Purge 1

PURGE 1

Review: FOUR CIRCLES by Meg McCarville

If Harmony Korine and Max Hardcore made a film about a budding modern day Aileen Wuornos it would probably watch a lot like Four Circles reads.

Meg takes on a ride through a handful of choice chapters from her life, from rape to crack den to rape to suicide motel to miscarriage to trailer park to rape. And all with a wild sense absurdity and humor, aided no doubt by the plethora of street-level drugs she's on. Given the subject matter, it's a feat that the book punches along like a Hannah-Barbera cartoon on crack.

I would say reading Four Circles is akin to repeatedly skinning your shin while eating fruity pebbles. This book somehow feels warm and nostalgic while still being utterly real and nightmarish. Maybe it's because I dropped out of school and ran with similar ne'er do well's that this is the case. Some of these adventures feel ripped from the periphery of my life and especially the lives of people I've known that are now either dead or worse. Given what McCarville has gone through, it's really a wonder that she's still here and coherent enough to write a very good book.

All this is not to say that Four Circles is for everyone. Please don't think that. I imagine many readers will relate the book to being repeatedly flicked in the nuts or clit. This is a trashy book written for trashy people. It is gratuitous to a level bordering on rape-revenge porn. It even comes with a kind of trigger warning on the back. Which, coming from the publisher Amphetamine Sulphate, says a lot.

Some might find Four Circles overblown, gimmicky, or childish. And well it sort of is. If addiction, depravity, and constant sex crimes (written with a flair for the absurd) is a gimmick. McCarville isn't going to win any awards for her prose, but she is damned funny in the midst of real American sickness. No clue what Kafka would have thought of this book, but it definitely aims to stab and wound us.

Review: PERIPATET by Grant Maierhofer

Major self-loathing, doubt, guilt. Portrait of the artist as an open bleeding conduit of influences attempting to cauterize via oblation. Diary of critiques, search histories, and borrowed texts. Excavation of a bottomless malady.

I'm trying to make my review more coherent and sequential, but I find that that betrays the substance of the object. This is an intimate version of the author's reality as he tries to wrestle with writing the thing you're reading, as you're reading it. He includes samples of literature, criticisms, and whatnot written by other people. This method is apparently called "ambient nonfiction," a term I had not come across before reading this book. It is interesting, like receiving spurts of oxygen while being drowned. When it works, it nicely breaks up the torrent of intensity that is Maierhofer's id. There are large portions of quoted passages from Melville's Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, which I have not read. Maierhofer points to this book as his aspirational ideal for Peripatet.

"If there's a literary work I'd most like to live within it might be Pierre..." 

Throughout this exploration of life as a teacher, writer, husband, father, we are mostly with Maierhofer in the Now. Walking side-by-side with his neurosis as he sometimes flashes back to show us the ills of his childhood. The death of his father, which haunts him. His current state screams with malaise and guilt. He's:

"...moneyless and fucked...depressed and anxious and certain you're an evil person."

Maierhofer writes almost pleadingly about the struggle of the writer to want to feel what his idols and inspirations felt. To writhe in blood with Yukio Mishima, or crunch needles under boot in the Cabrini Green projects. He is also a goddamn great crafter of sentences.

"I don't know the extent of the mistakes I've made but they are likely the mistakes you've made and maybe worse I'm not exactly sure. I don't know what to make of them and I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do about mistakes. I want to confess. It's a part of my disorder." 

"The process of generating nonfiction is like peeling back a phantom wound." 

Maierhofer is an English teacher, I believe, and Peripatet does occasionally feel like reading through articles on the Craft & Criticism section of a literary website (albeit all written by the same self-hating graphomaniac). It offers only questions though, no answers, which opens up possibilities. You can take what you want from his struggles. You can take nothing and simply bask in the miasma.
He tells us numerous times what the work is trying to do, with a different goal each time. He claims the book is about literary praxis here, his own death there... to my mind he never hits any of these scattered targets, but that's probably, definitely, the point. He even acknowledges this (directly after stating yet again what the work is here to do):

"An author's intentions become irrelevant when spread as thin as this." 

Then on the next page

"I do not seek or hope to put forth anything like an answer." 

I thoroughly enjoyed most of Peripatet, and I think it will mainly appeal to other artists. It is a long book, even though the font changes and pictures make it a much quicker read than the size suggests. I think that some of the perfunctory padding (ambient sampling) could have been cut out. I get the feeling that this is Grant spilling the last of his guts, with the remains not quite filling the hole. But this is the end, he wants to write himself empty. It's a recurring motif:

"I want my next work to be final and then I'll go off and fish with my kids. I want to go to sleep for the next thirty years. I want to spend the days with lifers."

