Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Simon Van Booy’s The Sadness of Beautiful Things

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Reviewed by John Biscello

The Sadness of Beautiful Things
by Simon Van Booy
Penguin Books, 208 pp., $16.00

“O Lord, give us each our own death. Grant us
the dying that comes forth from that life in which
we knew love, grappled with meaning, felt need.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours

Simon Van Booy is a collector of stories, a distiller of them. He is the ear suctioned to the glass pressed against the door, the man scribbling on the back of matchbooks while seated in a hotel lobby, the sensual rover making his way through the patchwork euphony of voices in a diner. He is, in paraphrasing Anais Nin, a consummate spy in the house of love. Love, in all its splintered fragmentation, in all its rubbed shine, is always at the punchdrunk heart of Van Booy’s work, a dreamworn kernel in the grist of his tender elegies. His latest collection, The Sadness of Beautiful Things, inspired by true stories he was told during his travels, holds the power of love up to the light, in soft focus, while moving through a world of ache, sorrow and longing. [Read more…]

The Silence and the Fury: The Passion Of Joan of Arc At 90

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by John Biscello

“We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces!”—Norma Desmond, Sunset Boulevard

If I had to choose one face as the truest and most magnetic testament to Miss Desmond’s proud claim, that face would belong to Renee Maria Falconetti in the 1928 classic, The Passion of Joan of Arc. Falconetti, who was a stage actress and comedienne (Joan of Arc was Falconetti’s only major film role, and her final one) delivered what you might call a virtuoso facial performance, unparalleled in its plasticity of range and soul-felt expressiveness. Or in the words of the late film critic, Roger Ebert, “You cannot know the history of silent film unless you know the face of Renee Maria Falconetti.” [Read more…]

Maiden Voyage at Tale’s End: Denis Johnson’s Final Masterwork

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The Largesse of the Sea Maiden
Reviewed by John Biscello

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden: Stories
Random House, 224 pp., $27.00

Picture the sibilant music of blood-red sand shifting from one bulbous half of the hourglass to the other. Or black-and-white film footage, bearing a scarred geography of squiggles and motes and hyphens, bleaching a darkened room in a ghostly light. Picture the slow and deliberate turning of calcified pages in a vinyl photo album, which provides evidence of the people you were, the friends you had, the family you loved, and hated and loved again. Any one of these notions, or those of a similar ilk, could serve as the tonal prelude, the lo-fi trailer, to Denis Johnson’s collection of stories, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, completed just before his death. [Read more…]

Strange Music Of Silence: Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet

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Reviewed by John Biscello

“I am me again, exactly as I am not.” — Bernardo Soares, a.k.a. Fernando Pessoa

“Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” — Dante

If the Portugese writer, Fernando Pessoa, would not have existed, he would have created himself, if only to negate and deconstruct the existence of a writer named Fernando Pessoa. As an invisible spokesperson for identity crisis, and forger of multiplicities, Pessoa had up to 136 alter-egos, what he called his “heteronyms,” about which he said, “They are beings with a sort-of-life-of-their-own, with feelings I do not have, and opinions I do not accept. While their writings are not mine, they do also happen to be mine.” These heteronyms existed in a Pessoa-spawned universe in which their lives sometimes overlapped, i.e., the criticism and translation of one-another’s work, and it wasn’t until 1982 that the bible of that universe, The Book of Disquiet, was first published. Originating as a fragmentary series of impressions, speculations, reveries, distillations and dream-speak, Pessoa’s unending work-in-progress was unified into the book he one day hoped it would become…forty-seven years after his death. Which makes a passage like this one all the more achingly poignant: “I sometimes think with sad pleasure that if, one day in a future to which I will not belong, these sentences I write should meet with praise, I will at last have found people who ‘understand’ me, my own people, a real family to be born into and to be loved by. But far from being born into that family, I will have been long dead by then. I will be understood only in effigy, and then affection can no longer compensate the dead person for the lack of love he felt when alive.” [Read more…]

Charles Bukowski’s Storm for the Living and the Dead

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A New Volume Of Uncollected And Unpublished Poems
Reviewed by John Biscello

“Baby . . . I’m a genius but nobody knows it but me.” — Bukowski, Factotum

As a bottom-feeding, hardscrabble Walt Whitman, Bukowski sang of himself, incessantly, with a volcanic chip on his shoulder. He was determined to be heard, recognized, affirmed—Charles Bukowski Wuz Here stamped on Eternity’s forehead. He coerced you to see life as a cruel and dirty joke that he was in on, and often felt himself to be the butt of, and he would play the page like a blowsy stand-up comedian with too much acid in his diet. He was a living room Pulcinella with a beer-gut, a literary W.C. Fields tossing water balloons and Molotov cocktails with sardonic glee.  [Read more…]

Gathered Crumbs From A Lost Cake

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A Review of Elizabeth Ellen’s Person/a
by John Biscello

I

In the 2004 film, The Libertine, Johnny Depp, playing the Earl of Rochester, delivers an acidic opening monologue, which begins, “Allow me to be frank at the commencement, you will not like me. The gentlemen will be envious and the ladies will be repelled. You will not like me now and you will like me a good deal less as you go on.”

The ego, as a mouthpiece for rebellion, as an exiled priest dispatching its sermon-of-self from a rogue pulpit, creates itself through voice. In the “Letter from the Editor” section of Elizabeth Ellen’s new novel, Person/a, the author states: “… I write this letter to you, dear reader, as both editor and author of this novel, with full awareness and with full admission that if there is a ‘Monster at the End of this Book,’ that monster is I. I am that monster. Let this then serve as an introduction.” [Read more…]

The Bruises and Bloodletting Of A Hard-Boiled Romantic

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Ernest Hemingway: A Biography
by Mary V. Dearborn
Reviewed by John Biscello

Can I believe myself as others believe me to be? Here is where these lines become a confession in the presence of my unknown and unknowable to me, unknown and unknowable for myself. Here is where I create the legend wherein I must bury myself.  — Miguel de Unamuno.

