5 books I read recently & loved: Jane White Quarry, Sean Kilpatrick TANTRUMS, Parker Young Cheap Therapist Says You’re Insane, John Wieners Solitary Pleasure: Selected Poems, Journals and Ephemera, Alison Mills Newman Francisco

‘Brooks Peters, who had a wonderful website devoted to neglected gay writers before he lost it to Russian hackers, wrote me back in 2008 to recommend Jane White’s 1967 novel Quarry: “It’s a British novel from 1960s about three adolescent boys who kidnap a boy and keep him in a cave in a quarry. It’s been compared to Lord of the Flies. It got great reviews when it came out. I’ve just finished it and thought it was extremely well done. But a real enigma. I can’t figure out what it is really about except perhaps the breakdown of society.”

‘There is nothing bucolic about this novel. In fact, it simmers with sense of the danger that’s fostered by apathy. Early in the book, three teenagers — Todd, Randy, and Carter — persuade a younger boy to come with them to a cave in the side of an abandoned quarry near their town. The boy, who’s never given a name and who seems to lack any parent or guardian to notice his absence, is nothing but an abstract victim for them to toy with. “Who do you think he is?” Randy asks Todd.

The question never gets answered. Nor does the boy help. He seems, in fact, to be happy to leave his identity ambiguous. “But who are you,” Todd asks him after a few days. “You know who I am,” he replies. When asked for his name, he answers, “Fred. Or Bert. Or Jim. Anything will do — I really don’t mind.”

The friends aren’t even quite sure what they intend to do with the boy. All three are products of the 1960s, when parents let children — or at least boys — spend most summer and weekend days running around outside with little sense of how they spent the time. “Well? Where’ve you been?” Cater’s mother asks him. “Up at the quarry.” “Oh, the quarry again,” she concludes, moving on to another subject. And so, it’s easy for them to smuggle small amounts of food that they take to the boy.

‘It was perhaps unsurprising that Quarry was compared to Lord of the Flies by numerous reviewers. Golding’s stranded schoolboys, though, had far richer imaginations than White’s teenagers. The violence of Randy, Todd, and Carter is not savage but mundane. Their captive boy is a welcome diversion from their otherwise tedious lives, but when he becomes an impediment, they have no choice but to make him go away, like disposing of the sheet of newspaper after finishing a packet of chips.

‘At the time it was published, Quarry seemed shocking to readers and reviewers, but after Columbine and countless other school shootings in America, after the murder of James Bulger in England, I suspect it will seem either prescient or all too numbingly familiar. What it will not seem like is the work of a private school English teacher in her offtime.’ — The Neglected Books Page

 

‘Quarry’ @ Neglected Books
‘Quarry’ @ goodreads
Review @ Crime Time
Rediscovered Books: Jane White’s Quarry
Buy ‘Quarry’

 

Jane White Quarry
Boiler House Press

‘“The most frightening novel of the year,” said The Scotsman of Quarry on publication, in the 1960s, and with good cause: it is among the most unsettling novels of its time. Written in cool, realistic prose, it weaves a narrative that seems almost too horrifying to be true – yet sustains an atmosphere of normality that only increases its power to shock.

‘It is both a gripping and believable account of a crime and a parable filled with complex symbolism. “Nothing since A High Wind in Jamaica probes the depths of innocence with such terror and finesse as Jane White’s novel,” declared Newsday.

‘Todd, Randy, and Carter are teenagers, grammar school boys who come across a younger boy while roaming the countryside around their commuter town. They decide to hold him hostage in a small cave in an abandoned quarry and then consider what to do next. They ride bikes, worry about exams, and have to get home in time for supper, yet they imprison and elect to torture another boy with the cold calculating objectivity that Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil.”

