Sick Ticket by Nikki Guerlain

November 4, 2012 by bizarrojones

Reblogged from The Imperial Youth Review:

Sick Ticket

It had all started at The Neon Boneyard.

We were watching blacklit girls in fluorescent bikinis doing strange things in pools of neon, drinking Bones Under Buttercups— 120 proof butterscotch creams served in white chocolate cups.

An argument broke out at the table to our right regarding the whereabouts of Marilyn Monroe’s body. One man insisted she was still alive and was drinking mojitos with Elvis in Cuba.

Suck on This!

October 10, 2012 by bizarrojones

Summer Reading List

June 21, 2012 by bizarrojones

I’ve been reading some good shit this summer, but I don’t have time to read everything I want to. That’ll have to wait for August or September. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t check out some of the ass-kicking books that are on my summer reading list. Here’s one I will be reading in the near future.

Steve Lowe’s “King of Perverts”

Dennis isn’t a bad guy, but life circumstances have rendered him a complete waste. The only way to redeem himself is to engage in a shit load of raunchy sex acts for prize money. This book delicately splices two of the biggest fantasies in male narrative:

1. sex that is not only condoned, but absolutely mandatory.

2. riches to rags to riches (via sex, no less!)

The idea of finding redemption through mandated sex acts on a reality television show is a brilliant idea. It’s essentially what we’re confronted with on reality television shows today, in a manner of speaking. People display their most primitive and base characteristics–the part of ourselves we normally consider private and tuck away from the judgmental public–to draw in viewers and to acquire some degree of redemption in the public eye. Networks don’t even have to request this. It seems to be a natural human folly: people act stupid once a camera is on. Additionally, the moral parameters maintained by the middle class (because morality is the easiest way they can weigh their self-worth against others, as it is the form of capital easiest to acquire) are thrown out the window.

Dennis, however, is a reluctant participant. He needs the money. The entire dynamic has shifted. Instead of a willing participant and a normal setting conducive to our autonomy and psychosis, here we have a setting that forces proclivity and a hesitant performer. Dennis becomes an underdog working against the network, against the system, to get what he needs. It’s the pornographic version of King’s Running Man.

This is the future of network television. Hell, it could just be the future. I declare Matt Good’s “The Future is X Rated” the official theme song of this book, even though I have no authority to do so.

Satanic Book Teaches Children How to Commit Suicide!

April 24, 2012 by bizarrojones

A Scathing Review of We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, aka The Children’s Guide to Passive Suicide

Before we go any further, a little context:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWpzxzDGxr0&feature=related

There are plenty of children’s books about self destructive impulses. In The Cat in the Hat, the children are seduced into destroying their entire house, which they know full well will result in mother’s unbridled scorn. Franklin the Turtle is always doing stupid shit and then whining about it when he gets caught. I don’t have a big problem with those books. They make sense to me because they follow three core principles: it’s ok to depict kids doing dumb shit, because their mistakes are generally inadvertent. The mistakes characters make should teach children about human folly and the lessons we can glean from the err of our ways. Finally, rarely, if ever, are the parents depicted as condoning the child’s self-destruction.

Not so with this piece of shit. The parents lead their children gently by the hand right to the threshold of death’s door. They take them to a bear’s cave as he is, presumably, in the midst of hibernation, when bears are at their most pissed off and hungry. There are only two options that come to mind when I try to discern author intention here: this book is either a treatise for parents “tactfully” trying to get rid of their kids, or the first in a failed series of books, the overarching theme of which is “let’s do stupid shit!”

Yeah. They’re going on a bear hunt. Just like this zebra is going on a “lion hunt.”

Then there’s the artwork. The artwork is impressionistic, evocative of my youth, particularly the memories I have of using the excrement in my diapers to paint on my bedroom walls. Much like the drawings in this book, I couldn’t distinguish between the characters in my own imagery either. Only two things could be said of it with absolution. It stunk, and you can’t bleach the images away once they’ve been burned into your memory.

How cute. She’s going on an alien hunt. What a beautiful day!

