Mark Spitzer, CHODE!, Six Gallery Press, 2010.
"CHODE!, the prequel to Mark Spitzer’s cult-classic novel Chum, is more than just a gob of spit in the face of lit: it’s a completely absurd abomination of scatology, blasphemy and violence. It’s the epic epileptic history of a dump of an island off Alaska that chronicles the chronic lives of scurvy slaves and sodomite pirates, creepy convicts, crippled fanatics, sadistic midgets and underage whores; plus madmen, mongoloids, feckless hags, pinheads and elephant men. It’s an anti-P.C. travesty, a smearfest on the handicapped, an all-out assault on every race and faith there is. A seizuring indignity riddled with exaggerated stereotypes, ludicrous slang, and no social value whatsoever, CHODE! drips with body slime and suicide, big-butt gutter-sluts, birth defects, torture, rape, genocide, incest, VD, orgiastic revelry, rug-munching bearded ladies, human torsos, Siamese twins, Cleveland steamers and impossible fish. It’s an absolute abuse on the reader, totally devoid of any hope, just waiting to get banned and censored by hypocritical moralists who will surely reject its nouveau cartooniness as the shameless pornography of an extreme and graphic indecency."
“Shades of Bataille! The first genuinely French novel has just burst upon the AmLit Scene. It’s a hyper-Célinian beyond-Sade journey to the end of everybody’s night—a Symbolistic Surrealistic Genre-Busting manifesto of toilet prose as unapologetic as an environmental disaster waiting to happen! I couldn’t put it down.”—David Gessner
“Mark Spitzer is the pseudonym of a writerly fury unleashed on earth by the Great God Perspiration.”—Andrei Codrescu
“A mad melange of frank, gritty, and hilarious tales!” —Kane X. Faucher
“A career-ruining transgressive novel.”—Robin Becker
"CHODE! is a completely absurd abomination of scatology, blasphemy and violence. It's the epic epileptic history of a whacked-out island off Alaska that chronicles the chronic lives of scurvy slaves and sodomite pirates, creepy convicts and crippled fanatics, sadistic midgets and underage whores, plus madmen, mongoloids, feckless hags, pinheads and elephant men. It's an anti-P.C. travesty, a smearfest on the handicapped, an all-out assault on every race and faith there is. A seizuring indignity riddled with exaggerated stereotypes, ludicrous slang, and no social value whatsoever, CHODE! drips with body slime and suicide, big-butt gutter-sluts, birth defects, torture, rape, genocide, incest, VD, orgiastic revelry, rug-munching bearded ladies, human torsos, Siamese twins, Cleveland Steamers and impossible fish. It's an absolute abuse on the reader, totally devoid of any hope, just waiting to get banned and censored by hypocritical moralists who will surely reject its nouveau cartooniness as the shameless pornography of an extreme and graphic indecency."
"How many creative ways can one pose the vulgar? And we don't mean pose in the effete way, either. Perhaps this book will make you feel like Charles Manson playing the kazoo before an audience of irritable emperor penguins. Maybe. It is hard not to take the printed "volume one" as anything but a threat, but it is a kindly one under the care of a good reader. Spitzer's short rocket-style blasts of the absurd, visceral, and tradition-baiting vulgarity makes for that kind of nostalgic reading many of us had as kids with the flashlight under the bed covers reading Mad Magazine. If you liked Spitzer's "Riding the Unit", you'll most definitely enjoy this more. In some ways, the irreal-ist quality of these shorts, wondrously masked by trademark obscenity, turns The Art of Fiction (1984) on its ear. Again, maybe. There's simply not one bit of bathos in the whole lot, so hang on tight to your lawn furniture and have this book kicking around your cottage this summer." - Kane Xavier Faucher
Mark Spitzer, Chum, Zoland Books, 2001.