‘In Lord of the Flies, William Golding needed a plane crash and a tropical island from which to imagine the capacity for violence and evil in his English schoolboys. Jane White, a mother and housewife living in Godalming, born in Cambridge, and who grew up on the Norfolk coast, needed only a chance encounter in fields not unlike those around her own locales. Indeed, when we consider how in the UK our own society and its institutions have been ransacked by an equivalent cruelty emanating from corridors of power, where the Bullingdon Club have gambolled and gambled freely, we too might consider such things all too easy to imagine, and all the more relevant to consider, these days.

‘Out of print for over 50 years, Quarry continues the mission of the Recovered Books series to rescue exceptional books long unavailable to today’s readers. We commend it to you as our latest addition to this excellent, and growing, list.’ — Boiler House Press

Excerpt

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Matt Lee: I’ve followed your work religiously since Gil the Nihilist and this is an aspect of your work that has always excited me. Despite having written reams at this point, you still find inventive ways for language to copulate. The language fucks itself, as you noted, but I also feel the writer and reader both participate in this fucking, sort of akin to the wonderful orgy sequence early in Goliards. For me this promiscuity permits the propagation of strange, mutated wordplay on the page. From your perspective, what guides this linguistic fuckery?

Sean Kilpatrick: Others are welcome, even appreciated, at times, to join my circle jerk of one, but their participation is not necessary. Where two words rub together, I have directed those appendages into a growing frottage, and hopefully the puppet ends up well-hung. I burned my life down for this assemblage. But we are in an ascetic epoch again, eating plastic in caves, many banished (self-banished or otherwise) to their basements. Post-post-post-postmodernism, you don’t have to travel to find art, you don’t need the overrated and disappearing wilderness to achieve adventure, all that is readily available. There exists an infinite amount of high quality work to study, at the end of a button (likewise all sort of treasure and pussy), for better or worse (better for a misanthrope, though the sacrifice ends bloody, because earning money is the only hamper against winding up a homeless ghost in the street, which is forthcoming for many a millennial, and we deserve worse). It’s okay: they made being burned at the stake just as lame. I grew up with the Gen X transgressive masterworks, the Enlightenment’s best and loudest dying caw against the church, before it sloppily replaced mass with another plugged in communal (meme’d) corniness. We were taught the meanest forms of instinct, and to laugh at references before knowing to what they refer, so that each layer stayed funny the more you grew and knew, and this art all holds up, perhaps better than any generation has experienced – the power of an influence unsurpassed. But now we’re suffering the passive aggressive, bad girlfriend humanities, the playing of mind games concerning one’s expectations, schizoid hire / firers toting yuppie for-profit handbooks. Can’t be gate-kept in if you’re not concerned with office politics and politics at large (even community colleges), for fear you’ll alienate the fucking customers. With my doily degrees, I hereby offer my services to any junior college, for a whopping ten grand a year, to replace the typical, overpriced zombie eking by on whatever cynical program was stuck in them. MFA’d bricklayers with a headshot more worked on than their sentences, as toothless as their agents, they are trained in the semi-literate phenomena of relatability, a salesmanship of originality, an X-factor affiliated beyond any hint of the biblio-onamnism that might wound profit. Few creatives are allowed to teach anything aside from this countertop fallacy: that quality equals readability, well-rounded minimalism, and expository intrigue, or, failing this con, try dry theory-jargon-gibberish meant to pick Abelard’s testicular gauze. I exceeded my transparent pathos with prose and am old enough to have lived through tyrannies right and left. No interest in the uber-nominalist enigma-text that ousted the belles-lettres system. Romanticism rejected God in favor of the artist’s innards and found we could remain sublime, but the mechanized slaughter of the twentieth century put the atom too high on its throne.