Then of course there’s the suspension of disbelief. Our characters traipse across the four seasons and every environmental variation at every altitude possible, meet a bear, and then react in the most inappropriate manner possible. They’ve come equipped with absolutely nothing but ignorance and stupidity. They cross rivers with potentially dangerous undercurrents. They walk through snow in summer clothes. This book is a treatise on everything you should not do while hiking. And for all the reasons mentioned above, by the time I got to the end of the book, I f*cking wanted the bear to eat the characters.

Except the baby. That’d just be cruel.

Michael Allen Rose: King of Trades

February 25, 2012 by bizarrojones

Some folks dabble in multiple areas of interest. The risk, of course, is spreading oneself too thin. But that’s not a problem for Michael Allen Rose, author, actor, and musician. I had a chance to converse with him recently about his many artistic endeavors and past successes, including the recent publication of his first book, Party Wolves in my Skull.

1. First and foremost, can you tell us a little about your book?

Of course! Party Wolves in My Skull is about Norman Spooter, who awakens one morning to find that his eyeballs have fallen in love and are leaving him. They tear themselves out of his skull, steal his car, and take off for parts unknown. He doesn’t know what to do, so he does what most of us would – he goes back to bed, hoping it’ll all resolve itself. Unfortunately, a pack of wolves moves in overnight, since his skull now has a vacancy, and worst of all, they’re party wolves. They end up joining forces, and go on a wild road-trip as poor Norman tries to track down his eyeballs. A woman named Zoe joins them, and she’s on the run from her psycho ex-boyfriend who happens to be a walrus. Really, it’s a satire of road-trip stories with some really crazy characters and some fun set pieces, like the Motel Sick and a tiny cult town in the middle of North Dakota. Oh, and crazy walrus violence! It’s a sweet story though, I think, and the reviews so far have found it a very funny book, so I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out.

One of the fun things for me about writing this book was that each of the party wolves has such a distinct personality. Through them, I get to explore parts of myself as an author I might not always give voice too. That’s especially becoming apparent with the reviews I’ve been doing on www.partywolves.com where I’ve been reviewing books as the party wolves. It helps me really accentuate the positive, since I can let different books appeal to different parts of me and use that particular character to talk about an aspect of the book I’m reading. It’s also a nice way to extend the fiction into the real world a little bit, which hopefully will get more people interested in the book.

2. You work in theater as well. Can you tell us what the strangest or sexiest production you acted in was? Give us details. Juicy details! (and photos!)

I’m actually pretty proud of the work I’ve been doing with RoShamBo Theatre and also with Hot and Heavy Productions here in Chicago, because everything we do is both sexy and strange! I think my crowning achievement with RoShamBo so far may have been our production for a WBEZ (NPR) event last year themed around the history of Chicago theatre. They had a bunch of famous people come in to do a panel discussion and story share about the history of professional theatre here in the windy city. We were tasked, along with a handful of other tiny theatre companies, to create a piece illuminating some aspect of that. We chose to highlight a “brief history of nudity in Chicago theatre.” It was amazing. We took real stories of actual “naked moments” and productions featuring actors in the buff from the last 40 years and performed little blackout sketches about them. As I narrated from backstage over the mic, the cast cleverly covered themselves with strategically placed props, body paint, etc so that none of them were actually naked. Of course the twist was, at the end, they’re all lined up at the front of the stage and I’m narrating about how audiences have come to expect that they could see nudity on a Chicago stage at any time without warning. As I’m doing this, I come out from the back buck naked. The only person in the production who didn’t need to be naked. We got a pretty nice reaction from the crowd for that one. That led to us producing one of (Emmy winner) Joe Janes “50 Plays Project.” I directed a piece that involved a cast of four in this bizarre mash-up of Butoh dance, S&M bondage and absurdism regarding a possessed ATM machine. Good times. More recently I’ve been working with my friend Viva La Muerte and her Hot and Heavy Productions group. I was honored to be part of their tribute to Pink Floyd’s The Wall recently, where I got to show off my amazing back-bend and paint myself red. Sexy and strange all the way through.