"It's something that Kierkegaard at his most suicidal moment would feel at home with." - Andrei Codrescu
"Mark Spitzer's Chum is a side-splittingly funny, ultra-raunchy ride through the Alaska nobody wants to believe exists. Read it and weep, this Moby Dick of the millenium." - Jo-Ann Mapson
"If Ingmar Bergman were still making movies, he would be the perfect director for a film based on Mark Spitzer's Chum. This book reminds me of the film Shadows of Forgeotten Ancestors, Johan Bojer's The Last of the Vikings, and any Tom Robbins novel. The Rasputin-like Mother Kralik would scare the pants off of Kafka." - Barry Gifford
"Erstwhile porn star April Berger, shipwrecked on the Alaskan island of Lo, believes she has found a secret paradise: the land is cheap, the people seem nice and it beats L.A. for rural authenticity. What the heroine of this aggressively offbeat first novel doesn't know is that Lo is home to a crude, incestuous and downright nasty group of fishermen and their families. Comely, abused island native Nadine (in love with Yann, the best of the fishermen, but obsessed with April), Yann (in love with April's voluminous breasts, but obsessed with Nadine) and April form an uncomfortable love triangle, which ends, predictably, in an explosion of the violence permeating the book. French translator Spitzer's inspiration was an obscure film script by Louis-Ferdinand Celine, but Celine's dark, obscene and savagely humorous style is difficult to imitate; Spitzer resorts to raw depictions of dissolute, sadistic characters who turn to unnecessary murder, illicit sex and excessive vengeance to distract them from their misery. Writing to shock, he delights in detailed descriptions of raging libidos and uncensored violence, but the frisson he works to generate wears off early and fails to disguise the familiarity of the plot and characters. Spitzer's unfocused, intermittently inspired satirical voice outshines his material and goes far toward filling out an otherwise flimsy story, but even impressively energetic prose is unable to redeem this ill-conceived novel." - Publishers Weekly
"This novel is based on Spitzer's translation of a film sketch by C line. He moved the setting from an island off Brittany to one in the Bering Strait and expanded the story to create one of the most grotesque, chilling tales in modern literature. The men "fish fight and fuck and the women work in the cannery wearing slate gray smocks splattered with the blood of creatures... processed into dog food." Inbred survivors of a prison ship blown astray, these sorry folk find their jobs boring but deadly and their lives routine but utterly depraved. Rape, incest, alcoholism, and crack addiction are common. When a glamorous porn star washes up after a storm, the spiteful, manipulative Mother Kralik directs a vicious cycle of lust, blood lust, and intolerance. The story's extreme darkness is almost transcended by Spitzer's powerful, poetic language and ironic humor. Strongly recommended for strong-stomached readers in medium to large academic and public libraries." - Jim Dwyer
"Both a sophomore effort and a sophomoric ordeal, bleached free of literary color and grayed over with the lurid details of life on an Alaskan island village, depicting what happens when a shipwrecked starlet turns up on its ruthless shore. Basing his second novel on an unpublished film treatment by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Web ’zine editor Spitzer goes to the island of Lo, a place peopled with tawdry folk achieving the banal in their cruelties and indifferent harms: men rape their daughters and wives when they’re not out drinking one another into homicidal frenzies; and the women, waiting for the men to return from fishing, hatch schemes of thievery and manipulation. The general human outlook here emerges from the lowest common denominator, all the world and the people in it being considered chum—blood, bone, and meat trash led by blunt cravings and raw instincts. The island is regularly battered senseless by offshore storms, and one such fury spits out the Hollywood blond April Berger. The villagers circle in on and vandalize the remains of the yacht she was sailing, while April herself is luckily rescued to the home of Father O’Flugence. A secondary love story comes into bloom when the young islander Nadine forces the sensitive, accordion-playing fisherman Yann to ejaculate, then grapples his semen-covered penis toward her vagina, angry that she has not yet reached orgasm. Like all the men on the island, Yann is entranced by the unbelievable April, and Nadine—hired by April for housekeeping duties—plots her revenge. Another storm blows up, April is killed by a cadre of murderous women, and Yann loses everything he loves. Thereby follows the descent of Yann to the Lo level of humanity, and the fish and sharks swim through the waters as they have always done. A remarkably feeble novel, for all the yawns induced by its unimaginative scribbling, its monotonous plot, and its ridiculously self-conscious attempts to shock the reader." - Kirkus
“Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous—to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.” —Thomas Mann, Death in Venice
I don’t know what it says about me, but I’ve always been drawn to stories about closed human ecosystems, the drama of the trapped or the isolated, the brutal hierarchies of forced society, the way otherwise civilized people transform outside of their element. The Tempest and No Exit are two of my favorite plays, Papillon and ClosetLand two of my favorite films, The Prisoner one of my favorite TV shows, and I find Kafka a pleasant read. I’m a lot of fun at parties. Apparently so is Mark Spitzer, associate editor at Andrei Codrescu’s exquisite magazine Exquisite Corpse, who has written one of the finest novels I’ve ever read about what becomes of human beings in a savage land. Chum is dark, violent, funny, visceral, and incredibly profane — an icepick in the gut and a sledgehammer to the skull. It is, simply put, one righteous motherfucker of a book. Based on Spitzer’s own translation of Secrets of the Island, an unproduced film treatment by Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Chum is a black fable of mad love and jealousy set among the people of a nameless rock of an island in the middle of the Bering Strait. The descendents of a boatload of Irish convicts originally bound for Australia, over two centuries of stultifying isolation and almost unbroken inbreeding have made them a race unto themselves. Violent and decidedly less than bright, the islanders exist in a meager and unchanging ecosystem: most of the men go out and dredge the ocean floor for bottom feeders to bring home to the women, who work in the cannery grinding the fish into dog food for the Russian and Japanese markets. When they’re not working the men get drunk and rape their wives and daughters. The islanders are born and die breathing the cold, fetid air of despair. Nothing changes except the weather. Chum begins with a storm, a black wall of weather that smacks the island with Old-Testament fury and washes two boats ashore. One is a fishing boat belonging to the father of nineteen-year-old Nadine Murphy, a girl with little in the way of brains but with enough dull beauty to aspire to better things than an islander’s fate. These hopes increase exponentially with the death of her father and the survival of his good-looking crewman Yann, whom she decides on the spot she will have for her man. Those hopes are tempered, however, when the owner of the other boat is discovered. She is young, blonde, wealthy, and beautiful in a way that makes her a goddess in the eyes of the island men and arouses the instant hatred of a group of diseased old seahags led by Mother Kralik, feared by all for her venomous invective and rumored powers of witchcraft. The girl, a B-movie actress named April Berger, is oblivious to the misery that fuels the island and, reveling in her anonymity among people who have never seen a movie or watched television in their lives, decides to stay there indefinitely. Suddenly what few charms Nadine possesses are rendered nonexistent next to April’s, especially in the eyes of Yann, and so April becomes the object of all the vitriol Nadine can muster. The only problem is that Nadine also finds herself attracted to April…
What emerges is a bizarre triangle fueled by April’s obliviousness, Yann’s thick indecision, and Nadine’s growing borderline-psychotic obsession with both of them, as all the while Mother Kralik attempts to engineer April’s destruction with a manipulative skill that would shame Madame DeFarge. As it is anytime a new animal is introduced into a closed ecosystem, there is no question that something horrible is going to happen, and this book is driven by sheer schadenfreude. Spitzer’s prose holds us in place to watch the spectacle like that contraption they strapped Li’l Alex into in A Clockwork Orange:
The murmurs increase and the tumult builds. Beer swills, whiskey gurgles. To anybody from anywhere else, it would appear a carnival of drunken misfits, roaring boors, flying spittle, gnashing maws, and gutteral cries spewing forth like public defecations.
Which is exactly what April witnesses as she opens the door and looks into the bar. For a second she thinks it’s her imagination, as logic informs her that such a bestiary could only exist in the imagination of some sicko—because what she sees is a mass of frothing jackals and hyenas howling at her, pointing at her, and launching their indecipherable onslaught on her, all of them competing to be heard—their turgid taunts and squalid squeals exploding from a hell of horrid gorges.
Spitzer pulls the plow from start to finish here, from his breathtaking description of the storm in the opening chapter to heart-in-your-throat horror at the end. Even devices I normally despise, like excessive onomatopoeia, are used to great effect here: there is an entire page of nothing but the word “WHACK!”, occasionally broken by a four- or five-word sentence, as the cannery women chop fish with their cleavers and work each other up into a frenzy of lunatic hate.
