BEWARE HE WHO IS THE PROTAGONIST OF THIS TALE OF THE FACT OF FICTION AND THE FICTION OF FACT AND WHOM WILL BE KNOWN AND PERHAPS OR PERHAPS NOT REMEMBERED AS A AND FOLLOWED THROUGH HIS AND EVERYONE ELSE’S EMPTY EXPERIENCES IN THIS PLACE MOST CALL THE WORLD AND IN WHICH SUCH EMPTY EXPERIENCES WILL INCLUDE IMPOSED EXISTENCE AND ALSO OF COURSE YOUTH AND BEAUTY AND SEX AND MONEY AND SUBSTANCES AND POP MUSIC AND DESTRUCTION AND SELF DESTRUCTION AND OBSESSION AND ANNIHILATION AND EXPENSIVE CLOTHES AND JEWELRY AND MC MANSIONS AND POWER AND POWERLESSNESS AND RAPE AND BLOOD AND PISS AD SHIT AND CUM AND GLORIOUS DEATH AND NECROPHILIA AND CANNIBALISM AND TORTURE AND SADISM AND MASOCHISM AND SELF IMPORTANT WANNABE ARTISTS AND OTHER SUCH DIVERSIONS DEVISED TO TRY TO MASK THE MEANINGLESSNESS ALL BATTLING TO BE EITHER TRUE OR LESS TRUE.
An experimental novel in one sentence
A W W BREMONT IS A MEMBER OF GENERATION Y AND AND HEY BOY IS HIS FIRST NOVEL.
MISCELANEOUS VIDEOS OF RELEVANCE
EXCERPT
RELEVANT, IMPORTANT, INFLUENTIAL, INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES
Just exactly like Father if Father had known as much about it the night before I went out there as he did the day after I came back thinking Mad impotent old man who realized at last that there must be some limit even to the capabilities of a demon for doing harm, who must have seen his situation as that of the show girl, the pony, who realizes that the principal tune she prances to comes not from horn and fiddle and drum but from a clock and calendar, must have seen himself as the old wornout cannon which realizes that it can deliver just one more fierce shot and crumble to dust in its own furious blast and recoil, who looked about upon the scene which was still within his scope and compass and saw son gone, vanished, more insuperable to him now than if the son were dead since now (if the son still lived) his name would be different and those to call him by it strangers and whatever dragon’s outcropping of Sutpen blood the son might sow on the body of whatever strange woman would therefore carry on the tradition, accomplish the hereditary evil and harm under another name and upon and among people who will never have heard the right one; daughter doomed to spinsterhood who had chosen spinsterhood already before there was anyone named Charles Bon since the aunt who came to succor her in bereavement and sorrow found neither but instead that calm absolutely impenetrable face between a homespun dress and sunbonnet seen before a closed door and again in a cloudy swirl of chickens while Jones was building the coffin and which she wore during the next year while the aunt lived there and the three women wove their own garments and raised their own food and cut the wood they cooked it with (excusing what help they had from Jones who lived with his granddaughter in the abandoned fishing camp with its collapsing roof and rotting porch against which the rusty scythe which Sutpen was to lend him, make him borrow to cut away the weeds from the door-and at last forced him to use though not to cut weeds, at least not vegetable weeds -would lean for two years) and wore still after the aunt’s indignation had swept her back to town to live on stolen garden truck and out o f anonymous baskets left on her front steps at night, the three of them, the two daughters negro and white and the aunt twelve miles away watching from her distance as the two daughters watched from theirs the old demon, the ancient varicose and despairing Faustus fling his final main now with the Creditor’s hand already on his shoulder, running his little country store now for his bread and meat, haggling tediously over nickels and dimes with rapacious and poverty-stricken whites and negroes, who at one time could have galloped for ten miles in any direction without crossing his own boundary, using out of his meagre stock the cheap ribbons and beads and the stale violently-colored candy with which even an old man can seduce a fifteen-year-old country girl, to ruin the granddaughter o f his partner, this Jones-this gangling malaria-ridden