Forrest Armstrong - The hiphop lovechild of Burroughs and Dali: the plot is a graffiti mural of military androids, mad gurus and ectoplasmic DJs

Forrest Armstrong, Asphalt Flowerhead (Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink, 2009)

"A picaresque movement in a nameless city. An America engaged in a propaganda-war, determined to clog drug-flow from the Netherlands and the rubble of a broken city on the opposite shore of the Atlantic. The youth who dream in the face of nightmares, who explore themselves with chemicals with sad paint with jail cells with institutions with a belief in something bigger than the flesh that holds them and strong to the constant symphony of junky poetics, melancholy."

"Tarmac toerag? Concrete conundrum? Forrest Armstrong’s written a book. Yeah – you remember them – not the ones you sit in front of while media whore clones babble mindless shit about other media whores – I’m on about the other ones. The ones where you have to do the work – y’know - turn pages, read the words, reflect... it’s time to get your cerebellum on yo!
“The hip hop lovechild of William S. Burroughs and Salvador Dali. The language is poetic and tangled, the plot a graffiti mural of military androids, mad gurus, and ectoplasmic DJs.” (The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction)
Asphalt Flowerhead is a novel about the underground mind in America. It begins with an illegitimate nightclub getting busted by the police and follows those arrested as they try to resume their lives after jail - some through fighting back against the system or pursuit of transcendence, and some through a submission of self to drug addiction and apathy. While America fights a propaganda-war against drug traders, the streets continue to dream in the face of nightmares, and the youth grow strong to the constant symphony of junky poetics." - monkeyboxing.com

"Asphalt Flowerhead fits nicely into the mental-work category. It’s not like a book at all, but a combination of sci-fi outer space films and the latest video-games realities that step off the screen and pull you into their worlds.... When you start reading fasten your irreality-belt and get ready for a never-before mind-space voyage!" - Small Press Review

"There aren't many writers, apart from Milton and Dante, who have such energy and invention, and ease of execution. This novel is tremendous, virtuosic and beautiful. Forrest Armstrong has vast talent." - Tom Bradley

"I like to think I have reached a state where I can observe the world from a detached location, somewhere near the clouds. I write surrealism because I think in the abstract we are closest to truth. Everything divine is surreal. I make enough money to get to whatever comes next but no more. I am writing to give you all I have felt, and nothing else - I am a vehicle and I am trying to bring my visions to the world, however I can." - Forrest Armstrong