3. You’re also a musician as well. Are you still active?

For a while I had to put Flood Damage (my industrial band) on hiatus, but it’s back with a vengeance. It’s finally coming together in the way that I dreamed when I was a sixteen year old kid in my parents’ basement. Last summer was our first show in years, and with the new incarnation, and it involved fire, sparks shooting from a woman’s crotch, zombie abortions, strippers peeling skin off, and the summoning of a tiny Cthulhu, among other things. I always wanted to be synonymous with blood, fire and titties. It’s finally happening. We’re planning a big show in April (4/20) here in Chicago in conjunction with Hot and Heavy, doing a burlesque tribute to industrial rock. It’s going to be one hell of a show.

Michael Allen Rose even delivers for the pervs who find my page each day by searching for bulge shots!

4. Can you give us a brief explanation of how you made your way from musician to head of RoShamBo Theater?

I guess all the things I do kind of cross-pollinate. I never claim to be particularly good at any one thing that I do, but I do a lot of things, and sometimes I get lucky and wonderful people come along who support my vision. RoShamBo, Flood Damage, and my writing are all just different arms of what I like to do trying to “make art happen.” I’m just happy that there are people surrounding my life who are talented and generous to help me make all these things work.

5. You’re a Chicago native, correct? What’s the strangest place you love to frequent in the windy city? (you’re under no obligation to answer if you have stalkers).

I grew up in the frozen wastes of North Dakota (at least the summers are nice). I moved to Chicago in 2007, after finishing my playwriting MFA in southern Illinois. I moved here because of the amazing art scenes, the awesome people and the best food in America. We combine world class restaurants and urban diversity with the Midwest love of eating. There’s no other place like it.

There are lots of places I regularly hang out. Actually, I’m looking for stalkers, particularly attractive women, so I might as well divulge. I spend a lot of time at Knockbox Café over in Humbolt Park. It’s a great little coffee shop with some super cool owners, and they’re also letting us use their space to host the Bizarro Hour on March 1^st, featuring myself along with the amazing Mykle Hansen, Garrett Cook and Andersen Prunty. Hell of a lineup. Oh! And the Pop Tarts are hosting! They’re the most famous British pop duo since… the last one!

6. Who were some of your biggest inspirations when you were growing up? (music, writing, drama, film, etc.)

Music has always been a huge part of my life, and many of the artists I most admire are multi-threat artists, like I’ve always tried to be. I’m a huge fan of Jim Thirlwell (Foetus) who I think is one of the greatest composers in the last century, bar none. He’s literally able to go from an industrial rock god to a symphony conductor to a big band nut to a dark and disturbing score creator in the scope of a single album. He’s also been releasing music since I was born, which is pretty amazing. There are tons of others of course… Tod Ashley of Firewater, Trent Reznor of nine inch nails, Johnny Cash… people who have really done it all in a variety of arenas.

I’ve also developed a healthy interest in philosophy, of the armchair variety. Jean Paul Sartre is amazing. Samuel Beckett is one of my favorite playwrights ever. I love the existentialists in general, because it really is a fundamental humanist view. The choices we make are what matters. Not some uncaring, chaotic universe, but how we define ourselves as humans and move forward, choosing to act, making our own destiny. It’s really an optimistic philosophy, but a lot of people miss that I think because they get caught up in the “uncaring Godless universe” thing. I feel like that gives us our power back, as well as making us take responsibility for our actions, which is always a good thing.

7. What are the benefits of each art form you participate in? Why do you engage in multiple forms of expression? There must be benefits to each.

Like I mentioned earlier, I think everything feeds everything else. I’m a better director because I know how to write a play. I’m a better actor because I’m thinking about how a director might want me to act. I write better fiction because I’m used to writing dialogue. It goes on. Not saying that I’m amazing at any of those things, but I think being a jack-of-all-trades, while it may not ever get you to the top of any one field or art, is the way to go. You don’t limit yourself by choosing form before idea that way. If I have inspiration for something, maybe it’ll be a song, maybe it’ll be a short story, you know? Again, most of the people I admire are those folks who delve into whatever form strikes them for a given project.