white man whom he had given permission fourteen years ago to squat in the abandoned fishing camp with the year-old grandchild-Jones, partner porter and clerk who at the demon’s command removed with his own hand (and maybe delivered too) from the showcase the candy beads and ribbons, measured the very cloth from which Judith (who had not been bereaved and did not mourn) helped the granddaughter to fashion a dress to walk past the lounging men in, the side-looking and the tongues, until her increasing belly taught her embarrassment-or perhaps fear;-Jones who before ’61 had not even been allowed to approach the front of the house and who during the next four years got no nearer than the kitchen door and that only when he brought the game and fish and vegetables on which the seducer-to-be’s wife and daughter (and Clytie too, the one remaining servant, negro, the one who would forbid him to pass the kitchen door with what he brought) depended on to keep life in them, but who now entered the house itself on the (quite frequent now) afternoons when the demon would suddenly curse the store empty of customers and lock the door and repair to the rear and in the same tone in which he used to address his orderly or even his house servants when he had them (and in which he doubtless ordered Jones to fetch from the showcase the ribbons and beads and candy) direct Jones to fetch the jug, the two of them (and Jones even sitting now who in the old days, the old dead Sunday afternoons of monotonous peace which they spent beneath the scuppernong arbor in the back yard, the demon lying in the hammock while Jones squatted against a post, rising from time to time to pour for the demon from the demijohn and the bucket of spring water which he had fetched from the spring more than a mile away then squatting again, chortling and chuckling and saying `Sho, Mister Tawm’ each time the demon paused)-the two of them drinking turn and turn about from the jug and the demon not lying down now nor even sitting but reaching after the third or second drink that old man’s state of impotent and furious undefeat in which he would rise, swaying and plunging and shouting for his horse and pistols to ride single-handed into Washington and shoot Lincoln (a year or so too late here) and Sherman both, shouting, ‘Kill them! Shoot them down like the dogs they are!’ and Jones: ‘Sho, Kernel; sho now’ and catching him as he fell and commandeering the first passing wagon to take him to the house and carry him up the front steps and through the paintless formal door beneath its fanlight imported pane by pane from Europe which Judith held open for him to enter with no change, no alteration in that calm frozen face which she had worn for four years now, and on up the stairs and into the bedroom and put him to bed like a baby and then lie down himself on the floor beside the bed though not to sleep since before dawn the man on the bed would stir and groan and Jones would say, ‘flyer I am, Kernel. Hit’s all right. They aint whupped us yit, air they?’ this Jones who after the demon rode away with the regiment when the granddaughter was only eight years old would tell people that he ‘was lookin after Major’s place and niggers’ even before they had time to ask him why he was not with the troops and perhaps in time came to believe the lie himself, who was among the first to greet the demon when he returned, to meet him at the gate and say, ‘Well, Kernel, they kilt us but they aint whupped us yit, air they?’ who even worked, labored, sweat at the demon’s behest during that first furious period while the demon believed he could restore by sheer indomitable willing the Sutpen’s Hundred which he remembered and had lost, labored with no hope of pay or reward who must have seen long before the demon did (or would admit it) that the task was hopeless-blind Jones who apparently saw still in that furious lecherous wreck the old fine figure of the man who once galloped on the black thoroughbred about that domain two boundaries of which the eye could not see from any point
– WILLIAM FAULKNER, ‘Absalom, Absalom!’
