Thick Lazy Tongue
A Novel Misti Rainwater-Lites
Ebullience Press: Albuquerque, New Mexico, 112 pages
Misti Rainwater-Lites loves her porn and she loves her poetry, hence why she is the editor of the print poetry zine, Instant Pussy, a outlet for the less conventional and often thwarted creative voices of today's underground literature world, and also a showcase for some rather tasteful nude pictures of females (and males) that compliment the main course of a fine collection of contemporary verse. But that is not all. Misti Rainwater-Lites has self-published a number of books of her own poetry and prose as well, including Arsenal of Spitwads and Mordiscado. Furthermore, she has been hailed as "the Confessional Poet Laureate of the United States," and has appeared in so many underground poetry zines that it would easier to name the very few that are missing out on such a new and genuinely raw talent.
And "raw" being the appropriate word because the book being reviewed here is not your average conventional narrative that has been left to stew on the back burner for five years while the author thinks of what to use as a starter line. No, this is something, which has more or less just been cut off the live animals back. This is a small, yet chunky piece of meat, which the author takes unprepared and throws into your face, daring you to eat it like a savage - uncooked.
Thick Lazy Tongue, however, is by no means the first choice of publication from the author's extensive list, but it is one of her more unique pieces given the urgency of its conception. It is a short novel she claims to have written in the space of twenty-four hours. It is a story (or rather a bunch of stories) that explores the heart of the already shattered American dream, along with the equally shattered life of a female writer living not far from a cockroach existence in the so called land of opportunity. It is a brutal tale crafted very much with a poetic brilliance which Sylvia Plath and Dorothy Parker would have been proud of.
I am living true. I am living large. I am fat with life. Do you hear me America? Do you see me world? I am spinning, unafraid...You are alone. You alone will witness the agony, the humiliation, the heartbreak, the ecstasy, the triumph, the degradation, the absurdity that is your life.
She takes us through a roller coaster of various narratives ranging from present day observations of America to distant memoirs of her childhood and sometimes to the more surreal moments, which combine both the past and the present dilemmas. The present-day narratives are more of a political critique on the current state of the American Dream, which is where the story kicks off:
Harsh fluorescent lights. Tiny insects flying around the bright orange tangelos. Stockers farting and whistling mindless tunes as they place cans of tuna fish on the shelves...Get. Me. Out. Of. Here. This is 2006 America. There is no escape. When you are living at the poverty level ... buying your groceries at Wal-Mart Super center.
From here the novel becomes an almost classic Misti Rainwater-Lites "confessional," where she digs into her past and asks us to look at the decaying bones of what was, if we have the guts. Of course it has not so much to do with guts than it does with a morbid curiosity, almost voyeuristic fetish, as we are seduced to take at least a peek, if not a prolonged ogle. However, further into the book she goes on to give us hints at her possible insecurities of being a confessional writer as she reluctantly invites us to participate in taking a look at her past childhood through a cinema screen, saying:
It was hard enough living your own life, you certainly don't want to watch it, especially on a screen this size. You look around the theatre to make sure you are alone.
Certain aspects, it seems, when painted on such a large public canvas, do seem daunting to a writer. There is the feeling the author is not sure what to add to the book, or should I say, she is not sure how much she should add to the book, and obviously since it is "rushed," no concise decision can be made - it's all a gamble. But this is not necisarrily bad; it is actually interesting. It reminds me of a quote from Charles Bukowski who once said "it's like a cigarette, the drag is for me and the ash for the audience." It seems Bukowski learned how to balance his own personal living and what went inside his books, in other words, he learned what to save for himself and what information his audience was worthy of.
Of course, who, when writing a novella in such a short time span has time to think of what exactly gets put in and what doesn't? Maybe the genuine and uncorrupted harshness of the voice says something more than a clean-cut, sanitized, manuscript, maybe it says something more about the talent of Misti Rainwater-Lites than it does about any of her flaws.
R.K. WALLACE lives between Glasgow, Scotland and Long Beach, California. He plays the guitar in the streets for a living. He writes poetry and prose and can be found in the following various publications: Strangeroad, Barfing Frog, Hagard and Hallo, Censored Poets, St Vitus, Instant Pussy, Showcase Press, decomP, Laura Hird, Lit Chaos, Underground Voices, The Beat, 400 Words, Poetic Diversity, Savage Manners.
