Steven Shaviro - When you open your mouth-or your ass, or your cunt-there's no way of knowing what `foreign particles' will enter

Steven Shaviro, Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction about Postmodernism (Serpent's Tail, 1996)

"Doom Patrols is a rollercoaster ride through late-20th-century culture. Considering topics as diverse as Elvis worship, the erotics of cyberspace, fantasies of the millennium, multiple personality syndrome, and the molecular logic of insect DNA; ranging from William Burroughs to Dean Martin, from Michel Foucault to My Bloody Valentine, from Andy Warhol to Bill Gates, the essays in the collection take an idiosyncratic look at the forces and counter-forces currently transforming American and world culture."

"In Doom Patrols, Shaviro is out to prove that he is not just a nerdy literature-and-film professor, he is also a member of the hip-oisie who (gasp!) goes to rock concerts, reads comics and uses the word fuck. Through 17 loosely defined personal essays on subjects ranging from Bill Gates to Truddi Chase (of 92-personalities fame), Shaviro expounds on postmodernism. He applies the idea that essence is obsolete to examples from American culture (many already overanalyzed) including Kathy Acker and Cindy Sherman. Shaver's style is at times self-consciously smart ("This ability to deceive ourselves and to be sincere... is the defining characteristic of what it means to be American, or to be human") at other times embarrassingly confessional ("I needed your wound, but since that night you've withheld it from me"), always deliberately quotable ("war is menstruation envy"). Oddly, race has virtually no significance in his version of the postmodern universe. While Shaviro draws some interesting connections between the theory of natural selection and postmodernism, his book is still a party gathering the same tired, talked-out guests: Warhol, Burroughs, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Foucault. One gets the sense that Shaviro is trying way too hard to impress a readership of the converted-people who are easily wowed by ponderous statements such as: "When you open your mouth-or your ass, or your cunt-there's no way of knowing what `foreign particles' will enter." That may be true, but some of us have a pretty good idea." - Publishers Weekly

"Like those strange, fearsome fish that live in the ocean's deepest depths, Shaviro's prose and his ideas may thrive in their own confined milieu, but brought to the surface world where the rest of us live, they explode and die. Shaviro tries to conceal the basic unoriginality of his thought behind a dense patter of quotation, citation, and jargon. And so we are treated to the recycled thoughts of such postmodern sages as Baudrillard and Deleuze, as well as the usual, trite reflections on rock 'n' roll (it induces disorientation, the quintessential postmodern experience) and Disney World (where excess blurs the boundary between reality and unreality and the postmodern world's fetish of the object is fully realized). Shaviro also spends an inordinate amount of time analyzing the comic book series Doom Patrol, whose main virtue, apparently, is its deliberate engagement with postmodern themes. But the subject matter is really unimportant. With tautological criticism like this, subjects exist only to confirm a theory. Hence, postmodern critics adore such fabulistic novelists as Pynchon but almost never acknowledge the existence of such doughty realists as Mailer or Bellow. Shaviro jettisons such concepts as theme and coherence, rambling wherever whims and his borrowings take him, perhaps trying to demonstrate tautologically the confusions of a postmodern universe. In short, these essays aren't really about anything at all." - Kirkus Reviews

"This book is a theoretical fiction about postmodernism. Fiction because Shaviro exercises the novelist’s conceit of character and event in carving his preternatural discursions; Doom Patrols is not a declaration of narrative. Postmodern because: "Postmodernism is not a theoretical option or a stylistic choice; it is the very air we breathe."
Steven Shaviro’s gathering of dense, sometimes obtuse, occasionally electrifying essays should never have been published on paper. There is something awry (modernist; pre-modern even) about turning pages, submitting to the tyranny of left-to-right. We need a cerebral plug-in, intravenous disclosure; CD-ROM allows for Burroughsian cut-up (William Seward gets a chapter heading); or to at the very least restrict availability solely to the Internet. But chips like that are restricted to Jack Straw’s wet-dreams, and CD-ROM is never as good as (read Brian Eno - not a chapter heading, surprisingly). And besides, Serpent’s Tail have published it as a book, albeit after months of being available on Shaviro’s own web site.
Postmodernism: Let’s Go!
"To a postmodern sensibility, there’s no contradiction between cool and hot, irony and passion, playfulness and commitment, excitement and disgust, pleasure and anxiety, or camp distancing and involvement to the point of obsession." (from Chapter 1: Grant Morrison.)
"Sincerity is a postmodern malady." (from Chapter 2: Walt Disney.)
In his cover-shot, Shaviro - a teacher in literature and film - faces away but wrests his gaze for a brief glimpse of us. He recognises what he has written: Doom Patrols is a treatise that defies this very review. If there is no difference between cool or hot, camp and obsession, then how are we to accuse anything here of simple right or wrong, stupidity or perception to an nth degree? A mass of his dialogue is most likely bollocks; certainly much is almost impenetrable, compacted thought; mind-fucking inadequacy. And yet... and yet:
"It’s Bill Gates’s world; we just live in it... God, like Gates, has exactly the aggressiveness, the competitive drive, and the sense of entitlement you’d expect in a talented straight boy from a privileged WASP background."
If he builds it, we will come. Shaviro is good at that, lighthousing this ocean of punctuation, a beacon to pilot us through. And to the end is where we go, for no matter how annoying Doom Patrols gets ("detached from referential meaning; the mechanical piling up of fragments takes the place of organic completion or symbolic translation"), it remains compulsively readable. We have to find out who did it.
For every irritation (Chapter 7: Cindy Sherman, "all feminine coquetry and affectation"), there is real juice like the dissection of Twin Peaks in terms of child abuse (Chapter 14: Truddi Chase). Or the last and quite brilliant chapter on the enigma that was Dean Martin ("If Elvis ... is the triumphant product of processes of natural selection, then Dino is the anomalous, ephemeral, and sterile expression of an illicit counter-movement"). Tremendous stuff.
In the end the greatest trick Doom Patrols (the author’s world dissected in relation to the comic, not the celebrated POV-game) pulls is the very sobriquet postmodern itself; it is auto-reviewed. All Shaviro leaves with us are his own quotes. Pop will eat itself. We surrender." - Gerald Houghton

"...as a work on postmodernism, Doom Patrols can only approach its "subject" through performitivity. Or as Shaviro states in his preface: "Postmodernism isn't a theoretical option or a stylistic choice; it is the very air we breathe. We are postmodern whether we like it or not, and whether we are aware of it or not. For this very reason, the word postmodernism isn't explicitly defined anywhere in my text. Its meaning is its use: or better, its multiple and contradictory uses, as these emerge gradually in the course of the book." Thus, if one aspect of postmodernism is that we live in a highly technological society where words and images are constantly being recycled, being "borrowed" from television, the internet, books, magazines, films and CDs, being reproduced, scanned, downloaded, photocopied, recombined, distorted and redistributed privately and publicly, then Doom Patrols must make itself subject to these same "plagiaristic" forces if it is to discuss postmodernism accurately. Marshall McLuhan says that the medium is the message; if we take him seriously, then any work attempting to "study" the messages of contemporary culture must necessarily come to resemble the media which proliferate and perpetuate that culture.
Shaviro elaborates this idea further in "Grant Morrison," the first of the book's seventeen chapters, each named after a media personality or artist. Writer of the DC comic book DOOM PATROL from 1989 to 1992, Grant Morrison and his work actually become emblematic of Shaviro's whole enterprise. For like most graphic novels in the 1990s, DOOM PATROL is actually a reinterpretation of a comic book that originally appeared in the late 1960s. Indeed, the 1960 version written by Arnold Drake featured the same group of genetic and social misfits who put their strangeness to use by becoming superheroes. Yet Morrison appropriates from diverse and often idiosyncratic sources- ranging from chaos theory to literature, philosophy to alternative music-to infuse the 90s version with a mixture of cultural cynicism and camp utterly lacking in Drake's original.
"DOOM PATROL is just the fix I need," Shaviro writes, "It has exactly the right mix of ingredients. Everything is in pieces, everything is borrowed or stolen... Plagiarism, blank mimicry, parasitic borrowing, speaking in tongues: these are the tactics of exemplary postmodern works like DOOM PATROL." Just as traditional images of the superheros like Superman developed in the 1930s get subverted and transformed into "the world's most bizarre heroes" of the 1960s DOOM PATROL written by Arnold Drake, so Grant Morrison subverts and transforms the "naive earnestness" of this original into the "sly hipness" which characterizes the 1990s DOOM PATROL. Shaviro's subversion and transformation of the play on cultural and identity construction in Morrison's book into the "theoretical fiction" which makes up Doom Patrols, then, is merely one more rotation in an ongoing series. The writing and rewriting of DOOM PATROL as a text, thus serves not only to introduce many of the themes Shaviro wishes to discuss, but acts as a strategic statement of the methodology Doom Patrols will employ: "All we can do with words and images is appropriate them, distort them, turn them against themselves. All we can do is borrow and waste them: spend what we haven't earned, and what we don't even possess. That's my definition of postmodern culture, but it's also Citibank's definition of a healthy economy, Jacques Lacan's definition of love, and J.G. Ballard's definition of life in the postindustrial ruins."
With other chapters like "Andy Warhol," "William Burroughs," and "Bilinda Butcher," Doom Patrols appears initially like a series of meditations on the nature of celebrity culture. Yet as we can already begin to sense in a chapter like "Grant Morrison," Shaviro's goal is nothing less than to trouble our conceptions of "individual personhood," and "representation." Through what are both highly autobiographical and extremely theoretical discussions on topics ranging from Elvis Presley to the molecular logic of insect DNA, Shaviro calls attention to the essential fictiveness of "personality," and endeavors to trace out how notions of "reality" have been constructed. The chapter on "Walt Disney," then, is less concerned with our collective celluloid memories of good old uncle Walt than it is with trying to explicate American sincerity, with Shaviro claiming that, "a strange mutation arose in our hominid ancestors, probably less than two hundred thousand years ago. Call it the Reagan gene: the ability to deceive others by first of all deluding yourself."
For all the apparent glibness of this initial remark, Shaviro traces the idea of sincerity back to what Gerald Edelman calls 'higher order consciousness,' or the ability to know that one is merely playing a role, and doing so without this knowledge causing the performance to be any less heartfelt or 'authentic.' This category of 'realness,' Shaviro points out, is precisely what is most prized by drag queens and method actors: the triumph of simulating to perfection a gender or character whom one is not. It is precisely this same quality we admire in audioanimatrons (like the robotic Abe Lincoln in the Hall of Presidents at Disneyworld), creatures that cannot help but mean precisely what the say, and say exactly what they mean. Yet, Shaviro contends both Freud and Marx radically misunderstood the fetishism of the drag queen, and Americans in general, convinced as they were as Europeans that an obsession with surfaces and objects could only be a substitution for feelings of inadequacy, a means of concealing a lack. Yet, "if all you can say about a drag queen is that she's 'really' a man, or that her ostentation conceals a defect," Shaviro counters, "then you've missed the whole point of her performance... This ability to deceive ourselves and to be sincere-far more than language or sexuality-is the defining characteristic of what it means to be an American."
Yet Doom Patrols doesn't limit itself to what some might consider the "standard" postmodern concerns or positions. In "Michel Foucault," Shaviro begins with the wonderful anecdote about a woman who once wrote to Ann Landers asking her whether oral sex meant you 'just talk about it," and goes on to discuss how social constructions of human sexuality are actually much more rigid and intolerant of change than those in the biological world; he ends with an exploration into how electronic and information technologies invite us to imagine a different economy of bodies and pleasures not exclusively bound to reproduction. In "Truddi Chase," Shaviro locates in this case of Multiple Personality Disorder what is perhaps "the best paradigm... for postmodern consciousness," arguing against Freudian and Cartesian conceptions of a radically singular 'ego' in favor of demonology. He argues that we are continually and so powerfully transformed by visceral sensations and emotions as to make any philosophical claim to a fixed and stable 'I' entirely illusory. Shaviro explores in "Bill Gates" how the postmodern God might indeed resemble this brilliant and ferocious man-talented and competitive, an unreliable visionary not at all in control of the forces of liberation and mutation that drive the virulent evolution of cyberlife.
Much of the logic in Doom Patrols is admittedly tautological, and critics of postmodernism will undoubtedly claim that Shaviro's playful, meandering, meditative approach is indicative of an entire movement which is fundamentally anti-intellectual and lazy. I find it utterly impossible to counter such claims. If it seems difficult to weave discussions of the band My Bloody Valentine, tape-worms, Dean Martin, virtual reality, and language as a viral infection into a single, intellectually unified framework, the problem seems hardly to lie with these "objects" themselves as much as it does in the critical project. As Shaviro states in the preface, "I do not propose anything like a balanced and well grounded critique of postmodern culture. To do so would to assert my own separation from the phenomena under consideration." Instead we have a series of gestures, a frenzied dance through the fractured centers and along the dark peripheries of experience. Everything in this book is familiar. Every word is "autobiographical."
"Henry James" is not a chapter in Shaviro's book, but it very well could be. In it we might explore the fate of the printed page in the age of digital reproduction. Or better yet, we might trace out that all too human nostalgia certain humanist intellectuals feel for the peace and sanctity of old mausoleums. That melancholy of anxious critics, as Shaviro describes them, who find themselves unable to adapt to what McLuhan calls 'postliterate' culture. But no, Henry James is in need of no such chapter, for his work is alive and well. His image and excerpts from his books are available for downloading at numerous websites dedicated to his work on the net. His artistic visions and authorial intentions are discussed in electronic newsgroups at many of the major universities, and as soon as copyright expires on his printed works, they will undoubtedly be posted on the web beside those of Shakespeare and Milton. Indeed, Henry James as a virus will soon be free to replicate as never before." - Sheldon Robert Walcher