 

SHUCKS ABOUT EVERYTHING
Sean Kilpatrick @ Instagram
Sean Kilpatrick @ Twitter
Sean Kilpatrick @ goodreads
Buy ‘TANTRUMS’

 

Sean Kilpatrick TANTRUMS
Independently published

‘Pregnancy dream of poetry has this Sean Kilpatrick book by the fist. You learn to signal to others from the woken state, here, line-by-line. Do you have any extra money? Buy this book! If you have to skip lunch, buy THIS BOOK! “I held my breath so hard I ended up in the country.” Some poetry you read is forgotten, and never remembered. Some poetry, this poetry, Sean Kilpatrick’s poetry, is a manual for exciting the engine to throw you out of the vanquished pleasures. Here is your I.V. drip of sphinx’s blood.’ – CAConrad

Excerpt

from FUCKSCAPES

A man strangles a woman. She is lifted into the air. Their bodies lit, frozen. These are paintings wobbling on a series of backdrops, actors’ heads poking through.

MAN: I’d like to get to know you. If that’s okay. I’ll fetch myself wrecked by movement. Treasure you about an inch. I’ll ruin your sense of alarm. I’m building a home of every sneak you snuck, dude. Where I rid you of bitchiness with a single tusk. You give snippets of approval here and there just to keep me conscientious. (Small explosion). I bow through your moods ready to reply. Are you self-conscious about your body? Spaces don’t count if they haven’t been torn there. That pussy claps around. An altar for crime, my crimes, mega-plural. They start when I wake up. Approximate the joke. No, someone looking good as you ain’t required to contribute. (Explode). I hug you a lot. You get annoyed because I’m kind of silly and your disappointed expectations have turned you constantly quite serious. Cute toenails. I cheat on you with the television. A man does not love outside whatever maximizes relaxation. Screen the socket where my nuts guess. Objective distance quells you. I always keep within my rights. Still, I sleet apologies. (Explode). Offspring, build a roster. Basically garage my expellant. Our chum silent bitch-girl. Her groin is ours recycled. Mmm, sliding contour through feigned darks. We are the proud infectors of a life. My main job: jabber everything’s okay. Nothing’s been okay since the big bang. Anyway, roll baptismal juice fallow districts from change. Bomb the new. I believe in free assisted suicides for everyone who shakes my hand. I believe outside my house is all pennies. Step back, my hygiene dines on itself. I liposuction our crabs because they touch. You hike into nests. (Her period covers his arm). Aw, love every pain you’ve had. I swaddle your feces. I’m a flea jockeyed in your stoma twenty-four seven. Pagan in that feed. The testimony of everything right about being alive becomes activated the moment you flinch.

WOMAN: Boy, I’m the calamity being said. Note the sorry varnish. Note your propensity for shrinking. All this would and could. Such male tutelage ralphing its own veneer. Now let me visit gravity as a second pan full of tame spitties spat by saying rawr. You poorly steer the immaculate. You’re an ingrown patient beeping his Hot Wheels. Plus, the ceiling’s dirty. Plus, I shower in your tools. Hello! I give out the belly buttons here, fuck-flak. Men pass through my prayers throat-banged by mountainous clit. Meanwhile, your every succinct point gets clenched through my halo. When I rip loose our little boy he’s going to wear each dress I hate until his peener swabs the deck. I keep snoring through the trial they’ll give me for his death. Men who best themselves at love equal unvacuumed fetus I’ve yet to huff. Oh, and all silence is not stoic. Yours feels practiced. Set me over by my flowers. They tell me what to do. They span the gimmie gimmie this home constantly booms. This home, this home! I’ve planned an escape from debt so fucking long I’ve learned to despise whoever hands me gifts. I’ll tangle your daydream. We’ll pursue drawn-out deaths. My clothes are the only bracket between me and other men. That’s why I need so many. I soil myself on purpose for your legacy. Where are all the self-improvement books I keep molesting you with? Why don’t their clipped paragraphs line your unhygienic foreskin? But I do enjoy being an object bound higher than maybe television. I have good stories. I’m shiny. I have relatives that hate you and give off radiation. Your unfulfilled needs afford my every strength. Looky-look, I’m your gunky dame, like, bondage is over. I can sit through anything you try. Thus I’m better organized than all beliefs. Not much will do. At least I conquer. All the way Disney.