Everything’s in ruins, everything’s been degraded, but I could say that they’ve ruined and degraded everything because this is not some kind of cataclysm coming about with so-called “innocent” human aid, on the contrary, it’s about man’s own judgment over his own self which of course god has a big hand in or dare I say, takes part in, and whatever he takes part in is the most ghastly creation that you can imagine because, you see, the world has been debased, so it doesn’t matter what I say because everything has been debased that they’ve acquired and since they’ve acquired everything in a sneaky, underhanded fight, they’ve debased everything, because whatever they touch, and they touch everything, they’ve debased; this is the way it was until the final victory, until the triumphant end; acquire, debase, debase, acquire; or I can put it differently if you’d like, to touch, debase and thereby acquire, or touch, acquire and thereby debase; it’s been going on like this for centuries, on, on and on; this and only this, sometimes on the sly, sometimes rudely, sometimes gently, sometimes brutally, but it has been going on and on; yet only in one way; like a rat attacks from ambush; because for this perfect victory it was also essential that the other side, that is, everything’s that’s excellent, great in some way and noble, should not engage in any kind of fight, there shouldn’t be any kind of struggle, just the sudden disappearance of one side meaning the disappearing of the excellent, the great, the noble, so that by now the winners who have won by attacking from ambush rule the earth and there isn’t a single tiny nook where one can hide something from them because everything they can lay their hands on is theirs, even things that they can’t reach but they do reach are also theirs; the heavens are already theirs and theirs are all our dreams; theirs is the moment, nature, infinite silence; even immortality is theirs, you understand?; everything, everything is lost forever, and those many nobles, great and excellent just stood there, if I can put it that way; they stopped at this point and had to understand and had to accept that there is neither god nor gods, and the excellent, the great and the noble had to understand and accept this right from the beginning, but, of course, they were quite incapable of understanding it, they believed it and accepted it but they didn’t understand it; they just stood there, bewildered but not resigned until something, that flash on the mind, finally enlightened them, and all at once they realized that there is neither god nor gods; all at once they saw that there is neither good nor bad; then they saw and understood that if this was so then they themselves did not exist either; you see, I reckon this may have been the moment when we can say that they were extinguished, they burnt out; extinguished and burnt out like the fire left to smolder in the meadow; one was the constant loser, the other was the constant victor; defeat, victory, defeat, victory; and one day, here in the neighborhood I had to realize and I did realize that I was mistaken, I was truly mistaken when I thought that there had never been and could never be any kind of change here on earth; because, believe me, I know now that this change has indeed taken place.
– BÉLA TARR, LÁSZLÓ KRASZNAHORKAI; ‘The Turin Horse’
The company was now come to a halt and the first shots were fired and the gray riflesmoke rolled through the dust as the lancers breached their ranks. The kid’s horse sank beneath him with a long pneumatic sigh. He had already fired his rifle and now he sat on the ground and fumbled with his shotpouch. A man near him sat with an arrow hanging out of his neck. He was bent slightly as if in prayer. The kid would have reached for the bloody hoop-iron point but then he saw that the man wore another arrow in his breast to the fletching and he was dead. Everywhere there were horses down and men scrambling and he saw a man who sat charging his rifle while blood ran from his ears and he saw men with their revolvers disassembled trying to fit the fit the spare loaded cylinders they carried and he saw men kneeling who tilted and clasped their shadows on the ground and he saw men lanced and caught up by the hair and scalped standing and he saw the horses of war trample down the fallen and a little whitefaced pony with one clouded eye leaned out of the murk and snapped at him like a dog and was gone. Among the wounded some seemed dumb and without understanding and some were pale through the masks of dust and some had fouled themselves or tottered brokenly onto the spears of the savages. Now driving in a wild frieze of headlong horses with eyes walled and teeth cropped and naked riders with clusters of arrows clenched in their jaws and their shields winking in the dust and up the far side of the ruined ranks in a piping of boneflutes and dropping down off the sides of their mounts with one heel hung in the withers strap and their short bows flexing beneath the outstretched necks of the ponies until they had circled the company and cut their ranks in two and then rising up again like funhouse figures, some with nightmare faces painted on their breasts, riding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground with a peculiar bandylegged trot like creatures driven to alien forms of locomotion and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing the blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up in gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows. And now the horses of the dead came pounding out of the smoke and dust and circled with flapping leather and wild manes and eyes whited with fear like the eyes of the blind and some were feathered with arrows and some lanced through and stumbling and vomiting blood as they wheeled across the killing ground and clattered from sight again. Dust stanched the wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair beneath their wounds and tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodsoaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming.