Jesus del Campo - Chaotic, reality TV-obsessed, carnivalesque account of world history, with biblical figures, scientists, magicians and God alike

Jesus del Campo, A History of the World for Rebels and Somnambulists, Trans. by Catherine Mansfield (Telegram Books, 2008)

"So, you’re in search of a new, manly cult novel... you just need something fresh. Enter the Spanish philologist Jesus del Campo and his slim, crazy, funny, History of the World for Rebels and Somnambulists, which is exactly what it says it is. It’s a roughly - very roughly - chronological account of world history, marked by the bravado and befuddlement of presidents, biblical figures, scientists, poets, magicians and God alike.
“On the first day God created light,” it begins, “and he saw that he missed darkness. So he bought himself some black-framed Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses and went out into the street, where he came across humans who, not having yet been officially created, were covering their bodies with paramilitary rags, not realizing they were already dressed. He saw them drinking cold beer out of plastic cups and feeling each other’s ribs and whispering about the fearfulness of life under the neon signs for Nokia and Kawasaki and General Electric and Holiday Inn. And God went home feeling dejected, wondering what to create next.”
You can probably imagine some of the things God dreams up. (Hint: the book ends with a man on a TV talk show discussing how he was attacked and sodomized by a penguin.) If del Campo’s history is sometimes too chaotic, too reality TV-obsessed and too carnivalesque, he makes up for it with his soothing answers to a number of age-old questions. In “Spain’s Pain,” we learn why Spain is called Spain. In “Tuscan Confidences,” we (finally) learn what Leonardo said to make Mona Lisa smile like that. We learn the secrets of war (“It’s all very well talking about the strategic intelligence of Egmont and Coligny and a hundred other captains of one religion or another,” says a crow pecking at the face of a dead man, “but at the hour of truth each man has to fight for his own skin, and ends up buried under a chaotic avalanche of oblivion. There’s no cure for human folly, that’s for sure.”), but not the secrets of peace, which is only fitting. We learn why writers dress in black these days (“to hide the burden of their horribly ordinary features, and say that they feel persecuted by their characters, and other things like that”), and the true story of Bob Dylan’s shadow, and the fact that the emperor knows he’s naked. In my favorite piece, “Some Words of Warning,” a disquieting version of the story of the Pied Piper, we learn the limits of freedom.
There’s a great scene in “With No Left Hand” when Miguel de Cervantes confronts an editor, who (leading with, “Look, Miguel, it’s nothing personal”) calls him a “dead weight” and demands that he cut 300 pages out of his novel and get shy little Dulcinea topless before page fifty. “I don’t like the world much either,” says the editor, “But at least I try to enjoy what’s left of it while it lasts. When China becomes a global superpower we’ll cover our heads in ash and go begging forgiveness at the American embassy, and look for hamburger dealers under manhole covers, and watch with Christian resignation as the high altar at the Almudena cathedral is turned into a stand selling spring rolls… Do what I say, come back and see me, and then we’ll see whether we can squeeze anything out of the town councils of the villages you mention in the book. Hey, why are you looking at me like that? Do I look like some kind of a monster?” Miguel smiles. “No,” he says, “No. You look like a windmill.”
A History of the World for Rebels and Somnambulists is not a work of fiction or history - it’s a work of philology, actually, at a moment when rare, good philologists are more essential than they might first appear. Why are you looking for a new, manly cult novel, after all? It’s not really because you want to challenge yourself, to slink around smoking Gauloises and being a sexy literary badass. It’s because you need to be secretly comforted, so that you can survive. “Please, I want to go home,” Eve says to God, “…I suppose I’m allowed to make mistakes, aren’t I?” “Yes,” God answers, “yes, you are. For now.”" - Elizabeth Bachner


Jesus del Campo: Immortality has nothing on the Roma–Lazio derby

They started arriving slowly, with cautious steps, as if unsure of themselves, as if worried that they might be struck down at any moment by a sudden feeling of reverence, and little by little they spread across the square until they had covered it completely.

Once they found themselves all squeezed in there together the mood changed and they started looking at one another with an almost rude curiosity. There were desert nomads proudly holding the reins of their camels and occasionally beating their drums out of fear of losing their companions in the crush of the crowd. There were Chinese torturers with painstakingly curled black hair who were fanning themselves with peacock-feather fans and struggling to breathe under the oppressive Mao collars on their nylon jackets, and astronomers from Cape Verde waving maps of Saturn in the air, and anarchists from Minnesota studying books on phonetics, and deliverymen from Cuzco handing out free painkillers "because today's a special day," they said, "and we're all brothers". And of course there were Romans too: women with plucked eyebrows and men holding their heads up high as if posing for their picture on a coin.

And finally the Pope took the advice of the canticles and stepped out onto the balcony.

"What do you want?" he asked them.

"We're here to protest against mortality!" they shouted back at him in an avalanche of different languages. A group of Eskimos waved a banner in Danish demanding immortality for those who work for it.

An Englishwoman turned to her husband and whispered, "I have to say that the Archbishop of Canterbury, when you see him in person, looks far more majestic than the papists' infallible guru."

"We have to respect the views of the majority, as we agreed," said her husband diplomatically, without looking up from his copy of News of the World.

Then a spokesman stepped forward to speak on behalf of the demonstrators and read a manifesto in Latin.

"After deep discussions," he said, "we have decided to put aside our differences of creed, which at this moment seem of secondary importance, and have agreed to come here, to the centre of world religion, to express our shared conviction that what we have to go through and suffer is simply not fair. No, Your Holiness. It's not fair that we should be weighed down with uncertainty about our final destiny for all our lives, on top of all the other hardships which keep us in a permanent state of discomfort, as well as being blackmailed to do the right thing left, right and centre under the threat of eternal punishment. We have realized that we are all united by the same anxiety, and because of this we want Your Holiness to communicate our protest to He who has appointed you as His representative on earth. We will not move from here until we've had an answer to our request, which is the following: we want Him to declare a 'time out' in the life of the earth, during which not a single creature on this miserable planet will be struck down by death's crushing blow so that, when we've received this guarantee, we will all be able to feel safe at last, and breathe as freely as if we'd never read stories about Original Sin. In short, we want to vent our frustration, Your Holiness, because where there's death, nobody can live."

And the Pope thought in silence for a few moments, and scratched his chin.

"Look, all of you," he said, "I'm an old man and I share your concerns, believe me, I understand it well, but I fear your demands are beyond my powers. I can ask Him for you, of course, and I might even be able to negotiate a little more excitement and less tedium in your view of the world's landscapes: you will have emerald-green skies, sand as blue as sapphires for your beaches, snow as red as leopard's blood for your mountains and water as transparent as Bohemian crystal for your rivers, which furthermore will run full of nymphs and sirens with an open, liberal attitude with whom, if it's any consolation, you will have the chance to live out your most primitive fantasies of entertainment. I might even be able to get you a reduction in the hole in the ozone layer; but oh, my friends, I can't get you the thing you ask for."

"We won't move from here," the spokesman repeated, and his phrase was echoed in a storm of defiant applause, and the first torches began to glimmer in the night amid shouted threats to set fire to Rome.

"But not the taxi stand in the Piazza del Popolo," someone protested;

"Not the Trevi Fountain," shouted someone else;

"Not the statue of Giordano Bruno," somebody else begged from the crowd.

"What time is the Roma–Lazio match?" asked a Spanish demonstrator holding a transistor radio to his ear. And a sharp, sickle-shaped silence spread over the square and trembled in the air like an old-aged acrobat.

"It's already started," answered an Italian, who understood the question. "I'm from Milan and a big Inter fan, what team do you support?"

The Spaniard answered but nobody heard him because suddenly a tumult of voices arose declaring: "I'm a Glasgow Rangers fan," "I support Dynamo Kiev," "I support Ethiopian Coffee from Addis Ababa," "I'm with Yokohama Marinos," and "I'm an Alianza de Panama fan."

And then, above all this noise, they began to hear a dull roar which they hadn't noticed until now coming from the Stadio Olimpico with the swelling force of a sea stirred up by a stormy wind and, little by little, larger and larger groups of dejected demonstrators started leaving the square, speeding up the further away they got. And the Swiss Guards stopped frowning and pointing their halberds at people and let a group of South Koreans take their photographs in exchange for half a dozen CDs of music for Zen meditation.