Perhaps no other 20th century writer has invited more scorn, worship, lampooning, lionization, and soapbox scrutiny than Ernest Hemingway. Or rather the “legend” of Ernest Hemingway. His name became not only synonymous with American literature, and a laconic style of writing, but also with a specific he-man persona that wore its balls on its torn sleeve. [Read more…]

Immune to Extinction: Meridel Le Sueur’s The Girl

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Reviewed by John Biscello

Meridel Le Sueur’s The Girl, written in 1939—the year in which World War II began, the Manhattan Project got underway, and The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind premiered—had to wait nearly forty years before its publication date in 1978. If it hadn’t been for John Crawford, the founder and publisher of West End Press, whose goal was to “print works by American writers neglected by publishers in the ‘mainstream,’” this small masterwork may have remained an unknown treasure collecting dust in Le Sueur’s basement. [Read more…]

The Killers at Red’s

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Excerpted from Nocturne Variations, a soon-to-be published novel by John Biscello

   Joe pushed open the door and a bell sang.
   Max followed Joe into Red’s.
   The men’s dark hats and trenchcoats were beaded in snow.
   Joe took off his hat and waved it profusely, air-drying the moisture that had accumulated on it. He put the hat back on and surveyed the diner.
   The place was empty except for two customers.
   An old woman, wearing a green hat that fit her head like a woolen conch shell, was seated at a table in the far corner. Arms gelatinously splayed on either side of the table, she was hunched over her bowl as if divining messages from it. When Joe and Max entered, she raised her eyes and stared at them with listless gravity.
   At the counter, which was lined with red vinyl stools, sat a rumpled, doughy-looking man with an eyepatch.
   Snow in April, Joe piped, as if announcing the title of a hit song. [Read more…]

All the Lonely People: Haruki Murakami’s Men Without Women

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Reviewed by John Biscello

Was it all a dream—
I mean those old bygone days—
Were they all what they seemed?
All night long I lie awake
listening to autumn rain.

This poem from the Zen monk, Ryokan, could serve as an emblematic preface to Haruki Murakami’s Men Without Women. Claustrophobic poignancy and stringent wistfulness, shot through with quirky humor, characterize the autumn-flavored tone of the seven stories comprising the collection. [Read more…]

Displaced Debutantes and Soluble Entities: The Vision of Linda Stojak

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Silent Voices
at LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe NM
Reviewed by John Biscello

During a recent visit to Santa Fe, I chanced upon the artwork of Linda Stojak. Her show, Silent Voices, was being featured at LewAllen Galleries, and entering the shrine-like atmosphere of the nine-painting exhibition, I immediately felt as if I were holding sacred vigil or bearing witness to metamorphic elegies.

The female subjects comprising Silent Voices seem to exist in a haunted chrysalis state, or embryonic purgatory. Their faces, ashen swabs which are kin to Di Chirico’s faceless enigmas, suggest not only the tragic obliteration of identity but also the potential for rebirth, i.e., a Bardo makeover.  [Read more…]

The Little Emperor

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by John Biscello

I………..I have seen
the Little Emperor—
mischievous, unabashed, baiting
in borrowed skin
dong tolling through the marketplace
offering his services for a nominal fee.
He leads, without words,
through smile and eyes alone
flesh blood bone advertisement
robed in dust baked brown
in the sun’s unremitting violence
hands nursing thin air
into something mesmeric. [Read more…]

Poem in the Manner of Arthur Rimbaud

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by David Lehman

.....Wandering in the forest I was naked as the dawn that has never
before seen herself naked. But no bell tolled and no cock crowed.

.....Between the waterfall and the wall stood the incautious girls of my 
village, which I left when I reached my fifteenth birthday, fed up with
the bitches picked up in cafés who would have me own what I preferred 
to possess by short-term lease. [Read more...]

The Haunting Of One’s Self: Paul Auster’s 4 3 2 1

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Reviewed by John Biscello

“He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all of possibilities of time.” — Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths”

One could imagine Borges, who declared that the basic devices of fantastic literature are four-fold—the work within the work, the contamination of reality by dream, the voyage in time, and the double—as personal timekeeper and Virgil-visioned guide to Paul Auster, who for the past half a century has trafficked in existential loops and slipknots, identity crises and vanishing acts. Auster, whether writing fiction or non-fiction, writing in the first person or third person, has always haunted his own writings, sort of as the negative imprint of a splitting point. [Read more…]

The Downwind Smell Of Teen Spirit

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Henry Miller’s The Time of the Assassins
Reviewed by John Biscello

“This time we have him: we know where Arthur Rimbaud, the great Rimbaud, the real Rimbaud, the Rimbaud of Illuminations is. This is not a decadent hoax. We are declaring that we know the real hiding place of the famous missing poet” —La France moderne, Feb 19-March 4, 1891 [Read more…]

Through a Lighted Glass Darkly: Ann Nietzke’s Windowlight

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Reviewed by John Biscello

In many respects a window is a writer’s best friend. It can give the unrelenting “I” a break from inner-space-gazing, extend depth and perspective, offer slice-of-life unscripted cinema, frame the world in manageable portions. It is also the voyeur’s privileged peephole, and this is the spy-glass through which Ann Nietzke covers the whirligig waterfront of Venice, California. [Read more…]