Richard Grossman, The Book of Lazarus
, Fiction Collective 2, 1998.“The Book of Lazarus is as much a novel about the O'Banion family as it is a scrapbook of the dead -- murder victims to be exact. The death of Mitchell O'Banion, a.k.a. Mitchell Finkelstein, a former political terrorist with family ties to organized crime, brings together a bizarre lot of ex-anarchists whose paths have criss-crossed from the heady days of the sixties to the present. In the middle of it all is Emma O'Banion, who has not seen her father Mitchell for years. As Emma uncovers the story of her father's life, death, and the vast fortune he has left behind, a frightening family history unfolds. Surrounding Emma is another world, one in which the stories of the dead and the insane are revealed in poetry, aphorisms, photographs, and handwritten notes from the grave.”
“When Emma Goldman O'Bannion is summoned from Rome for the reading of her father's will, her pursuit of the truth embroils her in Mafia intrigue, radical politics, hard drugs, murder, and madness. Why did Emma's father abandon her? Where did the millions of dollars come from? And who is Emma's supposed "brother," a troubled old man named Bobby Lazarus who dresses as a crossing guard? This second novel in a projected trilogy is less grisly than its predecessor (Pen West Fiction Prize nominee The Alphabet Man, LJ 10/15/93) but equally intense and experimental. Emma's narrative occupies only 126 pages but is accompanied by Bobby Lazarus's notebook: aphorisms of the People's Liberation Brigade, a 70-page sentence fragment by a brigade member, a collection of two-line poems and drawings by another, letters, a "Hallowed Hall of Heroes" who died saving the lives of others, and, finally, a revelatory poem, "The Crossing Guard," by Lazarus himself. A powerful, fascinating novel; highly recommended.?” - Jim Dwyer
“Like the characters who inhabit it--acid casualties, Mafia wives, political terrorists, and the like--Richard Grossman's latest work, the second book in his American Letters Trilogy, locates itself outside of the mainstream, and has already begun to win praise from other contemporary writers and critics like Dennis Cooper, Steven Moore, and Benjamin Weissman.”
“The story of a brutal war between the Mafia and a seventies revolutionary gang, The Book of Lazarus is the second volume of Richard Grossman's American Letters Trilogy, which describes earthly visions of hell, purgatory and heaven. The first book in the series is The Alphabet Man, his award-winning novel about a serial-killer poet struggling with damnation.
"The Book of Lazarus isn't just a successful portrayal of a dream-turned-nightmare. It also is a risky and moving novel, a dignified piece of visual art - and a welcome challenge to publishers who believe the successful bottom line lies in ghost-written celebrity bios." - The Seattle Times
"If an artist's task is, as Beckett claimed, to 'find form to accommodate the mess,' then Grossman has done it, with an exceptional feat of choreography and a radical vision for the possibilities of fiction." -Voice Literary Supplement
"Bold and brilliant." - William T. Vollman
"The Book of Lazarus is an amazement...It blew me away." - Dennis Cooper
"The Book of Lazarus is a novel that ought to change the direction of American publishing." - The Nation
“In a market where commercial viability is lord and master, Richard Grossman seems to be getting away with murder. That Mr. Grossman was able to get a publisher to put out his graphics-filled and expensively bound 500-page novel for $19.95 is a splendid demonstration of defiance. And surely Grossman wasn't overly concerned with commercial success when he decided to start The Book of Lazarus with 65 random pages of aphorisms ("Technology demands the abandonment of dignity"), scrawled New Year's resolutions ("I promise to stop thinking I'm so beautiful when I know I'm not"), photographs of the dead, frantic personal letters, and other literary odds and ends.
Not to give away any pleasant surprises, but a third of the way through, a narrator does shows up to make sense of this scrapbook--if only for a mere 46 pages. Emma O'Banion, who describes herself as "a lesbian rough-trade Catholic intellectual," receives an unexpected call one day from her father Mitch. After deserting the family 20 years prior, and leaving Emma to live with a drug-addicted mother and her pedophilic friends, Mitch has called to mention that he's dying. Not surprisingly, Emma hangs up on him. But after Mitch's death, curiosity gets the better of her, and Emma begins to discover all sorts of sordid things about her family's involvement in organized crime and political terrorism.