Sonic Transmission - Television, Tom Verlaine, Richard Hell
"An Illustrated History" Tim Mitchell
Glitter Books: London, United Kingdon, 150 pages
Good music writing can be a transformative experience, even if you don't particularly care for the subject. I found THE DIRT--a book on the career and exploits of Motley Crue--a fascinating read, despite the fact that I am not a fan of the band. It was a book were you felt the passion of the band--a passion for getting laid, taking drugs, and--oh yeah--making music. Another favorite book of mine is DEEP IN A DREAM: THE LONG NIGHT OF CHET BAKER. Even if you are not a die-hard fan of the man's music, the book will still be an unforgettable experience, getting into the dark side of the mans psyche as thoroughly as it does. DEEP IN A DREAM like all good biographical writing, was as entertaining as a good work of fiction, maybe even more so because it is tangibly real.
SONIC TRANSMISSION, unfortunately, falls far short of this kind of alchemic writing. The subject is undoubtedly a fascinating one--Television, one of the touchstone bands from the birth of punk, a band that stalled tragically two albums into it's career, but left a legacy of amazing songs that pushed at the boundaries of what "punk" really was. Sadly SONIC TRANSMISSION offers no new insights into the fractured relationship between Television's co-founders Tom Verlaine and Richard hell, and is content to cull all of it's information from existing sources, coming across as more of an extended school project than a serious piece of music journalism.
Television remain a fascinating band because of the poetic roots from which the band sprung, and because of the scene they helped to create--the CBGB's scene, The Ramones, Blondie, The Heartbreakers, Suicide ... the white hot flashes of rock-and-roll purity which would alter the course of American music forever. Amazingly, there is no other book on the market which even attempts to tell the stories of Hell, Verlaine and Television.
The book catalogues the chaos and excesses of the band in an officious, offhand manner, capturing neither the grimy netherworld of New York's Lower East Side in the mid 70's, or the ice-cold, otherworldly splendor of the music created by Verlaine, Hell, Ficca, Lloyd and Smith.
Oddly, while the book claims to be a biography of "Television, Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell", when Hell leaves he band he ceases to exist in the book (apart from a rather cursory chronology at the back) ... It as if he never went on to form The Heartbreakers with Johnny Thunders, or the Voidoids, or indeed write his novels or books of poetry. Indeed this is not an omission limited to Hell: Verlaine's life in the intervening years following the end of his solo career and Television's late 90's reformation are dispensed with in a couple of sentences, the author content to rely on Verlaine's veiled account of what he did in the preceding decade "I went to the movies a couple of times."
The book also suffers by looking like something of a rush job. The typos are too numerous to list, the first letters of paragraphs are routinely dropped, and most amusingly Nick Zedd's cinema-of-transgression classic is given a new title ... anyone for "Greek Maggot Bingo"?
Also hampering this account is the author lack of objectivity. Every release by the band is given a glowing analysis, even when the biggest of fans will recognize that the author is talking about some of the band's lesser works. Listening to the author's gushing account of the bands self-titled 90's comeback album, I found myself wondering if he and I had heard the same album as I.
So whether to recommend the book ... for die-hard Television fans, it is, as I mentioned earlier, the only product available. But frankly, a detailed net search would unearth most of the information that this book provides. There are no new revelations, no new photographs even (just badly reproduced promotional shots), and the soul of Television remains tantalizingly out of reach.
If you haven't already read it, PLEASE KILL ME, by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, covers the bands early days in much more vivid detail, and is a vastly more entertaining read. I am a great believer that it is the sum total that makes the story of a band--the friendships, the fallings out, the drugs, the mistakes ... not just a list of gigs dates and production notes. Like Television's later albums this book could be summed up as unfinished, overly technical, and rather dry.
TONY O'NEILL is the author of the novel Digging the Vein (Contemporary 2006), Seizure Wet Dreams (Social Disease 2006), and the forthcoming Songs From The Shooting Gallery (Burning Shore Press 2007). He is originally from the United Kingdom and currently lives in New York City.
Introduction to Tony O'Neill's Songs From the Shooting Gallery
essay by Rob Woodard
Burning Shore Essays, September 2006
By Rob Woodard
Introduction to Tony O'Neill's Songs From the Shooting Gallery
poems (coming Winter 2007) Tony O'Neill
Burning Shore Press
I first read Tony O'Neill's poetry on his own website maybe a year ago. It only took two or three stanzas before I was completely hooked. It's like that with the truly great ones: you know immediately that you're dealing with something special, something powerful, honest, and unique that leaves no room for questioning. I had recently founded a publishing company, Burning Shore Press, which was to be dedicated to exactly this type of serious, uncompromising writing. So, after reading thru all the poems on the site, I spontaneously emailed Tony and proposed that we should work together to put out a book of his poetry. The next day (or maybe it was that same day) he returned my email, responding with enthusiastic yes to my idea. It was that easy: we were on the same wavelength from moment one.
