Hymn to Partenope

Partenope, predatory

as any earthly creature

,who all must eat,

omnivorous and unable

to fish—her bird wings got in the way

of the wire—created the art

of singing. To snare a man. Any man.

Not for loving—

she sang of other matters

of poverty perhaps, or camaraderie,

or the moonlight on the turbulent sea

—anything but romance, anything but love.

For she and her two sisters

had grown tired of poking their beaks

into the dirt, of grubbing

for scraps, and the island

was too rocky to plant. Anthropologists

confirm civilization impossible

under such circumstances.

            Not even Circe’s

Resources—a hut, a stall,

or the power of magic

to protect them, the sirens

did all that they could do.

Until Odysseus undid it all.

This is how my city was born in blood

And death and singing.

7/20/2020

Naples

 

Here is chapter Nine of the Fake Novel, performed by yours, truly and talented musician Robert English (50% of the band Nominal State) with some neat visuals. The novel was published on May 1st, 2020, International Worker's Day, just before all hell broke loose. It's a savage literary punk rock anarchist satire of all things Trump as well as politics and capitalism in general. The narrative pretty successfully combines the humor and horror genres. It uses the F-word a lot (4 times in the book trailer alone!) And yet it yearns for a peaceful revolution and a saner future for this world of bullies and pretend victims on TV.

Wake up, sheeple.  Fake is the new real.  The false must be told.

You can order the novel from your local bookshop or directly from the author (paypal $15 or 15 Euro to leefoust@gmail.com for US, Canada, Europe and UK including postage), or online bookstores--but please avoid Amazon and other predatory capitalists.

Play this as loud as your computer goes.

Chapter Fourteen: The House of Pain

I, the reluctant novelist, compose this fake novel from a place of suffering. Every word hurts. It’s unfair of Trumpistan to make me think like this and, worse still, to have to write like this. In your privilege as a reader you’ve put me to work as the conscience of a nation—a nation I’ve abandoned on at least three separate occasions. I don’t feel like I can go on with this much longer—yet what choice do I have? The falsity must be told. Someone has to call us all to account for our complicity in the Human Centipede Administration—and I appear to be the last novelist standing.

            Fuck you for that, for taking away my artistic freedom and respect for literature.

            I’m done with myself. Literature swallowed me whole a long time ago. My voice is hoarse. I appropriate the shrill whine of the political pundits I detest and speak from the house of pain where Dr. Moreau created me and all of the other manimals. Even the Sayer of the Law has abandoned us this time, replaced by a big-eared dwarf who, emulating Pontius Pilate, washes the dirty paws that shook Drumpf’s tiny hand in a devil’s bargain to keep US law as racist as possible.

            All that these Centipede segments seem to want to do is to get back at the cool kids who laughed at them in high school, the ones who smoked pot and had sex. These are the two big hangups these stunted momma’s boys never seem to grow out of. Of course they blame it all on Jesus. (Really they hate the Savior ‘cause He watched them jerk off with His omniscient eyes. So it’s really only guilt that keeps them kissing his ass in public, just like Drumpf kisses Putin’s ass, then they deny his every commandment with their politics like Peter before the crucifixion.)

 *          *          *

Otherwise, what? Mathias (of my writers group) says I only want to annoy people, or to get a rise out of them, by writing this bullshit. It’s possible. He also says I’m sometimes funny. He’s still caught up in the intentional fallacy: he believes I’m in control of what I write (“Just like soldiers believe they’re in control of a war,” sing that elecro-pop group I mentioned earlier). But you can’t make this shit up—it’s happening in real/fake time.

            Yet Mathias would claim that I still have free will and could choose to write anything I want, anything other than this political bull honkey.

            Free will, as a concept, is the basis of judgment and most monotheistic religions. Monotheists claim that it is God’s right (His duty!) to punish or reward our souls after death for lifetimes spent on Earth inside bodies doing stuff. But moralism’s kettle of worms is spilling out all over the kitchen table. The weight of judgment crushes us when our laws are skewed against the poor and only enforced upon those who can’t afford a lawyer. We store this oppression in our hearts and pass it on to our descendants. Judgment falls on me for writing this crap just as, in my nostalgia for morality, I heap a multitude of sins on the Drumpfster and all the real/fake public figures I appropriate here in imitation of Dante’s judgmental fake novel, The Self-Righteous Comedy.

            I’ve been rewriting Dante longer than Dante wrote Dante in the first place. (Behold another postmodern miracle!)

           Responsibility is always outside us, a wall upon which we lean. Responsibility can no longer be “taken.” It’s become a thing static and moot, crushed beneath the spectacle.