For all the abuses that fill the book, Grossman points out enough hypocrisies in his characters' lives to keep their stories from slumming in tragedy. As Mitch puts it, "Existence is unmitigated pretension, stupidity and boredom... we are burdened with lunkish meat from the very beginning, when we were gobs of flesh." - Amanda Ferguson
The Book of Lazarus – Excerpt
Gerald, pp. 255–324, The Book of Lazarus
ten interesting pages (pdf)
Richard Grossman, The Alphabet Man
, Fiction Collective 2, 1993.“America loves a murder, and I am a murderous American,” observes Clyde Wayne Franklin, who is considered by many to be the foremost poet in America. No ordinary killer, he is equal parts writer, obsessive lover, alcoholic, moralist, ex-con, clown, and butcher. The Alphabet Man is the story of his ruthless search for carnal love and spiritual redemption as he moves through the underworld of Washington, D.C., a sadistic landscape peopled by drug dealers, prostitutes, and assassins-for-hire.
Richard Grossman’s powerful and deeply disturbing novel is actually two books in one. Half the chapters follow Franklin as he battles to save the life of his girlfriend, a hooker whose blackmail plot against a U.S. senator has unaccountably backfred, while the other chapters return us to the past, to a drama of schizophrenia and molestation conducted in a sexual theater in a suburban basement, and to the crushing devastation of a satanic ritual that Franklin was forced to witness as a child.
Part thriller, part psychological and linguistic masterpiece, Grossman’s explosive fiction convinces us that if there is a pure poetry in the modern world, it must be rooted in madness, prophecy, and bloodshed."
"I have dreamt of a book, not a book that tells a story, not even one that tells story upon story, all of them intertwining and changing one another's meanings, but a book that simply is everything. And means everything. To my delight, Richard Grossman's novel is one of these perfect books or dreams." - Kathy Acker
“The lettered narrator of the title is a man fascinated by language and by murder in this amusing, yet ultimately grim, first novel by poet Grossman ( The Animals ). Clyde Wayne Franklin is the country's best-known poet. He is also an ex-convict. A chance encounter with a pastor who is also a former assassin for the U.S. Army makes clear the depths of Franklin's obsession. It turns out that he killed his own father and possibly others along the way. The exploration of this tormented and complex man forms the basis for Grossman's work. From the beginning, there are hints of abuse by Franklin's father. These become clearer as the book progresses, skipping back and forth through time and space. In the present, Franklin searches for his girlfriend, a prostitute in Washington, D.C. In his memory, he relives and attempts to come to grips with his childhood. All of this is not, however, unrelentingly morbid. Dark humor enlivens what is essentially an absurdist, postmodern fairy tale probing the psyche of a serial killer. In Grossman's confident hands, Franklin is like the hero of a Poe story, who talks to prove to the listener that he is sane and only succeeds in proving the reverse.” - Publishers Weekly
“Meet Clyde Wayne Franklin: world-renowned poet, walking alphabetic tatoo gallery, alcoholic, paranoid schizophrenic, multiple murderer, a real Norman Mailer kind of hero. After being sexually and emotionally abused by his parents, he becomes a self-hating "nazijew" who brutally kills his father and perhaps his mother, too. After his release from prison he is set up as an assassin, but by whom: the mob, rival politicians, the Pentagon? Is his "girlfriend" betraying him or is he being double-crossed? Grossman ( The Animals , Graywolf, 1990) alternates chapters, with numbered ones by Franklin advancing the plot and lettered ones by his grimly clownish alter ego serving up chaos from the past/present of his delusions. This is a very grisly account, but it is far deeper and more literary than a Bret Easton Ellis or Kathy Acker roll in the sleaze, precipitously plunging the reader into utter madness. Strongly recommended, especially if you have a strong stomach.” - Jim Dwyer
ten interesting pages (pdf)
Richard Grossman, Animals
"The Animals is a consummate performance. The objective of voicing the aspirations of the planet, employing the great brotherhood-sisterhood of the animals as a metaphor which reaches inward to the Earth and outward to Humanity is one that demands that this book be considered in the company of other works by Chaucer, Dante, Milton, Blake, Whitman, and Williams." - James Bertolino
“The Animals, comprising five hundred poems, is a pastoral wherein a mythical shepherd engages in a series of discussions concerning the most important spiritual, philosophical and practical issues of human life. These three hundred discussions, called "shepherd poems" are carried out with the two hundred creatures that form his mythical flock. Together, these creatures constitute a broad representation of all the members of the animal kingdom, from amoeba to whale, and it is difficult to think of an animal that is not present, itself or by association, in the book. Each animal relates its own story in a separate poem.