Man bent behind another, arm inserted to the shoulder.

PENETRATOR: Knock the hum. Out your boo-boos. Juice those jammies. Help the labyrinth hail gloom. Oh, fully your son back here. The buck-most baby left a precipice. You ate something angry. Will Adorno fan the pretty-please? I see heaven and nickels. My knuckle-bones shimmy heinous, such mousetraps, yum, shelters grown cowardly never yawn. I pet pink a muscle, velvety, ravenous, ha. The glow I’ve been chasing since adolescence let me down. Fast rivets soupfly our knowing. I’m mom twice over. Ha to the strings. Ha to all who scowl behind aesthetics. I stage your surgery mid-air. Born wearing the same hat, we make starving decadent. One last uppercut and love turns us blonde. Fuck the ruler. I am inches crowned. I’m the only stump your function has. Every stretch of ground I’ve faked walking. Industry in a handful. How’s my tickle? Trench the shock further adjectives, slick-ticker. Fulminate platform diabolical hymen, my tin grip, all Frankenstein claiming pets, pet, kitty likes. What’s the horrible thing say? A whisper or crouch? Bunch of sanguine fur shitting heresy? My fillings ejaculate gosh-like metals. Mommy won’t buy anymore puppets to cripple, help the car keep breathing, fend off those college loans, scooch sweet conjecture. I haven’t let ventriloquism mean everything outside our place not my retracting cuticles. Tap, tap, tap, blood pressure’s here. He needs a caning from your smoke. Beloved cluck, hammers never shush. I love you lacking stricture. I love you faster than coffee.

PENETRATED: Roadrunner deep, bowels for season, for the cancer I know you are, loping assward through shelter, for that shelter’s loss, everyone’s loss so always. Bask in my gobble, basketball the gulp sixty kilometers, seventy – the bong you can’t share. If you think for a second I will sneeze and break your arm. It will be blown off the planet unloved and sizzle nightly in the sun’s paler pussy. Everyone is a ladle for mistakes and I am them. Be the wizard of my dong’s removal, because it would take fucking days, then sip near the tippy-hole, going: wishes hurt! What hurts: being groped or being fed? The night you turned over in your sleep and I ran toward you screaming was our last shared experience. I tan your osmosis, dissipating your reach. Careful, there are scraggily broads bicycling the sunset through suburbia like white-flight orbs rewound. Happy worth seeks its kind. Privilege withdraws, especially from me. Still, I am a man unarmed against the diplomacy of his own tang. I am newspaper hollow. Hen fucked. An anti-beard. Be my eyes Mohammedan laughter? Psh. Ask Vlad, nothing manufactured visits my tum. My sonnets victimize the phone book. I’m the kind of friend that comes with technical support. I have arms like a dentist. Ways you can’t clobber. I sense fat before I’m near it and smile in any situation. My pre-cum feels vintage. Post like Formica. I speak a thousand languages per sentence. This is working out.

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‘I probably like first-person perspective because it automatically adds a layer of distortion to the story that I find compelling. I like to find those points of distortion and lean into them a little. It’s like if you’re in the middle of telling a story at dinner and you begin to surprise yourself, everything shifts in a way you hadn’t expected, the tone changes, and maybe the sad story you thought you were telling turns out to also be funny. Or maybe you realize that on some level the true story you’re supposed to be telling is impossible, it doesn’t all hold together. I guess the first-person perspective helps me take the stories to that place I like. It allows me to interrogate the story itself in a way that actually adds tension instead of destroying it. Because my narrators are usually people who, at heart, really want to get the story right.

