Revolver: Take arms against a sea of troubles...

The murk and sludge of 2008 engendered a wide variety of responses. When I could get high in 2008, it was on the wings of a writing bender which wound up seeing me into the Teens. In the triumvirate of e-chap/e-book publications in ’08 and ’09, Revolver distinguishes itself by a vested sense of sobriety. Revolver is not me burying myself in alcohol, nor is it me wallowing in the urban menace atmosphere of filth and scum. Revolver is where I respond to the sleaze and scum by fighting back. Wide awake, the protagonist here takes in the world around him, and sees what unholy, bitterly corrupted lights he can shoot out. Beneath the sobriety and the fury, Revolver also reads as a last will and testament of and for my relationship with Mary Evelyn Harju. I’m watching her moves, and watching mine, and trying to discern why the impasse between us must be, or seem, permanent. Blood on the Tracks time. There’s always a rift where the physical and spiritual play a violent, spiteful game of tug-of-war. The criticisms and recriminations which inform Love You To, lead to molten melt-down of She Said She Said and then the complete and totalized entropy of For No One. As the final salvo of the e-chap, Tomorrow Never Knows consummates a willful imposition of the physical on the spiritual and vice versa, into a sense of life being conceived in a dissolution of individual consciousness. This is where the lovers cease to exist, and commune in something like a Universal consciousness or Mind. Where sex means something. Where Mary and I are concerned, the final fuck (half-metaphorically meant) is the most profound. The revolver carried by the protagonist annihilates itself, as it self-exhausts, and the ecstasy does not exclude sobriety, faithfulness, or discipline. What actually happened between Ms. H and I in the second half of ’07 is tangled. Some of our raw material got transmuted, some rendered with (again) an adequate faithfulness. Released as a Scantily Clad Press e-chap in ’08, Revolver’s solution for recessional entropy is a commitment to cultivating presence, reality, individuality. These are seen to be worth fighting for. Entity, unthinking consciousness, is not to be trusted, as a weakening agent. All shot through with a patina of raw, divorced pain. One way home.

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                                          The Fall: Mary Evelyn Harju: 2008

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More on the death of love: Apparition Poem #1497 in denver syntax 20, Apparition Poem #1558 in Cricket Online Review 6.

Rubber Soul: Vino Veritas

 

Vino veritas, translates from the Latin, roughly, as this: truth-in-alcohol. The phenomenon by which we tell more of the truth when drunk. Is vino veritas something real? I wouldn’t venture a definitive guess. Different people react different ways to different stimulants and/or depressants. I would only say that, in my life as a writer, I’ve only dived (delved) into these murky waters once, i.e. written an entire piece (in this case, a chapbook length manuscript) while alcohol shit-faced. Rubber Soul was written and published in 2008. I have made a point of pointing out, in other places, that I was not playing the game straight for much of that particular, recession-trundling year. I wasn’t compulsively shit-faced either; I had (for instance) to function at Temple, both as adjunct prof and graduate student, and I did. But it was a saucy time, of old games turning up loose ends, and, where the recession was concerned, micro and macro levels converging in my life, and the lives of those I cared for. Even as I found, of course, that I couldn’t take care of them anymore. So: I was drunk enough of the time to take my stab, for instance, at the Jack Kerouac of Big Sur. The narrative voice emerges, as in Big Sur, fuzzy, hazy, staggering, stumbling. Drunken. Also channeling my old family relation Jim Morrison. Paul Rothchild said of Morrison, When he was being the shit-faced kamikaze drunk, it was odds-on against getting him to do a vocal. You might look into it. Paraphrase for a writer churning out a brief book: I looked into it.

The narrative Rubber Soul voice is, in fact, too fuzzy, too hazy, to attempt anything classic. Keats keeps getting leaned on, Manhattan juts in absurdly, as does a bizarre overlay of occult/New Age/Golden Dawn baggage. Amidst all the glass shards, who I am as a long-suffering male protagonist in Girl is clearly, and precociously, taking on the task of relating/mythologizing the years on the front-lines with Mary Evelyn. Eight years, to be precise. The Word finds me sounding not like Kerouac or Morrison but like Charles Bukowski. He becomes another absurd overlay, amidst the fuzziness and the Crowley bric-a-brac. The overall tone of Rubber Soul, I would say, is not morose like Big Sur but frenzied, chaotic, hysterical. Much of it’s supposed to be funny, too, the kind of funniness The White Album sacrifices at the altar of still-cherished classicism. Rubber Soul can be taken as a romp all the way through. Ungovernable Press, btw, which published The White Album (1st ed.) and Rubber Soul in ’09 and ’08, respectively, is based in Sweden, and emanates from editor Lars Palm at the center. Part of the ’08 fracas was about weird worlds colliding online. Philadelphia to Malmo? Why not. And me and many others did have a sense of largesse, then, about how many books and chapbooks we could publish. A nifty compensation, as it were, for all the drunken nights. And a clue as to why some of us have been able to survive all the melees.

