Moore ——but impotent in fury? ie: "Let's face it — the yo-yo president of the U.S.A. knows nothing. He is a dunce. He does what he is told to do — says what he is told to say — poses the way he is told to pose. He is a Fool.... This is not the time to have a bogus rich kid in charge of the White House.... he wantonly and stupidly endorses mass murder of a logical plan to make sure we are still Number One — he is a Jackass by definition — a loud and meaningless animal with no functional intelligence and no balls.... Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush? They are the same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill gooks. They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American character. They are the racists and hate mongers among us — they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis. And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not. Fuck them." Lo, our friendly neighborhood dopefiend has spun another narco-coil twined in clever curlitales of sundry plots converged in theme that as of yet no critics know what to make of bombast but more of ye olde same Cockmuffins! This is a different specimen sophisticated in suspense paced with cops and guns and Depp gelling to the namedrop end avec a secret stitch of aggressions in transgression in face of dick and bush and all their slimy scandaleezas nevermind the mad doc's bullshit self vindication re: fatporn stargone wild what's pisspants hilarious is booze-fueled roadkill pig-limo visions of Clarence Thomas humping whores in Elko lustrush of most quintessential knee-slap Amlit overkill this pseudonym has ever seen blast ratbastards in the ass Ho ho! Bravo! Encore Maestro! War makes art worth a shit. America: A History in Verse Vol. 3, 1962-1970 by Edward Sanders Black Sparrow Books, NY Aye the I in the eye of once Fugly troubabard who après l'evidence of JFK chiggerism poses "Is it not proper to think that military leaders who would propose domestic terror could also kill a president or fashion a patsy?" then all that ML Kingful marching lynching bugging baiting beating in red white & blue blood of sacrificial Camelot lambs (whom most luminous is Ted!) blazing amazing scathing faces thugslugging RatherDan in Panthered past of Mansonland where "The Spirit of Napalm... & his bone-pal Scythe Man the Lurker" spankingly contrasts "the fluffy... condemnation of a writer... famous for his breathy, envious book on... Kesey" adding "You could see Mr. Wolfe in 1827 snickering at the paint-stained clothing of William Blake (and his egalitarian politics) after... snickery visit" till Four Dead in Ohio and flowervisions in the gun as Sanders goes and goes and goes toward volume 4 of Nixon Ford Carter Disco Iran-Contra Reaganation Oblivion making a new Maximus what doesn't condescend. Slouching Toward Nirvana: New Poems by Charles Bukowski HarperCollins, NY Finally! A dead-Bukowski afterbook that doesn't suck posthumous butt poetry inspired by "my cats, my wife,/the shape of my coat thrown over a chair, the weeping of the planet... the flight of the hummingbird and" the fact that it's so easy to die long before the fact of it so the bird has now busted out the heavy stuff: "how close we all are to being nothing most of the time and for some of us nothing all of the time" since "we are hardly ever as strong/as that which we create" and "most poets are just big tit-suckers: accepting readings taking university chairs praying for tenure writing books on poetic technique and giving lectures" aka "those chattering bitching ninnies who are so quick to insist... that I am not one of them" plus plenty of advice for those who can't: "read this to your class in contemporary literature and tell them how easy it is. then send those children out to walk the asphalt like the rest of us" meanwhile "some are good at cleaning the shit stains out of the toilet; others at polishing the mirror of their own vanity; many are expert at composing inoffensive verse or sucking dick. but while the drippings from their thin minds spill from their tongue I'll continue to type" the unBukowski: "mental charutos pimentel charutos pimentel charuto entel charutos pimentel charutos pimen..." Say What? No wonder this voice was wisely left for surreal existential end of "flowers floating on the lake. New Jersey dogs in thrall... do abandoned factories ever scream at mid- night? I am warming up now as bottle caps explode in my brain. I am giving off smoke. I am really smoking now. I am an Easter egg. I am a paper clip.... as the world reaches its final foolish conclusion I realize that nothing has been learned" and as the "powers-that-be persist/in tolerating shit" Bukowski plays the "shuck and jive" like horses at the track a "pure folly to get slick about" cuz ultimately (he he he) poetry's "a lie." Suicide Girls by Missy Suicide Feral House, L.A. http://suicidegirls.com This is a glossy sexy photobook of saucy naked nudie Goths and Gen Y hotties but also a statement of a shaven piercéd generation tattooed Betty Booply not nipple porn for wanking wetly (though you could) but the stuff of coffee table yakage ahhhhh sweet sassy lasses how we love your boobs and asses your bad grrrrl grins and vixen visions but next time leave yr poetry at home. |
< Prev | Next > |
---|