Updates

I've had three poems accepted for publication at Twenty Something Press and I've also had two poems accepted for publication in the anthology Radical Dislocations from Chupa Cabra House. I thank the editors of both for accepting these.

Also, for those you not in the Des Moines area, the first volume of Spoilage is online. It contains my story "The Country Musician", and I'm very flattered to have had my story be the one to kick off this local zine.

Book Review: The Collected Works of Noah Cicero Vol. 1

The Collected Works of Noah Cicero Vol. 1 collects Noah Cicero's first three books The Human War, The Condemned, and Burning Babies as well as some other short stories. The first book review I did for this blog was The Human War, so it seems appropriate I cover this as well.

The first story in the book, "I Clean in Silence", stands out in that it's one of only two pieces in the book that's written in traditional paragraphs, rather than in the style of each sentence as a paragraph like most of the book. It certainly has all the other markings of a Noah Cicero story with its crude humor, its neurotic narrator, and its existential pondering that is never pretentious. As the title suggests, the story is about a woman's thoughts as she quietly cleans the house. She thinks about her boyfriend, her body, her self-loathing, and how hopeless everything seems.

I want the beauty of the west, the mountains, rocky coasts, sea urchins, long strips of highway, endless fields and clear rivers. But all I have are these dishes. Dirty dishes that must be cleaned. Everything must be cleaned.

"Bedroom Scene" is the other story in the book that uses traditional paragraphs. A story about pillow talk between two people with no feelings for each other. This story could be a play with very little re-writing. Not that that's a bad thing.

"No one does anything for themselves. People do it for their parents, to make other people think they're great, to get laid or make money, but they don't do anything for themselves. I don't have anyone to impress and there's nothing I want. I don't care if I'm happy.  People can go fuck themselves. And that includes you and me."

"That's a good attitude. You'll get far in life acting like total bitch."

Speaking of sex, there's a lot in this book. The story "Gratutious Kink" from The Condemned is the stand out in this area. The narrator recounts his sexual encounters from losing his virginity in a church, sleeping with a shemale hooker, sucking dick in an adult theater, to pissing on his girlfriend and watching her fuck other men.

The impact of an orgasm on the human body and mind is the only experience that can remotely relieve the existence of all the bleak shittiness of human reality.

Wise words. And believe me Noah Cicero is full of them. Take this aphorism from my favorite part of this book Burning Babies.

There is no reason to care what people think about you. Because seeing how this world is, it is obvious humans are not good thinkers

Noah Cicero knows how to boil a sentence down to its bare essence for maximum impact. His stories are funny, cruel, insightful, and just a joy to read. I highly recommend you pick up Collected Works. It is well worth a read.

Buy The Collected Works of Noah Cicero Vol. 1 here.

Book Review: Tool. by Peter Sotos

This is not going to be an easy book to review. At least part of that is because of who the author is. Peter Sotos was the first US citizen to be convicted of possession of child pornography. That alone will be enough to get most people to write this off. I'm not going to try convince you otherwise if you feel that way. If there's one thing Sotos makes it obvious he hates in Tool., it's apologists.

Tool. was first published by Jim Goad in the compilation Total Abuse in 1995, which collected this novella as well as the zines Sotos published Pure and Parasite. It was again published in another compilation called Proxy: Peter Sotos Pornography 1991-2000 in 2005, which collected five of the books Sotos had published up until then. Just this year, Nine Banded Books published Tool. as a standalone volume.

While Tool. is billed as a novella, it's tempting to see it as more of a short story collection, because the chapters stand by themselves as narratives. Though they are connected by theme.

The first chapter relates the kidnapping and abuse of a ten-year-old girl from the perspective of the abuser.

You're such a pretty girl. You shouldn't cry. Such a dear. Those tears aren't pretty, are they?