It has the contradictions and pains and manic confusion of most grown artists who still simmer with forms of preteen angst. Being one of them myself, Peripatet often made me feel better and worse from sentence to sentence. This is affecting in a significant way.


Very minor reservations aside, Peripatet is one of the better dives into privileged misery. I have a feeling that anyone under a certain age, or with artistic ambitions, will connect with and appreciate the majority of what's here. Some other's might find it painfully entropic. The deft prose, however, is unquestionable.

http://www.insidethecastle.org/peripatet/

Review: BABY KILLER - Frank Cassese

It's rare to come across a work of fiction that is as surprising as it is, on afterthought, inevitable. Generally a book like that would be about a standard subject written in an unusual style, or a book about an atypical subject written in a plain or straightforward style. Baby Killer is definitely the latter.

Written from the point of view of an overeducated observer and harsh critic of modern culture, as we've seen throughout the certified echelons of Literature, we hang out and sink slowly with the Killer of Babies in this first-person confessional.

To tell you the truth, for a book about a killer of infants, the story starts off rather slow. In fact, I became a bit bored until things picked up after about fifty pages of living with yet another well off homebody.

The protagonist carries a bit of the "Stupid pleb's and their alcohol and loud music and sex." A missionary here to stop the Idiocratization of our world. He loves to be alone, and long walks. He loves to read and proselytize. He listens to Radiohead, Leonard Cohen, and bebop jazz. He is, in a deeper vein, the perpetual man-child that is jealous of the effortless attention and love bestowed upon newborns. He is what many grown men fear of becoming, or simply are (and in denial of).

The Killer of Babes, safe in his cocoon, hates society's urge to change:

"They brag about how lightly they can pick up and create new beginnings, a new life for themselves, a new self for their lives."

But the big Butt is that this guy kills little babies. This does happen. He slaughters them with occasional remorse and well-articulated (some might say convincing) rationale. This is a problem that  ends up being the most interesting aspect of his soporific personality. Because outside of some light family trauma, the Babe Killer is quite mundane.

"I would rather do nothing than have any sort of stricture imposed on my time, and most days I did quite a bit of nothing."

I won't expound on the actual depictions of his extracurriculars except to say that each instance is unique, vivid, heart-wrenching, and often hilarious.

But this is, when it comes down to it, a character study. The Baby Killer is outwardly pathetic and inwardly God's Gift. He is as much a mirror on our cultural moment as Patrick Bateman was in the 80's. Whereas Bateman went out everyday and overachieved in order to be seen and noticed, the Baby Killer avoids people, jobs, and social interactions at all costs. He's rich (you'll have to read it to know how), so he can do that, but even if he didn't have his golden cushion of wealth, I could see him figuratively being that 30-year-old that still lives in mama's basement, antagonizing true achievers through his digital curtain of anonymity. There is even a hilarious section involving a katana that reads like a neckbeard's wet dream, and the narrator actually says, "It's nothing personal."

This book is such a binary for me that it's hard to judge. If you took out the specific acts it would be as tame as some Austen, but we must include the acts. This isn't Sotos on a diet or anything. Those familiar with transgressive fiction will have nary a feather ruffled (though maybe I'm a deathly numb sociopath). But it is a work of thrilleresque appeal. A work of the moment that I don't think could have been written at any other time. It probably says something about consumer culture and apathy. It definitely holds a mirror to doughy rich mama's boys that are afraid of commitment. It held my attention in the way that a horror movie by Wes Anderson might. An oddly comforting read that I bet you'd enjoy.

*I realize that this review comes off a bit negative and vague, and the novel did in fact go down slightly lukewarm, but I want to state that I do highly recommend it to readers of transgressive (for lack of a better term) literature. It is an important book.*

Vidya

Far into my 30' s and I recently bought a used Nintendo 3DSXL with the personal excuse that it would be a quit-smoking-aid, give my hands something to do during those quiet moments when a cig feels like the perfect coma. I have a PS4 but only use it for streaming movies and shows, as most of the games are too involved to play in short bursts.

So for the past three days most every idle hour I've been killing and collecting demons in Shin Megami Tensei IV. I've never played Pokemon but apparently this game is kind of like that game but for adults. It is a decidedly twisted narrative set in post-apocalyptic Japan. It's fun to hold that world in my hands, to occupy it.