Over the next several months Tony sent me poems almost as he wrote them, and I gave him feedback in as close to real time as possible. And less than a year later we had a complete manuscript for this book.
There is of course far more to the creation of this work than the short description I have rendered thus far-but I don't want dwell on editorial details, or even the dynamics of the interesting long-distance literary and personal friendship Tony and I have developed over these last months: I'd rather concentrate on the man and the poems themselves.
What are the important details of Tony O'Neill's life? Well, he's an Englishman of Irish decent, who apparently grew up under typically depressing gray British skies in an equally gray and bleak urban wasteland of dead-end jobs, government handouts, and intellectual and creative stagnation. Like so many English youth of recent generations, however, he used music as his escape from this sorrowful landscape, learning to play keyboards and then hooking up with touring bands that eventually took him all the way to Los Angeles. Once in Los Angeles he paired in the biggest way possible his love for music with his life's other great passion: drugs, including cocaine, crystal meth, and most importantly, heroin. His life quickly turned into a wild ride thru L.A.'s party culture, on its way into a spiral of bad marriages, the darkest mazes of Southern California's drug underground, and finally the narrow hell of deep addiction.
Unlike many a junkie, however, he somehow pulled himself up out of this pit and found himself again, thru a temporary return to England, the love of a good woman, the birth a daughter, and finally the finding of a new home in New York City.
This is of course just a thumbnail sketch of Tony O'Neill's days and nights, which is fine-because the details are all there in his poems, which is where they're best experienced. Besides, what's more important, I'd say, is the way in which these facts of a life are explored, are made to live again. In others words, it's the poems that really matter.
There are of course as many ways to write a poem as there are poets. Tony's way is that of the clean simple line, stripped down to its declarative essence. In his poetry there are no word tricks, no obscurities, and especially no literary posturing; his words are like a polished pane of glass, thru which we see the workings of his vision of the world with the least amount of distortion and deception as possible.
And it can be a very difficult vision at times. On the surface this universe often exists as a kind of drug-fueled death match, and beneath this surface we find a profound rage and loneliness based in shattered dreams and hearts so badly broken that they could only be the result of the loss of faith in a god whose most fundamental promises turned out to be blatant lies. But there are cracks in this darkness, sometimes huge cracks thru which the light just pours. Usually they are discovered at the most unexpected moments and thru the simplest of gestures: a look, a kiss, a tiny act of human kindness, the sight of the poet's newborn daughter sleeping ... And it is this light that gives the poet and his readers the strength to hold on-because this light promises no less than redemption, no less than a revealing of love itself ...
Hard stuff. Very heavy at times. But ultimately not bleak, I'd argue: for these poems also contain a great deal of warmth, passion, and most especially hope. Tony O'Neill's vision is a tough one, but it's also surprisingly forgiving: for all the degradation, overdoses, slow suicides, and screaming train-wreck lives are ultimately redeemed thru a deep compassion that lies at the heart of every word the man writes.
How this vision came to be is largely evident in his poems and need not be gone into in any more depth here. How he came to write the way he does, however, may not be quite as apparent. English-language poetry has of course undergone massive changes in recent decades, shedding much of the ornate and obscuring excesses it has acquired thru previous centuries-and Tony O'Neill works deep within this movement to reclaim the simple language of storytelling that once, and will perhaps again, make poetry relevant to large numbers of people. To put it another way, he's about as far from being an academic or establishment poet as possible: he is shielded by no literary paycheck or formalist cocoon: he is completely "open to the street," as Henry Miller so famously once wrote. Tony O'Neill, in other words, is very much the real deal ...