‘As for what my narrators look for first, the simplest answer, as you noted above, is probably that they tend to be expecting something terrible to happen. There’s this move I noticed Bolaño making—later I noticed Poe doing it too, and Bolaño loved Poe, so he must have stolen it from him—and it’s just that early in a scene, the narrator will say something along the lines of, “I knew something terrible would happen.” It’s so straightforward that it’s almost ridiculous, but it works; it helps create this totally menacing atmosphere. And the best part is that it’s not always clear in retrospect if the narrator was right. Did something terrible actually happen in that scene? It’s an important question, but the answer isn’t always apparent at first glance. Anyway, I guess that’s the kind of atmosphere my narrators in this book tend to find themselves in as well.’ — Parker Young

 

Parker Young Site
Parker Young @ Twitter
MAY 24 by Parker Young
Parker Young @ Instagram
Buy ‘Cheap Therapist Says You’re Insane’

 

Parker Young Cheap Therapist Says You’re Insane
Future Tense Books

‘Cheap Therapist Says You’re Insane is a debut collection of stories that announces a startling new talent in American storytelling. Parker Young’s short stories and flash fictions combine humor, anxiety, and pathos as they walk a razor’s edge between the absurd and compelling human stakes. Young’s total command of voice and style makes for stories sure to linger in the haunted air of your subconscious.’ — Future Tense

‘As did Russell Edson, Parker Young beholds the universe’s catastrophizing with admiration. Like tiny inky quilts, his prose-devisings are tinkerings in, with, and about the border between intricacy & error.’ — Jesse Ball

“This collection inhabits a comic uncanny that offers kindness and anarchy both: a Donald Barthelme pose made new in this modern moment. Each piece tumbles toward its perfect end—sometimes slapstick, sometimes tragic, sometimes motionless, but often all three. In this book’s feints of metafiction, and in its fundamental sincerity, there is proof that writing is an existential act.’ — Amanda Goldblatt

‘These brief and impressionistic stories capture the strange, inchoate logic of dreams better than any collection I’ve read. They are ripe with a vague foreboding, confident yet dissociative leaps in time and place, inarticulate obsessions, quiet and bizarre quandaries. A fresh spin on continental neuroticism.’ — Zac Smith

Excerpts

Oven Blew Up

One day, our oven blew up. No food was inside, so we didn’t miss a meal, but still it was a problem. We put in another oven. That oven blew up too. We gave up on ovens altogether and put an armoire full of knick-knacks there. The armoire blew up. Exploded might be a more accurate verb. Now we were really puzzled. We put a drying rack there. Explosion. Perhaps we should not put anything else there, I said. Then Uncle Jim came over, and during his visit he must have stood right where the drying rack used to be. He exploded. This made us angry. I called the landlord. He couldn’t remember who we were or which property of his we lived on. I gave him the address and he hung up right away. He never returned my subsequent calls. We may have to move, I explained to the kids. Why? they said. When I explained it all, they became upset, the news shocked them, because as usual they hadn’t been paying attention. Don’t worry, I said, none of us will ever explode. But they didn’t believe me. If you’re so sure, they said, prove it. I looked to my wife for support. Yeah, she said, prove it. She started crying. Uncle Jim walked in. We thought he had died.

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Apocrypha

Someone said that W.G. Sebald’s stroke, suffered at the wheel of his car, coincided with a perfect idea for a novel, an enormous mental breakthrough. Maybe the two can be considered one: the stroke was the breakthrough. I don’t know where this account of Sebald’s last moments comes from. But remember, his death wasn’t really so long ago. He could have been using a cell phone, verbalizing his thoughts to a careful, trustworthy listener—perhaps his wife. Perhaps he died in the midst of telling his wife all about his mental breakthrough, dictating from one world to the next. Although if the breakthrough and the stroke were really the same event, he couldn’t have verbalized his idea—there wouldn’t have been time.

Perhaps I conflated details of Sebald’s death with the events of Thomas Bernhard’s novel The Loser, which presents a fictionalized version of Glen Gould’s death: a massive stroke in the middle of performing the Goldberg Variations. It’s a story about the death of desire. A pianist, the eponymous loser, is emotionally and psychically crushed by the musical ability of his friend, Glen Gould. Later, Glen Gould is crushed by a stroke. Why is it such a funny novel? Sebald once spoke of his admiration of Bernhard. Maybe he was thinking of The Loser when he died.