There's probably a bit of warranted escapism seeing as I recently returned home from Thailand and really don't want to be back in this town, at this job, living this timeline (though I did miss the cats something awful). That said, I haven't written a word other than on this blog or in a journal since stepping stateside. I told myself that the novel would be like a siren beckoning seductively, but it seems absence does not always make the heart grow fonder.

Vidya games.

Anyways, I'm still reading at least.

That's my current pile. I am now an unabashed  Amphetamine Sulphate and Nine-Banded Books fanboy since reading stuff by New Juche (reviewed here and here), Ann Sterzinger, Anita Dalton, Peter Sotos, and others. Baby Killer is very intriguing and the longest of the bunch. Excited for what all of this does to my brain.

Bluescape

On a nomadic slice of Rawai Beach 14-year-old Ning is arguing with her mother in their shack home that also serves as a restaurant. She's extolling virtues upon the next throb she plans to run off with, why he's different from all the others. The new guy, Ning says, doesn't care that she's occasionally a prostitute.


Her mother laughs and rotates her dense torso away. She seems to float atop her tree-trunk thighs. She eats sticky rice and every time she bends her neck a bit more of the mural tattoo on her back is revealed. She lords over the space like a Hun as twitchy young men arrive on motorbikes to deliver bags of ice and cases of water. She doesn't move from her seat and directs them with curt, barked commands.

Ning looks up from her phone, thumbs frozen mid-text, and stares blankly at the boys. They don't reveal their eyes. She speaks louder about her farang prince, hoping to provoke a glance.
Her mother counts money and laughs.


Her first English was "Bingo Was His Name-O". Her uncle Bing showed her her first brown cock.


Young prostitutes shop in groups in well lit stalls, hanging off each other like spider monkeys dressed in faux leather shorts. Ning has perfected seduction through simple fashion options and repetition. Her tricks are not the pioneers they believe themselves to be. They land on the island of youth to find that it has already been invaded. Yet they march through the salivating packs with machetes primed to slaughter tonight's Golden Ox, who's one visible eye is iced over with fear. They try to take pleasure in the thrusts, and she turns her head because she knows they will weep if they see her eyes.


A blown out pocket. A freshly abandoned nest. Her workmanlike demeanor is challenged by dimples and baby fat. Defiant cures for held over trauma.
She watches a cat swallow mosquito eggs out of a potted plant filled with stagnant water.


Feral cats and dogs practice incest and eat their young outside of Ning's home. Her mother has boiled a few.


When Ning is seventeen she realizes that all the men are the same. Her farang prince doesn't exist. She still falls in love once a week.


Her mother and brother die in motorbike accident. She learns this via text just before sucking a sweaty Indian dick in a Patong bathroom.


Ning inherits the restaurant and immediately sells it for $200 USD.


She burns incense at a roadside shrine on her way to Bangla road to pole dance. Her palms sweat profusely over the pole as an Australian octogenarian stares at her with hungry, bloated-red eyes.


She develops a terrible itch, accompanied by unyielding rot odor. She is bitten by a feral dog while sleeping on the street. The dog does not have rabies, it wants to eat her because she smells like food.


She has seven teeth left, these days.


At 22












She wishes the mountain was a volcano

Nutrigrammar steambath, back and or forth,

Just remember how big this is, I'm just really torn

We're physical bodies here, for a really long time

You're alone and labeled a "loved one" but,

Read up on the effects of sulphur content on your bones

Knee jerk reactions to life's ups and downs

It can get better, one foot in front of the other

Skin is not kevlar, you're not a minotaur

Exploit all trust, we're happy for you 

Guilty Guilty! Forage on the beach bitch

Get to the top of the mountain when

Everything is stripped away

Hand-to-mouth

It's not you that needs to change, 

it's the world

Heteronymical Mineral Bath

I live with the notion that certain forms of manageable schizophrenias are beneficial, necessary even, for the growth of the human race. Our evolution in the meatspace realm is essentially over, or stunted (beyond the fact that we will all eventually be varying shades of brown). What's the next step for our physical selves apart from merging with technology? Are there any doors left for consciousness to unlock? Are our minds in their springs or winters?

The optimistic part of me (small and afraid like a boxed kitten) prefers positive answers. In all the plants and roots and fungus the West hasn't tasted. In all the altered states of consciousness which the shaman, among his tribe, offers tours. In the cartography of perception and imagination. I'm OPTIMYSTIC.

Shamans actually share many traits with schizophrenics. They have visions, hear voices, speak to spirits. There is some science that shows similar brain deficits (enlarged ventricles, etc.). While the crazies are overprescribed to diminish symptoms, the shamans are seen as the doctors. They willingly enter into states of 'psychosis' and commune with personalities, relaying the pertinent news. What if the symptoms of some forms of schizophrenia are actually harbingers of our mental evolution? Multiple personalities that we can control and enter in/out of at will... the capacity to master numerous arts, trades, and modes... brains able to understand and sympathize with every human point of view.