Those familiar with this type of poetry will recognize some of Tony's influences right off the bat. There's Charles Bukowski of course, the colossus of Post-Modern American poetry following poets can ignore only at their own peril, and other L.A. writers John Fante and his son Dan Fante quickly pop into mind as well. William S. Burroughs has also played a huge role in Tony's development. The aforementioned Henry Miller is in there as well, I'm sure. I've never read Nelson Algren, but I'm told there's a connection with his work too, and Hubert Selby is another likely reference point. Go deeper back in time and names like Knut Hamsun and Dostoyevsky simply demand to be included in this little survey. Cˇline? Lawrence? Baudelaire? Rimbaud? I can't say for sure, but I'd bet these guys have also filtered thru this man's world at one time or another. Less obvious influences perhaps than these luminaries are writers such as Richard Hell, Lou Reed, and the lyricists for dozens of rock-and-roll bands from London to L.A. and back again. In other words Tony draws inspiration from "poets" of a very wide range indeed ...
There's one other poet I have not mentioned but whose presence I believe hangs luminously and tellingly over this work as well. When Tony first proposed SONGS FROM THE SHOOTING GALLERY as the title of this book my initial reaction was to cringe a bit: I thought it sounded kind of hokey, a touch too Walt Whitman. But after living with this title for a while I began to see that his instincts were completely on target-for like Walt Whitman, Tony O'Neill is a prophet of sort, and definitely a poet of the people. In fact, the greatest difference between these two poets, I would argue, is simply the times in which they've lived. If Walt Whitman's wide-open nineteenth-century America caused him to sing "democracy," then Tony O'Neill's constricted twenty-first century causes him to scream this concept, like a man desperate not to lose the last thread of humankind's greatest dream ... And if it sounds like I am being over the top here I assure you I am not-Tony O'Neill is that good and that important. If Walt Whitman were alive today would he be searching for a vein in a dirty depressing Hollywood motel room? I cannot answer this question. But I do believe that he would have completely understood where a poet of such a world was coming from-for Tony's journey, like Whitman's, has fundamentally been one in search of freedom, for himself, for us all ...
So what I guess I'm trying to say is that despite his place of birth and English accent, Tony O'Neill is very much an American poet, both in that this land has fundamentally shaped his vision, but also because he innately shares the best dreams that this country exudes, and therefore weeps for it people and curses its failures with the anger and hope of even its most native son. SONGS FROM THE SHOOTING GALLERY is first and foremost Tony O'Neill's song of himself, but it's also the song of an England fled and an America discovered, the song of an immigrant searching for a place to be. And it is this, my fellow Americans, that makes it our song too, the song we all sing each day in our own way ...
But enough of this theorizing and explaining-again, it's the poems that matter and with Tony's blessing I now give them too you, raw, uncensored, and fully alive, as poems should be. Whether you love them or hate them, whether you can swallow them or find yourself gagging on their jagged edges, they're now yours to do with as you please.
Good luck, dear reader, and stay strong.
ROB WOODARD is the author of the novels Heaping Stones (2005, Burning Shore Press) and What Love Is (to be published by Burning Shore Press in the summer of 2007). In 2008 Burning Shore Press will be bringing out King of Long Beach, his first volume of poetry. He lives in Long Beach, California. Contact:
Time Capsule of Ourselves:
Jack Kerouac and the Failure of America
Burning Shore Reviews, June 2006
By Rob Woodard
Book of Sketches
Word Sketches Jack Kerouac
Penguin: New York, NY, 414 pages
Jack Kerouac, as anyone even slightly interested in American literature knows, is the most visible, and arguably most important, writer to emerge from the literary/cultural movement known as Beat, which exploded into mainstream American consciousness in the late 1950s with the publication of his novel ON THE ROAD and his compatriot Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl."
While many a hostile critic over the years has tried to dismiss him as a period writer or more of a cultural phenomena than a true literary force, Kerouac's work has continued to find new large audiences with each generation before and since his death, and in the last two decades or so he has even slowly begun to be canonized by an American literary establishment, which is finally beginning to admit the originality, quality, and profound social impact of his work. Kerouac's popularity and importance, along with the fact that he was an amazingly prolific writer, has led to the publication of many posthumous works, which not surprisingly, have been quite uneven in quality, ranging from the truly brilliant and necessary to the negligible and slightly embarrassing. Given this situation, it is most definitely appropriate to be skeptical of any "new" Kerouac book coming out at such a late date. Which is what makes the emergence of BOOK OF SKETCHES such a wonderful, unexpected, and important surprise.
