I'm moving to France- between Narbonne and Perpignan- on Wednesday, so until I find a suitable internet provider, which might take two or three weeks, I won't be posting much, if anything at all. Though I'll try to make the occasional trip to the library to abuse their computer. However, once connected, things will gradually return to normal.

Remembering Ted Berrigan

I remember first coming across Ted Berrigan's Sonnets in the 1960s and was soon trying- no doubt unsuccessfully- to write like him. Though he had many imitators, he was really one of a kind. He died on July 4th, 1983. Check out Tom Clark's entry on Berrigan in Vanitas.

Politically, Berrigan was certainly no mug. This despite his anarchic humour and the contour of his work. Though, of course, some would have you think otherwise. So well you're at it, have a look at Tariq Ali's talk on Obama, Pakistan and the US Empire, delivered the other day in London. I can't help but think that Berrigan would have agreed with him.

I've long regarded Larry Brown one of the finest writers around. An opinion shared, I recently discovered, by Bob Dylan. Having just ordered his last, unfinished, novel, A Miracle of Catfish, I happened upon the following clip from a documentary, The Rough South of Larry Brown (wasn't there also a Rough South of Harry Crews a few years back?), directed by Gary Hawkins:

Zizek on Iran

Despite my ambivalence regarding much of Slavoj Zizek's work, his article in support of the Iranian people, entitled Will the Cat Above the Precipice Fall Down?, makes some interesting and valid points. Also, on the same website, is Zizek's June 18 talk at Birkbeck College which covers some of the same points, but delivered in Zizek's inimitable lecturing style.

Dead Boys by Richard Lange



I picked up this one based on enticing jacket comments by Pelecanos, Connelly, Offutt and Woodrell, read the first few stories, which I thought were good, but derivative. I put it aside for close to a year, picked it up again a few weeks ago and was blown away by it. How could I have thought it derivative, when Lange's is such an individual voice? It just goes to show that you have to be in the right frame of mind when reading a particular book. But Lange has definitely put his own stamp on the low- life, urban-grit short story as few others have been able to do. It put me in mind of Dennis Johnson's Jesus's Son, but it's more compact and consistent than the latter and its imagery is more precise. Lange could be thought of as the grandchild of Selby and Bukowski, and the cousin of Donald Ray Pollock, whose Knock Em Stiff bears certain similarities. In any case, Lange's low-life characters, as comic as they are tragic, invariably ring true, always pushing at what's possible, accompanied by some magnificent bits of linguistic juxtaposition. I was particularly amused by the following, from his story "Loss Prevention":

"Every junkie I've ever known has had a thing for Neil Young. Be he a punk, a metalhead, or just your garden-variety handlebar-mustachioed dirtbag, if he hauls around a monkey, he's going to have Decade in his collection, and he's bound to ruin more than a few parties by insisting that you play at least some of it, no matter that the prettiest girl in the room is begging for something she can dance to. Even if he gets off dope, he sticks with Neil, because by then Neil's become the soundtracks to his outlaw past. Let him hear 'Old Man' or 'Sugar Mountain' years after the fact, and everything in him will hum like a just-struck tuning fork as mind and body and blood harmonize in mutual longing for a time when desire was an easy itch to scratch."


Just as I was finishing Dead Boys, I came across an interview with him in the LA Weekly, and discovered that he's just produced a novel entitled This Wicked World. That's one I've got to get my hands on.