The Pope improvised a good-natured, routine blessing with the confidence of someone who knows his job inside out, then turned away from the dispersing crowd and glanced surreptitiously at his secretary.

"Please," he whispered to him, "can you find out the score?"

(Translated from Spanish by Catherine Mansfield. )
http://www.thedrawbridge.org.uk/issue_9/immortality_has_nothing_on_the/

Willie Smith is deeply ashamed of being human, his work celebrates this horror

Willie Smith, Oedipus Cadet (Black Heron Press, 1990)

«Oedipus Cadet is a satire of the middle-American ideal of security and stability. In the 1950s everything only appears stable. But beneath appearances something sinister lurks. It arises from the depths, flirting with, even wholly engaging pure evil. It is a consuming fire, blazing from the furnaces of the libido to enflame your entire being. It is the violation of what you hold most dear. It is PUBESCENT FANTASY! Or is it? Willie Smith blends fantasy and - what? Other fantasy? Let's call it reality--until first you are not certain which is which, and then you know very well. Oedipus Cadet is very seductive. It is a book to be experienced rather than read with detachment. After reading this book, you will look at life, yours and others, different, perhaps with sympathy, perhaps with horror. Also, it is a fun book.»

"If James Joyce had wanted to write like Dashiell Hammett, and had a sense of humor, he would have written like Willie Smith." - K.O., Reflex Magazine

"Willie Smith has a reason for writing that goes hand in hand with my reason for reading: surviving under a crushing weight by proving daily that it is not a crushing weight. This writing is the only kind of argument that beats universal inertia. Heads roll here." - Jessie Bernstein

«A satirical first novel that nails the American lust for national security in the 1950's onto the myth of Oedipus. Young Cruikshank is only 11 as he begins his story and, although he masturbates night and day, has yet to have his first orgasm or ejaculation. Cruikshank is a kind of half-kid/half-airplane. His immense power of fantasy forever links him to the latest or most colorful aircraft: ""I ...
More was an American fighting under the joint command of Mom and Dad. My particular Hurricane, because it was Pentagon-designed, was every bit as good as any Spitfire the British could put up."" Then he sees his erotic ideal, Maureen, dressed as an SS Colonel, and swoops down, fires a burst, and as she dies riddled with wounds he sees that her wounds weep a sticky white fluid. None of which he understands yet. Stella, his long-suffering mom, thinks he should go to the doctor for his sticky bedsheets. Meanwhile, dad, who missed active service in WW II, works for the Pentagon, has built a bomb shelter in his backyard and fitted it with food and a phone. Where toweringly alcoholic Dad knows baseball backwards and forwards, and forever watches games on television while bombing out on beer, his son is spellbound only by war. The entire novel is a cartoon strip peopled by three one-dimensional main characters and a small handful of other one-dimensional family relatives and schoolmates. But an Oedipal drama is underway, and Cruikshank - who lusts for Mom and sees Mom's head on Maureen's body - must do in hated Dad to marry Mom. This is a quirkily original novel, told simply, that belabors a dead horse yet lusts for bigger fish than its surface satire can catch. The telegraphic, CÉlinesque style has its own energy but little lyrical force in Smith's hands.» - Kirkus Reviews

«Willie Smith is deeply ashamed of being human. His work celebrates this horror. His work can be viewed at corpse.org and he especially recommends, in the archives, ‘Spider Fuck’ and ‘Orestes In The Meat Department.’ Shorter pieces can be found at My Favorite Bullet, Zygote in my Coffee, Jack Magazine, Milk Magazine, Dream People, Thunder Sandwich, Monkey Bicycle, Fifth Street Review, Poetic Inhalation, et al. His novella, Oedipus Cadet is available from Black Heron Press. Novella Submachinegun Consciousness can be read at semantikon.com. He is a regular contributor to Andrei Codrescu's Exquisite Corpse and The American Drivel Review. He is reasonably clean, fairly sober and happily married without children. He enjoys stargazing, birdwatching, deep-breathing and hanging out at the public library with the rest of the bums. His chapbooks EXECUTION STYLE, STORIES FROM THE MICROWAVE, SOLID GAS and GO AHEAD SPIT ON ME are probably not available anywhere.»


Willie Smith: "How We X-ed Billy"

We crawled in through the sewer. Came up out of the toilet. Snuck into the parlor, where Billy sat in front of the tv puzzling over his Bible, the commercial selling a fast car to nobody. Lenny sneezed…
Billy slammed down the Bible. Jumped up. Saw us.
His spine iced.
I held a gin & tonic. Lenny kept him covered with a Hustler. Charlie shoved a chair backwards between the preacher’s legs. Sat with his chin on the chair’s wooden back, smiling big at Billy, who in shock mouthed JESUS!
Jack tore up floorboards. Put together a cross that he proceeded to lean against a glossy of Christ tacked to the knotty pine wall. Jack then leaned up against the wall himself; got out a jug.
Charlie had already wheedled the gin from my hand. Lenny was leafing through the Hustler. Billy saw his chance; grabbed for his Bible to quote us a few, when Jack lifted the wine – forced Billy to gulp. Fear froze the evangelist’s esophagus as tokay fired in his gut. He couldn’t even voice god’s name.
Then Bernstein, from somewhere out of the woodwork, crept in. He wielded a syringe capacious as a collection plate; inside lurked a bodacious taste of god’s good.
He motioned Billy into the bathroom. When they came out, five minutes and the rest of the gin and tokay later, Billy’s face was white; Bernstein zipped his pants.
Bernstein presently, in the presence of us all, knifed Billy in the back. Billy leaped forward into Lenny, who rolled up the Hustler; bunted him over to me, who fielded him with a javelin; forked him over to Charlie, who crooned in his ear, “This Jesus Jive Got To Go,” a song he had just written into the gin bottle.
Billy grinned watermelon. Danced over to Jack, who threw him up on the cross. We used bottlenecks for makeshift nails. Sank a garland of underground poetry into his head. Then Jack jumped up, drew a dirty picture and offed himself all over Billy’s face.
As a last gesture of redeeming cruelty, we left on the tv.


Willie Smith: "Acquired Taste"

I was sitting in my studio at the bottom of a five-hundred pound writer's block, when my critics surprised me. They knocked off the block. They grabbed me by the ankles. Dragged me into the john. Stuffed me headfirst down the toilet.
"Since you write about it," one began.
"Yeah!" another leaped in. "Let's give you a taste!"
A third critic flushed furiously, accusing me of fecal materialism. They snaked my body through the trap.
Feeling my feet submerge into the bowl, I realized these people were only trying to be constructive. They were intelligent, perceptive, sensitive. And they were right. I am scum. So I let go; shot through the plumbing, out under the frontyard and into the sewer.
Down there it was dark; reminiscent of rough drafts, false starts, abortions. But drink abounded, and it wasn't lonely. There were as many rats as humans in the city above. And many more roaches. Murder, rape, arson were unknown, although they happened. Above all, plagiarism didn't exist - who'd want to even read this shit? The critics are right.
So I loosened up, and let fly. Which felt so good, I passed out; then landed on a strange planet, where no scum had ever set foot.
I opened the door to my craft, and stepped outside.


Willie Smith: An excerpt from "Orestes in the Meat Department"

Big cow of a woman leaned over the pork chops. Mousy gramps with rimless peepers eyeing the rabbit, picking over the chicken. Packages squeaking like gristle in a knacking factory. Fingers depressing transparent plastic, prodding meat packed underneath on styrofoam tray. Yellow skin, pink meat, tan pork, scarlet flesh skirted in beige fat. Blue stamps, purple tags. Organ meat - heart, liver, gizzard, brain, intestine; hog maw, boar head, beef ball. Everything but stuffed rectum and pineal gland paste.
But no blood. Liquid leaked around muscle clumps is dye, packing ice and serous fluid.
Phone doesn't ring. Nothing happens. Who needs blood? Have a look at this pound of ground round. Bunch of red-white worms all pinked together - mashed on styrofoam, trapped under plastic. Nothing savage here.
The phone rings. It's Ellen again. She wants me to kill mother. Don't answer it.
Press down on plastic, feel worms squeeze. Dollar ninety-eight. Not bad this day and - hell! - age, damn phone rings a -damn!-gain.
Bovine woman tosses aside package of pork chops like they were hay in a disinterested needle hunt. She sidles her boxcar down to the chicken, the senile mouse having disappeared off into some corner of day-old bread.
I didn't ask for this. Father drove truck, yeah, sure: Akron to Chicago, Chic to Ak. Yeah. Frozen meat he hauled. Eighteen wheeler. Had a honey in Akron. Family in Chicago. Mom found out. Cut him in half pointblank with a sawed-off. Any business of mine? I'd left home by then. Just Ellen back there to clean up the mess. Just Ellen...
Looking down at the chicken, answer the phone. Ellen asks if it's me. I'm looking down at axed, bled, plucked, pre-frozen chicken - hell, I don't know...
She goes on anyway about why don't I come up to Winnetka tonight and plant a meat cleaver in Mom's skull. Let go the package of wings, close my eyes and concentrate on her voice sitting on my innermost face...
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Willie Smith: An excerpt from "Spider Fuck"

The horniest picture I ever saw was in National Geographics. It was a spider's asshole magnified fifty times. Resembled a soggy Cheerio on a slate background.
I haven't been the same since. Because I wanna do me one, and no live spider is big enough to accommodate. I've tried jacking off on arachnids. Wolf spiders and tarantulas the best. Daddy longlegs impossible. Scorpions a bitch. But I never come near the satisfaction gleaned that afternoon when I first drenched the National Geo full-color centerfold blown up to reveal a teensy parasite wriggling in some jungle spider's 0-ring.
You can't always get what you want. But, if you fixate, sometimes you get what you pay for. Visualize arachnoid roundeye.
One night I was jizzing a black widow -- ejaculating without orgasm, bored with the universe. I turned some jazz on the radio, while watching the spider struggle under the shroud of ejaculate.
Goodman Benny inhaled clarinet. Jack Webb sat in. Max Roach fogged the chamber. They were in mixolydian - I heard a vodka tonic. Willie "The Lion" Smith masturbated the 88.
I daydreamed anti-aircraft fire. Nazi flak redshifted into what I'd dine upon that night, Turkey Tetrachloride? Veal Hardon Blue? Fish Dicks? Spam Sushi? Only a wizard could decide which tv dinner, when all you got is a radio.
Imagine my lack of preparation, daydreaming as I was, when into the room clacked a spider big as a Buick. Eight pale legs supported a hispid, chartreuse body. She spun around. Hiked her crupper. Displayed a taut caterpillar-green starfish.
Like in a dream, I approached the miracle. The chiton of her legs buckled with anticipation. I ran a finger over the sphincter that was tinier than a dowager's purse. She stood nervous, shy, to all appearances a virgin. She was dry as calculus. I ran to the kitchen for butter.
Wow, I thought, yanking open the fridge, a cherry hallucination! I froze, staring at a bearded carrot, a cube of butter, a plastic liter of Rococo Coke and a stutter of roaches that had wormed in under the door.
The roaches didn't appreciate the light. Several rotated feelers. But none broke ranks. The fridge was too cold, despite crumbling insulation, for them to panic at such a stimulus. The insect at the head of the line lifted a leg at the grate of the middle shelf, whereon lay the carrot abandoned by Bugs Bunny about the time of Hiroshima.
I guess I didn't have any tv dinners afterall. In the back of my head a psychiatrist sniggered; neither was there any mammoth Miss Muffetbuddy out in the parlor.
I couldn't face that. Vision or not, she was real as anything else in America. Slammed the door. Sidled to the sink. Washed my hands. If she was from another planet, perhaps a victim of radiation, I didn't want to contaminate anything. Washed so good I scraped knuckles raw and broke two nails.
[read more - http://www.corpse.org/archives/issue_9/ficciones/smith_willie.htm]