The book is divided into three parts: 150 shepherd poems, 200 animal poems, and then 150 more shepherd poems. The shepherd poems form a barely detectable narrative, an amalgamation of themes and actions, as the shepherd eventually dies and is resurrected. The Animals is a literary work of immense ambition, a vast and intricate spiritual guide that affirms the beauty and holiness of nature, the quintessential unity of life and the similarity of conscious problems.
The book is the recipient of a national design award. It is available in a slipcased, letterpress deluxe first edition, published in 1983 by Zygote Press. It is also available in softcover, a reissue by Graywolf Press in 1990, with illustrations by Nicolas Africano.”
Amoeba
I am the wisest animal.
I always stayed in the most important sense
right where I am.
At one time or another,
everybody specialized and went the wrong way, developing
useless heads and arms to be
waved in the distance.
(A shark can bite off an arm,
but I simply make its teeth dirty.)
Where there is no night and day,
I move through a universe of shimmering particles,
eating.
I have never died
and never will.
Every time I split, I say good-bye to my eternal self.
Canary
When I was born into the world, it was
a striped egg. I didn't ask for the furniture I got.
All day long I sang like a roller,
and at night the egg disappeared. In my whole
adult life I never touched anybody.
I ate out of a box.
I wanted to build a nest ten feet off the ground
in the Harz Mountains and praise
liberty.
Sometimes I feel I am what I am because of an unseen hand.
Maybe when I die I will go to the land of humans,
where I was before I was born.
Cardinal
I was made
to make new
snow look
more beautiful.
Dog
Bred as a tool of destruction, then unleashed,
now they call me his best friend: Dog.
I stake out a territory equal to where I live
with a certain amount of human connivance
and my own brand of piss.
There is a law that told me what to do
long before "heel" and "come" were woven into my plasma.
Now, in the depths of the backyard,
I hear the call of the wild enlisting me in a pack,
to attack.
At night, when I hear my mistress and master humping,
it is all that I can muster
to keep from spraying the linoleum. There must be a way
to rid myself of this curse
of proteinized existence
which has made me lazy, pathetic, averse--
a mass of flesh wired into a tiny house,
surrounded by pickets,
insectless grass, a clothesline, sandbox, swing set,
two scrawny trees, and a large, plastic four-wheeled mouse.
Richard Grossman, Tycoon Boy, kayak,1977.
“Between 1967 and 1976, Richard Grossman worked at Gelco, one of the largest transportation leasing companies in America. When he quit at thirty-three, the corporation owned the largest car leasing company in America, the second largest truck leasing company, and the largest trailer leasing company in the world. It was also involved in various other financial businesses, including car and space rental agencies, financial management companies and subsidiaries that leased a variety of other assets. Gelco was acquired many years later by General Electric.
Grossman was in charge of all administration and finance within the corporation as well as their planning functions and mergers and acquisitions activities, and he served on the Board of Directors.
Tycoon Boy is a rare literary critique of white collar life written from the pinnacle of a corporation. Grossman’s first published book, it relates his struggle for survival as he moves through a brutal, depersonalized hierarchy where human performance is gauged in terms of dollars. Written in a style that combines a sophisticated purview of the business world with the language of a boy doing a homework assignment, it provides an accurate and devastating look at life at the top of the corporate ladder.
Tycoon Boy was published in 1977 by kayak, one of the foremost literary presses at the time. Only a thousand copies were printed. The book is now being sold in its first edition, with limited availability.”
"...I was working as a corporate executive, and one of the groups that reported to me was 'Information Services' aka the computer department. Our mainframe, manufactured by National Cash Register, was a behemoth bolted to an elevated floor, in a cooled room surrounded by compressed gas, and fed with stacks of cards. From my vantage point I hated the machine, because I clearly saw how its presence had devalued and lobotomized people. In 1973, I wrote 'The Death of a Computer Operator,' which was included in my first volume of poetry, Tycoon Boy:
Working the graveyard shift he dug
his grave in our tape vault strapping his chin
to the side of a rack:
his knees hung six inches off the ground.