I'm not talking about some megaliberal wet dream or One Love sovereignty. I'm casting doubt on our perceived capacities, on our diagnoses, on our technological onanism. Yes, it's a bit paleo. A dash pagan. But I have a feeling we've skipped over something crucial in open-armed integration, in altering and improving ourselves via technology. We've given the mind(s) short shrift. We've relegated our prophets to padded cells or pigeon shit park benches. We are trying to outpace evolution, and so shall reap the consequences.

I'm exploring some of this in a novel, bout 3/4 through the first draft.

Review: STUPID BABY by New Juche

Amphetamine Sulphate has released a nicely-stapled piece of street literature here. At only 52 pages, I wasn't expecting as much to chew on as exists within. And as I learned from reading Mountainhead (reviewed here), one may go into a New Juche Joint expecting juicy reprobate shenanigans only to arrive at the frightfully sublime. So when I heard about Stupid Baby I was all in for another dispatch from my favorite Scot in the Far East.

This is basically a tale about an expat and his relationship with an older woman that happens to be a prostitute. If you've read any other New Juche, this isn't surprising in the least. We accompany Juche in first-person, present tense, throughout his adventures in the slums, markets, and bars around where he lives. He lives, by the way, not as your usual philandering sex tourist in Southeast Asia, but as a commoner. He lives with the prostitutes and gangs and crooked cops, on their turf. Amongst the rat shit and crummy, air-conditionless rooms. He seeps himself in the stench of undeveloped squalor.

You get a great sense of it from the beginning. In fact, the first 12 pages of this short work are spent describing the surroundings, orienting the reader with the setting and the petty politics (criminal and otherwise) that govern the slums. There is less poetry than I'm used to, having read some New Juche before, in this opening, which made me worry. It almost felt like an exercise in descriptive/travel writing. That being said, the author excels at it, so who the fuck cares.

After bringing us into his world, we are shown how he lives and navigates his relationship with his old lady. He includes extracts of text-messages before each new scene, showing us the ebb and flow of epithet-filled feelings from two opposing forces that I won't spoil here. Suffice to say it creates an interesting little story of its own.

Mostly, we are with Juche and Goong (lover/girlfriend/prostitute), invited to spectate their most intimate and vulnerable moments. The couple can (as most couples do) go from fighting to fucking to doing cute things like drawing temporary tattoos on each other. Some of the childish love games they play create some of the most tender moments in the book. At one point, Juche draws a mustache on Goong's upper lip, at her request.

...the pen tickled her face and we both kept laughing. She wanted to hoodwink the deity that delivered her dreams into thinking she was a man, so she could burgle the experience of a man's dream. 

Goong is a childlike, and eventually tragic person. I say person instead of character, because I'm assuming all of this is true. During their relationship, she is in her late 40's or early 50's. She is still a prostitute, and she loves New Juche. There are many touching moments where, through Goong's actions, we get glimpses into her wounded soul. She likes to cut out old pictures of herself and combine them with current(ish) pictures of Juche. We get glimpses into her past that are as shitty as you can imagine, but we also see immense amounts of love. There is no pandering or judgement going on here.

There are vignettes strewn throughout that show how different Juche is to your average sex tourist or expat. In one, a rich old man with health issues has fallen hopelessly in love with a prostitute that is so obviously using him for money (and hasn't given him sex in years), that it's almost sad. He also seems to assume that Juche is his friend, blinded as he is by his wealth and love sickness.

He has expressed the nauseating belief that they have been together in past lives and therefore their companionship has been preordained and will continue into future lives. This, he explains, makes him feel more comfortable with the limits she imposes on their relationship in this life. He has adopted his own partial conception of the other's belief system as a means of coping with the stress of her deception.

And then, towards the end of the conversation they are having at a bar:

 Why are we here? What are we doing here? He grins smugly through my questions, looking over me. 

New Juche is not a man of classical conscience or moral pedigree. He fucks around with streetwalkers and gets amazingly drunk while Goong pines for his affection. But, then, she too has her job and its necessities. Everyone has to secure sustenance and shelter with the cards they are dealt. And Juche isn't about to get all pious on us.

All in all, I loved this book. It's not as big nor deep as Mountainhead, but it is all class. I would almost consider it a companion piece to that work, or a sort of case study of the protagonist during some of his minor adventures. It definitely sheds some interesting light on his other work. I imagine New Juche probably of considers all of his art to be pieces of a greater whole, and Stupid Baby is an integral part of a messy, unpredictable, disgusting, beautiful thing.