"Why are you cunting?
- Is an email interview not good for you? Sorry, I'm just not good at the talking type interview, haven't done one in 20 years and I didn't like the experience or the result. So I'm not up for a phone-type interview. I think that's what you mean by podcast? Sorry I'm so ignorant about tech stuff. I'm not even sure what a podcast is... but I think it's done over the phone and then stored as an audio thing on a website? I'm really sorry for being so slow, man. But I am an old fuck and really not good at this new stuff. I prefer the old school written kind of an interview, although I'm not really much on interviews at all. I like to think mostly about the writing and the doing of it, which is hard enough for me. Talking I'm just not good at. It makes me nervous and I don't do a good job, so let's forget the talking approach; if the email approach doesn't interest you, that's fine, I'm OK with passing.
That was my first question.
Next question: did you read any contemporary novels in 2010 and, if so, what were they and what did you think of them?
- Gosh, I'm sorry. Let me take a deep glug of grog and wake up and not miss any more cues: In 2010 I worked fulltime five-days-a-week all 52 weeks that year as a financial worker in a Medicaid office in a big city in the Great Northwest I call Igdrasil. A financial worker is the guy who threatens to throw your grandmother out of the nursing home because she failed to send the fin wrkr a current bank statement the fin wrkr requested. It is the fw's job to track grandma's resources, to make sure she doesn't exceed the $2k limit. If she goes a penny over $2k in her bank accounts, cash values of her life insurance policies, stocks, trusts, etc. I promptly pitch her bony butt out on the pavement. I have 500 grandma's on my caseload. Actually a lot of them are grandpa's and some are just freeloading cocksuckers under the age of 65 who happen to be blind, disabled, crippled or otherwise living off the taxpayer. I sit at a computer in a cubicle with a headset staring into 6 different computer systems spread over two monitors. The phone rings constantly. Often it is you calling me up to threaten to kill me because I am threatening to pitch your grandmother's bony butt out onto the pavement. I explain to you that Amerika has consistently voted against socialized medicine. What you are thinking of, where snoops like me do not pry into grannies' financial doings, is socialized medicine. I hear-tell they have such a thing in savage countries like Japan, the European Union, Cuba, etc. But this here is Amerika and we aim to remain free and own all the guns we need and never pay any taxes at all. So what you get is your Uncle Willie: the Welfare boy. That's right, bub: Medicaid is just another name for Welfare. The last safety net in Amerika. And your grandma has fallen into it and there are some big fat holes in this here net. So you gonna get me that bank statement or do I push the series of 265 intricate keystrokes in my 6 computer programs that will deny Granny's benefits by 5PM today? You know it costs $6,698.15 to private pay one month for Gran in that nursing home where she is wallowing in her own piss while being raped nightly by excons masquerading as certified care providers? You sure you don't got a bank statement hanging around the house? By the way, how much is in Gran's purse right now -- that counts for resources too, ya know. And maybe if we kinda grab her ankles, turn her upsidedown and shake her good some pennies might fall out of her hospital gown pockets? They count, too. So when I come home at night I don't feel much like reading. Usually I just sit in the dark and swear quietly to myself. I think in all of 2010 I read about five books. Distinctly recall reading a translation by one Richard Holmes of Theophile Gautier's spooky short stories; Holmes rather blandly titles the anthology MY FANTOMS; the translation on the whole was rather mediocre, but it's hard to keep Gautier down; especially "The Opium Smoker" and "The Adolescent," both sexy chillers for the 1840s and they still can produce a tad of horripilation. The past four months Susan has been reading to me at night Trollope's THE WAY WE LIVE NOW, a surprisingly cogent and humorous social satire of the early 1870s London and environs. That's about as contemporary as I've gotten this year. I'm glad you asked that question.
You got me all wrong. My grandmother happens to leech off the communist State of Maine, which has this thing called MaineCare. My grandfather got a surgery in Massachussets using this MaineCare. It would have cost $650,000 out of pocket. During his life he only contributed a few million to the tax system, though very few of his contributions were on the employee side of the payroll tax. So clearly the bastard doesn't deserve any help! Good thing we're nice and soft up there in Maine, yeah?
Anyhoo, around the time that Trollope was writing, this idiot named Edward Bellamy wrote a book called Looking Backward: 2000-1887. Are you familiar with that? It's not incredibly good fiction, I wouldn't say, but it's interesting to read if only purely for the politics. Another good book I like from that period was definitely Moondyne.
I'm sorry to hear that you are a cog in the welfare machine. I myself will be collecting disability here in the near future. Don't ask me why, because I don't know. But I'm getting out of the army. I've started transcribing things. I'm good at it. Building a company around it. And going to school in the fall, hopefully.
Also, weren't you unemployed the last time I heard from you?
- Unemployed, yes. I was out of work for 14 months from September 2008 to October 26, 2009. For the last ten months of this otherwise unsalaried sabbatical Unemployment Compensation kept me in beans, rent and rags. Not such a bad scene at all. Everyday nothing to do but splat words on the page, lay around the house, look online for a job for maybe half an hour and go for long walks. One of heaven's sub-basements, but heaven nonetheless. Right when I was about to break the age-discrimination barrier and get hired on as a cog in the public library system, my old job took me back as a cog in the welfare system. Despite this meaning another descent into hell, it was a godsend. God often sends us to hell for our own good, you know. Godsend because I truly by then needed the bux. I had just turned my life savings insideout to pay off Susan's credit card debt of $37k and my Compensation had only another week to go. It was great to have those fat $1k checks arriving once again twice a month. Plus health insurance for only $94.00 monthly (plus copays, slowpays, blowpays, deductibles, refucktables, etc.) for both myself and Susan; Enzo the tomcat excluded. And after 15 months of consecutive feasting, I am, frankly, developing a real fondness for the taste of shit. The other day a supervisor in another unit asked me how long I'd been hired for this time. "Through Halloween," I responded, "but if it can be arranged I'd like to keep right on working till I'm 86." The soup reflected, frowned, said, "Sure, I think that can be arranged." Medicaid needs experienced workers these days. The whole system is collapsing like a house of phosphorus cards in sea water. Budget cuts make the legislature change the system at least once a month, in their usual shoot-yrslf-in-the-foot fashion of the latest bright idea on how to save money. I've been in and out of welfare offices since 1977, a perennial temporary hire, so I do have some idea of how things work; it takes a new hire, who has no knowledge of the system, at the very least one full year to be up to full production, that's how complicatedly complex welfare in general, and the Medicaid system in particular, is.
Thanks for filling me in on MaineCare, sounds significantly more merciful than Washington State Medicaid, although we have one of the more merciful setups in the country, less cold than MediCal (California's version of Medicaid) and certainly hotter than Texas Medicaid. Although by "you" I actually meant the third person singular general pronoun "one," which is so delightfully characteristic of British English. You with your French heritage probably speak better French than I do, and so are fully aware of the French version of this pronoun "on," which has such efficient usage in La Belle Langue. But I tend to rely on the vague American English "you" when I sometimes mean "one." Just another example of the ambiguity and lack of clarity in my prose. But I get a kick out of the obscure and the equivocal, so guess I'll just persist in this particular vagary.
No, I've never read Bellamy, though heard of the gent and his work, and I never even heard of MOONDYNE. I googled MOONDYNE briefly and looks like a great book. Thanks for the tip! I knew I'd learn something from this experience. Learning is where it's at. Even if you ("one") forget what you learned by suppertime. The very thrill of learning something interesting I didn't know before is what keeps me from dying of boredom on the spot.
What are your short and long-term goals as a writer? What was the last thing that pissed you off in a literary way? Non-literary? What do you think of Jonathan Franzen?
- Jonathan Franzen? My first reaction was: Who he? Then I googled the name and I see he wrote a book called THE CORRECTIONS, and I remember Susan read this book and told me something about it, I think she liked it OK, nothing special. Susan reads all the best sellers, brings home an armload of books from Costco once or twice a month. She also subscribes to the NEW YORKER and reads to me therefrom an article or two once or twice a year, whether she feels I need it or not. I guess this Franzen gent is on the rich and famous side. Bully for him! I'd like to be that way myself, except then I'd hafta endure the continual annoyance of potshots from punks like me.
My long-term goal as a writer is to die with a hot idea entering fresh into my mind. My short-term goal as a writer is pretty much the same.
Nothing much in literature pisses me off. I get a little bored sometimes. My entire lifetime teaching career amounts to one week. Out of the blue my phone rang one day in 1995. It was Naropa Institute. They wanted to fly me down to Boulder to teach fiction writing for one week as "guest faculty." I played right along with the game. It was a riot! My course consisted of dream writing. Assignment for each night was for each student to write down a real dream the student had actually experienced, could be from last night or from summer vacation age eight or whatever; then to write down a made-up dream. Next day the kids stand up one at a time and read first one, then the other, without disclosing which is the real dream. Then the rest of the class, myself included, vote on which is the real dream and which is the fake. It doesn't matter who wins and we don't keep track, but the voting, of course, is of vital importance. Everything is going fine and Uncle Willie and the kids are getting along great and everybody is doing his and/or her homework. For the last assignment I tell everybody instead just to write down a dream the writer would like to have. I have the kids the following day stand up and read his and/or her own personally desired dream. But one kid, we'll call him Jonathan, stands up without paper, hands empty as a cobweb on Beethoven's birthday. He starts talking. Jonathan has a way with words, good charisma, he's a born talker. He relates this dream he would like to have, pausing for the usual um's & uh's & backing up now & then to say something in a better or at least different way. It's a beautiful dream, good as any of the others, better than most. He sits down. I make him stand back up. "OK, Jonathan," I say in my best General Douglas MacArthur voice, "I'm going to pin a medal on you, because that was a grand dream, truly a wonderful imaginative creation. And then," I make the sign of the gun, bring the muzzle of my index finger to within an inch of his third eye, "I'm going to have you shot; because this is a writing class and writing is not talking and what you have done is talk. You, Jonathan, have not written a single word." But, of course, I spared the kid's life; after all, he was paying me for this; it hardly makes sense to hafta pay for your own executioner. I paroled him on his word of honor that he would go home that night and darken a page with words to capture the chat he had just given us. I guess I got a little bored that day, although not really; I had fun with it. If you ain't having fun, it's your own fault; always.
I get pissed off plenty in a non-literary way. And usually from the same phonomenon: people (this includes electronic people, machine people, people in print, people on the airwaves, etc.) who try to sell me shit. I get so fucking pissed off at phone solicitors let's not even talk about it. I don't watch TV and only listen to about an hour of radio a year, because I become apoplectic whenever a commercial erupts. Susan watches lots of TV, but she knows to turn the volume all the way down when I enter the room, and she moreover knows, if a commercial is on, to turn the entire set off immediately. Susan has no arms, no legs and only one eye, because exactly five times in our 31 year marriage she has left on the TV when a commercial was airing and I happened to saunter into the room. This is all arrant hypocrisy on my part, of course, because humans are the animals that sell. We all sell. I sell, you sell, he sells, she sells, but "it" does not sell. Unfortunately I must confess to being a human; argal I, too, sell. So I try not to take my anger seriously; it's all just hypocrisy. I also try to follow Yeshua of Nazareth (the most famous rabbi who ever lived) in his admonishment to "Love thine enemy." Such a beautiful and obviously sensible idea! But I hardly ever succeed in that endeavor either.
Franzen was last year billed as a Great American Novelist and featured on the cover of Time Magazine (only the fourth writer ever to do so) for his latest novel, Freedom. He was a friend of over-rated man-child David Foster Wallace. Etc.
I know your father was in the service, wasn't he? How does that make you feel right now? Have you gotten into real physical confrontations in the last ten years? Did you ever drink for more than two days straight? What is the most modern piece of technology, besides your computer, that you own and personally use?
- My dad wanted to be in the service. He was 26 when the Day of Infamy occured and tried to enlisted in the Navy, but was rejected because of his nearsightedness. Instead he became a career Federal Government Employee, ending up as a technical writer attached to the US Army Engineer Corps; mostly he worked on scripts for training films; how to build a bridge, how to blow up a bridge, etc. We lived on the base at Fort Belvoir once for about nine months, until the Corps decided civilians could no longer take advantage of such quarters (we shopped at the PX, as well as enjoying low rent, cockroaches and silverfish). My Uncle Mart was wounded at Anzio. My Uncle Gil was mustered out for TB before he was even shipped overseas. I was a peace queer during Viet Nam. Not really out of any deep political conviction; I don't have any such luxuries. I'm just a coward who cringes at the idea of hurting other people, even those I'm carefully instructed to hate; in fact, even people I DO hate, I still am terrified of hurting them; it's a kind of phobia: I just don't want to get my hands dirty. Come to think of it, I don't even really have the guts to hate anybody. I'm pretty much of a loser when it comes to being a man. I do enjoy pain, however. For pain in the late sixties I was a logger; a chokersetter for George Weyerhaeuser; I had a wonderful time and only wound up in the emergency room once when the mainline caught me in the shoulder and threw me thirty feet through the air like the piece of shit I am. I went back to work the next day. Setting chokers is very healthy for a young man; especially if you stay out of the bight of the mainline.