Everybody said he was meticulous
and that he did everything correctly up until the day
he died. His handwriting, according to the Coroner,
was firm.
He worked for us for over a year
turning out massive amounts of information
late at night
but when we called to notify his mother that we cut him
down she said
keep the body.
The man who had committed suicide in our basement, and I do not mean to belittle his death in any way by this remark, was to my mind a sacrificial victim to the New Moloch, which appears to us now in the hydra-headed form of Bill Gates and a hundred million other dweebs--people without character or culture, spinning out their meaningless systems in a moneyed world of spineless dolls. The anonymity of the suicide, occurring while the machine that he served hummed at his side, struck me as more than heartless. I could not conceive at the time of a more vapid way of dying. With the passage of years, the uneasiness I felt at the degradation of this man's death has grown into a pervasive malaise, triggered by the quasi-instantaneous reorganization of our environment, where natural surroundings, with their natural dangers, are being replaced with static, risk-free, tasteless, moronic, computer-engendered spaces, replete with designated emotional repositories. Ours is no longer a society based on class domination; it is a society based on system domination, whose armature and armament is the glorified calculator." - From an interview with Grossman in Rain Taxi
ten business poems
Richard Grossman, Breeze Avenue, forthcoming
“Breeze Avenue can best be described as a massive, highly integrated cyberspatial literary form that disgorges poetry, prose, art, music, dance and theater through a large variety of books, objects, videos, performances and Web content. Various sections draw upon information from geology, screenwriting, software development, Vedic, Greek, Egyptian, Roman, Chinese, Japanese and Hebrew studies, astronomy, politics, urban planning, graphic and product design, quantum mechanics, economics, meteorology, metaphysics, linguistics, literary theory, material science, musical instrumentation and composition, computer animation, cryptology, deaf theater, comic book illustration, residential and commercial architecture and construction, sleep medicine, mathematics, choreography, photography, engineering, archaeology, business practice, zoology, cosmology and lexicography. Besides English, documents are produced in Latin, Yiddish, Orkhon, Hebrew, Fraser, Sanskrit, Chinese, Hieroglyphs, American Sign Language, the International Phonetic Alphabet and various forms of symbolic notation.
Driven forward at varying rates of speed through a noetic space as if they were components of a channel of wind-borne thought, its texts continuously change position, and sometimes content, with some appearing as others disappear. Consequently, Breeze Avenue is actually a “breeze avenue,” an evolving band of meaning that arises from and is impelled by forces analogous to those that undergird physical reality and determine the depth and character of the human mind. The work is, in fact, an attempt both to redefine the nature of literature and to expand radically the area of its concerns: how it is conceived and operates; and its future direction and effects.
Interlaced within Breeze Avenue’s larger structure are 16 works of fiction, 802 poems and 64 essays, among many other less conventional literary forms. The overall work is 3,000,000 pages in length. Its first appearance will be as a single Web-based volume, at breezeavenue.com, that will launch in mid-2010. Within a few years, a printed version will be installed in a reading room in a location yet to be determined. This set will consist of 4,000 case-bound volumes, each consisting of 750 pages, displayed on shelves that surround a central reading area.
Breeze Avenue currently comprises 44 “elements” or distinct groups of texts, 40 of which will have been completed at the time of the launch. Most of these consist of sub-elements, some carrying titles. For example, there are a group of philosophical essays that form an element called Tractates, one of whose sub-elements is a three-page treatise entitled “Branded for Life.” There are approximately 1,700,000 individual sub-elements.
The elements adopt different approaches to expression and in some cases are constructed on technical principles from the past (as examples, ancient literatures, Japanese travelogues, Renaissance sonnetry and neo-classical verse essays). Others are based on sophisticated methods of computation, process and organization that are unique in their formulations and far removed from anything that has ever been written. Breeze Avenue is open-ended, and new elements may be added over time.