"With sandwiches going at twenty dollars a pop (according to one disgruntled online reviewer), it seems likely the bards all have tenure. How would they react to their franchised enclave being invaded by a penniless kid from the rough part of Boston who dropped out of high school in 2007? And what if this youngster, making his entrance--which is to say creating his point of ingress--reached out an unwrinkled, unarthritic, yet masterful forefinger and caused the Somerville bakery wall to melt like sour cream on an unfrosted Jewish doughnut?
Of course, after recovering from their shock at his means of making the scene, the Bagel Bards, being poets, would embrace the beautiful boy and buy him a fifteen dollar latte, in unconscious hopes that the dairy content might speed the day when he no longer shames everyone by looking so god-damned good--for he is impossibly young. The lad could be Hugh Fox's great-grandson, if this nosh pit were languishing among the savage Latter-Day Saints in the unincorporated municipality of Panguitch, Utah, instead of metropolitan Massachusetts.
As it is, he's Bostonian in the same way that V. Ulea is Odessit: not just in spirit but bodily as well (a duality unacknowledged by more than one of our seven authors). This enigmatic Keats, this chaotic Rimbaud, is none other than Forrest Armstrong. And in his unjaded newness he starts from assumptions which his elders must hypertensively huff and puff to arrive at. Here he is penetrating a storefront in his beloved native city -
They stop short and turn into an alley. Dead end.
"This the place?" Bill asks.
Nail holds up a finger and smiles. He strokes the cracks in the brick wall and it starts to radiate like a blacklight. Bricks melt and drip down the wall in embryonic sludge. An opening emerges--marijuana smoke billows out like steam from an exhaust pipe--Nail dips his shaved head inside and drops through the void like a fetus. Bill follows and the hole closes.
In the city, the only trace left behind is a weed cloud dissipating into the stars. - Asphalt Flowerhead
Forrest Armstrong bursts in upon these places of commerce so handily. Dare we hope this native Atlantic Seaboarder will one day pull a similar Joshua on the East Coast Literary Establishment's walls, and make them, too, melt with a flick of his godling digit? Gone, fucking finally, will be the bloated Brahmin days when American lit's "sense of place" was determined by a Beantown hack like William Dean Howells. Coincidentally in the very Gay Ninety which Hugh Fox evokes above, Howells, author of that stupid abortion about Silas Whoozit, forsook the twats at the Atlantic Monthly for an effectively identical clutch of twats to the southwest. In schlepping his fat ass the 190 miles from Boston to New York, the equivalent of two thirds of the distance between the real and unreal Odessas, he is said to have "brought the literary center of the country with him," thereby, presumably, effecting a huge epochal discontinuity in the Annals of American Literature. And then, a hundred or so years after the fact, the Atlantic Monthly itself dogs William Dean Howell's steps. The Odessos and Odessa of our own Argonautic coast become quantumly entangled. And, as I sit here in my Nagasakian position-momentum, I wouldn't give a fuck if the resulting rend in time-space sinks both of them under a mile of submolecular silt.
Long before email and the web made it obvious, Milton knew how wrongheaded this fetishization of locality is-
...horror and doubt distract
His troubled thoughts, and from the bottom stir
The Hell within him, for within him Hell
He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell
One step no more than from himself can fly
By change of place...
A more or less recent fiction editor of the abovementioned overblown ass-rag once proclaimed there was "not a single good writer in America" who didn't send his best work, "first and immediately" to the following Cartesian coordinates, from which all unsolicited manuscripts weren't re-snailed unread unless accompanied by an SASE (can't you just taste the mollusk mucus on the backs of those stamps? Can you even remember the doomed relic called postage?): Atlantic Monthly ,745 Boylston Street , Boston, Massachusetts, 02116
-as in:
...on Boylston Street a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling.
Gasp and genuflect at the unmitigated glamour! What a privilege to have one's saliva regurgitated back in one's face from such a lofty fucking flyspeck on Maya's map! This fabled curb sounds like the perfect place to squat, trousers about ankles, expose one's own boils and take a big steaming, fly-attracting catharsis. It's the second most popular Back-Easty place one fantasizes about going up in smoke, in dreams whose skies are filled with jumbo jets that have been laden with nukes.
Hiroshima does indeed come to the mind of the present reviewer, who coincidentally spends his current incarnation commuting between there and Naga-etcetera. This undulant resident of those burgs, each boiled as any bagel, daily walks past rubbly remnants memorializing walls that, with the help of fuddy-duddy Einstein, not glam Heisenberg, really did melt and radiate black light and ooze Armstrongian embryonic sludge. We proper Boom Towners don't need to resort to commercial photographs, as Lowell did in his cushy Back Bay. And it's Forrest Armstrong's Boston, and his only, which we would never wish Hiroshimized--though it's Forrest's that is more than resilient enough to withstand any number of apocalypses, the most drastic of which must be the prodigious lad's own fictionalization of the place, as here -
The city shudders when the only familiar face disappears. Leaves blow in circles overhead like razors. Streets feel like massive corpse with weathered gray skin as Nail cuts across Landsdown...
And here--
Streets dripping halogenous and running off the frame, revealing (space) at his feet, neon screens skeletal in the (sky), architecture ignited and glowing hot blue like laboratory flames. Time runs jagged like cut-up film and the building glow burns out like an overcharged light bulb. I am alone in this city as I am alone in my head...
And, yes, by the knotted bowels of Christ, here--
The city at night: a thousand molten steel skeletons with sedated fire burning in ribcage, lungs and skull. A calm hush over the streets, blue gloss the stars, tires to cement and car sounds but everything seems to come from a distance as if Nail, Bill and Luis walk in sealed-off reality glitch--the world around them kept out by nothing but a paper-thin sheet of fog...
Leave your Euclidian space; quit your Quantum, too. Fuck Schrodinger and his house pet as unambiguously as they can be fucked in a multiverse where a cat's ass is no doubt interchangeable with the dewclaw on its elbow. Stuff like Armstrong's nukes all pseudoscientism to nothingness. This is not semi-gelled abstraction, but concrete composition - Asphalt as well, in the molten Miltonic sense. Armstrong turns the walls of all our complacent nosh pits to Asphaltick slime, such as sizzled from the Infernal Bridge -
Smooth, easy, inoffensive, down to Hell...
...the work by wondrous art
Pontifical, a ridge of pendant rock
Over the vexed abyss...
And, while we're speaking of vexed abysses, of spaces nuked to nothingness, of an art every bit as wondrous as Forrest Armstrong's, let's just unzip all the way. Call in the wrecking ball and turn all four walls of that bakery to embryonic sludge. Send starchy food items flopping everywhere. Rest assured that Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink will maintain a presence on the disintegrated premises.
Were you aware that every demolition site in every town, in every Odessa, in each Boston and all Hiroshimas, is a sculpture?" - Tom Bradley
Forrest Armstrong, ed., Avant Garde for the New Millennium (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2009)