Trish: A Romance

 

Ironic, in a piece about luxury, sensuality, and ease, that it’s taken me so long, until 2024, to finish Trish: A Romance. The portion of the Aughts Philly dream which has remained crystalline over twenty to twenty five years— emancipation from limiting belief systems or creeds, freedom to live expressively, and, most importantly, manifestations of extreme, libertine-worthy excess— are not difficult to define or express. The difficulty in the Trish: A Romance textual journey, which began in 2009, is to render luxury, sensuality, and ease, while remaining faithful to complexities built into myself, Trish (Mary) and Tobi (Abby) as characters. Not all libertine models are complicated people; we were. Also worth noting about 2009; the last real chunk of time I spent with Abby Heller-Burnham, in the 23rd and Arch apartment (Westminster Arch), involved Trish: A Romance. I wanted to tape Abby talking about Mary, narrating their friendship, to see if I could use it. Thus, one section of the book (I thought) could be Abby-on-Mary. Didn’t work. When the tape began to roll, Abby wanted to talk about herself and her travails, which were gruesome in late-summer ’09. Abby was not a happy camper then, and all the ease, the bliss of the six, seven, eight years before were gone. As I said, I was never to interact with her in a prolonged way again.

Yet, Trish: A Romance remains, a testament to a period of time with many miracles built into it. Like the travelogue writings of Christopher Isherwood, the text dwells on a surfeit of characters who don’t just dream but live wild adventures and romances. The bizarre formality of the piece— seven sets of six sonnet-length stanzas— was invented so that the action could be conveyed in a vessel (as Mary would say) lean and mean enough to make the ride a brisk one. The miracle isn’t just in fornication and carousing— it’s the fact that said fornication and carousing was done in a spirit not just of affection but of love. At the end of the day, these are characters who love each other. This, notwithstanding the concluding revelation of the protagonist— that Trish has remained at lease partially unknowable to him. The point is, the characters in Trish: A Romance are not scallywags. They have, and notice, their own emotions. Even as accusations of self-indulgence are not necessarily misplaced. People will take Trish: A Romance not just to Christopher Isherwood but to Brett Easton-Ellis; that much sex, drugs, youthfulness, and rambunctious indulgence does form a sense of symmetry with Less Than Zero. I would only choose to say that in Trish, a sense of emotional/spiritual engagement, rather than dispossession, takes all the Philly-L.A. energy and harnesses it into a form more human, more likeable than the Easton-Ellis book. Remember: the three protagonists are all artists, creative types. La Boheme? No. Something unique, that’s just what it is. See for yourself.

The White Album

 

Memories of the summer of 2008, when I wrote The White Album: lots of them, all about chaos, disorder, built-up scum. The move I made that July was within Logan Square, from 21st and Race to 23rd and Arch. The old flat had been a horny revelation: endless fun, endless soporific reverie. The new flat was comparatively pedestrian: low ceilings, not much direct sunlight, let alone bay windows, or a loft-like sense of space. All this, because rents in Center City Philly were going sky-high. The visit to Chicago in June had been interesting, borderline brilliant: but I was running out of the money needed to do such things. Was, in fact, accruing a significant amount of debt. Temple was a source of continual frustration. There were the Comp Exams to worry about, and trying to teach and do everything else I was doing at once. I had started an affair in May, and it had ended in May. I numbed myself out to deal with the disappointment I hadn’t expected. The new Mary H failed to arrive. I was alone. The temptation to wander over to between 20th and 19th and Chestnut and procure another bottle of whiskey was always there. And often indulged. Mary herself had become obdurate, unreachable. There was no going back. Jenny Kanzler arrived with a vision of reality straight out of the late Roman Empire, or the Rocky Horror mansion. A good painter, but a spook. Nothing soporific there. And Abby was wandering at large somewhere out there, shooting up God knows what by that time. Entropy: that’s what all this was about. When, a year later, and still scum-ified in another scummy summer, I affixed the Robert Ryman to the first edition of TWA, it was to express the sense that the magic of several years back had inverted, for all of us, into something primitive, faltering, sloppy. Ryman takes Abby, Mary, and Jenny, and turns them on their heads. That’s what The White Album is supposed to be; the Aughts Philadelphia dream of the early Aughts turned on its head. But sleaze and grease can be glamorous too. Right?

Henniker Heat

Henniker, New Hampshire is located eighty miles outside of Boston. This Something Solid sequence recounts Henniker and its inhabitants, transient and otherwise, in the mid-Aughts. From the Miscellaneous Sonnets section of the book. 

Portal-ways

Portal-ways, sonnet from the Aughts Philly section of Something Solid, in Moss Trill. 

Portal-ways is also available as an individual mp3 file on PennSound. 
 

Something Solid: Aughts Philly: Glass Doors in Synchronized Chaos

Glass Doors, from Something Solid, in Berkeley's Synchronized Chaos.