Even with these postmodern prose conceits, Chum lies solidly within that most terrifying of literary traditions, American Naturalism. Like Stephen Crane at his best and Herman Melville at his windiest, Spitzer pulls back from the human drama to show us that, as vicious and horrible as we human beings can be to each other, we are nothing before the implacable justice of nature: Father O’Flugence, however, believes in God no more than he believes in the Devil—he knows it’s just an excuse for a job. What he believes in is fraternity—but he knows he’s in the wrong place for this. The island is an atrocity, its people are an abomination, and its future is just the same as its past: disaster. He closes his shutters, lets the storm hammer at his house, and pretends to pray. . .
Father O’Flugence believes in Nature. He believes it has a mind of its own, but no destination. He believes that humans evolved from primates, and that some are still apes. He believes we are all part of a big mistake, that the species is corrupt, and that the storm is pure. He believes that Nature is correcting itself. He believes that accidents are glorious, and that the will of Nature is the only will. Spitzer’s shifts from the perverse microcosm of the island to the larger universe are daunting and ominous, tiny deliberate horrors reduced to their rightful scale in the face of the blind, chaotic Big Kahuna. This is not recommended reading for those looking for silver linings. But for those who believe that the real measure of savagery, in man and in nature, goes a long way beyond the artifice of Survivor, Mark Spitzer offers up a deluxe package tour of the abyss." - John G. Nettles
Mark Spitzer, After the Orange Glow, Monkey Puzzle Press, 2010.
"Mark Spitzer has written a humping, yowling, brow-beating memoir. After the Orange Glow is a must read for anyone who cares about poetry, sex, drugs... apparitions."
'After the Orange Glow' is a bohemian burlesque careening through both the literal and literary catacombs of late 20th century France. It's a typically atypical Mark Spitzer romp, filled with outrageousness and insight.' - Ken Wright
'Mark Spitzer is a great writer... what he gets down on the page is his own vision, a vision filled with energy, movement, humor, and surprise.' - David Gessner
'Mark Spitzer has written a humping, yowling, spewing, brow-beating memoir about his crackling youth spent in Paris at George Whitman's Shakespeare and Co., an historic and histrionic wacky crash-pad bookstore where misguided and horny youth flop and --- and color poetry while smoking hashish and drinking wine. 'After the Orange Glow' recounts how --- buddies, perverted patrons, jaded poets and trustafarians distracted Spitzer from translating Genet s poetry and writing the Manifesto of his generation, and is a must must must read for anyone who gives a --- about poetry, the Beats, Paris, sex, drugs, and apparitions.' - Elva Maxine Beach
Mark Spitzer, Age of the Demon Tools, Ahadada Books, 2008.
"You have to slow down, and absorb calmly, the procession of gritty, pointillist gnarls of poesy that Mark Spitzer wittily weaves into his book. Just the title, Age of the Demon Tools, is so appropriate in this horrid age of inappropriate technology—you know, corruptly programmed voting machines, drones with missiles hovering above huts, and mind reading machines looming just a few years into the demon-tool future. When you do slow down, and tarry within Spitzer's neologism-packed litanies, you will find the footprints of bards such as Allen Ginsberg, whose tradition of embedding current events into the flow of poesy is one of the great beacons of the new century. This book is worth reading if only for the poem "Unholy Millenial Litany" and its blastsome truths." —Ed Sanders
"Only dumbf**ks will not read this book and exult. Spitzer's furious epic is a supremely satisfying blasphemous gorgeous cantankerous yowl for a generation of hep-infected-cats neutered by American supremidiocy. He has managed—quite un-nicely, thank you!—to tweeze every bloody splinter from our polluted and polluting culture. His Missouri misery odyssey ra[n]ges from big bass to big brass, from celebrity bodies to celestial bodies, from a micro-war between the blustering hero-narrator and local developers bent on greed and eco-genocide to a macro-war between the US government and practically everybody else, including its own soldiers. Most rewarding is Spitzer's renovated language that, read and screamed aloud, bends and twists and curls the tongue so erotically that orgasm is a valid conclusion. Really." - Debra Di Blasi "Triage of daily life and text, mines in the headlines, flat faced mutancy in the details of man's folly and avarice, rapacity and ballsack confusion, set against an individual pastorale amid the cowpies, text addled by brush, "angry vines," and "channel cats with mongo backs," sluiced with wind and wave, in turn set against the maw of what increasingly seems to no longer exist, green world of birdsong, face of simple intention, word strong as bough, and so forth (and yet . . .). Text with an edge like a serial killer's holiday in a target rich environment, the monkeyward of Washington, or the plains of Iraq and Afghanistan, corporate board rooms and city council meetings clotted with preening inanities in the form of the human, etc., the text's language slick as a lineman's clit, doffing a nod to the warbled wordexitry of Burgess and the wee ones who sleep in eaves, all woven with the witchery of electronic missives, condensing words to mush. Spitzer in battle-rut (Moloch panting beneath.)" —Skip Fox
Mark Spitzer, The Pigs Drink From Infinity: Poems 1995-2001, Spuyten Duyvil, 2006.