I began to worry that if I continued to associate these two ideas too closely—Sebald’s stroke and his mental breakthrough, his great idea for a novel—I would turn myself accidentally into a person who was afraid of great ideas. The other possibility was that I would turn myself into a person whose main goal in life was to have a stroke. I would spend years concentrating my energies on the target provided by Sebald, which was the stroke. Because the stroke leads to the breakthrough. It didn’t make any sense. I wanted to be Sebald, but the only way to do it that I knew of was to have a stroke. I was scaring myself. I tried to stop thinking about writing or Sebald, but I knew that eventually that would destroy me too, and ultimately I’d become a husk of a writer due to this notion—probably apocryphal, something I invented when I wasn’t paying attention—that Sebald’s best idea manifested as a stroke and killed him. An erroneous insight. How much truth can be mined from an erroneous insight? It doesn’t matter, I thought, I’ll never know with one hundred percent certainty which part is erroneous and which part is insight. Although if it’s one hundred percent error, pure error, wouldn’t that make it the perfect error? The perfect story. And perfect stories are usually true. I closed my eyes.

Recently, I was in the shower, thinking about Xanax. I thought, Xanax may be destroying my writing. I’ve got to quit. But quitting cold-turkey can lead to seizures. Seizures are sometimes indistinguishable from strokes, at least at first. I don’t want to have a seizure or a stroke; I don’t want to take off my costume before it’s time. Then I thought of Sebald, who left too early. Then I thought of writing this piece.

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‘Solitary Pleasure is a selected collection of Wieners’ poems, appended with letters and journal entries. An introduction, written by contemporary poet Nat Raha, makes a powerful case for reading Wieners’ work as art born from “the heart of struggle”. The poems themselves are offhand and diaristic. Sometimes, they deploy childlike rhymes that purposely steer close to nonsense, successfully generating a sense of wonder (“If I had a canoe / I’d fill it with you / Then what would you do”). The Wieners of Solitary Pleasure is a poet eager to vocalise queer desire. “The beauty of men never disappears,” he writes, later portraying desire as something that must be “choked” out of him. Occupying nearly a third of Solitary Pleasure are his “Asylum Poems”, which Wieners wrote in 1969 – the summer of the Stonewall riots – while in a psychiatric institution. These poems spotlight the connection between art and affliction, but challenge us to consider creative expression as a very real mode of survival and salvation, and not merely, as current wellness discourses suggest, a potential curative or preventive to mental ill-health.

‘To recover poets from the past, poets whose unimaginable nonconformity contributed to their contemporary obscurity, is a necessary task. How we read those poets – particularly if we hope their work might help us navigate our own precarious present – is more complex. Perhaps the challenge is to do so with care and without sentimentality. Or should we defer to the poets themselves? “Poems,” wrote Wieners, several months before he was first institutionalised, “are my salvation alone. The reader can do with them what he likes.”’ — Ralf Webb

 

John Wieners @ Wikipedia
‘We exist upon the fringe of the world’
John Wieners @ pennsound
The Altered States of John Wieners
Buy ‘Solitary Pleasure’

 

John Wieners Solitary Pleasure: Selected Poems, Journals and Ephemera
Pilot Press

‘Solitary Pleasure is a new collection of poetry, journal entries, letters and ephemera by the American poet John Wieners, edited by Richard Porter with an introduction by Nat Raha. John Wieners (1934-2002) was a poet, a Black Mountain College alumnus and an antiwar, gay rights & mental health activist.

