August 2010 Archives
The last time I mentioned Supervert, the nom de plume of a writer I know, the headline, Better Than a Review, referred to a YouTube video that a fan made about Supervert's latest book, Perversity Think Tank.
The other day, an interview with Supervert showed up on the Web site Dark Markets that led me to a review of Necrophilia Variations, his previous book, about death, desire and deviance, which puts the lie to that headline. The reviewer writes:
Every once in a while, I find a book that affects me so greatly that it lingers long after it's been devoured and placed back on the shelf. I have a feeling that SUPERVERT's collection will be with me forever, worming its way deeper and deeper into my brain until its presence is untraceable.
Is there a writer alive who wouldn't kill for a review like Jessica Brown's? I don't know who Brown is. But she's one smart critic. Her interview with Supervert is terrific, too. Here's a sample:
Have you always been interested in things that are generally seen as depraved?Yes, always. When I was being pushed out the birth canal, I managed to lift my head and give my mother a chomp on the clitoris. Nothing has changed since.Of all unusual and unpopular practices, why did you choose exophilia and necrophilia?It is difficult to articulate the "why" of a choice to write about something. A few nights ago I had a dream in which a friend confessed to some eccentricities in her sexuality. She was seeking some sort of approval, which I gave her. I then informed her about a sexual pathology called "anusitis diametes" -- a made-up condition, fabricated in the workshop of sleep. When I woke up, I marveled that my brain had invented this scientific-sounding term without my having the slightest idea what it meant.Writing is a similar process. Something appears in my head and a book is the record of my attempt to fathom it. This was especially true of Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish. I didn't choose the subject so much as it forced itself on me. I made up the term "exophilia," but it was to describe something already flourishing like a tumor in my brain.Is there anything that does personally offend you?Bad manners. Nietzsche defined philosophy as the ability to reverse perspectives, and the same could be said of courtesy. It is a matter of thinking the thoughts of others -- the people around you, their needs, their movements, their reasons for doing what they do. A philosopher who lacks such an ability to get outside his own head can't be much of a thinker, thus courtesy is a good indicator of a genuinely philosophical temperamentWhat do you think about the American culture of celebrity worship? Would that be classifiable as a perversion?Celebrity worship is very much the norm. Perversity is to turn away from it, to eschew the spotlights in favor of the obscure and the shadowy.
That's my kind of writer.
The first story I ever wrote about Nelson Algren appeared on the cover of the Chicago Sun-Times' Sunday magazine, in 1979. That was when the paper was healthy enough to have a Sunday magazine.
Algren had just returned from a month in the south of France, where he'd gone with a beautiful young woman half his age. He kept referring to her as his girlfriend. I don't know what their arrangement was -- they were accompanied by her boyfriend -- but Algren must have liked it, because he came back relaxed and cheerful.
He was not at all "angry," as the headline put it. Sure, he had a bone to pick with Chicago, but he looked to me like he enjoyed picking it. I think he considered it a public service.
I once asked Nelson Algren what he thought of Naked Lunch. He was living in Hackensack, N.J., getting by on Social Security and whatever he won at Aqueduct. He still wrote the occasional book review and received small but steady royalties from his two most famous novels, The Man With the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side, but his glory years were long past. He grinned at me as though he were being entertained by a wiseguy. I knew he had no love for any of the Beats. He had derided Jack Kerouac as a blowhard and Allen Ginsberg as a publicist -- and he knew that I knew that. So his answer surprised me, because he meant it as praise. William Burroughs, he said, wrote "half of a good book." I didn't ask which half. I didn't have to. I could easily guess. Algren had no use for cut-ups.
-thumb-340x230-16652.jpg "'His ice-cream cone runneth over' by Nelson Algren [The New York Herald Tribune, May 16, 1965] CLICK TO READ.")
The other day I dug his review of Kerouac's Desolation Angels out of the microfilm files at the New York Public Library. Kerouac's prose left him cold, colder than cut-ups -- colder even, if that were possible, than Kerouac's unbearable Momism.
"His ice-cream cone
runneth over"
The New York Herald Tribune
Bookweek: May 16, 1965
The cultural references in the review are especially telling for the context they give, this one in particular: "no Congressional investigator is any more likely to ask anyone whether he knew Allen Ginsberg than he is to ask whether one knew Hugh Hefner."
Algren had gone through a hellish period during the McCarthy era. He was under FBI surveillance. His passport was withheld by the State Department, which kept him from going to Paris to fuck Simone de Beauvoir at a crucial time in their affair. At one point he attempted suicide and committed himself to a mental ward (eventually fleeing out the window and down a fire escape in his hospital robe).
By the mid-'50s the establishment critics were crowing that Algren was a has-been, citing A Walk on the Wild SIde as evidence. A wronger call on that novel they could not have made, but it put a severe dent in his confidence. Having gained literary fame just before the Beats arrived, Algren might have felt upstaged. But I don't think he would have minded had he believed their output merited their publicity.