It's been maybe 30 years since my last physical confrontation, and that was because I was just standing around while a junkie was screaming at my fellow Welfare worker because said worker had denied said junkie said junkie's food stamps because said junkie was not cooperating with treatment. My friend stands six-foot-seven and I'm barely five-ten, so the junkie turned his frustration on me and shoved me to the pavement. I was surprised at how easily and professionally I fell. It was all those summers setting chokers: nothing like being a logger to teach you how to fall. The junkie ran off the moment he shoved me. I did nothing, of course, because I am a peace queer. Just got to my feet, dusted myself off and suggested to my buddy that we repair to the tavern for a couple pitchers and try to forget about Welfare. Before that... well... I remember throwing a brick at a friend when I was three... more like heaving a brick at him... and I remember the brick fell short and we both burst into tears and it was a thoroughly disgusting experience. I think that 's the last time I ever engaged in violence. Unless you call fucking the living shit out of three consenting women in one night violence. I have nothing against consensual sex. I think sex is very shiny and clean. It's violence makes me feel all dirty inside. Oh yeah, Susan and I were shot at in our own home back in the wild and woolly 90s; just a .38 or so, no big deal; I still keep the bullet hole in the ceiling of my study; I like to lie on my back sometimes and watch spiders crawl in and out of it. I didn't do anything about that either. Just call a cop, who showed up about an hour later and shrugged the whole thing off as just another unsolvable aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. At the time I was working as a medical records clerk in an African American mental health clinic. I told the gang about it the next day, but nobody was impressed. I just got looks like: "Hey white boy, welcome to the club!" That was a great job by the way. I was the token white boy and the gang really got to love me; they even bought copies of my novella; I tried to give the copies away, but they insisted on paying for them; and social worker in an African-American mental health clinic don't pay shit, bro; love to reminisce about those days... anyway, what was I babbling?
Did I ever drink for more than two days straight? Do you mean without sleeping? If you count days where I got my eight hours and my three squares, I drank for two days straight from about 1972 through 1996. I was a highly skilled beer drinker. In my prime I put away a gallon a day on the average; that means there were certain days when 18 cans of cheap brew were necessary to float my boat. But I never drank as much as a case a day. Alcoholics drink like that. I was not an alcoholic. Goddamnit, I LOVED drinking! I wasn't allergic to bourbon, brandy, vodka or gin, either; and would sometimes for a week or ten resort to a daily regimen of one to two quarts of cheap wine per diem. But I always ate plenty and ate well and always got in at least eight hours of sleep, plus an afternoon siesta. And I was careful to walk at least six miles a day. I very much enjoyed my booze. But one day when I was 46 or so I just decided I was too old for the shit. I've been a teetotaler ever since. It wasn't hard at all giving up. The first month was a little weird; but it was more like a free trip to outer space than a season in hell.
I don't completely own this computer. Susan bought it for herself. But when she got her laptop, she insisted on handing "Dottie" down to me. She was sick and tired of my lack of engagement with the internet, email, youtube, spacebook and various other fucksites. That was about seven years ago. I enjoy Dottie a lot. We have tons of fun together. I always wanted to live in a library, and now I do. The other piece of technology I own is... uh... well I do have a pair of binoculars my parents gave me about 35 years ago. As a kid I was an avid stargazer (still am!) and they wanted to be sure I could grok the Galilean satellites of Jupiter and the Andromeda Galaxy and the double cluster in Perseus and such whenever I needed to. I also own outright a gorgeous Smith-Corona portable -- one of the best manual typewriters on the planet. That's about it. Never owned a cell phone or a car or a TV... wait, I have some old-school cassette taperecorders gathering dust upstairs! That's right, bought those suckers with my hardearned library money back in the early seventies. I useta be a clerk in the Portland Public Library for a little over a year. Terrible job. Even though I love libraries. Working in a public library, for a bibliophile like me, is like being blindfolded while surrounded by a gaggle of gorgeous nekkid babes. I useta have loads of fun with those clunky old cassette recorders. I'd make tapes to friends and poets all over the country; walk around the neighborhood monologuing on the landscape, holding the condenser mike up close to fences when packs of maniacal watchdogs would exhibit fits of snarling and barking, sometimes catch the sound of a fender-bender, or some drunk screaming at his wife, etc. Yeh, I'm probably more into technology than I'm willing to admit. Never owned a watch, though. Damn things weigh down my wrist, ruin my typing.
How do you feel about the people of New York or New York itself? To me it's like totally over-rated and inflates itself like toxic commodity futures / mortgages. What was your first acquaintance with literary literature, ie, like Joyce Carol Oates etc?
- I blush to confess that I harbor a deep and abiding prejudice against NYC. Prejudice is never good. In the blind ignorance of my bigotry I consider NYC the bullshit capital of the universe. Except for a few hours once as a teenager screwing around on the subway, while on my way to somewhere else, I have never even been to NYC. What the hell would I know about the town? I need to get over this.
I think I read James Joyce in a previous life. The Joyce who wrote ULYSSES, that is. I first read ULYSSES carefully when I was 22, just out of college. I perused it at least another six times during the ensuing decade. I look on Joyce as being about half-a-dozen different authors. In my humble opinion: The Joyce who wrote DUBLINERS is a damn good writer, right in there with Stephen Crane, Hemingway and Raymond Carver; the Joyce who wrote EXILES should never have bothered to attempt a play; the Joyce who wrote POMES PENYEACH shows a lot of promise; the Joyce who wrote PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN is on to something really big; the Joyce who wrote FINNEGANS WAKE should see a shrink and stop annoying us with this nonsense; the Joyce who wrote ULYSSES is a god -- a fallible god, a sloppy god, a weird god, but an absolute fucking GOD. My taste in the works of Joyce probably tells you more about my limitations, interests and capabilities than anything else I might reveal in this or any other interview. But what do I know? I mean, really, what worse source on who someone truly is than the person him- and/or herself? Not that I'm not enjoying babbling; this is great fun! Thanks again for providing me with this opportunity. I love writing letters; I'm an epistolary freak; the letter is my soap box, my diary, my father confessor, my audience. Thanks for your patience in reading all this blather.
I was definitely referring to JOYCE CAROL OATES, author of Black Water? Pretty sure she's older than even you are. But anyways. In Oedipus Cadet, the narrator ends up "flying missions" (having sex, or at least masturbation) with his mother after (if I remember correctly) killing his father. Any reality there? Are there any plans to ever bring that novel to the digital age in some way?
- Holy Hannah - I just googled Joyce Carol Oates and I see she has eleven years on me; I had no idea people could even live that long. Whatever, yeah, sorry I got off topic with my answer to the last question; I majored in divagation and hold a masters in irrelevance. I read one of Joyce Carol's novels, but it was abridged. It was a book on tape (my eyes are failing me and about half of my "books" these days are books on tape) and only after I'd listened to it did I decipher the liner notes and realize the damn thing was an abridgement. I forget the title, but it was about a serial killer, told from the viewpoint of the perp. The killer stole off the corpse of one of his victims a pair of gloves lined with rabbit fur. Throughout the book he refers to this anonymous victim as "Bunny Gloves." I've always remembered that. I guess that's my abridged opinion of Joyce Carol: Bunny Gloves. I really should get out more.
There is a lot of reality in OEDIPUS CADET. All of the baseball players named in the book are real; even those with rather unlikely names, such as Enos Slaughter, Moose Skowron, Bullet Bob Turley, Clint "Scrap Iron" Courtney and Rabbit Maranville. However, my favorite line in the book, "Slaughter walks to load the bases," never happened; not in the 1958 World Series, at least.
I don't remember ever fucking my mother. I do recall exposing myself to her once, when I was about fourteen. As a child I was a chronic exhibitionist and masturbatory maniac (nothing much has really changed, I've just channeled my talents into less dangerous outlets). I was certainly one sick little "motherfucker." That's what's wrong with this country: we allow people like me to live on into adulthood. A little cyanide properly administered back there in 1962 or so and none of this embarrassment and inconvenience called my life would ever have occured. You could be interviewing a real writer instead of some twisted old douchebag with a handful of almosts to his credit. Well, I actually am fond of O. C. It does kind of work. Although what the Kirkus Reviews said about it is painfully accurate: "...lusts after bigger fish than it can catch." I think that's how it was worded; anyhow, that's probably true. But still and all, O.C. is the only novel I ever cranked out that is worth even a cursory read; I have maybe six other "novels" in manuscript. Oh yeah, I still have vague hopes for SUBMACHINEGUN CONSCIOUSNESS; but that's barely novella size, and I'm careful never to refer to it as a novel.
As a small child I feared my father would kill me. He was a functioning closet alcoholic who raged all night through the house naked screaming obscenities, slamming doors, kicking the dog and punching holes in the wall. I would lie awake in my bed perfectly still, eyes screwed shut, hardly breathing; I knew if I made the slightest noise he would storm in and pound me to a lifeless pulp. I learned a lot of things in those days, not the least useful of which is how to masturbate soundlessly. Then at about age 13 I stopped fearing for my life and instead grew afraid I was going to kill Dad. I left home at age 18 and never went back. As I boarded my Northwest Orient Airlines 727 from Dulles Airport in the Virginia countryside for Seatac Airport between Tacoma and Seattle, where I had never before in my life set foot, I breathed a deep sigh of relief: I had NOT killed the poor old drunken sonofabitch. Still, it took me another ten years to stop hating my progenitor. Bad scene hating your father, or either of your parents, for that matter; because in doing so you are also hating yourself, since Mom and Dad are both essential components of every human psyche. Today, seventeen years after his death, I realize I owe my dad TONS. He taught me how to do arithmetic in my head, he taught me my first words of French, he taught me how to throw a rock, he first read to me Edgar Allen Poe and he read aloud to me (over the course of about three months, when I was bedbound with rheumatic fever at the age of eight) A. E. Van Vogt's classic SLAN. But the greatest treasure Dad handed down to me was how to read poetry aloud. And I don't mean how he read to me at my bedside in the early evening. I mean how he screamed, howled and swore throughout the night, once he had a fifth of vodka under his belt. Ah, the passion he worked into those obscenities! SHIT! GODDAMNIT! SON... OF... A... BITCH!!!! That's how poetry should be read. I took those nightly lessons to heart. And I do LOVE to read my own stuff aloud. Thanks, Dad, you old dirty dying sonofabitch, you! I guess my father being a son of a bitch, that makes me a grandson of a bitch.
Actually, though, I think I am the grandson of a whore. My mother (she died last year at age 94) never knew who her mother was. Nobody now ever will. So 25% of my genetic makeup is utterly unknown. For reasons I don't have time to go into here, I strongly suspect Mom is the offspring of my maternal grandfather's union with a prostitute. So there you have it: OEDIPUS CADET, by Willie Smith, Grandson of a Whore.
I think Girls with Insurance might be happy to serialize one of these manuscripts you speak of. Feel free to send it along. Anyway, any closing words?
- Thanks again for providing me this opportunity to slap plastic. I had a bellyful of fun. I guess everybody's favorite topic is him- and/or herself, and I'm no exception. My only regret is that I misspelled POMES PENYEACH. Any chance that could be corrected? I so dislike in my own work typos and slips of orthography. The irony is that Joyce intentionally misspells both words in the title of his poetry collection, and I didn't have the balls, or the memory, to misspell them both. I will definitely consider your offer re GIRLS WITH INSURANCE. Unfortunately the only novel that today exists digitally, ZOMBIE INNA BASEMENT, is already up at THIEVES JARGON, where it received a deservedly cold reception. Nonetheless, it would be fun to have at least one of the others in digital form, even if I do chicken out at the last minute and decide it doesn't deserve to be seen on the web; like I say, these other "novels" are not capable of even one at-bat in the OEDIPUS CADET league; I really got lucky with O. C. Also, it's lots of typing for each novel, and time, energy and eye-strength are limited, at least till the State eliminates my job; so we're not talking near future, here; and I fully understand that by the time I manage to get one into digital form, the offer may no longer stand; like I say, I would not at all be the loser, as at least I would have one of these developmentally disabled novels in electronic form. Thanks again for your patience and all of your admirable energy and application.
Your humble and obedient servant, Willie." - Interview with P. H. Madore