‘John Wieners has been described as both ‘the greatest poet of emotion’ (by Robert Creeley) and ‘the poet laureate of gay liberation’ (within the Gay Liberation press). Solitary Pleasure delivers us this poet raw with mid-century queer feelings. Here, we encounter a writer preoccupied with the power and magic of poetics to profoundly render love, loss and survival in the face of destruction.’ — Pilot Press

Excerpts

Extras

John Wieners, 1973, reading

USA: Poetry Episode Robert Duncan and John Wieners

 

 

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‘The 1968 American series Julia, about a single mother raising her son, was one of the first TV series with a black woman in the lead. The mum’s babysitter was played by Alison Mills. One day, aged 17, she asked the producer if she could stop wearing the hideous wig that covered her hair. The producer replied that her real hair looked like rats had been sucking on it.

‘Mills had been a working actor since she was 12, but was now fast approaching the realisation that she no longer believed in Hollywood. “My beauty,” she wrote a few years after Julia in her only novel, Francisco, “existed before the white man commercialised it or bought it, and it will exist long after the black man has woken up out this western nightmare.” First published in 1974, when it was hailed by the likes of Ishmael Reed and Toni Morrison, and now reissued with an introduction by writer and academic Saidiya Hartman, Francisco is the autobiographical story of a runaway 70s Hollywood starlet on the road in the San Francisco Bay area – a runaway from Hollywood and from white America.

‘A runaway, too, from fame and recognition, from Hollywood producers, from black “guest roles”, from waiting around for that movie that never gets made – but most importantly, from an enforced conformity that would have turned her into a palatable version of a black woman.

‘The eponymous Francisco is her lover and the documentary film-maker Francisco Newman. Everything in the novel revolves around him making a film about Angela Davis. Mills wants to be there for her man because they are in love, but she is “honestly bored of Angela”. Francisco won’t have sex while he is finishing his film, so Mills sits to one side and describes coolly, in small letters and deliberately informal English, the black indie scene of the 70s. How, away from the Hollywood Hills, these accomplished men and women were living an alternative lifestyle of films and fornication – and happiness.

‘Rediscovering this lost classic is like finding a montage of the radicalism of the black America of the 60s and 70s from where plenty of writers and activists of colour have drawn their courage. Read it for the author’s clear-eyed spontaneity, for Hartman’s foreword and for cameos by the likes of Angela Davis and Pharoah Sanders among others.’ — Ankita Chakraborty

 

Francisco – lost classic of black radicalism
Freebird
A Love Story of the Black Arts Movement
‘Francisco’ @ goodreads
Buy ‘Francisco’

 

Alison Mills Newman Francisco
New Directions

‘Alison Mills Newman’s novel Francisco—“profoundly underappreciated” (NY Times)—has long been out of print and impossible to find. Written in her early twenties in a “fluently funky mix of standard and nonstandard English” (Harryette Mullen), Mills Newman tells the vibrant story of a young black woman’s love affair with an indie filmmaker, Francisco. Described as “a portrait of the artist as a young black woman trying to find a way back to herself” in the new foreword by Saidiya Hartman, Francisco unfolds like an on-the-road diary of a young actress and musician as she becomes increasingly disillusioned with success in Hollywood. She chronicles her bohemian life with her filmmaker lover, visiting friends and family up and down California, and her involvement in the 1970s Black Arts movement. Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali, Pharoah Sanders, Melvin Van Peebles, Frank Silvera, and Amiri Baraka make appearances, along with other artists and writers like Ishmael Reed and Joe Overstreet. Love and friendship, long revealing conversations, parties and dancing in Berkeley and LA—Francisco celebrates “the workins of a positive alive life that is good value, quality, carin, truth . . . the gift of art for the survival of the human heart.”‘ — New Directions