– CORMAC McCARTHY, ‘Blood Meridian Or The Evening Redness In The West’
I move around, I jump, I fling myself and yet I’m still inside that one space which is too tight for me, unbearably small, although at times it is only exactly just a bit too tight, and it is exactly then, when it is exactly just a bit too tight, that it is the most unbearable; I jump and I’m still inside something, whose dimensions could be called redundantly inabundant, because it is not simply a question of dimensions but rather that in the moment when I jump, and I am inside that space, I am immediately caught, the space has caught me, the space into which I leapt unguarded, and it is not that I’m not cautious enough, I am cautious enough, maybe even unduly so, but that it’s all the same where I jump, it’s certain that I’ll end up in a space that is too tight for me, at times only exactly just a bit too tight, but amazingly very often just that, unendurable, I feel that space coiling around me like a cage no matter where I move, I immediately reach the end, in fact hardly do I move at all before the end of that space reaches me, I say, it is so much like being in a cage, as if all I could ever do is jump in a cage, and I can’t do anything else, I have to jump, however if I jump I immediately end up in that space which, as I say, is often maddeningly tight, I feel more or less not as if I were jumping into a square wire cage, or even worse into a brick-shaped one, but at such times I feel that I have got myself into a space that has been measured exactly for me, that’s what I think, that it is exactly as big as I am, and that is the most maddening thing of all, because I don’t even have to move, I touch the grating everywhere, for it is all one and the same what the end of this space is made of, to me it is a grating, the grating of a cage, and at such times there is no mercy, I try to free myself and if I even merely budge I feel the attempt to be absurd, because everything within this space is made in such a way, this space-cage, so that exactly what is missing from it is space, because you have to imagine it like this, and I say this to everyone, everyone else who also needs to jump, they will understand what I’m thinking about, and how this has to be imagined, that space is exactly what it is not, that apart from me this space has no innate freedom, so that in fact it isn’t even that, just a cage made to my measurements, I jump into it and in reality if I think about it more deeply, it is even so when I think that the space into which I jump is somehow wider, because in reality just the sheer knowledge that if I stretch myself four, then six, then seven centimetres further out, I’ll touch this or that side, well, already I’m touching the wall of the cage, so that the end of the cage in reality already starts there, at that point where I’m thinking that in an instant I will bump into the end, in other words there is no escape, if I jump up to sink my teeth into your throat, I jump into the trap definitively and inevitably, there is unfortunately no point in speaking of escape.
– LÁSZLÓ KRASZNAHORKAI, ‘AnimalInside’
MAIN LITERARY INFLUENCES AND INSPIRATIONS
The Last Wolf’, by László Krasznahorkai
‘Absalom, Absalom!’, by William Faulkner
The Works Of Arthur Rimbaud
‘Juliette’; by Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis De Sade
The Work Of William S. Burroughs
The Work Of Arthur Schopenhauer
The Work Of Dennis Cooper
`Light In August` by William Faulkner
‘Ulysses’, by James Joyce
‘The Sound And The Fury’, by William Faulkner
‘Assisted Living’, by Nikanor Teratologen
‘Strange Landscape’, by Tony Duvert
‘Our Lady Of The Assassins’, by Fernando Vallejo
‘Blood Meridian Or The Evening Redness In The West’, by Cormac McCarthy
‘The Melancholy Of Resistance’, by László Krasznahorkai
‘The Mysterious Stranger’, by Mark Twain
‘AnimalInside’; by László Krasznahorkai, Max Neumann
‘Death In Venice’, by Thomas Mann
‘Play It As It Lays’, by Joan Didion
‘The Madness Of The Day’, by Maurice Blanchot
‘Child Of God’, by Cormac McCarthy
‘Suttree’, by Cormac McCarthy
‘Hogg’, by Samuel R. Delany
‘Jealousy’, by Alain Robbe-Grillet
‘Ariel’, by Sylvia Plath
The Works Of Georg Trakl
‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’, by François Augiéras
‘It Then’ by Danielle Collobert
‘Pedro Páramo’, by Juan Rulfo
‘The Well-Dressed Wound’, by Derek McCormack
‘a’, by Andy Warhol
‘The Room’; by Hubert Selby, Jr.