5/5. Buy it HERE and support independent literature.

Robo-readin'

I worked at Borders bookstore for about three years, right up until they closed down. For many months afterword, jobless and nigh-on-homeless, I subsisted on beans, ramen, and stolen Pub Subs. Pub subs are Publix submarine sandwiches. I stole one of these sandwiches up to four or five times a week. I'm not proud of it, but it was so simple. I would just walk in and get them to make me a sub, then walk right back out, sandwich in hand. I was never stopped or questioned, probably stole about a hundred or so throughout those destitute months.

I used to look back on that time as one of the worst stretches of my life. I was living with a girlfriend that was quickly growing sick of my shit. We were over each other completely, but I felt trapped because no $$$ and she was too timid to break it off, I guess. I drank a whole lot of cough syrup and stayed drunk or high pretty much 24/7.

But, looking back, I had something like 300 books. The extent of my personal possessions. These were friends that remained while 'real' friends slunk off into shadows and disappeared. I got to know Kafka, Beckett, Kosinski, Hamsun, Woolf, O'Connor, O'Brien, Ligotti, Mishima, Jackson, Dick, Dunn, Conrad, Camus, Schulz, Ducasse... my intimates, my asylum inmates.

Robitussin and Ginger Ale, 1:1 ratio. Life becomes a cartoon. Within these waking dreams I would copulate with great whites in Maldoror, bother aristocracy on cobblestone streets in Hunger, cry from the beauty of the sun refracting light from The Temple of The Golden Pavilion, stand in terror before The Castle. My friend's became as real as you feel you are. Time became elastic. It was as complete an education in the finer arts as I would ever get.

Memory, though, is obliterated through continual indulgence in volatile substances. Eventually, my new friends disappeared like the rest of 'em. Well, I had to sell almost all my books to help pay first months rent in a shitty apartment after the GF finally got the guts to break it off. Maybe that's why I return to these authors specifically, time and time again. Those brief months where our worlds merged...it's like reading transcripts of half-forgotten dreams. And maybe that is the closest an author and reader can come to achieving the sublime.

PULSE-POUNDING THRILLS are best left to visual mediums

Mrs. Blue's been having heartburn issues again. She wakes up around 3 or 4 the past few mornings and wavers out of bed, back bent, abdomen and tits wrapped in arms as if she's guarding guts from spilling out. No, she's not pregnant. This is a recurring issue and she takes prescribed meds to keep it at bay, but it's been worse lately. She blames it on stress and, specifically, the homemade nachos we ate last night (she made them).

It pains me to see her in pain. Her digestive system is being a dick. It's affecting her work and we're about to go to Thailand for two weeks where spicy food is hard to avoid. I not-so-secretly want us to expatriate to a hidden patch of beach, with a cave or self-built lean-to, eat fish and coconuts, trek up mountains, live out the rest of our short lives doing mushrooms and ayahuasca and mucking it up with the locals.

I will write and and pluck acoustic instruments, she will make pottery and catalogue wild flora, our passions. We're both from Florida, we're meant for the tropics.

Anyways...

I'm convinced lately that terror and action and PULSE-POUNDING THRILLS are best left to visual mediums. You know, the movin' pitchers and vidya games.

I just finished reading an International Bestseller, NPR book of the year, award winning literary thriller. The lazy twist (they were all the same dude, DUDE!) was obvious by chapter 2. I trudged on.  It was mercifully short, thank dog. But one thing that was handled...decently (even though the surprise was ruined), was the dread. The terror. And that's not saying much, for me, anymore.

There were a few years where I read nothing but horror and thriller novels or novellas. King, Ligotti, Graham Jones, Tremblay, Baer, etc. I've read a rhinoceros's shit pile worth of books that try to lay on the terror and dread, and this one did it well. But you know what? You know what does it better? The shittiest low-budget horror movies do it better. Video games do it better. Mimes do it better. Shadow puppets...maybe.

The strength of a novel lies in seducing you with inaction. Or very little action. Manufacturing human drama, without fireworks. Because the fireworks look, sound, and feel ten thousand times better when they explode in front of your eyes, not inside your head. Literature's special place is not in the outwardly visceral, it is in the human dread of simple ennui and looming death.

I don't know if I'll ever read a so-called "literary thriller" again. The one I recently finished was touted as the cream of the crop by every major channel. It sold a bajillion. It was not memorable.

I am open to suggestions, though