Matthew Sharpe – History Is A Hilarious Hallucinogenic Jazz-Symphonic Device Of Post-Apocalyptic Karmic Overdose

Matthew Sharpe, Jamestown (Soft Skull, 2003)

«Jamestown is set in a dystopian future when Manhattan and Brooklyn are at war with each other. The Manhattan Corp. sends a group of men in an armored bus down I-95 to Virginia where they hope to find food and oil to replenish their wartime supplies. Arriving in Jamestown, they find strange natives "of a reddish hue" who aren't too friendly. The Manhattanites communications specialist, Johnny Rolfe, is enamored of the sexy and bawdy Pocahontas, while the bus' mechanic, Jack Smith, tries to keep his head about him. Rolfe narrates most of the novel via letters, e-mails, IMs he shares with the Indians' leader's daughter. It's an anachronistic struggle where the 21st century technology could be trumped by a 17th-century civilization. Matthew Sharpe's novel has received mostly positive reviews with the Washington Post saying, "Jamestown is packed with marvelous material, moving and funny and deeply provocative."»

«Few writers since Donald Barthelme have been able to synthesize an absurdist comic vision with true erudition, not even to mention narrating a story which is both hilarious parody and dark, haunting realism. In fact, erudition, one could say, works against comedic ambitions, creating a gravitas which can all to easily undercut other authorial intentions. And if the story-telling is in the hands of a writer willing to forfeit deeper levels of substance for camp and jokes, the work can become tiresome and banal. It is most difficult to apply the lighter touches necessary to political parody these days and even harder to create a narrative that will operate sort of like a hot air balloon and carry its passengers across history, myth and legend, while letting them fly into giggles, as if drifting into fluffy, vaporous clouds. But in Matthew Sharpe’s book, this balance is wonderfully achieved and skillfully at play. “Entertaining” is an under-rated quality in literary fiction, perhaps, and Matthew Sharpe’s new novel Jamestown reminds us how potent it can be.
Matthew Sharpe is the author of two previous novels, The Sleeping Father and Nothing is Terrible, as well as a short-story collection Stories From the Tube. Jamestown draws on the Jamestown legend: how the first American settlers made their first settlement in the New World, driving the Indians off their native grounds. Sharpe has set up his retelling of the Jamestown legend by casting his characters into contemporary voices who alternately parody the standard story of the first Americans and Indians and then weave in their own wild, original adventures and personalities. The novel is written in several different character’s voices, each presented as first-person monologues. It is Sharpe’s impressive skill with language and voice that makes the book so seductive and enchants us. And so, for the purposes of rendering a truly literary appreciation of this author’s gifts, I would like to showcase parts of these inventive, playful monologues, as only describing them wouldn’t suffice or do justice to Sharpe’s formidable talent. The play and echoes of these monologues provide the wind on which his satire flies and they are the reason the work reaches such peaks of hilarity and sting, offering a deftly told political tour-de-force.
The book begins with a monologue from Johnny Rolphe (who will become our romantic interest in the book as he leads his survivors into the swampy South and falls in love with the famous Pocahontas - the daughter of the Indian’s Tribal Chief):
“To whoever is out there,” Johnny Rolphe begins the novel, “if anyone is out there: Today has been an awful day in a run if awful days as long as life so far. The thirty of us climbed aboard this bus in haste, fled down the tunnel, and came up on the river’s far bank in time to see the Chrysler building plunge into the earth...”
Witnessing human chaos as the city pieces fly about, Rolphe’s comic portrayals of the feuds and debauchery inside the fallen New York City fill the beginning pages of the tale. “Some great, quaint pre-annihilation philosopher described the movement of history as thesis, antithesis, synthesis, whereas I’ve seen a lot more thesis, antithesis, steak knife, bread knife” he tells us, then describes how a man holds a breadknife in one hand, a steak knife in the other, vaults from his seat back during the collective journey out of the destroyed city, to slit the throats of not one but two other men, each knife, steak and bread, ready in his hands.
“A few miles out of Delaware a log or rock got lodged in our tank tread,“ Rolphe continues, chronicling the exodus from Manhattan, “I gazed out the dirty bullet-proof window at two plump hares, creatures one sees none of on the island of my birth. ‘Say bullet resistant glass not bulletproof glass because there’s no such thing as bulletproof glass and though this may be a technicality I wouldn’t want to sell this glass to you under false pretenses however slight’ the used bullet proof glass salesman said to me in my role as this trips communication specialist, back at home, three days before the earth swallowed the tower. ‘What will you be using the glass for?’
‘For not dying,’ I said and put my fist in contact with his chin, in modern-day New York. Stepping over his prone form, I put as much glass in my cart as would fit. Don't judge me, if I exist. Show me a man who goes to sleep each night integrity in tact and I will hit him in the chin with my fist and take his glass.”
The eager new settlers, after the arrive in the South’s wilderness are led by a character named John Ratliff. Ribald satire abounds once the books gets rolling. Ratliff’s mother's boyfriend is the CEO of Manhattan Company. The Indians are “redskins” due to their applied use of “sunblock SPF 90”. The story follows the Rolphe’s falling in love for Powhatan's daughter, Pocahontas, and later in the story, she saves the life of another settler named Jack Smith. Kidnappings, killings, and theft continue to alternate as each first-person account leads us through another verbal thicket of dark comedy and surreal events.
After Johnny Rolphe’s first person account, we meet Pocahontas:
“To the excellent person who is reading this! Hi! My name is Pocahontas,” she writes, “and I’m nineteen, but Pocahontas isn’t my real name. If I say my real name you will die. Anyone who hears my real name will die. Pocahontas is my nickname means “person who cannot be controlled by her father. My dad didn’t make it up, my mom did before she died, and he’s kind of mad because that that’s my name because anyone who says my name name will die., which has been proven, but right now I can’t talk about that because in English, which isn’t my mom tongue, you can talk only about one thing at time, at most” she continues: “Oh, English, how I love to write to you in English, even though its so slow to anything in English because English moves at the speed of talking, whereas my language moves at the speed of thinking. Thinking in English is beautiful sort of in a way it is beautiful to have smoked a big bowl of Busthead.”
Later in the novel Pocahontas delivers a poem for us. She writes:
To the edge of the world I am running
Beyond the land, beyond the sea
I evade my predator with cunning
And so does my virginity
--Pocahontas
As the the novel follows the legendary plot of the Jamestown history. John Ratcliffe, lets the reader know what is happening:
“Dear President Stuart,” begins Ratcliffe’s first person account, “Please allow me to to begin by letting you know how honored I am by the confidence you have expressed by appointing me executive president of the Virginia Branch of the Manhattan Company. I will do my best to execute your intentions to the extent that I understand them. have arrived safely, and have begun scouting the area for a suitable location on which to begin construction of regional headquarters. As surely you must know, our departure took place under less than ideal circumstances due to the unanticipated urban infarction of which you were also no doubt a recipient. (I trust you have found safe ground sir and are prospering!)”
There are also darker places in this book, surprises even as the story becomes more wild, and Sharpe flirts with sounding preposterous. At one point, for example, Pocahontas observes a man with an arrow in his head and speaks of him to her Aunt Charlene:
“That man does not believe he’ll die one day”, she says to Charlene,
“Which one?”
“The one with the arrow in his head.”
“How can you tell?”
“He’s got an arrow in his head and he’s not dead.”
“How could he not believe he’ll die? What a dope.”
“He’s not a dope, he’s smart and strong, in spite of how he looks and acts. And what he says. His unbelief in death protects him. his unbelief in his own death is an attack on death that death is flummoxed by. and by the way, you, too, don’t believe you’ll die.”
“I know I’ll die. I think about it all the time.
“You know and think but don’t believe.”
“And will my unbelief protect me?”
Reading Jamestown I thought of Barthelme’s famous novellas Snow White or The Dead Father. I thought how humor in a skillful writer’s hands can open a door to profundity, to substance, show us places without those depth that are as absurd as they are serious. Absurdity can be enlightening. Jamestown is as much about violence, the exploitation of races, women, corporate avarice as it is a tour-de-force and plain wildly funny. It’s the adroit balance of effects Sharpe strikes makes it exceptional and one not to be missed, I think.
Or as Pocahontas sums it it up, capturing Sharpe’s combustive blend of bawdy parody and sober seriousness:
“What strange fish these are who fear the water that surrounds them. And by fish I mean men, and by men these grim and self-destroying fools among whom I sink down now in illness and despair. But the heck with Shell Knee Craw for uttering the d word, even in her mind, and to no one. She - I - might as well say aloud, seriatum, to her worst enemy - and who dat is she think she know but (ugh!) will not admit - all her killing secret names, show all her secret selves, leave no wall between her outside and her inside, become in other words - nothing.“
There are so many more examples of glistening, inventive, and ingenious writing. John Ratcliffe’s wife writes:
“After we had sex tonight, Jim read aloud a haiku he wrote for me as is his wont, and gave me a copy in his fast and and clear and forceful script:
Manhattan’s dirt in Brooklyn’s eyes
my cock in your ass
Orgasm.”
As the novel stampedes and rollicks towards its climax and inevitable end, Pocahontas takes the narrative reins and provides us with a report of exactly how the famous Indian tribe was dominated and conquered at last by the white settlers.
“Dear fellow grown-up," Pocahontas writes,“First thing I did as a woman was the dishes. Oh no wait, that’s not true. First thing I did was watch two boys flight, and try to break them up and fail. Last night, after I told you about the advent of the menarche, I kind of went into a swoon and passed out in the corn shack awoke at dawn with killer backache. I eased my redass down out the back flap of the shack so as not to be seen by the guys on the bus, in case they were awake, and I tip-toed, real quiet, Indian style, through all the corn stalks all dolled up in dew like girls in rhinestones. Hello, you glorious young woman, they said to me. Corn loves me. Plants in general love. Soil rich in human blood loves me.”
In short, a sparklingly energetic vaudevillian satire becomes a sobering meditation on war, sex, and gender, (or “civilization and its counterparts,” as John Rolphe describes it at the very beginning). Black humor always bubbling, and often raising the boiling point of this narrative stew to reveal the folly and doomed apocalyptic intensity of humankind. This is, indeed, no small literary feat. I think Sharpe is a rare writer, one who freshens the air with new and original work at the same time he re-acquaints us with our past (and too often forgotten) maestros. Donald Barthelme is just one such maestros that this work called to mind, and I do hope readers will enjoy as much as I did the abundance here.» - Leora Skolkin-Smith