‘Tonio Kröger’, by Thomas Mann
‘Dancing Lessons For The Advanced In Age’, by Bohumil Hrabal
‘Cows’, by Matthew Stokoe
‘Eat When You Feel Sad’, by Zachary German
The Work Of Bill Henson
‘Tulsa’, by Larry Clark
‘The Trouble With Being Born’, by E. M. Cioran
‘Anthology Of A Decade Hedi Slimane RU DE’, by Hedi Slimane
‘The Sunset Limited’, by Cormac McCarthy
*
p.s. Hey. If today’s debuting book’s author doesn’t ring a bell, know that A. W. W. Bremont is the nom de plume (or is it vice versa?) of the blog’s very own longtime d.l. and commenter Armando! This is his first published book much less first novel, and need I say this occasion is thereby most momentous. Also, as someone who’s reading ‘Hey Boy’ right now, I can squarely and enthusiastically recommend it to all of you. So use your local time today to celebrate and read/look and ideally buy Armando’s aka A.W.W.’s novel and festively note the start of a no doubt stellar oeuvre to come. Thank you, folks, and thank you Armando for the golden opportunity. ** Misanthrope, It seemed a bit ambitious not even knowing where you are with what. Stick to your stick-to-it-ive-ness. Good you’re sorted, one arm-wise, just keep more than the usual look-out for daredevil bunny rabbits and deer and those types. And don’t pop it or get popped by it or anything like that, obvs. One gets the distinct feeling that virus outbreak-occasioned things are going ratchet up big time re: shutdowns and cancellations and so on this week. Over here and over there. Yikes, you bet. ** David Ehrenstein, Unexpected birds of a feather whose flock makes total sense. Other than an announcement by the publisher that Woody Allen’s book will be released here as scheduled, I haven’t seen or heard much about it here. I don’t think people are particularly surprised that that happened over there. I missed Nayland Blake’s retrospective, which I’m truly regretting. And thanks for the Rosenbaum/Bresson link, duh. ** Bill, Hi. Yeah, Tyner was great. I got to see him live several times back when, and he was always spectacular. Mattei’s movies are all really garbage-y, top to bottom, in a delightful way if you’re a receptive state. I would truly love that guest-post you’re proposing, yes! Please do! I would be gratitude’s minion. Thank you! ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. Like I said to Bill, his films are really junk, and not accidentally auteur-ish junk (unless I’m missing something), but tons of light fun in some cases. So great about the funding! Big big congrats, Ben! Seems like things are going most swimmingly for you of late! Hooray! ** Jeff J, Hi, Jeff! Good to see you, bud. That is quite the batch of film showings! Especially thrilled that the triple bill one went so well. How’s the Matthew Barney? I’ve heard extremely mixed things about it. Sure, a Skype catch up sounds great. Just let me know when is good for you. Sorry you’ve been hit with that whammy of irksome things. Upswinging? Yeah, don’t sweat the novel impasse. I know you know that’s part and parcel of ambitiousness. My plate? It seems my novel has a US home at last, and I’m anxiously keeping my fingers crossed and waiting for the paperwork part to be over. Film fund-raising. Zac and I have to go to Rouen soon to plead our case before a grant committee. TV series related hell that’s too lengthy/complicated to go into here. Fiddling with some writing. Was planning a Japan trip, but, with the outbreak, that’s been pushed into the we-will-see future. Reading: some poetry books that I’ll feature in a ‘… books I loved’ post pronto. A very good book on film called ‘After Uniqueness’ by Erika Balsom. Film-wise, the best thing recently was Margaret Honda’s ‘Color Correction’ at the Pompidou with her in person. Boy, was that a demanding watch. And other stuff I’m not remembering? You, great input-wise? ** Steve Erickson, Hi. I don’t have Spotify, but for those who do … Everyone, Here’s Mr. Erickson with a very cool offer: ‘Yesterday, I made a Spotify playlist recreating Rough Trade Records’ great singles compilation WANNA BUY A BRIDGE? it was never reissued on CD or MP3, but every song from it is available on streaming, so you can hear it here.’ ‘Alternative Ulster’ is a great kick-start to anything. That’s the spirit (re: the operation). I’m imagining a lovely combination of relief and clarity-related perkiness. I have a feeling I’ll see ‘The Invisible Man’ on a plane. ** Okay. Do attend this awesome book’s DC’s apportioned birthday party and say something accordingly. Thank you! See you tomorrow.
Now available in North America 