"Death is something that happens to someone else, quipped Duchamp. But, conditioned as we are by television news, it's more likely that for us, life is something that happens to someone else. That is, until Spitzer arrives with his new book of poems to reveal to us our own true mythologies, the mythologies we miss:The return of a problematic friend, the sex life of a tattooed woman, pulling into a gas station for a burger, in other words, what we omit, what falls through the cracks:Our neglected stories, the places where life really lives." - Julian Semilian
"I was lucky enough to attend a reading and pick the book up before it was relased in the major chains. And I'm glad I did. I found myself strolling down a brutally honest, twisted yet real, grungy, sparkling clean, next-door-neighbor-himping-in-the-next-window, bronze saturn road, laughing all the way. Spitzer highlights the things we forget and isn't shy about putting them in the light we all see them in but are afraid to admit. The best poem I thought, was JUNKYARD, a poem about different American junkyards. It is a clinic in rhythm without rhyme. Also, for those of you who don't like quiche, this book should fix that problem. Highly recommended." - Perrin C. Carrell
"Mark Spitzer is the pseudonym of a writerly fury unleashed on earth by the Great God Perspiration." -Andrei Codrescu “No more poetry!” cops order wild poet revellers in a Paris cafe at the begining of The Pigs Drink From Infinity. mark Spitzer courageously responds with poem after poem of “perpetual insouciance.” Three highpoints for me were “Message Concerning the State of Poetry,” a hilarious fantasy in which poetry is forced into a straitjacket of bully poetics; “a mon amie de la Quiche fantastique,” a rhapsodic erotic ode to his girlfriend’s “quiche,” and “Junkyard” a major poem capturing junkyards from Colorado to Washington. Behind the swashbuckling desperado aura of Spitzer’s bemused muse, is an incisive awareness of and pity for the human world gone insane." - Antler
Mark Spitzer, Bottom Feeder, Creative Arts Book Company, 1999.
"Holy Lunker Catfish! The Great American eco-novel starring the legendary bottom feeder Old Shithead has just been re-released. In a manner reminiscent of Ed Abbey, a wacky castof monkeywrenching characters battles the Anal General's forces of Industrial Cheese to preserve a metaphoric fish that's larger than usall. A cult-classic of Guerilla Lit and one hell of a fish story! "
Mark Spitzer, Writer in Residence: Memoir of a Literary Translator, Univ Of New Orleans Press, 2010.
"An American translating punk in Paris living at the infamous Bohemian bookstore Shakespeare & Co. hooks up with a bipolar nymphomaniac who puts him through a mental sausage grinder. Enter the cops, hippy chicks, black hash, crazy old men, a major deluge, and a host of whacko international freaks and street people. Then POW!, the ultimate betrayal." "Writer in Residence, Memoir of a Literary Translator is the rather raunchy, but totally brilliant, story of the narrator's submergence into the literary, bohemian side of Paris in the late 1990's. At book's beginning, he is into drugs, drinking and eccentric off-the-wall behavior with a host of unique characters: ancient George Whitman, owner of the offbeat Parisian bookstore, Shakespeare and Company; huge Simon, another writer in residence; Fatboy, who sells Shakespeare and Company's books; Madame Twi, who runs a nearby restaurant of sorts; and totally insane Janie, the narrator's love interest of those nutty moments. As the story proceeds, the reader will be acutely aware that the narrator is slowly getting his life in order and is becoming a serious translator of French writers. Writer in Residence is created in the free flowing style of the beatnik generation, in the off-beat style of William Burroughs and Henry Miller. It is well-written and well-edited, but the casual reader may be put off by the book's rhythm. Once over the shock of free-style Bohemia, any reader will be hooked until book's end. The characters, including the narrator, are well-created, amusing, totally believable and absolutely delightful. Fatboy tells off customers who come unknowingly into Shakespeare and Company. George, who claims to be Walt Whitman's grandson, cooks a goose for Christmas dinner...for five hours at an oven temperature of four hundred degrees. And sad-eyed Byron passes himself off as Jimi Hendrix. Writer in Residence is a book that should not be skipped. It's one man's story of successfully settling into a unique lifestyle." - Alice D. for ReadersFavorite.com
Mark Spitzer, Season of the Gar: Adventures in Pursuit of America's Most Misunderstood Fish, University of Arkansas Press, 2010.