Fourteen published books and fourteen works of art will be sold from the author’s website. Additionally, nine more installation sets intended for reading rooms, each with unique content, will be printed over the course of a hundred years, as will ten editions whose volumes will be sold off individually. A not-for-profit foundation will be established to display and protect the art and literature in its care.”
hodge in heaven
podge in hell
“The Book of Lazarus is the second volume of a project called the American Letters Trilogy. The widely-read Alphabet Man was the first volume. Can you talk to us about some of the reasons you've chosen to pursue a trilogy, why you call it American Letters, and what's in store for volume three?
- My intention is to parallel Dante's project in the Divine Comedy, creating a three-fold vision of America that, like the medieval work, bridges the political "on-the-ground situation" and the sublime. Whereas Dante's triple structure, incidentally, was conceived on another structure of threes, terza rima, my organization is based on the broader contemporary threesome of poetry, iconography and prose.
The title "American Letters" is actually a double pun. All the novels are in some sense epistolary, hearkening back to the earliest English fiction. The clown chapters, for example, in the Alphabet Man are really letters released into the interior of the brain. Secondly, there is the notion of letters in the literal sense: in The Alphabet Man as contoid sound (the c as a sleep-induced stutter in the clown chapters), as homophone, the b standing for bees, or simply as cabalistic curse (the x in the cunnilingus chapter). In The Book of Lazarus, letters are used as a different form of identifier, mixing the notion of name and icon. I'm thinking of using letters as symbols of battling languages in the third book, matching up Yiddish and Latin on opposite pages, a flow of words, two stories, moving toward the spine, reflecting also the notion of a book as biomorphic object, as something with backbone. Thirdly, I mean "letters" in the sense of belle-lettres, proclaiming in my own perverse way my belief that writing is a defense of the highest standards of literacy and civility.
Book three will be my Paradiso, a story about heaven. All that I can say for now is that it will carry forward many if not all of the leitmotifs of the first two books: the presence of the Archangel Michael and Hank Williams; an alcoholic killer, part Catholic, part Jew, whose significant other is murdered; sexual perversion in a basement; a clerical trickster figure whom the protagonist meets on an airplane; the same organizational considerations, the book as a virtual document in the form of a farewell; a long poem to cap the work, and so forth.
I'm intrigued by this notion of the epistolary form embedding itself into the interiorized, time-released language-capsule of, say, the clown in The Alphabet Man or in The Book of Laz too, especially as evidenced in the diatribe written by Marty at the beginning of the book and that reads even more bizarre than The Unabomber Manifesto. Do you see a kind of sickness in what I'll call The American Psyche that is best expressed in the ur-forms of written language and that only certain writers or artists can pick up on? I'm thinking about something Cocteau once said about writing itself being a kind of sickness and, to stretch it a bit, that only certain writers, out of absolute necessity, can trigger the kind of mediumistic self-cleansing that a society needs to balance itself out. Would this be another high standard of activity for the one whose role is the composition of belle-lettres?
- The problem with answering yes to your question is that it plays into the hackneyed sixties notion of poet as shaman. But the answer is still a qualified yes. Writing is not a private exorcism of demons, however; it's a communal role, a form of citizenship, with another nod to Dante. And the act of writing is not a sickness at all: it's a form of doctoring, where the medicine is beauty. The proper focus of novel-writing is the mind, and the puncturing of the illusion that there is a coherence, other than spiritual, to the world we operate in. The essential wildness and chemical constituencies of human emotion, mitigated by plot and tamed by the necessity for rational and quintessentially selfless solutions, is where it's at for me. It is in this particular sense that writing is a ritual or cleansing activity: it is the most potent ritual that we have, and the staleness and inanition of the world culture, and its lack of perceptive writing, endanger our survival. A culture without proper ritual will certainly self-destruct. We see this as the operative notion within the global entertainment culture, with its nutritional and excremental channels. It was this week's news that archaeological DNA research reveals that for an extended time there were three distinct types of human on the planet, like brands of monkey: Neanderthal, Erectus and Cro-Magnon. They traded with each other, but they didn't fuck each other, and two of the three species didn't make it. The Neanderthals buried their dead with flowers. They had their rituals; but the rituals weren't powerful enough. They eventually went down.