Written mostly between the years 1952 and 1954, BOOK OF SKETCHES is pretty much what its title implies: a series of word-sketches of what Kerouac is seeing, thinking, feeling, and generally experiencing at any given time. Written in small notebooks, which he so famously carried in his breast pocket, these sketches take the form of a kind of jagged verse (though on the book's opening page Kerouac explicitly rejects this term) that mostly hovers somewhere between poetry and an odd sort of elastic prose, which overall has the feel of that more impressionist sections of his best novels. This very open form, and the fact that Kerouac is simply sketching the moment as opposed to trying to structure a formal story, leaves him a great deal of freedom to filter thru numerous topics and states of mind. For those acquainted with Kerouac's work the subject matter will be very familiar, with explorations of America and its meaning, Buddhism and eastern thought in general, Mexico, jazz, the role of the writer, loneliness, and the wandering lifestyle dominate throughout. This is not to say that this book is a rehash of other works. Actually, it is quite the opposite: one of the most amazing things about this work is its freshness. This most likely is because the years in which these sketches were written were the ones in which Kerouac was at the absolute peak of his abilities, while he was also making the major breakthroughs in his philosophy of "spontaneous prose," which Kerouac's codifies wonderfully in this work:
Unbroken word sketches
of the subconscious pictures
of sections of the
memory life of an
imbecile genius resting
in the madhouse of his
mind-The word
flow must not be disturbed,
or picture forgotten for
words' sakes, nor the
pictures stretched beyond
their bookmovie strength
except parenthetically (pages 258-259)
Driven by this attitude, BOOK OF SKETCHES takes us on a four hundred-plus page whirlwind journey thru such typical Kerouac haunts as Lowell, Massachusetts, New York City, Denver, Mexico City, San Francisco, and lesser known locales including rural North Carolina and the central California farming hub of Watsonville, all of which are described from the classic Kerouac sad-beautiful point of view. Less typical is the scathing criticism Kerouac levels at the country he so obviously loves and the lifestyles of its inhabitants. Jack Kerouac is perhaps the most compassionate and forgiving of all American writers. While his novels, poems, and other works do contain their share of anger directed towards what he sees as the follies of this nation, this anger is usually muted by the basic awe the man feels towards the American experiment and creation in general. In BOOK OF SKETCHES, though, this anger is more often left bare, allowing Kerouac's contempt for the wealthy, the business class, and bourgeois middle-class values to come thru quite strongly. "-Gad I hate/ American with a passionate intensity," he writes, in what is probably the book most angry passage. "It aint no atom/ bomb will blow up/ America, America itself is a bomb/ bound to go off/ from within" (page 148). Jack Kerouac's America is a place of great beauty, wonder, and courage-but it is also a place that is destroying itself with foolish consumerism, pointless "progress," and its profound neglect of its spiritual core. For him, the middle-class values that drive America are a nightmare to be escaped, which he does, by turning to what he sees as our society's more fundamental inhabitants, such as poor blacks, even poorer Indians and Mexicans (in Kerouac's vision Mexico is really just another aspect of "America"), artists and wanderers of all stripes, and most importantly the land itself, the disappearing "Railroad Earth," a mythic America that cannot be contained in books or even minds, but can only be lived, breathed as overall experience, as the promise of freedom and truthfulness that is fundamentally the American dream.
And it is these aspects of BOOK OF SKETCHES that make it such an important work. Though the landscape has changed much physically since Kerouac wandered the land, the same values of "progress" and spiritual degradation still rule America and continue to destroy its soul. In his examination of this reality from the perspective of a different time, Kerouac has left us an invaluable blueprint of our own struggles, an engaging time capsule of this place and people, which shows us not only where we've been, but where we seem to be heading, and perhaps, for those listening very carefully, ways to stem this destruction.
ROB WOODARD is the author of the novels Heaping Stones (2005, Burning Shore Press) and What Love Is (to be published by Burning Shore Press in the summer of 2007). In the 2008 Burning Shore Press will be bringing out King of Long Beach, his first volume of poetry. He lives in Long Beach, California. Contact:
Digging the Vein
A Novel Tony O'Neill
Contemporary Press: New York, NY, 219 pages
As a young man, a kid really, Tony O'Neill got strung out on heroin in Los Angeles in the wake of a promising music career and a quickie marriage gone south. For three years he battled his addiction and demons, a virtual smorgasbord of woe begotten experience filled with junky days and nights, Methadone clinics, and twelve step mishaps, eventually kicking on his own through the perseverance of will and the power and promise of redemption through love, faith and inner fulfillment.