I guess the short answer is, I don’t know how else to do it. I can’t focus long enough to stick with any one particular thing! Thankfully, there are people in my life who help me hone in on one thing at a time. And it seems like right now, I’m lucky enough to have people noticing and enjoying what I’m doing, which is a huge blessing for any artist.

8. How do you balance your various roles as an artist?

Very carefully.

9. This year the NBAS crew had their books in electronic format from the start. With the previous crews this was not the case. We were required to sell 200 print copies. Have the stipulations changed at all since the electronic book was added to the equation?

They have. Thanks to you guys being all successful and awesome, they made it a bit harder for us and raised the number by another hundred. Every sale matters! It’s been fun though, and it’s nice because all of us are promoting each other as well as our own books, which I think will pay off in the long run. It’s a great crop of crazy authors this year, and we hope to follow the trail that you guys have been blazing these past two years.

Michael Allen Rose (center right) with the NBAS 2012 gang

10. what are your plans for the future, in terms of your artistic endeavors?

I’m going to keep trying to spin all these plates at once, hoping none of them shatter!

11. Finally, what’s with the bathrobe?

So my first year at BizarroCon, I was meeting everyone and hanging out, and I had just come back from the amazing salt-water spa at Edgefield. As you might have noticed from the pictures, I’m not that self-conscious about my body, so I was just standing there outside in a bathrobe. People found that amusing, especially since I didn’t think anything of it until they mentioned it. So, Rose O’ Keefe (editor in chief of eraserhead press and Bizarro queen) was kind enough to give me a reading slot. I asked people if they were coming, and without fail, almost everyone asked “Are you going to wear the robe?” So I kind of had to. So it became a joke, and I wore it most of the weekend. There’s actually a character in Jordan Krall’s “Valley of the Apocalypse Donkeys” based on a situation involving the robe and a donkey-headed woman. It was a thing. So the next year (my 2^nd) I didn’t want to be “the robe guy” but people kept asking, so I integrated it into my bizarro showdown performance, doing a short story about a guy in a robe, the climax being that I disrobed… and had another robe underneath! So this past year, I had to at least reference it. It’s one of those things where, you don’t always get to choose your persona, sometimes it just happens and something resonates with people. It’s fun. It’s comfortable.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Learn more about RoShamBo Theater HERE

Stop by the fan page for Mr. Rose’s band, Flood Damage: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Flood-Damage/10704896687

Party Wolves in my Skull is available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle formats. Click on the image below for more information:

Goodnight Moon: Good Morning Death

January 4, 2012 by bizarrojones

"Goodnight Moon"

“A great man in his pride . . .

Casts derision upon

Supersession of breath;

He knows death to the bone

Man has created death.”

~William Butler Yeats

“Goodnight Moon . . . Goodnight Air. Goodnight noises everywhere”

~Margaret Wise Brown

There’s only one time in your life that you say goodbye to everything you’ve come to know and love . . . and even dedicate a little time saying goodbye to the things you’ve come to hate: the shitty bowl of mush your “old lady” tries to pass off as food growing cold on the nightstand, the filthy rodent that’ll probably leave droppings in said mush as you rest comfortably ETERNALLY. Because when you’re about to kick off, even the fecal matter your little brother leaves on the toilet after he forgets to wipe his butt is endearing, and the tasteless, formless garbage your nation has sold to you as “food” reminds you that’s it’s better to have the faculties to hate and loathe than to have nothing at all.

"Goodnight Air"

Most poets paint death with a palette of the morose and depressing. There’s nothing good about dying. There’s no room for cliché rhymes and red balloons in the classic written rendering of death, until Margaret Wise Brown comes into the picture. In 1947, Brown threw all the conventions established by previous poets writing about death, bidding folks like Yeats and Donne to say “goodnight air” as she peppered her death poetry with balloons, bears, and cows jumping over the moon.