*          *          *

My writerly desire to prick your conscience, to add to the chorus of literature, preach to the choir, and engage other languages in self-defense of their assaults on fact and logic, remains inexplicable. (Unless, like Flip Wilson’s Geraldine character, the devil is making me do it.) For surely I’m not as bad as my nation’s leaders proclaim me to be in all of my elitist/liberal/taker glory. They’ve ruined my reputation as an American—by association with hillbillies—all over this continent. Europe is so stunned by Trumpistan it can’t make up its mind whether to laugh or cry.

            Such is the work of the novel: to try on other voices and languages like shoes. Or perhaps to sift through rhetorical styles, making room for the voices of conformity and protest until the novel makes some sense of the chaos of individuality that has emerged from our treasured plurality, “We, the people.”

            Society against the state, words against language; throwing shit against a wall until something sticks. Maybe the only value we ever find in living comes from the shortcomings of language to save us—the conscience behind the text’s composition, the form of a novel that speaks in-between the collected monologues I here repeat, assassinate, regurgitate, and negate with parody and indignation.

*          *          *

No wonder emigration is the natural state of novelists—we’re always looking for new languages, foreign terrain, and novel rhetorical forms to contradict the old ones. No single country is enough for us, no one language; no lone point of view is ever compatible with our search for meaning in all this chaos.

 

Oakland

It’s the last week of summer, my last week in the Bay Area before I return to everyone’s dream city: Florence, Italy. I stop this afternoon by Lake Merritt and today, Oakland—my semi-imaginary hometown—feels even more idyllic.

            The afternoon light is lonely, long-shadowed, the already behind-the-high-rises sun slapping golden highlights on the treetops and falling in desolate splotches on the sparkly sidewalks. The temperature is optimal, still warm from the late-August day but cooled by an ocean breeze. The traffic around the lake is steady but quiet—perhaps compared to the impulsive, always dangerous, and noisy Italian traffic with which I’m more familiar these days. The park where I stop is shadowy and cool, the grass I sit on lush, the pine, redwood, and oak trees old and knowing. Each one of them is so familiar to me and my upbringing that I could name them and no one would contradict me.

            The Kaiser high-rise looms above the lake and park where I sit; both my aunt and sister worked there when I was a child and they loved me—thus I feel a friendly affinity with the high-rise’s early sixties corporate cleanliness.

            There’s a building site nearby, abandoned for the day, and decay: ever present and incremental. A staid mansion turned into an old folks’ home. Syringes in the gutter. Victorian opulence. Sixties apartment-complex glitz and much glass with many-balconied lake views. Past, present, and future stand side-by-side on these streets, always in conversation.

            Oakland is my imaginary hometown because I usually say that I come from here—and do, originally—despite the fact that I don’t really remember ever having lived here. I came home from the hospital to my family’s tiny California bungalow on Midvale Avenue, but we moved out into the suburbs before my brain was developed enough to construct any very valid retrievable memories of the city. Only images of that house and its tiny front yard remain—reinforced and intertwined with old family snapshots.

Still, even growing up in the ‘burbs, Oakland was central to my family, the town where my father also worked, the city we came to on shopping expeditions, the central figure of my East-Bay identity, and home to the baseball team to which I remain ever faithful. All I know of Oakland therefore comes from family stories around the dinner table, later visits, movies, and reading about it in books.

Images of this troubled city so often at war with itself and its gentle climate has left an indelible mark on my psyche although I do not and will probably never know its streets, buildings, back alleys, homes and apartments as I know those of Walnut Creek, New York City, Rome, Florence, or even Naples—that other city of my heart. Still, my pretend familiarity with Oakland is precious to me. It’s like loving a film star, a ball player, or a particularly self-destructive indi-rocker—you can love them from afar, without having to put up with their everyday real-world bullshit. You just love them because they let you love them—and they are so cool.

(With apologies and sympathy—and a little bit of jealousy—to those of you who have and still do live with Oakland’s everyday real-world bullshit.)

Aug. 4^th, 2019

Oakland

La Dracu Arta! Or, Everyone in Romania Says Da, Da

Forests of slender trees, spaced at polite distances one from the other, wave at our passing automobile. “Since our forests are so well behaved, we Romanians feel free to go a little mad sometimes,” Ela tells me. Forbidden visual impression: look but don’t record. “No photos!” I’m admonished by a truck stop warden. Memory is an objective lie. Even anonymous prefers to be seen but not photographically recalled. Rosé is a poor compromise anyway you look at it. I’m not surprised—after all, the radical always hides in plain sight.

            The rules usually break me so I blush to be thus censured.