Still a young man, Tony O'Neill has survived the nightmare ordeal that is heroin addiction and given us his debut novel, DIGGING THE VEIN (Contemporary Press, 2005), a compressed fictionalized account of those brutal years on the streets hustling, scoring, fixing and getting clean. His suffering becomes our deliverance and it is a most generous gift for those willing to receive it. Like Burroughs, Selby, and Algren before him, O'Neill is unflinching in his portrayal of the dehumanization that permeates the life of an addict, capturing the stink and filth of burned-out neighborhoods and characters infected by this lifestyle. In showing us the bleakest, blackest bottom we are confronted with an elemental humanity and compassion. Strange how life works, no?
Yes, having ingested and internalized all the great dope fiend novels that choke as they define the genre, in DIGGING THE VEIN Tony O'Neill offers up something miraculous in a perversely oversaturated field: a unique perspective on the whole drug thing. I never thought I'd say the words … This condescending attitude toward drug fiction can't be helped when considering all the years of abuse and bad writing that has plagued the genre.
The opening chapter introduces O'Neill's nameless British protagonist: a young junky looking to score in Hollywood, fresh from thirty-eight days in rehab and glad to be back on the streets, back in the familiarity of routine. He is of a pedigree and background similar to the author's own: a teenage musician "from a depressed northern English mill town" who finds himself on the skids, caught up in the excess and the wreckage of the music biz. Back in a motel room, reveling in his first fix since bailing on the clinic, he is aware of the clawing need to bear witness to his disintegration, to mine the depths of his despair and addiction:
None of it can touch me now that the heroin is deep and heavy in
my bones. I fall back into a trance. I am beyond life and death,
beyond the boredom and madness now. I make a mental note to
myself while drifting into my opiate dream. If this ever ends, if I
survive this, I will write it all down. I need to remember everything,
and I don't want these years to have been for nothing. (page 4)
Moments like these are when O'Neill is at his best. The writing is sharp and focused, digging at the heart of what it means to be an addict.
Back in L.A. churning out music reviews and video treatments for crummy late-90's pop stars, O'Neill's protagonist has "two hundred pages of wank," a novel-in-progress, on his nightstand taunting him and the despondency and impotency of his life and marriage leads him into the vapid, drug-fueled L.A. party boy lifestyle. Through mountains of cocaine, E and one-dimensional characters his destiny is set and the first third of the novel focuses on the grim superficiality of L.A.'s drug and club culture. Despite endless partying, and sex, and 'wild' lifestyle chronicled here, no one is having a good time and that seems to be the point of these early scenes--to illustrate the banality of the deeply unfulfilling lives that these people lead.
To writ, all of this can be summed up in the character of Sal Mackenzie, a fringe reveler of the party set, but indicative of the degeneracy of the lot:
Sal was a man without any kind of moral compass, and so long as
you accepted him on this basis, he could never surprise you. It was
best not to get mad if he screwed you on a drug deal or fucked your
girlfriend while she was passed out drunk. He just didn't know any
better. (22)
Other than junk, the closest thing to a friend that O'Neill's unnamed narrator has in all this is RP, an ageing pretty boy and set designer of straight-to-video soft porn thrillers, who used to sodomize our hero's wife in the back of his truck when they had a thing. As O'Neill's protagonist slips further into the doldrums after another all night binge he tries to articulate his sense of loss and confusion to RP on a balcony overlooking Western Ave in Hollywood:
"Where is this going to end?" I asked him. "Death," he told me,
"for all of us. For the whole city. The whole world, man. Can't you
feel it? Can't you smell it? It's the last days of Rome, the empire is
crumbling and we're doing all that there's left to do." RP looked
beautiful that morning. He had been awake for a couple of nights …
He was disheveled but in a deliberate way, and the early morning
light gave a color to his usual pallor. He made sense. He made all of
the sense in the world, and there on that balcony full of whiskey and
cocaine and ecstasy and speed I loved RP. I truly loved him as a brother,
and I didn't want the moment to pass. I blurted out a garbled, "I love
you," and immediately regretted it, full of embarrassment and
inexplicable shame. But he reached out to me and put his hand
on my shoulder and looked at me, telling me that he loved me too.
"I understand you," he told me, "don't ever doubt that. Don't ever
forget this." (46)
This passage underscores the nihilistic core of the novel and illustrates the utter disjunction between these characters and the profound isolation of its central figure. In O'Neill's world, this is as close as these people get.