Excerpt

Extras

ALISON MILLS NEWMAN TALKS THE WRITING/RE-RELEASE HER NOVEL

Alison Mills Newman in Conversation with Niela Orr

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Ah, you remember it. If you ever find that gif, give it over. Maybe it’ll inspire a sequel. Better that the meeting wasn’t explosive, but it was still depressing, very predictably. And the Paris metro is the best in the world, I swear. That happens with my American bank too. But everyone tells me French banks are even worse. Anyway, hoping love fixed that. Come on, love, you can do it. Love making the performers in Japanese gay porn pick up the pace a little, G. ** Charlie, Hi. I remember deciding that since the ball strike knocked his head sideways that counted as a ‘no’ because I liked the gif. Good, good, good about your excitement and compressed ideas! Go, go! Yeah, Dr. Strange felt like a goal yesterday. I hope J. got ravaged by you in whatever way you saw fit and felt was appropriate. ** Misanthrope, The Golden Triangle. Weird but not weird that the human body is just a machine. Revising/ editing is like celebrating Xmas when you’re two years old. Everything seems possible. I’m with you on the research thing, but I write what I write. Rawk! ** _Black_Acrylic, I saw that film in Philip’s feed too and wondered. And now you’ve kind of riveted me to it. Gonna find it somewhere. It’s hard to believe now after so many films have imitated it, but ‘Blair Witch Project’ at the time was (and still is) the scariest movie I ever saw. ** Brendan, Brendan, buddy boy! I see your ‘Yes’, and I raise you a ‘Maybe’. Love, me. ** Bill, Hi. Thanks. Any positive developments from here will have nothing to do with the producer, that’s crystal clear. Huh, ‘Tommy Guns’, another total out of the blue newbie of seeming great interest. What would I do without you, B? ** Cody Goodnight, Hi. I’m ok. Yes, and Stallone before eight thousand cosmetic surgery procedures to boot! I finally got ok sleep last night, thank you and thank whatever powers that be. Funny, I’ve seen all the Roald Dahl film adaptations, but I haven’t read his books. That’s not good. You’ve made me want to try ‘The Witches’ first. Zac and I directed a music video for Xiu Xiu, but the record company rejected it, so no one’s ever seen it. I also like Candlemass and Electric Wizard. I know I’ve heard Type O Negative, but I can’t remember what they sound like. I’ve just been listening to the new Guided by Voices album because they’re my favorite band, and it’s awesome. ‘House’ is great. And, obviously, ‘Female Trouble’. I might finally see ‘Asteroid City’ today. I’m pretending I’m a frog and wishing you a ribbit ribbit day. ** Steve Erickson, Everyone, Steve E. has his July music roundup available for you to peruse. It covers the odd trio of Big Freedia, Beverly Glenn-Copeland, and Greta van Fleet. Here. No, zero plans to see ‘Barbie’ or ‘Oppenheimer’ this weekend, and, in the latter case, to ever necessarily see it unless I’m desperate on a plane flight. Not a Nolan fan. You, I presume, will be hitting the cinemas? ** A, Deadline crunch, I know it well. Yes, give the other editor my email, and we’ll sort it. Shouldn’t be too difficult. The vibe is … melancholy but highly determined. How’s yours? ** Darbz 🎪💥🐘, Either will do. I have a friend who always says, ‘Bonjovi!’ Well, you exude power here. Language is your friend. No, you don’t seem violent. ‘rizz’: I’ve heard it said and/or seen it typed. Let me guess: something to do with ‘reason(s)’? Today I’m going to meet with the photographer who shot photos on the film set of ‘Room Temperature’ and pick out photos for us to use in publicity or whatever. Then I think I might see ‘Asteroid City’. And then I think I might finally go to the summer fun fair, but maybe not. And then I know I’ll buy food and cigarettes. Dude, no bothering whatsoever re: you being here. Zero worries. Au contraire. And etc. I think it’s extremely frustrating that every word doesn’t have an emoji. Like even ‘the’ should have an emoji. ** Mark, Apparently. Yes, from everything I see and read everywhere that it is possible to look/read, the USA is in the midst of a Barbinheimer tsunami, so why not see what the fuss is about. France isn’t in that midst. I think I’ll see ‘Barbie’ at some point, but I don’t think I’ll see ‘Oppenheimer’. But convince me otherwise, if you so wish. ** Right. Up above are five books I managed to find time to read recently and loved. They arrive in your eyesight with my stamp of approval, for whatever that’s worth. See you tomorrow.