Goodnight, Uncle Jim.

Her work reminds us that death does not have to be a subject of woe. Death is best reminisced with a cocktail of kittens and mittens, chairs and bears. The proverbial spoonful of sugar Brown gives to us with her stylistic rendering helps the medicine go down, as it were, continuing the discourse established by her predecessors and taking it in a direction desperately needed by people today. This is not just a book about a stubborn rabbit with OCD who will not go to bed until he lists everything in his room. This is a story about the human condition, and a celebration of our greatest collective vulnerability. Read. This. Shit.

Clifford the Heartless Capitalist Dog Bathes in the Blood of Communists

December 13, 2011 by bizarrojones

Clifford is a friendly dog, one who supplies love and knowledge to the puny proletariat inhabitants of a small rural town. The more love he receives in payment, the larger he grows, until his owner, Emily Elizabeth, tells him simply to “stop.”

But it is never that simple. One can’t just halt growth for the sake of the motivation-lacking peasants because they feel like they’re not getting their fair shake. It is market growth, symbolically depicted by a large dog, ironically colored red, which helps society flourish. The working class depends upon Clifford’s growth and tutelage, and it is ultimately their incompetence which perpetuates this dynamic. They are to blame for his growth and they will bend to his will, because they need him. That’s the message Norman Bridwell sends us in the timeless masterpiece, Clifford the Firehouse Dog.

Clifford begins his life in a previous installment. He is puny, but upon being fed by the city peasants he begins to grow to titanic proportions. He grows so large that he must be relocated to a small rural setting where he will no longer damage those around him. In Clifford the Firehouse Dog, Clifford returns to the city to engage the peasant class once more. He mingles with them, attempts to emulate them. But when he stops (working), drops (onto a couch and collects welfare) and rolls (with the pace of government assistance) like the apathetic peasantry, he destroys the paltry vendors upon the street and then pays them off so they’ll keep their mouths shut. No, Clifford is too large to simply drop out of the rat race. He is a mechanism which cannot be stopped. Even when Emily demands he stop growing, just as the weak and downtrodden demand an end to monopoly, he simply spreads out, wreaking havoc on the small businesses surrounding.

In this respect Clifford is the Wal*Mart of loveable children’s story characters. But he is so much more. When danger calls, Clifford outruns the peasantry to the scene of atrocity. He begins rescuing people before the others arrive. And when they do finally arrive, he kindly gives them their fair shake, allowing them to fail at each attempt to save their peers before he jumps in to save the day.

This is where a potential problem with Bridwell’s metaphorical depiction of an idealized capitalist society begins. Bridwell’s society is built upon the presupposition that the endeavors of the working class are fruitless. Every attempt they make to save others are met with failure. “The heavy hose was hard to unravel. Clifford gave the firefighters a hand.” (Bridwell). This depiction of the working class as incompetent allows Clifford to jump in and save the day, as if these working class veterans have never successfully stopped a fire or successfully completed the tasks allotted to them. The emphasis on worker incompetence allows the glorification of Clifford as a necessary component of the social mechanism.

Don’t let Clifford’s cute demeanor fool you. This is what rests at the heart of that dog

But is Bridwell’s depiction really flawed, or is it a carefully veiled blueprint for capitalist control over the working class drones in society, one which transcends the shallow capitalist fantasies of shortsighted writers like Ayn Rand? I vouch for the latter. To control the masses, the upper class must make themselves a necessity. They must disempower and emphasize the futility of struggle against their authority. They must breed fear and danger that outweighs their own inherent fear the working class has for them . . . and then squelch the greater dangers they fabricate. Only then can they be lauded as heroes just as Clifford is at the end of the book. Essentially, the Mega Corporation becomes a part of the people by being a necessary superior force. Marx be damned.

Sorry, Ayn. Your utopian uber-class hinging on a mere system of barter and non-monetary self-sustaining principles undercuts the greedy capitalist ethos that catapulted them to riches to begin with. Our new hero is Bridwell.