“I began this anthology to dispel the illusion that we are in a famine age of literature and the result surprised even me in how powerfully it shattered that misconception.”

"Words are slippery things and though we have bridled them with grammar, feel at ease in the presence of a common turn of phrase, they have not been completely tamed. And there are still writers who are both brave and foolhardy enough to let words out of their cages, feed them despite the signs that clearly state not to and prod them with sticks to see what they might do.
Editor Forrest Armstrong has gone in search of these experimenters, alchemists of verbiage, who wrestle with words in dark places and return with something newly minted, transmogrified and fresh for us to puzzle over.
Avant-garde is by definition work on the front line of art, and I accepted every single piece of writing in this anthology because of how fresh it is, how differently the writer approaches his or her art."

Contents:
Fiction:
Gigantic • Steve Aylett
The Reformation • Kek-W
Transcript at the Close of a Life Cycle • Forrest Armstrong
Performance Equations • Thomas Wiloch
Fist World • Carlton Mellick III
Looking for a Name • Kevin L. Donihe
Ecphoriae • Forrest Aguirre
Perpetuity • D. Grîn
Moral Turpitude, Fella • John Edward Lawson
This Town • Mike Philbin
A Cock Smiled • Richard Polney
Istigkeit • Amy Christmas
From Click • Kristopher Young
Intermittent Movement • Joe L. Murr
Alchemies in Orbit • Robert Chrysler
From Degenerescence • James Chapman
Anti-Music • Prakash Kona
Poetry:
Book 24: Humble & So Humble • Tim Miller
Poems • Cameron Pierce
Poems • D.D. Wildblood
Living for a Nuclear Tomorrow • Forrest Armstrong
Poems • Stephen M. Wilson
Death-in-Life Love Song • Kevin L. Donihe
Items #6600-6617 & 0930 • murmurists
Poems • John Moore-Williams
The Nikkeo • Lynn Strongin
Poems • Cocaine Jesus
Poems • Jeff Mock

“Be careful! If books had teeth, Forrest Armstrong’s Avant-Garde for the New Millennium would chew you up and spit you out just for the sake of amusement. More a bestiary than an anthology, Avant-Garde for the New Millennium contains some of the meatiest, most carnivorous fiction being produced in the English language. These are not stories for those who prefer petite truffles with extended pinky. These stories will break your pinky off and stuff it into their mouths and then come after the rest of the arm. These writers bring meals, not finger food. Eat this book before it eats you!” —Eckhard Gerdes

Ben Brooks - New form of the novel: emotional montage like experimental film only wishes it could be

Ben Brooks, Fences (Fugue State Press, 2009)

«Deeply Russian in its sense of life, bitter, very funny, and shattered in its love of beauty, Fences by Ben Brooks shows what happens when the art of poetry and the art of the novel get in a head-on collision. Told in flashes and fragments of compressed emotion, this novel tells its story through glimmers of an intense personal narration: about a Russian girl, a librarian and an Italian man's mysterious wife, a hopeless car trip across Europe, judgement, inadequacy, God in his drunkenness, death at the end of time, and the fury of an apocalyptic search for meaning.
Ben Brooks has invented an involving new form for the novel - emotional montage like experimental film only wishes it could be - but more importantly has cut human desperation into pure form and made it go 180 miles an hour.»