"Mark Spitzer’s Season of the Gar is a travelogue into the world of ancient garfish—those prehistoric “monsters” that in their alligator gar variety look like something out of PT Barnum or an older mythology. These misunderstood fish—which can grow to twelve feet long and a century old—have been hunted for both sport and for purposes of genocide. Misperceived as a “trash fish” for centuries, the gar become, in Spitzer’s fascinating book, a figure for the cultural constructions of their greatest predator: man. Equal parts fishing adventure narrative, ecological ruminations, and Gonzo journalism, Season of the Gar will make you care about things you’ve never even thought about before." - Davis Schneiderman
"Season of the Gar is a fang-infested, monster-headed, armor-plated romp through the prehistoric swamps and murky rivers of America's most feared and demonized fish. Follow Mark Spitzer on his lengthy and often frustrating quest from Texas and Louisiana, Missouri, and Arkansas to catch his own gar. Read about his sometimes bizarre angling adventures in search of this air-breathing freshwater giant (up to ten feet in length and well over three hundred pounds) as he separates fact from fiction. Spitzer draws on folklore, science, history, his own pet gar, and even gar recipes to tell this unique and exciting literary eco-tale about a fish that has inspired imaginations for centuries, a fish many have hated, a fish many have thrown on the shore to die. "I love Mark Spitzer's passion and energy for gars and, just as important, for the pursuit of gars. Like the novelist and poet he is, Spitzer brings empathy, humor, and deep imagination to a type of writing usually mired in the merely factual. Mark Spitzer had worked hard at his craft daily for twenty years and it shows in every sentence. There is a wildness here--in both fish and man... Thanks to this we can read Season of the Gar and have our lives lifted." - David Gessner
"The prehistoric gar, a fish sometimes mistaken for Nessie, has found its chronicler in Mark Spitzer. This is a work of history, adventure, and philosophy, as suspenseful a tale as any fictional thriller, yet amazingly true and thought provoking. Don't be surprised if this book starts a gar-craze!" - Andrei Codrescu
"Bravo to Mark Spitzer! He dives headlong into the roiling, snake-infested realm of the gar and exposes ugly truths about the long campaign to rid the earth of these fearsome yet fascinating fishes. By debunking myths about gar, he does for them what Barry Lopez and Rick Bass have done for wolves. . . . Season of the Gar is the best compendium of gar information ever put together. More importantly, it is an emotional essay about one man's enthusiastic inquiry into the proper relationship between man and nature. It's destined to become a classic in outdoor literature." -Keith Sutton
Season of the Gar Interview
Mark Spitzer, Riding the Unit: Selected Nonfiction 1994-2004, Six Gallery Press, 2007.
"When we first read Spitzer's bit of lit spite we were amused, seeing in it a certain vitriolic mode all-too-absent from the politesse-ridden Am Po Scene...OK, Spitzer was a rude guest. Nonetheless, we have to say that he only vented in public a tiny bit of that swirling mass of orality that is the 'lives of the poets.'...Spitzer doesn't know mole from brown gravy: it's not his fault. But his point is clear: nobody gossips about his generation. Not until now anyway." - Andrei Codrescu
"Mark Spitzer's piece, "Dinner with Slinger'...is one sick piece...he may find gainful employment in the swelling ranks of political media Philistines - provided that he gives up those 'ounces of schwagg' and joins the Church of Rushing Newts." - Anselm Hollo
"Mark is on a campaign to rule the world...[he] is the definition of the mad scribe." - Luis Alberto Urrea
"I want to break his neck." - David Gessner
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