Exploring Our Inner Demons with The Muppets

December 7, 2011 by bizarrojones

The Benign Monster Within

“I . . . am the monster”
Grover Monster

This is probably one of the most profound statements in literary history to date. Today, there are hundreds of books, films and television shows which address man’s incapacity to negotiate his own darkness. In many variations of the tale, we see the darkness within projected outward, cast onto another real or imagined character. Stephen King’s Secret Window, even the latest season of Dexter re-acquaints us with this age-old phenomenon, but never have they explored it with the depth and finesse author Jon Stone did in the chilling The Monster at the End of this Book.

The tale begins with the seemingly lovable Grover, whose ambivalence has yet to be revealed. He fears the monster, an entity which he believes he shares no association with. His dissociation from his own darkness becomes apparent to the reader on the first page when Grover Monster ironically proclaims, “I am so scared of monsters” (Stone).

On subsequent pages, Grover’s fear grows. But what does he truly fear? Does he fear the monster at the end of the book, or the fact that, upon reaching the end of the book, we will see him for who he truly is? If we align ourselves with the latter of these two possibilities, then the futility of his attempt to hinder our progress is augmented by the fact that even the casual observer can see Grover for what he truly is: a monster. On the other hand, if we believe Grover genuinely fears the monster at the end of the book, the text becomes a testament to identities which have become so fragmented that an individual interprets different facets of the self as separate individuals. The various mechanisms Grover constructs throughout the book follow in the vein of the former of these two possibilities, for it is the industrial era which catalyzed such fragmentation initially, and it is Grover’s attempt to reconstruct the industrial mechanism, and his inability to adapt to the requirements of industry, which allow us to finish the text.

Over the next few pages, Grover treats the text as a serial killer might treat its victim, binding the book with rope, smothering the book with brick, and building a shack–likely in some remote location–in which he can hide the book away from the public eye. But all of his attempts to slow our progress prove only testament to his inability to adapt to the requirements of the harsh society whose growth is grounded in industry. Even the infantile readers can wretch victory from Grover’s grasp simply by turning the pages. By turning the pages we leave him no choice but to identify himself with the only thing he can inherently identify himself as: the monster.

"So Grover tells me there's a monster at the end of this season."

Grover’s attempts to stop the reader from moving forward are reminiscent of the behaviors we all exhibit when trying to hide our darkest impulses. We try to box ourselves off from others, or “put up a wall.” These very counterintuitive impulses are often what give us away. It is the hiding that reveals us.

"Shit. Grover was right. I should have checked myself. But it's too late now. I'm going to wreck myself . . . and my other self."

While this text could be said to be a grim portrayal of our own fears and impulses, it ends on a positive note. Grover learns to embrace the monster within, and realizes that it is a benign force once refutation of its existence comes to an end, showing us that we all must accept the darkness inside, for repression can only result in physiological complications and self-inflicted damage that far outweighs what we might perceive our inner demons to be capable of. The final message left to readers is best encapsulated by Grover’s closing statement, “I told you and told you there was nothing to be afraid of.” (Stone).

I highly recommend this literary masterpiece. It has something for the child and the scholar within, a rare feat by today’s standards.

Curious George: Deviant Sociopath

December 4, 2011 by bizarrojones

Pictured above: Curious George. Don't fool yourself. Ichi and George are essentially synonymous.

In 1952, H.A. Rey released the third installment of the Curious George series: Curious George Rides a Bike. While on the surface Rey’s text appears an innocent exploration into the forays of a happy-go-lucky monkey, under the surface much darker themes lurk.

One such theme would be that of responsibility to society. Dostoevsky touched down on this theme in Crime & Punishment, but ultimately his 500+ page treatise on the subject is dwarfed by Rey’s unflinching exploration of the sociopathic mind in Curious George Rides a Bike.

In Rey’s text, Curious George acquires a new responsibility after disobeying the man in the yellow hat. Upon riding his bike outside the parameters established by the man, he is asked to deliver newspapers to local residents. Here we see Ray’s exploration of a dystopian society, not unlike our own, in which violating basic rules goes not only unpunished, but shares a positive correlation with reward. Such a twisted system is the precursor to the sociopathic personality which surfaces in Curious George.