When O'Neill finally plummets off the cliff, into a life of sustained hard drug usage, it is not with a bang but rather with a whimper or dull thud: "Finally, I was finished. I was finished with the party, I was finished with everything. I didn't need to say goodbye to anyone. I got up, and I got the fuck out" (59). This decision feels inevitable, as if there is no other choice or trajectory for this young man at this juncture. This realization is confronted head-on, rationally--clinically--even. The roots the same as in any fractured life gone too far, be it in pursuit of drugs and alcohol or money, or a million other life-eroding illusions that allow the essence of one's life to get lost and become rotted. I believe it was Hubert Selby, Jr. who said "Happiness is an inside job." Well, whoever said it knew what the hell he was talking about. Whatever the case, once the course of self-destruction has been set it becomes exceedingly difficult to right the ship. From DIGGING THE VEIN:
When does a habit become an addiction? When does the particular
insanity that comes with choosing heroin as an aesthetic, as a lifestyle,
become normal? I'm not sure; all I know is after a while of drifting
along with things, of not dealing with my immediate problems and
focusing instead on funding heroin use, things shifted around me
fundamentally. At some point I woke up out of heroin, and instead
of becoming confronted by my living situation, my broken marriage,
my precarious financial situation, I was instead absolutely sure that all
of these things were No Longer Relevant to my existence. All that
mattered was that I got some drugs to help me through the day. The
other stuff, well, that was as abstract and distant as if it was happening
to someone else. And in a way, I suppose it was. (66)
There is no moralizing here, no grandstanding, no clues to kicking or self-righteous proclamations of the "cured." Instead you'll find two-hundred-plus pages of unremitting brutalization; bruised and battered junk life devoid of sentimentality and romanticism. This is a real as it gets. In DIGGING THE VEIN Tony O'Neill has lived more lives in his twenty-seven years than most people could in a thousand.
I recently saw the Bukowski documentary BORN INTO THIS and the refrain of one of the poems featured, "the crunch" from LOVE IS A DOG FROM HELL, comes to me now: "people are not good to each other." This is undeniably true. To which I would like to add, people are not good to themselves. DIGGING THE VEIN is a bludgeoning reminder of that simple axiom.
We can learn a lot from Tony O'Neill if we have the courage to listen. This is an engaging and original debut.
Tore Down a la Rimbaud:
Richard Hell Uncorks One for the Ages
Burning Shore Reviews, February 2006
By Rob Woodard
Godlike
A Novel Richard Hell
Akashic Books: New York, NY, 150 pages
Richard Hell is of course the former singer-songwriter-bassist for the early New York "punk" bands Television, The Heartbreakers, and the Voidoids, and later musical assemblages such as the Dim Stars. Always a fascinating lyricist, he has in the last decade or so forsaken music -- and an on-and-off-again acting career -- and turned his attentions to the written word almost entirely, building himself a very interesting, if underappreciated, career as an essayist, critic, poet, and novelist.
Hell's first novel, GO NOW, released in 1996, can probably best be described as a flawed effort that manages to succeed in many ways despite itself. It is the story of a cross-country trip taken by a down-and-out, and hopelessly strung-out rocker named Billy Mud and his French photographer former-girlfriend, Chrissa. As Billy's musical career and life are hitting a serious trough, Chrissa uses her connections to get them both a book deal, the premise being that they will fly from their homes in New York to Los Angeles to pick up their backer's "fire-colored '57 DeSoto Adventurer" and then drive it back to New York, for the purpose of later creating a book about their experiences along the way, with Billy writing the text and Chrissa supplying the photographs. This trip back to New York turns out to be a strangely under-described leapfrog from city to city, during which Billy and Chrissa find and lose each other again on more than one occasion, while Billy spends most of his time scoring, or being sick because he cannot score, heroin.
While there is some wonderful writing in this book (especially in its early chapters), where Hell lays down some jarringly spot-on descriptions of and insights into the artist-junkie's lifestyle in late-twentieth-century America, it is ultimately undermined by its gimmicky plot and the lack of interest its author eventually seems to show in his own narrative (it is as if Hell realized halfway thru things that his basic premise was not working very well and simply did not have the heart to delve into it any further than absolutely necessary). In the end, we are left with huge chunks of a truly fascinating addict's memoir attached to the wobbly scaffolding of just another silly road-trip novel.
I am happy to report that GODLIKE, Richard Hell's second novel, is an affair of a much higher order, both as a technical piece of writing, and more importantly, in the depth and wisdom of its tale.