«I think, in terms of capturing real suffering, Brooks writes best about heartbreak. In many ways, the narrator of Fences seems to be evacuating all the thought in the book to overcome the loss of his lover, even the things he writes about that are unrelated to it. It all comes back to the distance apart from her and the slow breaking-down of their hypothetical future. And even if the narrator is determined to give up on that, his mind can’t help from bubbling up with thoughts of her or sudden primitive exclamations of “I fucking miss you.”
Fences is definitely a dope book. It’s described as an “emotional montage” and no matter how many words I put in this I don’t think I could sum it up better than that. A full-throated reconsideration of the world and a photograph of the mind when stuck in the clamps of loss and depression.» - Forrest Armstrong

«...Within its few pages it manages to overturn centuries of literary tradition without apology, pretence or verbosity. A concise, thoughtful, clean form for the modern age. The text takes the form of a combination of prose, disembodied philosophical statements and provocative, yet eminently quotable, sound bites. But if on first viewing the book seems to be made up of random thoughts, when read through a story is immediately evident, or at least the retelling of the authors emotional thoughts invoked by a passage of events... [that] weaves around a small cast and their personal connections, apocalyptic world view, mainly failed relationships, and a European road trip... In the same way that earlier religious writings were allegorical and designed to provoke thought, such as the New Testament parables or the Zen Buddhist Koans, I see the purpose of Fences to move beyond mere language and inspire powerful sentiment for the reader to meditate on. Possibly an agnostic Book of Revelations for a postmodern End of Days?... Such a new approach is brave enough, but Brooks is more than happy to take literature into the world of graphic art. Its pages, paragraphs disjointed, in seeming random font and format, take a step into the visual realms, any one of which could be framed and exhibited in its own right... Like all good philosophical works, you come away with many more questions than answe rs. It is thought-provoking, fresh, innovative, immensely brave and possibly a whole new step for the modern literary form.» - Dave Franklin

«This book absolutely slays. The language completely destroyed me in the best way possible, and I considering immediately starting the book over upon finishing it. The narrative that moves through here is terrifying, but there is abject humor that serves to heighten the intensity of narrative even more. yes yes yes.» - Mike Kitchell

«Fences contains some of the strongest lines i have read in a while... you can feel the filth of solitude from the very beginning where the narrator is 'in a hole' where 'nicotine eyes' stare at him. the book then seems to progress by branching off endlessly into different tracts of hopeless love, self-hatred and general dismay. this book is the message left by a burning tree blowing ash against the side of a garage where inside a man huffs gas to feel like a king. the biggest success of this book to me was how disconnected it was while remaining engaging. fuck. good job ben. don’t kill yourself yet." - Sam Pink