But not all is lost. The plot seems to suggest that if and when a society reaches such a deplorable state, karma, or natural order, will set things right. This is a rare circumstance in which nature is depicted as a mechanism of control rather than a mechanism of liberation and potential chaos. George takes the newspapers from the boy, excited about his new task. But he quickly deviates from the parameters given to him yet again, and he crafts the newspapers into paper boats to float downstream. It is then that George is finally given his first taste of repercussion. As he follows the boats downstream, he runs into an obstacle to great for him to tackle, and his bike is destroyed.

Above: George, one hand soaked in blood, one in bile, about to engage in some satanic ritual, no doubt

George tries to ride the bike to no avail, sending a potent and counterintuitive message about social deviance and social mobility. George’s crimes result in immobility and loss of opportunity. This differs from classical works like Crime and Punishment, where upward mobility acts as the incentive for a crime. But Rey’s text requires a dynamic between man and environment that is more complex, for George is a monkey who seemingly has no motive for his crimes. He is deviant for the mere sake of deviance. The fact that his actions are attributed to curiosity is a testament to the ignorance of society, and their inability to see past the facade of a criminal mastermind. Upon closer inspection, one can see that George is actually child literature’s equivalent to Hannibal Lector, showing no remorse for his actions. But in a dystopian society where crime is rewarded, can we truly hold George accountable? How much agency can we attribute to our young protagonist’s actions? The answer comes only through self-exploration. And when looking in the mirror proves too painful, we can explore our primitive urges and darkest desires guised as an innocent monkey. We can laugh at our destructive impulses and eradicate all semblance of accountability. Each time we do, we must remember to thank Rey for his contribution to literature.

The Plight of the Academian and the Author

November 7, 2011 by bizarrojones

Read Aeschylus yet? Have his works on your shelf? If you answered "no" to the first question and "yes" to the second, maybe it's time to reconsider your personal library. Considering the rate new and engaging books are coming out these days, ask yourself, when am I actually going to sit down and read his works? Just toss it.

Now that I have finally weeded out my book collection, I’m starting on my magazines and journals. I started with a year’s subscription of The American Poetry Review that I got back in 2003. I don’t think I can part with a single one of them.

I’m not an indiscriminate reader, not anymore anyway. I mercilessly throw away books or donate them to libraries at least once a month. My disdain for literature which didn’t apply to me started back in my undergraduate years, when the school, or one of the clubs, would host a book sale each year. I’d watch my friends scramble down after class and pick up as many of the “classics” as they could get their hands on. Anything with Aristotle’s name, or Plato or Socrates. We were English majors after all and we already had full collections of Shakespeare and all of the Norton anthologies with the greats. We had moved on to literary criticism, philosophy, and relatively obscure poets like Hart Crane, the poets we didn’t always hear about in class but heard about in passing or in interviews with other greats.

When I moved in with my wife, also an English major, we started boxing up our collections and tossing out the books we both had copies of. Three Shakespeare collections were reduced to one. A lot of required texts we read for class were tucked away in a closet in my parents’ house. Years later when we went through them, we realized most of them meant little to us. Neither of us cared much for American imagist poetry. The countless collections of literature that feature excerpts from classic greek texts, they just didn’t matter. If they did feature something important to us, we wanted the entire text, not a single chapter to sample the material. All of the texts that we promised ourselves we’d get to some day, like the works of Euripides, we knew in our mid-twenties what we didn’t know when we were in our late teens: there was no way in hell we were going to dig through all of the works our professors attributed value to.

I feel like most people hit a point early in their lives where they’ll come to the realization that they’re not going to read everything on their shelves, but they don’t. I’ve watched many a professor retire with three shelves filled with books they’ve never read. I’ve had the luxury of sorting through the collections of retired professors who then, at the moment of retirement, realize they’re not going to read most of the work and leave the books in boxes in a department common room for students to browse, so that they may continue the legacy of knowledge hoarding. I have watched cohorts slink away with bags filled to the brim with books they’ll never read. Screw that. I won’t be a part of it.