«The plain, even soporific titles of Matthew Sharpe’s books belie one of the most energetic and laudably fluid prose styles going. On any given page, Sharpe can swing contagious exuberance (“How unpleasant and interesting it is to be alive!”) and aphoristic head-scratchers, shrewd pop-culture quotation and hairpin dialogue, the brilliant joke and the dumb joke and the dumb joke repeated enough times that it becomes brilliant. His breakthrough novel, The Sleeping Father, engineers a nuclear-family meltdown striking for its luminous sadness, as well as for its buzzing word games. As that hilarious and haunting tale closes, the teen protagonist officially enters adulthood, contemplating with clear eyes “that finite loop of breakdown and consolation known as the future.”
In Jamestown, the future has arrived, and we get that loop writ large: a postapocalyptic Eastern Seaboard teeming with misunderstanding, wobbly truces, Technicolor violence, and moments of grace. But it’s also loopy: In the wake of a massive, undefined “annihilation,” Manhattan and Brooklyn are at war, having recently waged the Battle of Joralemon Street. A Manhattan exploratory party, heading south in search of fuel, encounters a Virginia tribe of ambiguously ethnic Indians (one is named Sit Knee Find Gold—or is it Sidney Feingold?), who use wireless devices and appear to know English. In contrast to the ennobling austerity of The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s recent foray into calamity lit, Sharpe amps up the Grand Guignol and the wisecracking, hurling the “linguistic detritus” of the early twenty-first century at us at warp speed. The story is a laudably freaked-out (and occasionally bewildering) cover version of the early-seventeenthcentury founding of Jamestown (England’s first sustainable colony in the New World), rendered as a narrative round-robin à la As I Lay Dying and reset in a rusted-out day after tomorrow that owes something to the variant futures of Philip K. Dick.
In short, you couldn’t ask for a book more different from The Sleeping Father, which underneath all its verbal wizardry and deft absurdity has the heart of a crowd-pleaser. Sharpe isn’t one to rest on his laurels, and some (if not most) admirers of that book will be turned off by the often deliberately cartoonish nature of this latest offering. (In an inspired bit, colonist John Martin gets an arrow permanently lodged in his head but survives to become like his wild and crazy namesake Steve.)
More than in any of his previous fictions, Sharpe delivers breathtaking sentences, and nearly every page has an example or three worthy of our awe. Similes crackle, and even when they don’t, their not-crackling crackles, as in John Rolfe’s description of the now-destroyed Chrysler Building: “Back when it was built you could stand at the top and feel the clear, clean, cold, blue, crazy-ass air hit your skin like— like— like— like— like— air.” Language gets spun into labyrinths, elegant stalemates (“The bus we thought would take us to our new home may turn out to be our new home”) captured between capital and full stop.
Pocahontas, whose doomed love for the Manhattan Company’s Rolfe constitutes the book’s most compelling story line, writes early on: “Oh English! How I love to write to you in English, even though it is so slow to do anything in English, because English moves at the speed of talking, whereas my language moves at the speed of thinking. . . . When I think of the world in English, or look at the world in English, it moves so slow, like English, and that feels good cuz life’s so short!” In English, she notes, “you can talk about only one thing at a time.” Sharpe’s carefully crafted prose has the freeze-frame effect Pocahontas alludes to, while simultaneously packing so many surprising nuances that at times it’s as if he’s communicating in a different, more advanced tongue—one that his heroine would grasp.
The book begins as a perverse epistolary novel, in which Rolfe and Pocahontas send messages into the ether, first electronically and then, it seems, mentally, with no specific recipient in mind. Pocahontas addresses her first missive with the hopeful “To the excellent person I know is reading this”; Rolfe’s greetings range from the dubious (“To the one whose existence I doubt”) to the ornately Stevensian (“To nothing that is not there and the nothing that is”).
Are they simply writing into the void? Any blogger, faced with depressingly low site traffic, has had to ask this question. And those of us living in the midst of the wordwild Web have pondered the impermanence of it all, not to mention the exact date the book will die. Sharpe exhibits the virtuoso’s simultaneous and contradictory infatuation with, distrust of, and fear of language. “Talking is dangerous. Writing more so,” Pocahontas decides. “Best not to.” This is shortly before she publicly blurts out an off-the-cuff prophecy that the strangers from the north will defeat the tribe. “I can’t believe what I just did. I opened my mouth and changed the world.” You can choose silence, if only it were a choice. If you know how to write, you write.
The mutual ignorance that the Manhattanites and Indians harbor for each other’s cultures could correspond with this country’s current stagnant occupation of Iraq, the citizens of which remain opaque to many of us, and vice versa. Pocahontas reveals that what the northerners thought was a welcoming song actually translates to “Fuck You, New York Shits”; in a sly reversal of the notion of the Other, it’s the men from Gotham whose identities merge, their sturdy Anglo names less distinctive than those of their native counterparts. That the book is set in Virginia and New York suggests redstate/ blue-state tensions ratcheted to their absurd zenith. Jamestown both is and isn’t about this. As Rolfe (“GreasyBoy”) puts it in an e-mail to his inamorata (“CornLuvr”): “Art, though sometimes nice, has always been perfectly useless against war.” - Ed Park