The first two volumes, The Book of Laz and Alphabet Man, experiment with what I'd call "the visible word" -- that is, the material of the letters themselves are developed as "characters" (excuse the pun) by way of innovative typography and the way the print gets distributed over the page. There are also all sorts of photos, handwritten scrolls, totally black pages, etc., that suggest a connection with the visual art world which I know you have. Could you talk about how you integrate these features into your narrative structure and what connections, if any, you see between narrative & visual art? Between letters as transpaernt linguistic signs that are meant to lose the reader in the author's world and letters as material objects that an artist uses to create meaningful effects?
- Visual art is, in one sense, a form of subitization, which is the mind's ability to instantaneously gather information. This mental process in the visual realm, moving "into material," has a different vector from temporal embedding, the false sense of time, of being carried through the hours by narrative. It's vertical contrasted with horizontal effect. The reader moves in and out of the page, as well as across it. This movement in two directions at once creates a fifth dimension. Within this new volume, everything floats: plots, characterization, images, icons, letters, photos, an endless sentence, shards, thematic material like loosened DNA, because the mind is forced to register information on a momentary as well as on a continuous basis; so that, from a certain point of view, my novels appear as layered thought, depending on the page on which the eye is trained. If one is looking at a page that is simply black or blank, one receives the smallest conceivable amount of information, information that is literally nothing but context; if a single letter appears on a page, the amount of information increases significantly, because the letter is always iconic or phonetic. Then there are areas of "walk and talk", or photographs, or incantations, or songs, or whatever. In other words, each of these layers exists at its own depth, and has its own top and bottom, its own bandwith of meaning within this new, noetic space. At the end of each book and within each book are areas filled with poetry, the deepest and most propelling of forms. The disjunctive use of letters fits within this context like letters in alphabet soup. And overall there is a sense of seamlessness, because the various elements fit together snugly into the most conventional possible context: a story with a simple surface, with plot, plot twists, and nothing that doesn't contribute to the totality of meaning.
The plots in the first two volumes sometimes seem formulaic, as if the reader were being set-up for some well-rehearsed moment of resolution or closure. Keep them on the edge of their seats type of stuff, a kind of Hitchcockian trickery. But then there are all of these radical departures from what we all know to be normative narrative structure that bring us back to the artificial construction you as author are creating for us. This sort of practice is generally not accepted in the so-called "quality-lit" scene that dominates the mainstream publishing industry and, in many ways, would be easy enough to avoid (self-censorship disguised as smart editing), such that, it seems like, with your skills as a writer, you could just do away with the "radical" aspects and hone the more conservative side of your writing to the point of composing a book with even more commercial potential. But that's not your gig, is it? And assuming it isn't, how does this sort of position you're taking as an artist, to go against the dominant writing/publishing models, relate to the political battles some of your characters wage against the mainstream culture?
- My "gig" is to reach out to the most perceptive minds that I can, quality, not quantity. There is a small confraternity of starving souls in America, and that is my audience. I have nothing against conservative writing, by the way. There is no rule-book, and the rule-book that contains all the rules is as good a working model as any. I actually have great admiration for a simple tale that is told with style and finish (Chekhov for example is a favorite of mine) and a natural suspicion of the self-reflexive and self-consciously experimental, which smack to me in most cases of flatulence and ego. I just go where I have to go to do what I have to do. It's a calling, not an enterprise.
As far as the politics of my writing is concerned, I am quite simply an incendiary, which explains to an extent why, as a middle-age man, I am just beginning to reach an audience. I don't fit in and I don't want to fit in. I've never gone to a writer's conference, I've never applied for a grant, I've never had lunch with an editor. I've never had a mentor. No gravy trains or medallions. I do not consider myself to be a part of "literature," and I think that no true poet is. Poets have to create their own footpads.
The corporate culture demands corporate writers, in the same way that the academic culture demanded academic writers after WWI, which produced the carbuncles of Pound, Williams, Joyce, Eliot, and the moronic types who looked good on course-lists. Today, almost all serious writing is inept and wan. Where is a powerful style? Everybody is trembling snug in their niches. In poetry, it is free verse that is way too free, mixed metaphors that are way too mixed, and the fetor of utterance. Utterance is what swings from the belly of a cow. In the novel we have prose without music, an inability to create strong and indestructible structure, the metallic bones of plot and character. We have very very little. It's not only a cultural defect; but more frighteningly, it's an accumulation of individual defects. Most writers are cowards.
