Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

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…]

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 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…]