The value of these works diminished for me a long time ago. It used to pain me to say “no” when a colleague or cohort in my program asked, “hey, have you checked out Aeschylus?” It doesn’t bother me anymore. That’s not my focus.

I’ve learned, through the years of cleaning out texts which are unimportant to me, not to crack a book that I know I probably won’t read. The minute I do, I’ll convince myself I need to read it. The last time I did this, it was with Proust. The prose was elegant, so elegant and drawn out that after a few pages, I still didn’t have any notion of the plot. But the language. The language!

That’s part of the reason I’ll hang on to my subscription to The American Poetry Review from 2003. There’s some great material in those issues. Some of those folks can truly be called wordsmiths, even the folks who I don’t recognize by name. But there’s another reason: I feel sorry for most of the authors inside, all of which, at the time of publication, had probably convinced themselves that they were on the verge of making it big, at least as far as poetry is concerned. I look back almost ten years later, and I still don’t recognize 95% of the names in the July/August issue. I counted 30+ books advertised in that issue. I recognized perhaps one or two of those names, and those were the names of poets who had been writing since the 90s or earlier. Some of those books probably won a pushcart prize or some other notable award of distinction. I still have no idea who the authors are.

Perhaps that’s my fault for not being an integral part of the poetry movement in America. Maybe it is society’s fault for not attributing enough value to poetry today. Despite the culprit, maybe what I’m describing is symptomatic of the lives of many as writers, including myself. No matter how much exposure we work to give ourselves, we’re still going to die obscure authors known by few, relatively speaking. The question is, are you willing to accept that? Furthermore, why are you writing?

Most days knowing I’ll likely die an unknown author doesn’t bother me. I’m writing because I love it, and if only one other person enjoys my work, that’s good enough for me. I’m not writing to make a living, and I’m glad I’m not. I think that can be dangerous. I’m still motivated to expand my audience, but I find my motivation stems more from my desire to be remembered after I die than to be applauded for my works now. But there will be no marble bust made in my honor. My works won’t be tucked away in some monastery, hidden from the eyes of the general population for years before resurfacing and granting me the acclaim I once thought I might deserve. At best, they’ll grant me continued appointment at my job and I’ll garner a wider audience. Most days I’m alright with that.

But there are some days where I open an old literary magazine and see a plethora of names I don’t recognize. I wonder where those authors are today like I used to wonder what happened to the cast of Salute Your Shorts on Nickelodeon. I looked them up long before I started wondering about authors in these magazines and journals. Like most, they fade into the backdrop. I wonder if the old tapings of their shows bring them only a sense of longing and despair. Do they look back in disappointment at what they thought was going to be when they were in the prime of their career?

Ever wonder what happened to these folks? Some went on to do notable things in the realm of acting. Others just moved on. What're you going to do if and when it finally occurs to you that you're not going to be the next Sophocles, or the next Dean Koontz?

I think it is a pivotal point in the small press author’s career when we have these feelings of inadequacy, when the disparity between what we originally set out to accomplish and the reality of the situation hits us, and for the first time, we begin to feel unremarkable. It’s almost inevitable that most of us will feel this at some point. It’s what we do with it that counts.

This feeling has hit me many times over the years, but it never keeps me down. I doubt I’ll be doing anything different from what I am today, or was yesterday. I have come to terms with the fact that I’ll never stop writing, and I’ll never give up on publishing whether it takes me somewhere, or leaves me laboring over a manuscript in my moldy basement. One of my primary motivations has been to establish a legacy that will live on after I’m gone. I can’t imagine giving up on that while I’m still here.

So what are you going to do? Whatever our dreams are, are you going to move on to do something notable in the field you’ve always loved, or are you simply going to move on? I think the answer rests in part with why you’re doing what you’re doing to begin with.

bizarrojones

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