«Matthew Sharpe's Jamestown is defiantly not a historical novel; it is a brazen back-to-the-future plunge into the present, mixing period details with anachronistic abandon, and charting the decline of civilization—namely, ours—with an anarchic glee fueled by moral outrage that eventually eases into bemused resignation. Amid the ear-shattering awfulness of so many contemporary American discourses, from the geopolitical to gimmick techno-talk, Sharpe squeezes poetry from gadgetry and jerks. "I'm reclining on my bunk," notes one of a band of colonial brutes, "caressing the small, soft qwerty keys of my wireless device."
The Sleeping Father, Sharpe's sleeper lit hit of 2004, portrays dysfunctional suburban family dynamics through seamless perspective shifts and language often tragicomically ill-suited to communication. In Jamestown, which makes landfall exactly 400 years after the founding of the actual colony (and arguably the swampy start of the U.S.), Sharpe has composed a jazz symphony of a novel out of American voices and violence, exchanging suburbia for the sprawl of history and apocalypse.
The settlers in Sharpe's version of his-story (a narrative very much about the afflictions of males) are a group of men escaping New York City down I-95 in a beat-up bus. Behind them, the Chrysler Building has collapsed, the city's water and food supply are contaminated, and the boroughs of Brooklyn and Manhattan are locked in a fierce war over who knows what, exactly, but resulting in the bleak black comedy of archly mock-historical lines like: "I was surprised to encounter Chris Newport... whose left arm, you may recall, Sir, you severed with your Glock on the last day of the Battle of Joralemon Street."
Johnny Rolfe, one of the book's two principal narrators among many, and the clan's "communications specialist," reports to us, his unseen and possibly nonexistent readers, via the aforementioned portable qwerty device. Life on Rolfe's bus is dominated by violence and dread. "I don't like a bus of guys," he deadpans after yet another bloody altercation among his fellow men. "Is there any bus of guys on which a man can hug and feed another soup without first having sliced his face?" Don DeLillo once suggested that his novels might be grimly unreadable without their flashes of humor. Throughout Sharpe's graphically brutal scenes, the violence is rendered in visual gags reminiscent of hardcore slapstick—a Jackass for the Jacobean set—and framed in ironic lines of whiplash humor. When the first attack by the natives (would-be Indians, it later turns out, reddened by sunscreen abuse) launches, the arrows "sprang into being in other guys' body parts—hands, beards, knees" like Wile E. Coyote getting barbed by the natives.
A few sentences later, our communications man Rolfe reflects: "They did with their bows what I'd been trying to do with my wireless device: send a message, instantly and invisibly, across a vast amount of space." Historians and aficionados of Jamestown lore will recognize Rolfe as the real-life 17th-century tobacco planter who, despite all the Captain John Smith/Pocahontas soap opera mythology promulgated by Disney (the novel calls him 'Jack Smith' and sometimes 'Jack's Myth'), wed the most famous pop-cultural icon of Native America—Pocahontas—variously identified in Sharpe's pages through gleeful, wise-guy deconstructions as 'Poke-a-huntress' and... well, use your imagination. Rolfe may be the novel's designated communications specialist, but Pocahontas is its Great Communicator, the whirling dervish at the center of the book, and perhaps Sharpe's greatest creation thus far.
Subchapters alternate between voices, with Rolfe and Pocahontas at the center, and concentric rings spiraling outward to include prodigal son John Ratcliffe, his sexy mother back in Manhattan, Smith himself, analyst and spiritual adviser Sidney Feingold and his aggressively erotic part-Japanese wife, Charlene Kawabata Feingold, and others. But Sharpe's Pocahontas comprises the book's heart, soul, and sometimes bleeding body. She comes on like a hurricane, blogging for all to see ("To the excellent person I know is reading this," she begins), full of yearning, fearlessly recounting her first period, her entanglements in lust and self-loathing, and her love/hate/sadness toward men, particularly her own sleepy father, Powhatan, oversized embodiment of "patriarch," chief of his tribe. The voice of Pocahontas is the novel's most melodious and warmly Whitmanesque, singing of puberty, the stupidity of humanity, the banal brevity of life on earth, and the need to celebrate it. Through Pocahontas and Johnny Rolfe, we get a love story, an unlikely and comical courtship via Instant Messages and e-mails that nonetheless edges the story toward genuine longing, as both parties seek to transcend the imposed exoticism of their lusts.
The plot moves deathward, toward the failure of colonization (think Iraq), toward the nightmare of hegemony (think 9/11), and toward the absurdity and desperation we all live with today: the dream that technology—in the shape of hybrid cars, broadband access, white noises—might stop a Greenland iceberg from melting us into oblivion. Jamestownis relentlessly contemporary, because we are brutally, even stupidly, historical.
In a novel of broad-stroke ambition and reach, there is the occasional overextended joint—the pages of ping-ponging dialogue that volley a tad too many times, for example, or wordplay that comes off as clever or coy. But as I leaf through the heavily dog-eared pages of my review copy, it's hard to find a page that doesn't afford dollops of pleasure, of pain—and the hard-won pathos of a people, like us, going mad with grief.» - Roland Kelts

«You know that guy in ninth grade who was always reciting Monty Python skits to himself? Somewhere, in his parents' basement, he's now committing chapters of Matthew Sharpe's Jamestown to memory. This hilarious, poignant and often annoying novel reimagines the first permanent English settlement in America as a modern-day dystopia, an absurd hybrid of Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Walt Disney's "Pocahontas." Sharpe calls Jamestown "an ahistorical fantasia on a real event," which seems as good as any description we might devise for his psychedelic tribute to the 400th anniversary.
The more you know about the actual history, the more you'll be amused (or horrified) by Sharpe's weird transformations, but there's plenty of broad, scatological humor here even for those who couldn't find Virginia on a map. In Sharpe's zany version, the United States has collapsed, the environment is dead, and the survivors are starving. The ruler of Manhattan - in the midst of a ruinous bombing campaign against Brooklyn - sends a group of settlers (half of them "early-release convicts") down highway I-95 to Virginia to search for food and fuel on the Autobus Godspeed, a bulletproof vehicle that "differs from jail only insofar as it's more crowded and volatile, smells worse, and what surrounds it makes most of what goes on in jail look like a walk in a field of poppies."
The story comes to us through a series of short entries by different characters, such as the group's craven leader, John Ratcliffe; the indefatigable, often chained, frequently condemned-to-death Jack Smith; and even "A Couple of Fops" who are dying of their wounds. But the primary narrators are "the irreverent scamp" Pocahontas and the settlers' communications specialist, Johnny Rolfe. In real life, they eventually married and had a son. But here they fall in love at first sight, and their letters, e-mails, IMs and telepathic communications make up most of this story of disastrous cultural contact.
Despite the incongruous elements of modern technology, the old chestnuts of the Jamestown story are here: Pocahontas interrupting Smith's execution, a couple of horny settlers lured to their deaths by Indian girls, and negotiations collapsing into deadly skirmishes again and again. But it's all run through the meat grinder of Sharpe's freaky sense of humor. He plays with the names like a naughty, brilliant child: "Rat Cliff," "Poke-a-huntress," "Jacks Myth." Native American customs and language are subjected to the kind of politically incorrect comedy that could get a writer who cared burned at the stake. Pocahontas is a linguistic acrobat whose feminist wit skewers Indian pretensions as readily as it punctures Anglo cliches. Watching one of her friends prepare for the hunt, she writes, "If a man could dance and have a heart attack and an orgasm all at the same time, [he] would resemble that man." Later, spotting the settlers' bus, "I tiptoed, real quiet, Indian style, through tall corn stalks all dolled up in dew like girls in rhinestones."
But the settlers come off far, far worse. Beneath a torrent of sophomoric vomit jokes, sex jokes and fart jokes, Jamestown is an anguished lament for the whole bloody history of Western conquest, the stupidity and cruelty of invaders then and now. Back in Manhattan, their crime boss, Jim Stuart (think King James of the house of Stuart), lays waste to the city and tortures his mistress with bad erotic haiku after sex. One of the most vicious (and therefore successful) settlers survives having his legs hacked off and an arrow shot through his head, which he keeps there, à la Steve Martin, while being carried around through the rest of the novel by two muscle-bound bodyguards in their underwear.
Sharpe's wit relies primarily on the juxtaposition of profundity and silliness, tragedy and absurdity, a kind of Catch-22 about the 17th century for the 21st century. Jamestown is packed with marvelous material, moving and funny and deeply provocative, but Sharpe is determined to cram the pages with allusions and fragmented quotations till you feel like you're stuck in an elevator with Dennis Miller: Here's Plato, Tennyson, Beethoven, Whitman, Kant, Shakespeare, Wang Yang-ming, William Morris, Otis Redding, Judy Garland, even Gary Coleman - it's enough to make you stop googling and cry "Okay! Okay! You're the cleverest writer in the universe, but just stop it, for God's sakes!"
Needless to say, a little of this goes a long way, but Sharpe is a consistently surprising writer, who puts as many crazy demands on the English language as it's ever endured. Like those original profiteers and thieves, if you venture into Jamestown, you'll find more than you could have imagined - some of it inane, some of it wonderful. Beware and Godspeed.» - Ron Charles

«Is the history of America a hopeful tale of fresh beginnings, or the same damn thing all over again? In a way, this question - whether it's ever really possible to make a better place in the world - lies at the heart of most of our current political arguments, and Matthew Sharpe's novel, Jamestown, takes it down a long, rough road littered with disappointment. A work of hectic brilliance and immense sadness, Jamestown is a post-apocalpytic retelling of the settlement of America's first colony. It takes place in the future, but it's also set in the past.
The story begins with the collapse of the Chrysler Building and the departure of an armored bus, stuffed with an unpromising mixture of ex-cons and political appointees, from the embattled island of Manhattan. The expedition has orders to set up an outpost in Virginia and establish relations with the Indian tribes there, with the ultimate end of seizing some of the resources lacking up north - namely, food, water and fuel. After a catastrophe referred to only as the "annihilation," most of the environment has been transformed into a toxic, Hobbesian wilderness teeming with carnivorous hares and rabid seagulls. "Dreads these days are a dime a dozen and a dozen a day," one of the bus' passengers remarks. The only thing scarier than what's inside the bus is what's outside it.
The novel's two main narrators are John Rolfe, a depressed romantic, and Pocahontas, daughter of Powhatan, the chief of the dominant tribe in Virginia. In many aspects - from the sealed box containing the list of the expedition's leaders, to the ascendancy of a shrewd but rebellious redhead named John Smith, to the death of a colonist by torture at the hands of some Indian women - the events in the plot mirror those of the founding of the original Jamestown 400 years ago. Several of the characters share names with historical figures, from the bus driver, Chris Newport, to the president of Manhattan, James Stuart, and his rival, Philip Habsburg, the ruler of Brooklyn.
In Jamestown, however, people communicate with wireless devices and film commercials in the ruins of Central Park. Acid rain falls on the forests where Pocahontas' people hunt and her father is attended by Dr. Sidney Feingold, a psychiatrist whom the colonists think is called Sit Knee Find Gold. Feingold administers Rorschach tests to the newcomers, ostensibly as a preliminary to signing some kind of treaty, but most likely just another Indian prank, like giving the colonists bad water and pretending not to speak English ("a ruse my people think both necessary and hilarious"). The supremely clueless colonists, like the original Jamestown settlers, can barely keep themselves alive, and then only with halfhearted help from the locals. "It's true, our English is different from yours," a visiting Indian remarks on touring their fort. "For instance, we wouldn't call that a gate, we'd call it the place where you gave up working on the fence."
Whether Indian or New Yorker, the characters in Jamestown fall into two basic categories: those who lament the brutality, injustice and brevity of life and those who intend to be more brutal and unjust than everybody else in order to live longer. The Indians are not Native American by blood, but rather a group that has adopted Native "folkways... though we know them only in fragments." They've eliminated private property, but like their namesakes, live in a state of unceasing territorial warfare; one of Pocahontas' suitors has a severed hand, a battle trophy from a nearby town, braided into his hair.
None of this suits the frisky, insubordinate Pocahontas, who, as devoted as she is to her dad, wishes the tribe's menfolk would do more in the way of governance than "jog up the street every month or so to kill, rape, kidnap and pillage." The colonists aren't much better, but she still manages to fall for Rolfe, despite his being, in her words, "sworn to anemia as a philosophical world view and way of life." Hers is the most vivid voice in the book, an unpredictable font of astute observation ("he's like a figure in a bad painting who wishes it was in a better painting") and trippy, but winning joie de vivre ("Hospitality, as you may know, is an intoxication of the senses"). She's the fading strain of a playful flute in a symphony otherwise heavy on solemn bass violins.
Despite its doomy view of humanity's chances of making something halfway decent of itself, Jamestown careens along, powered by Sharpe's voltaic prose and rich in half-submerged literary allusions. Characters - especially Pocahontas - slip in and out of lines from Wallace Stevens poems, hip-hop lyrics, even a speech from Fannie Hurst's sudsy 1934 bestseller, Imitation of Life. They reenact scenes from Richard III and King Lear. This feels less like postmodern patchwork than like a Western version of samsara, a vast cycle not only of events but also of words, in which the same ghastly elements return again and again. Against it all stands the spirit of Pocahontas, who in the end has just one question for her paramour: "What do you propose to do?"» - Laura Miller