That's some pretty harsh criticism of the Modern Poetry canon. Would you put, say, H.D., Stevens, Moore, Crane, Olson and Ginsberg in the same "moronic" category? What were the redeeming qualities (if any) of the Modern Poetry movement? Is your work, in part, an attempt to challenge that canon or are you beyond that now, creating something that you think has no vital connection to the poetry produced in the first 60 years of this Century?
- I apologize for the hyperbole. And I wouldn't call the people on your list "moronic" by any stretch of the imagination, although I don't understand what can be squeezed from the work of H.D. or Charles Olson. As for the Modern Poetry movement, I have no desire to challenge it, and as a young man, I studied it carefully and learned from it, but modernism in all of the arts has been a relative failure--a tempest in a sea of half-filled teapots, and the literature of the period is unusually bad. Some work of great value has come from modernism obviously--for example, the strong history of post-war abstract painting in this country--but the positives are far outweighed by an over-arching impoverishment of individual talent. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the aesthetic, which is extremely interesting, but modernists, and especially the modern poets, just aren't particularly good at what they do. Going back to painting for example, Picasso and Matisse are far removed in abilities from the likes of Velasquez, Leonardo, Giotto, et alia, or even from the mass of painters who immediately preceded them. They are third-raters at best. We make knee-jerk excuses, as if we don't expect to have any Leonardo's prancing in our midst, but in a society as vibrant as our own, why have we lowered our expectations so? What is the explanation for this? I believe that a society creates its own geniuses. It demands artistic genius, because it needs artistic genius, and genius then appears. No demand, ergo no genius.
To answer the last part of your question, I build upon early twentieth-century modes from time to time, but I don't consider myself to be a post-modernist. My principal concerns have evolved from different ideas.
What role, if any, does absurdity play in the construction of your stories?
- Quite a bit, in both my novels and my poems, although it tends to be an overlay rather than an underlay. Existence isn't absurd. People are absurd.
Let's talk mechanics for a moment. A major section of the Book of Lazarus is a 70-page run-on sentence that is about as outrageously imaginative as I've ever read yet, again, very controlled so that even if reader senses that they're caught in the mad flow of a creative genius streaming language-consciousness into the story-structure, there is still this presence that dictates the need for this sentence to be there, to resonate with the rest of the mixed media that is embedded within the narrative. How did you go about creating this sentence? Is it improvised? Straight from the brain or part collage/appropriation?
- It's straight from the head, followed by a prodigious amount of editing. I mess with the notion of what a sentence is by creating a sentence on hormones, something that evolves on the basis of an indecipherable patterning, a multiplication and mutation process: there is a lateral accretion of elements, and yet it is impossible, because the sentence is in fact only a portion of a sentence, to determine whether this process is cyclical or linear. One senses that the fixations of the bemused, self-destructive narrator are becoming more extensive and complex within the structure, less clipped thought, more relational logic and story-telling, but I provide no evidence of where this is all going. The sentence is a brain-impacted monster, a form of syntactic biology.
Did you take all of the photos yourself and design the handwritten pages of the novel or is this part of a team-collaboration? Do you see a future, especially with developments on the Web, for more multi or mixed media collaborative-storytelling?
- There are three instances of others' participation in my book. The ransom note was written out by a child, Oliver Omura; the prostitute's New Year's resolutions are in the hand of my wife, Lisa Lyons; and design was a collaboration with Robert Jensen, who has worked with me on all my books, with the exception of my first, Tycoon Boy. The photos, drawings, other handwritings, all of the texts, and the conceptual layout of the book and each of the pages are mine.
As for your question about the Web, when we develop a new tool, such as Internet communication, we must ask ourselves what we're losing, because for all the fanciful jargon surrounding computers, or the advent of any other helpful mechanism for that matter, a tool is still a prosthetic device, pure and simple. It replaces something weak within us. Therefore, tools can render us much more vulnerable at depth than we need to be. This is the danger of the Web. We can make powerful ethereal fabrications in cyberspace, but we will have to adopt a rigorous discipline of sorts--by bonding with people in new ways, independent of computers-- before we can collaborate on-line successfully; we'll have to take the time to prepare ourselves properly for change. If we stumble forward, if we just try to work the machinery, we won't get very far.” – Interview with Mark Amerika
Richard Grossman’s web page
“Dangerous Characters” by Benjamin Kunkel
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