«Told in numbered sections that read like super rhythmic breaks, Brooks has created a narrative hinged on volume and aggression, the words often snapping out at the reader, taking skin and layers with them. The most apparent of these techniques is Brooks adherence to variable text formatting, where some words are in microscopic print and others are in extended sizes. And while Chapman is know for selecting texts that challenge the reader, often referring to his own press as a place seeking ‘unreadable’ books, Brooks is the mastermind behind this altered format, asking his language to speak in screams and whispers even beyond the words themselves.
But it would be a mistake to get caught on or hung up in Brooks formatting, as if that is all the text had to offer. In fact, it has much more, including a story that vibes in and out of philosophy as the character takes to the road and a structure that is part poetry, part prose, and always framed by conviction and import. Brooks wastes few words in FENCES, and writes a book where we are both drawn to finding our own similarities with his characters while also made acutely aware that this is Brooks’ own landscape, a private apocalypse, and something we should feel lucky to witness.
Ben Brooks is doing something significant with words, risking language and testing readers; and for that alone he deserves a wide audience.
I read recently that you relate the format of your fonts in their variable sizes as something akin to language as volume – talk to us about how you structure writing and when in the process that happens for you.
The font sizes thing is pretty strange I guess. It was never intended, like I didn’t set out to write something deliberately “wacky.” I think someone once said that I hid a lack of content behind those font sizes. For me its just another tool to be used. Its like someone giving you a whole new box of punctuation marks and telling you not to worry about paragraphing. The sizing and breaks tend to happen during writing, occasionally I go back and alter things but I pretty much know how I want the words to feel as I write them. I don’t really structure plots either. There will maybe be a few bullet points about some scenes I have in my mind, but mostly I just sit and go with things.
Let’s talk briefly about that notion of content too – how some may wrongly assume the formatting means the content is thin – for those who have not yet read FENCES, what is it about, what is its content, how does it mean?
FSP called FENCES “a private apocalypse.” I think that sums it up well. Its about a man on a road trip, meeting God, watching people grow and die around him, always heading for one person. One person he doesn’t reach. He’s shooting for a hypothetical future with that person but in the process he abandons everything else and that search takes everything over. The book is told in whispered thoughts and screamed phrases. There is no flat-lining. His thoughts are never ordered or confined.
Interesting. That seems something akin to WAITING FOR GODOT or other absurdist / existential texts – are those any influence on your writing? Or is there anything drawn from more contemporary examples of apocalyptic / aggressive journey novels like McCarthy’s THE ROAD?
FENCES had no conscious influences which I could list. After taking the book on, James Chapman asked me what I had been reading whilst writing the book then declared it to bear no resemblance to any of the books I listed. I guess there’s a degree of that Russian bitterness in the book. I like Dostoevsky.
You say the contracting of FENCES with Fugue State gave you a much needed boost to work on the next two projects, both now contracted as well – are those two structurally similar, using formatting and volumes in language? And if so, are they also similar in content, or is the content vastly different?
Both still make heavy use of unconventional formatting and erratic font sizing although I think AN ISLAND OF FIFTY does so to a slightly lesser degree. FENCES and THE KASAHARA SCHOOL OF NIHILISM are both very emotional books whereas AN ISLAND OF FIFTY deals more with the nature of men and civilization and so it involves less meandering trails of thought and more omniscient narration. I still wanted things to jump and hide so I didn’t abandon my unusual formatting.
You are, as may surprise some people, a 17 year old writer – and FENCES is a perceptive and complex book – are there elements of your personal or writing life that have afforded you this advanced authorial skill, or do you think many young writers are this capable and perhaps simply written-off or overlooked by publishers / editors?
Thanks a lot. Age never really came into things for me. I didn’t tell James Chapman my age until he had rejected my first two things, accepted FENCES and had gotten a good way into getting it all laid out. I used to feel quite secretive about my age. I thought it might effect how people read what I wrote. Now I don’t really mind so much. So I guess I’m lucky I’ve never really encountered an age prejudice but I think with the internet its easy to get judged on your writing alone, unless you start a cover letter “I’m a twelve year old writer” and enclose a poem about how dope your dog is. You just have to practice typing like a man. There are a bunch of really talented young writers in the blogosphere, like Jillian Clark and probably a bunch of other guys who I‘ve read places and never been told how young they are. I probably wouldn’t claim “advanced authorial skill”, just an interest in something a lot of people my age would never want to devote time to. I would say I had an imagination perhaps. As for personal life, I think its impossible to know how much things influence you. Sometimes I’ll write something and it will be a few weeks before I recognise how clear a reference to some past event in life it is. There are probably some references I will never pick up on myself. When I was younger we lived in Latvia. I think that played a part in my interest in eastern Europe.» - Interview with Ben Brooks by J. A. Tyler