Needless to say, it's a very unpleasant read. Between this and his conviction (which is recounted in chapter five of the book), it's easy to think Sotos is simply a violent pedophile. I don't think he is. Sotos seems far more interested in the suffering and loss of the parents of the victimized children than the actual act of abusing children. Much of the first chapter is spent ruminating on the pain the girl's parents will feel from finding that she's been raped and murdered.

Your parents are going to miss you for the rest of their ridiculous lives. They're going to be hurt and be miserable human wastes from this day forward. They are going to grow to hate the very thought of you.

This is even more obvious in chapters four and eight, which are written as letters to the parents of children who have been murdered. Chapter four is a letter from a man who murdered a woman's son. He recounts to the mother how her son was a drug addict and a prostitute and tells the mother that she needs to admit this to herself. As cruel as this is, it shows a deep concern for the humanity of the victim.

Well, I know I've taken up too much of your time, and if I might be so bold, one last time, I suspect your time with Danny was always a mite strained and difficult for you. Hopefully, next time you talk to the press or the parole board, you might mention less about what a great kid gone awry he was and more about how he was pretty much dead before I even got near him.

I think that would be the honest thing to do and more in keeping with a real love for Danny. No use in tarnishing your personal photo book even more than it already is.

Sotos refuses to canonize the young man as a saint because he was a victim of a murder. He demands that the young man's flaws not be swept under the rug simply because of the crime inflicted on them.

Chapter eight is probably the most fascinating, because compared with the previous chapters, it is far less angry and violent and explicit. Yet it is by far the bleakest. It's written as a letter from a stranger to a woman whose child was the victim of a high profile kidnapping, rape, and murder. The letter begins sympathetically enough, but soon he begins to pry into uncomfortable details.

Are your thoughts entirely controlled by this heinous crime and terrific loss? Are even the most menial, knee-jerk tasks now subject to uncontrollable recollections of Lisa? Are all your memories harsh and painful and ugly?

He ends this letter by essentially telling this woman that the best way to cope with her loss is to give up all belief in hope, love, and empathy.

Those things you thought were real before are now too cumbersome and ungainly. Those feelings have to be changed. The lines in your face, the stretch marks on your belly, and the grey in your hair all must attest to something new. Something unplanned and unprepared for. Something that reflects how life truly is.

It seems like in this book of raped children, crack whores, AIDS victims, and gloryhole vistors, you could have no other ending. It also brings us full circle with Chip Smith's statement in the preface of the book that Sotos is best viewed with (in Thomas Ligotti's words) the idea that "the Universe is malignantly useless" as a starting point.

I can't pretend I completely "understand" this book, nor that I read it for reasons beyond a fascination with the subject matter. I don't think Sotos completely understands why he writes what he writes either. He makes this clear in the essay that ends this book called "Mine/Kept".

I need to explain myself and, I swear, I already have.

Though one could argue that there's really nothing to "understand".

I don't think art is a conversation between the reader and the creator. It's an intensely selfish obsession and a personal, internal dialogue. Just exactly like experience.

This is a very difficult book to recommend. Sotos is a powerful writer with a lot of talent, but reading him makes one feel like you've had someone take a shit on your soul. Here is a sample chapter. If you believe it has worth, then you should certainly pick up Tool. If it simply disgusts you and you see no value in it, then skip it.

Buy Tool. by Peter Sotos here. 

The Bride of Brief Thoughts

Yup. We're doing this again.

Sick City by Tony O'Neill

Now this was a fun read. In this neo-noir thriller, a junkie named Jeffrey comes into possession of a sex tape featuring Sharon Tate after his lover dies. Knowing that this tape could be worth millions, he sets about to get himself clean so he can cash in. While in rehab, he meets Randal, another junkie from a rich family with connections in Hollywood. They team up to find a buyer for the tape. All the while being trailed by someone who has it out for Jeffrey.

This book is a fun page-turner, and even throws some entertaining barbs at the Hollywood system and the rehab industry. Easy targets, I'll admit. But some things you never get tired of seeing beat up on. If you're a fan of thrillers or neo-noir in general this is definitely worth a read.

Buy Sick City by Tony O'Neill here.

The Kid by Sapphire

The Kid is the sequel to Sapphire's first novel Push, which is probably better known by the movie Precious.

I think Push showed that Sapphire is a talented writer. However, she has a tendency to pile it on a little too thick. I can take a retarded baby conceived through incestuous rape seriously, but when you name it "Mongo", you start to lose me.

Sapphire works in a similar vein as Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines, in that she paints a nasty and vivid picture of the life of poor urban blacks. Unlike Slim and like Goines, she has the unfortunate tendency to engage in a certain degree of preaching. She ended Push on a "hopeful" note, with Precious learning how to read and her second child, Abdul, being born healthy. Reading the reviews of The Kid was interesting, because that hope is shattered at the beginning of this book when Precious succumbs to complications from AIDS. This upset a lot of people.

Another thing that bothered a lot of people is the stream of consciousness style the book is written in. This book is about Precious's son Abdul and his life from childhood to young adulthood. Unlike his mother, Abdul is intelligent but also plagued by a lot of mental problems. This results in him doing things like blurring the line between his dreams and what actually happens, engaging in mantras to keep himself steady, and jumping between his memories and the present. Especially in the final chapter, it begins to border on Faulkner levels of confusing. That said, it makes for a highly visceral read.

Like Push, Sapphire piles it on way too thick. I'm beginning to wonder if she's capable of writing a character who hasn't experienced childhood sexual abuse. The scene where Abdul is attacked by an older boy is disturbing, but loses it's impact from the boy attacking him being called "Batty Boy". Seriously.

The fact Sapphire tries to cover so much results in things going nowhere. For example, there is a scene where one of Abdul's friends comes out as transgender to him. You think this will lead to something. It doesn't.

In the end, if you liked Push, then The Kid is worth a read. If not, skip it. Personally, I think Sapphire's command of language is strong enough that I'll probably check out her poetry at some point.

Buy The Kid by Sapphire here.

Book Review: Mad by Jonathan Bowden

We are all failures because we all die.

About a year ago, Jonathan Bowden died of a heart attack. He was 49, just a few weeks shy of turning 50.

Politics is a matter of life and death.

Bowden is probably best known for his involvement in various British right-wing movements. At one point, he was the Cultural Officer for the British National Party. He gave several speeches over his political career and was regarded as a master orator by his peers.

Art hates ideologies because it is the one that encompasses all the others.

Bowden's other great passion was in the arts. Many of the speeches he delivered were in regards to the relation of art to right-wing politics. He was also an artist, a writer, and an actor. He acted in two films (which he also wrote), produced several drawings and paintings, and wrote several books. His first book was Mad. Apparently written when he was 18, and originally released in 1989, it was re-released in 2009 by Nine Banded Books.

In spite of his conservative political beliefs, Bowden's artworks have a very modernist sensibility to them. This is very apparent in Mad.

It's difficult to say exactly what Mad is. It's too scattershot to call it a proper essay, and it's too experimental in form to call a polemic. As vague the description is, it would probably make the most sense to call it a prose poem. Though even that may not be accurate.

In short, this is an attempt to understand the Marquis de Sade. A man who was destroyed by the revolution he created. There was something bad in him. Baudelaire was right: when you want to discuss cruelty we must always go back to de Sade.

Mad has three major themes running through it. The first is the inherent cruelty of humanity that civilization is based on. The second is the fact of human mortality. The third is human sexuality.

The first theme is best summed up by the first two sentences in the book.

Terror is the chief motivation of civil behavior. No other explanation does as well.

He bangs on this particular drum very often in this book. However, it's never boring. The phrases and associations he draws from this are amazing. A particular favorite of mine is near the end when Bowden discusses fascism. The part is too long to quote here, but it's essentially about how Peter Brueghel's The Triumph of Death foreshadowed the fascism of the mid-20th century.

The final part of the book is especially fascinating in general, given Bowden's later activities. He engages in a dismissal of almost every major political doctrine. Fascism is "the moral equivalent of venereal disease in the politicals of the body", liberalism is "bourgeois guilt", conservatism "has no ideology except self-preservation" and communism "commits plastic surgery on a face which had not been damaged". His critical view of the state itself even seems to indicate anarchist sympathies.

States are built on mountains of skulls. A state is a revolution against nature; enacted in alliance with nature. States represent nature in so far as no-one rebels against their moral squalor.

It would be interesting to hear how Bowden went from this view to being involved with right-wing party politics.

The third theme was, for me, the most difficult to get a handle on. On the one hand, I admire that the views on gender and sexuality presented would piss off traditionalists and feminist/queer activists at the same time. On the other, this is where Bowden makes the most ludicrous statements in the book. The worst of this is where he characterizes masturbation as a "homosexual act". Yeah, okay.

Something that may be a sticking point for others is the use of punctuation in this book. It's used in obviously "wrong" ways several times. This is coming from a guy who constantly needs to look up rules regarding commas. Yet I don't think they were mistakes. I get the impression he was attempting to create a unique cadence with the way he abuses commas, semi-colons, dashes, and colons.

Even if they are actual mistakes, they don't detract from the book for me. That is the key attraction of this book for me. The complete fury I sense coming from the work. Reading this, it seems like something Bowden wrote in a complete fugue. I can picture him sitting at a typewriter. Eyes wide, teeth clenched, and breathing heavily. Pounding furiously at the keys. Tearing away the filled up paper and slamming it on the table next to the typewriter. Annoyed by the time it takes to load a new page to abuse.

The result is completely enthralling and often very thought-provoking. Because of that, I highly recommend Mad.

Oh and that second theme? I think Bowden is all too familiar with that now.

Sadly, though, moments of ecstasy are rare. Most human-beings are on a treadmill of sorrow. They know they’re going to die, and they have repressed it. They have not taken responsibility for it. They have not realized the truth. They have not understood that men are born screaming; and when they stop; they die.

Buy Mad by Jonathan Bowden here.

Book Review: Janitor of Planet Anilingus by Andrew Wayne Adams

Don't let the title fool you, this isn't science fiction porn. Technically. I think.

Andrew Wayne Adams' debut novella is about a janitor named Jack who lives on the planet Anilingus. With me so far?

Anilingus is a sort of resort planet run by the Catholic Church where people come year round to engage in non-stop ass-licking. Except during Lent. Lent is Jack's favorite time of the year, because he has the entire planet all to himself, and he can clean the place without being surrounded by butt-lickers. However, he's not alone this year. While out cleaning, he meets a woman named Nimue who has been stuck on the planet because someone is trying to kill her.

Jack and Nimue soon run into the man after her. After narrowly escaping, Jack goes back to work the next day to find he's been fired and is going to be replaced by a man-child who is one of the boss's relatives. Then things start to get weird.

Do I have Satan in my rectum?

The story in Janitor of Planet Anilingus is absurd and hilarious.The ridiculous world Adams creates is fascinating and fun to inhabit for the duration of the book. The way Adams twists science fiction tropes kept me enthralled through the whole thing. It even manages to make some commentary on religion and belief without sounding pompous or pretentious.

The cast of characters is limited but well developed. None of them went in the direction that I expected them to.

It isn't perfect. There are times where the prose felt a little clunky. There are also some attempts to explain the metaphysics of the world that just made me kind of space out. Uninteresting technobabble.

That said, if you want a completely insane science fiction adventure story, pick this is up. It's a short but highly enjoyable read. I see a lot of potential in Adams as a writer. He sent this to me for a review, and I plan to check out his future work.

As for you, pull your tongue out of that ass, and buy this to support a new writer.

Buy Janitor of Planet Anilingus by Andrew Wayne Adams here.

Book Review: The Talkative Corpse by Ann Sterzinger

The protagonist of Ann Sterzinger's The Talkative Corpse calls himself Johnny Jaggo. That's not his real name. Whatever his real name was is lost, because he's dead. Long dead. Everyone he knew is dead. He lived in Chicago, but whatever is left of that is buried under rubble. Jaggo had enough foresight to know that would probably happen and took it into consideration while he wrote his message for the future.

I will print it all out on the highest-quality paper I can find, and then cover it with plastic laminate. I got a great deal on the laminating machine. And plastic? Plastic might even outlive nuclear waste. So what if none of the current weasels pay me no nevermind, not even enough to give me a job at a decent wage; in this gob of hopefully unmelted plastic I hope that part of me will outlive them all. From here on in I’m all about you, anthropologists of the new dawn!

Jaggo decided to document his present time to preserve information about it for future generations. Specifically a few months from 2011 to 2012. He's more interested in venting his spleen than doing any documenting though. One could argue that's a far better way to capture the basic essence of American life in the 2010s. I'd be inclined to agree.

Jaggo attacks everyone in his diary/time-capsule. His asshole bosses, his asshole neighbors, the privileged, the poor, and his ex-girlfriend. Eventually his rage builds to the point he accidentally summons a demon during a drunken blackout. Don't you hate when that happens? Worse, the demon Bertram will only leave after he's killed one person Jaggo hates and one he loves. Fortunately for him, he doesn't love anyone. Yet.

Anyone who's had the displeasure of looking for a fucking job within the last few years will probably know where Jaggo is coming from in his rants against the people who do the hiring.

Who’s working in HR these days? Burned-out kindergarten teachers?  Planet of the assholes… at least I can enjoy thinking about the wonderful relationships they’re setting themselves up for, with ruddy financiers who love only whiskey and employees who lie on their resumes and everywhere else…

Of course, anyone who's ever had a job at all won't have trouble seeing where so much of Jaggo's bile comes from.

And the way things are going, I might as well have stayed a medieval serf. I’m writing for you, Future, because you’re the only people I can talk toward, but really, I want to go back in time, way back in time, to back when people didn’t fucking hallucinate that oi polloi could somehow be “free.” We’ve always been serfs for life, but we used to call a spade a spade. So I hate you, America. You sneeringly frozen plutocracy, with your false promises of a fair shot for the best of the lackeys. You’ve convinced the morons that you’re a democracy when you’ve got too many citizens to even make a decent empire.  

The blurb on Sterzinger's previous novel NVSQVAM (nowhere) compares her to Knut Hamsun. That's appropriate, because I was reminded a lot of Hunger while I read The Talkative Corpse. Especially in how hope and some relief from his suffering will constantly be provided to the protagonist, only to have it immediately yanked away so that life can shit down his throat some more.

Jaggo is full of hatred and anger, and all of it feels completely justified. Well, his fantasies of murdering his ex-girlfriend are a little excessive. But hey, he quotes Magnetic Fields lyrics while he imagines beating the shit out her, so that's got to count in his favor. Right?

Once things take a magic realist turn and the demon Bertram shows up, it becomes pretty clear there's absolutely no way this will end without blood spilling. I won't spoil it, but the ending delivered while still being somewhat surprising.

Occasionally, Jaggo's rants begin to feel a little repetitive, but Sterzinger's violent and funny prose keeps things interesting enough that they were never boring.

In The Talkative Corpse, Ann Sterzinger tears into the bullshit of contemporary American life with a mixture of venom, humor, and even a little empathy. Sterzinger was kind enough to send me the text in advance for a review and I'm glad she did. I recommend you pick this one up once it's released. I have Sterzinger's NVSQVAM (nowhere) on my shelf and I'm looking forward to reading that as well. Unfortunately for assholes like me who fetishize physical books, The Talkative Corpse is only going to be released as an e-book as of this writing.

For those who still need some convincing, you can read the first three chapters at Fine, I'll start a goddamn blog.

Buy The Talktative Corpse by Ann Sterzinger here.