In this novel, Hell basically retells the story of the doomed love affair between the great nineteenth-century French poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, recasting them as American post-Beat poets who come together in New York City in the early 1970s. Paul Vaughn (Hell's Verlaine stand-in), though he hangs out deep in the heart of New York's underground poetry scene of little mimeographed magazines and drug-soaked bohemianism, is also a married man, who goes home at night to a life of middle-class comfort, mainly because of his wife's family's money and connections. This more mainstream half of his life is quickly shattered, however, by the appearance of a young poet named Randall Terrance Wode (most often simply referred to as "T"). At sixteen, T has flown from the stunting sterility of suburban America to the more stimulating environment of New York City. Having written his poet hero Paul in advance (and out of the blue) of his plan, Paul encourages his young fan to track him down once he is in the city, which T does, in arrogant, blustering, and brilliant fashion at a poetry reading featuring what seems to be a large number of New York's alternative poetry elite. Paul immediately falls violently in love with T, forsaking his pregnant wife on this very first night for the burning privilege of sucking T's dick and generally basking in the genius and passion that the younger poet constantly sheds like sparks from a crackling fire.
This relationship is not entirely a one-way street, however. Paul is T's gateway into the world of poets, and for a time his necessary partner in mind-opening (and bending) experiments with homosexuality, various drugs, and a poet's lifestyle that finds its meaning in pushing things to their emotional, physical, and financial edge. But though T is brilliant, he is also a peculate child, and therefore cannot return or even understand Paul's love; and so Paul ultimately becomes little more than fodder for T's insatiable need to experience, his need to move beyond certain feelings and beliefs in search of his own destiny. Because of this, Paul is eventually forsaken by T, but not before a wild affair of bittersweet meaning is paraded before our eyes. Not that Paul is anything close to a complete victim; he truly understands T and what he is getting into. He also has his own agenda of need fulfillment, which he is not shy about putting into play, and most importantly, understands certain things that T, with all his intelligence, does not -- mainly that youth, though it is amazing, is also short-lived and limited in its vision, and finally "that love is real."
Those familiar with story of Verlaine and Rimbaud will easily recognize the grooves and textures of this novel, and those who are not will probably feel a sense of déjà vu anyway, as the dynamics of Paul and T's impossible love accurately reflects so many a doomed relationship in literature -- and more importantly, in life. Indeed, one of the most interesting virtues of this book is how its familiar story works to its advantage. Freed from the necessity of having to labor over the mechanics of his plot, Hell is able to paint in broad, almost impressionist strokes, which not only lays bare the inherently diaphanous nature of his main subject matter (poets, poetry, and of course, romantic love), but also allows him to describe the more surface level aspects of New York poetry scene of the early seventies, and the time and place in general, in language which is often both shimmering and evocative without ever being soft or lush.
This story's evocative nature also owes a great deal to its structure. Though told from Paul's point of view, the novel does not follow the standard first-person narrative, but shifts back and fourth between fragments of Paul's abandoned novel about T and excerpts from his notebooks, many of which are written from the mental hospitals in which Paul apparently often finds himself in the years after his time with T has ended. In less skillful hands, such an approach could easily become unwieldy and/or pretentious; but with Hell it becomes the instrument he uses to truly capture the voice of his aging poet, both thru "Paul's" prose, and thru the poetry Hell writes in Paul's name (Hell's skill as a poet as well as his knowledge of poetry serves him well throughout this work, as "T's" poetry also appears and other real-life poets are quoted liberally).
Though GODLIKE updates the Verlaine-Rimbaud story in a sure and meaningful fashion, and also brilliantly captures the feel of New York poetry scene in the early seventies, in the end, what reveals this work's true worth is that it transcends both its love-story framework and the time and place in which it is set and shows the broader and deeper reality of being an artist in a society that does not value such insights. Basically, GODLIKE is a wonderful novel on all levels, that due to the underground nature of its author's reputation and its graphic and unapologetic descriptions of homosexuality and recreational drug use, will probably languish as a cult read -- at least for the time being. However, if this country ever decides to move in a more humane and compassionate and less judgmental direction, GODLIKE will no doubt come to be seen as the American classic it is.
ROB WOODARD is the author of the novels Heaping Stones (2005, Burning Shore Press) and What Love Is (to be published by Burning Shore Press in the summer of 2007). In 2008 Burning Shore Press will be bringing out, King Of Long Beach, his first volume of poetry. He lives in Long Beach, California. Contact:
