New York Howl

Every band has a story an image a brand and a one-sheet. Rarely is it well written, rarely is it well-conceived or even vaguely interesting. The New York Howl however... what a great line. Who wrote it? Who knows.

"The New York Howl is an explosive punk, blues, rock n roll, psychedelic, soul family band living in Brooklyn, New York. We share a dream. We endeavor to hold the crackling, livid, blinding, screaming, fleeting, weightless truth in the palm of our hands, in the muscle of our hearts, and in the wet of our mouths. You will see us breathe bright waterfalls of fire and you will hear the sounds of children playing with electricity."

Roth

"The profusion of stars told him unambiguously that he was doomed to die, and the thunder of the sea only yards away—and the nightmare of the blackest blackness beneath the frenzy of the water—made him want to run from the menace of oblivion in their cozy, lighted, underfurnished house."

Philip Roth is still alive, and while his book "Everyman" is in my view his best since Portnoys Complaint his persistence gives hope he will better it yet. It's been half a century since he began writing and still no one else grasps that arena of queasy emotionality. He discussed it on NPR back in 2006.

Black Market Surgery

Matthew Good was probably fabricating everything. But he wrote an online journal of sorts. For a short period of time he was on Atlantic Records, and they for some reason printed them in two editions with identical covers but including journals of slightly different eras. the writing was disjointed, non-linear almost reflective of the Burroughs cut-up experiments. But ultimately, the words are not shuffled, only the strange mind of Mr. Good.

"Tomorrow everything will be the same as it was yesterday. Today is just another two minutes on the news. That picture in your wallet, salvation, they won't bring that up. Will they? There's a million different ways to say I love you."

Brother JT

Brother JT was a small-time rocker, a local legend that didn't make the big leap. His old band The Original Sins were a garage rock powerhouse. Today he's a more minor figure. But in his introspective obscurity he wrote a substantial rock essay. I say rock essay as you might say rock opera. It's 58 pages long and strings together his ideas about acid rock, Jesus, baseball, Ted Nugent and Miles Davis. He posted it online here.

"Her impossibly nimble, razor-like voice performs a sacred earjob on the listener, carving an explicit dream of dusty tent initiations into your poor brain, while simultaneously rubbing warm balm into the incision, leaving only a scar of involuntary enlightenment."

Ken Kesey

I feel unqualified to judge Kesey. When beat writing emerged from jive talk, it's literary adherents where young and up to the task of redefining literature. For all the talk of Don Quixote being the first modern novel... our present literary fiction bears much more similarity to thsi work. There were others surely, Go by John Clellon Holmes, and On the Road by Kerouac but these were biographical. Kesey tacked the other beast, the novel. in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest he also took a tip from Guy de Maupassant, with a narrator who is insane.

"The worker takes the scalpel and slices up the front of old Blastic with a clean swing and the old man stops thrashing around. I expect to be sick, but there's no blood or innards falling out like I was looking to see-just a shower of rust and ashes, and now and again a peice of wire or glass."

Roman Proske

To my knowledge he wrote nothing other than his autobiography. the book is pretty bad, if his life wasn't so interesting, the book would be outright hopeless. The play-by-play is great, but the color is lacking. His observations are few, leaving the text thin. But once, he makes a strange poetic observation.

"The thought that my lions were housed in the same den that had been occupied by the lions of Rome two thousand years before, that I was treading the same ground where the spectacle of the circus had it's origins, moved me deeply. I felt a kinship with more forebears, the gladiators, so long turned to dust, who had once faced death here, and triumphed or gone under. This dry, sunbaked earth that had known the taste of blood of men and beasts was sacred to me."

The lions are no metaphor. He was a lion tamer. But when first browsing, I didn't know that. I think as much as I like it, I liked it better when the lions were a vague idea of something regal but menacing.

The Stranger

It's hard to imagine it was made into a film. But it was Orson Welles, and it was 1946 right after the first English translation, in the middle of the red scare so maybe, at the height of our collective paranoia it may have been possible. It was published first in 1942 in French of course. In 1954 he even recorded an audio book himself. It was his true first novel, his prior work all being non-fiction. There are three primary English translations.

Stuart Gilbert (1946): Formal and stiff.
Matthew Ward (1989): More even handed and modern, my preference.
Joseph Laredo (1983): Similar to Ward but not as immediate.

"And I, too, felt ready to start life all over again. It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely ,all that remained was to hope that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration." -Camus

The Strange Woman

Ben Ames Williams, author of short stories and novels, was born in Macon, Mississippi in 1889. Strangely his best work was set in Bangor Maine. Much of the book feels dated, but when he delves into a sefarers gothic his provse comes alive in a dark 'Billy Budd' kind of way. He repeatedly descibes a hydrophobia that I don't think has ever been matched.

1.

"He imagined the canoe overturning, felt the strangling water flood his laboring lungs, saw his body sinking with last spasmodic reflex jerkings of arms and legs to rest at last on the dark, slimed bottom of the lake till great sluggish fish with toothless mouths came to pluck at the soft, decaying flesh."

2.

"...and he imagined the canoe broken against these ledges and saw his own helpless body caught by the current and whirled downstream, to smash against the toothed rocks with sodden. bruising blows, and he imagined the egglike crunch of a cracked skull or the hideous grating grind of breaking bones in his arms and legs. "

The paranoid fears of course were skilled foreshadowing for the real incident

...

The Wine of San Lorenzo

"The vast crescent backdrop of mountains began to merge into the darkening sky and a few stars glowed faintly through the incredibly clean air. It was both day and night, an overlapping of both, that infinite moment in the twenty-four hours that Juan Diego loved best..." -Herbert Gorman

Much of the book is downright cheesy actually using the terms "villainous" and "savage men" as a writer only could in 1945. But his flourish works well for certain applications. Mine is a used copy of course.

The Forest People

Really an anthropological text, The Forest people tells the story of living among the pygmy to tell the story of the pygmy. On some levels it fails. Writer/anthropologist Colin Turnbull changes the turn of events by being there. His writing gets a tad nostalgic and even misty when he describes how amazed he is by the pygmy. He's more of an active player than is probably appropriate. But he does have some truly great insights. But the two sides are somewhat at odds. (capitalization and italics are his)

"I heard him Murmur once more "You will see things you have never seen before... You will understand why we are called People of the Forest... When the Forest dies, we die." And for the last time I heard the chorus of that great song of praise: "If Darkness is, Darkness is Good."

I have no recourse but to beleive that is is as he describes, but so much of the rest of the book reads less fantastically. It's minimalism is so much more effective when used to express the stunning newness.

"The Pygmies express various degrees of illness by saying that someone is hot with fever, ill, dead, completely or absolutely dead, and, finally, dead for ever."

off topic.

I scanned a DIY comic I bought 15 years ago. Thought I'd share. The artwork is deliberately low-brow, but the plot line is disturbed.
http://www.divshare.com/download/5926089-1c3

L.S.D.-25

A modern Kerouac, a 255 page narrative on youth, rebellion, misery and of course drugs. It's a bit of a cult classic. Good luck finding it.
"I'd hoped that I would taste something strange - all this talk of synesthesia - but the turkey was just turkey.I was still me, neither happier nor more depressed, and, aside from a bit of vertigo, the world was still the world." - Jess Yandow

Robert Herrick

From the book The Web of Life, by Robert Herrick first printed in 1900. He was an early American realist, and one really engaged with all the Gothic trappings of our then fresh industrialization. He's the American answer to George Gissing. Of his 13 books this is generally considered by critics to be his best. Due to the wonderment of public domain you can download it free if you can find it. It was on Google Books, but has been mysteriously withdrawn.

"Thus the body social threw out much smoke, but no vital heat; here and there, the red glare of violence burst up through the dust of words and the insufferable cant of the world."

Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges describes the meeting of deserter martin Fierro and Tadeo Isidoro Cruz. None of us may ever write a sentence this powerful in our lives.

"Any destiny at all, however long and complicated, in reality consists of a single moment: the moment in which a man once and for all knows who he is."

Carlos Fuentes: The Old Gringo

A normal run-on sentence is pedestrian. The forceful, marauding use of polysyndeton to drag out a sentence into a multiple page narrative is badass. The comma, the semi colon, the parentheses, and the em dash all feature. Carlos Fuentes wrote in Spanish, as his native language. In translation, his grammar and punctuation was preserved as much as possible. It leaves me to wonder if this one sentence was even longer and more ungainly in the original.

"I could breathe with the place and see what each one was doing in his own bedroom, in his bathroom, in the dining room, there as nothing either secret or public for me the little witness, Harriett, I who saw them all, heard them all, imagined and smelled them all by simply breathing with the rhythm they didn't posses because they didn't' need it, they took it all for granted, I had to breathe in the hacienda, fill my lungs with its smallest flake of paint, and be the absent witness to every single copulation, hurried or languorous, imaginative or boring, whining or proud, tender or cold, to every single defecation, thick or watery, green or red, smooth or caked with undigested corn, I heard every fart, do you hear, every belch, every spit fall, every pee run, and I saw the scrawny turkeys having their necks twisted, the oxen emasculated, the goats eviscerated, and put on the spit, I saw bottles being corked full of uneasy wine of the Coahuila Valleys, so near to the desert that they taste like cactus wine, then the medicine bottles being uncorked for the castor oil purges, and the fevers running high in death and childbirth and children's diseases, I could touch the red velvets and creamy organdies and green taffetas of the hoopskirts and bonnets of the ladies, the long lace nightgowns with the Sacred Heart of Jesus embroidered in front of their cunts: the quivering, humble devotion to the votive lamps quietly sweating away their orange-colored wax as if caught up in a holy orgasm; contrasting, gringa, with the chandeliers of the vast mansion of stylish, expensive wooden floors and heavy draperies and golden tassels and grandfather clocks and wingtip chairs and rickety dining room chairs bathed in golden paint-I saw it all, and then one day my old friend, the most ancient man in the hacienda, a man maybe as old as the hacienda itself, a man who had never worn shoes and did not make noise (Graciano his name was, now I recall it), dressed in white peasant shirt and pants, a piece of rawhide that man, wearing clothes patched over and over again will it was impossible to distinguish between the patches on his clothes and the wrinkles on his skin, as if the body had also been patched over a thousand times: Graciano with his white stubble on his head and chin was the old man charged with winding the clocks every evening, and one night he took me with him."

Try to top that.

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard is overtly spiritual making most of her books degenerate into insane glossolalia-worthy gibberish. She connects utterly unrelated thing son the way to not ever making a point. But the stories are interesting if you don't mind skipping the pages of drivel. But in that jumble of deeply heartfelt dookie, are some wonderful turns of phrase. My example, For the Time Being Knopf books circa 1999.

"Later, if the boy saw a book left open on a bench, he spreads a prayer shawl to cover its open pages. In his world, people respected books. When a book wore out, they buried it like a person."

These two sentences make a cult of this boys thinking. The outside world disrespects books, possibly property, It symbolizes a disrespect for language, knowledge and maybe even the boy. Most importantly it isolates him and also gives him a ghostly seeming presence. It's very intriguing. If only she could carry a plot.

cockpunch

" ...the Russian operation in Georgia was straight out of Col. Boyd's playbook: Roll in hard and fast with overwhelming force, administer the cockpunch, and be finished before anyone can prepare a response or start blathering on about peackeepers and/or UN resolutions. Because that's how it's done in the New Century of the Naked Ape."

-S.A.W. (courtesy of Strudel and Shotguns)

This was an incredible turn of phrase. The juxtaposition of the formal word "administer" a verbose synonym for "apply" or "do" and the very informal, perhaps vulgar "cockpunch." It reminds me of the TV series Deadwood. Deadwood and it's own turns of phrase that won David Milch such laurels. For example:

"I may have fucked my life up flatter'n hammered shit, but I stand before you today beholden to no human cocksucker."

It's a rare writer that can do thsi with fluidity and still carry a plot, a dialog or a message. Strudel & Shotguns manages all three.

Breece D'J Pancake

It's probably one of the best books I ever read. His sentences are short like Hemingway but they stack up better somehow. The voices are truer, and the locale grittier and more tangible. It lacks the 1950s maudlin quality that Hem couldn't help painting all over France, Cuba and Africa.

"I should never show up in these little river towns until my tug comes in - but I always come early, wait, watch people on the street. Out there vapor lamps flicker violet, bounce their light up from the pavement, twist everything's color. A few people walk along in the drizzle, but they don't stop to look into cheap shop windows."

There is a collection of his short stories available. His catalog is short. In 1979 at the age of 26 he shot himself in the head.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200404u/pancake
http://www.appalachianbooks.com/Authors/Breece%20Pancake.htm
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1151208

Linda Yablonsky

Linda Yablonsky is a music critic. She's not quite on par with me, but she's much more suave and that's worth something. She also used to be on Smack and you can't beat that real-life experience in writing. Her book "The Story of Junk" is a strangely detached tale of a drug-fiend. While some may recoil at the inhumanity. Sincerity cannot be overrated. I quote a single sentence from a concert review she wrote in another less graphic book: The Show I'll Never Forget.

"I remember Roach go at his drums as if they were the pages of a book of joy and madness that he was reading and writing at the same time, that Simone picked up to add color and meaning."

You had me at "Joy and madness."