            My writing remains neutral in the war on the passive voice—for we’re awfully fond of empathy, all Voivode aside. There’s nothing quite like food in a paper sack as my own bones are woven of plant fiber, fish flesh, and stringy cat gut from the bottom of a snare drum. Culture is the camouflage I put on in order to circumvent the brutes. Wallachia’s mirror: the Turks. All mustaches are created equal. But our poets are bigger than your poets. Genocide’s only a part participle of national pride—usually in the third person plural. Sad in the homeland is only a backward way of saying nomad, (happyyes?); just another asshole, just another hominid in a dormitory of non-denominational dreaming. (He moved to Zurich—where else?)

            La dracu Tzara and his Dada, saying yes to everything twice. Bucharest should be the capital of Europe, so big and tactile are its endless cement precipices. Everything west of Wallachia has already been killed with kindness anyway.

            “If Vlad Tepes heard you say that he’d tell you to go impale yourself,” says Ela with aplomb.

            We climbed the Carpathians then, past his citadel (the Dracula Campground at its feet, impaled dummies up the steep slope for dramatic effect) to the glacier lake with its monkish tonsure of hairy October snow. But even here we can’t escape the barbarians nursed at our corporate teat all these years. I thank God for making Communists, so that there will be someone around to miss capitalism when it’s finally killed all of its practitioners. (I also thank God for making me an atheist—my mother only made me a sweater.) I’ve watched ‘em, worshippers of Moloch, these many years, throwing their lives at the feet of Telecom in supplication. He’s harsher than any heart-rending Incan virgin-eating deity. For the cellphone has finally found a way to coerce the bourgeoisie into choosing slavery over nothing.

This is why capitalism always wins: unlike humorlessly ethical and logical communism, it incorporates Dada into its barcode, never takes itself all that seriously (not even during its many genocidal binges), and lets its followers believe in advertising so that they can die desiring all the wars their little hands can muster—so many of them are dying to be martyred for their school, their boss, their country, and/or their god. (A word that can only be written between air-quotes these days.)

            Art, it appears from the glacier-lakeside at the top of the snow-dotted Carpathian Mountains on October 20^th, 2017, has proven itself impervious to either promoting or destroying capitalism. Although it’s a rather uneasy truce—and one that gives art, like Switzerland, a bad name. It takes a real audience of slaves aware of the fact that they are slaves to be moved by images of resistance. Humor always escapes the belongers, parishioners, capitalists, and automobile ‘n’ cellphone enthusiasts.

            The bullfighter stands alone against history (in a somewhat warmer country southwest of here), brutally murdering his only friend again and again for reasons so buried in history, machismo, and the desire for self-annihilation that he refuses to even consider them.

            The artist sits for the model who, not being made of paint, gets bored and goes out for a smoke. Dada, on the other hand, gets things done these days—since the rest of the world has fallen into a period of argumentative languishing. The artist fails to sell anything by selling out, puts his or her soul on sale, and ends up slinging hash—leaving a pile of vile bodies outside in a heap.

            I wonder how our boy Tzara crossed the Carpathians back in his day on his way to Zurich and ridiculous history. In a caravan? The covered wagon my family must have once taken from Ohio to Iowa. To end up in Hayward, California in a Model A—being wayward becomes a way of life once you take to the latcho drom. Some places are better to be from than to end up in.

            “The road down the other side of the mountains was built by prisoners,” Ela tells us. “It’s one of the most beautiful and famous roads in the world. It’s paved with their blood.” (Somewhere beyond its foot lies Dracula’s castle.)

Mercury Loves Lara

The kind editors of Red Fez online literary journal have just published a tale, "Mercury Loves Lara," from my novel-in-frames in-progress The Three Living Meet the Three Dead. Check it out by clicking on this text. Enjoy!

The Writer (a flash fiction recovered from an elderly notebook)

The writer doesn’t feel that she’s written her masterpiece yet. This is the best possible state of affairs. She actually fears writing the best thing that she’ll ever write for it might ruin her ability to push on into the search for the best writing she can do. For her life has come to revolve around this search.

            Everything that’s ever happened to her, both the good things and the bad, have helped. Every door that’s ever closed, shutting her out of something that she loved, has opened new possibilities of composition. Every good thing that’s ever happened to her has also helped by sustaining hope in a hopeless world too tired to give a shit about its own survival.

            Perhaps she will be one of those writers who pounds away at a typewriter or keyboard for years and years, writing works that never quite live up to her precocious talent and early promise. Perhaps this failure will be her greatest triumph: she will have no babies to kill, no early masterpiece to overcome when despair and alcoholism engulf her later middle age.

            Maybe she’s already written the best thing she’ll ever write but failed to notice. Distracted by the words, she just goes on composing, slashing, hyphenating, and shuffling them into new combinations. Probably being formed into a masterpiece isn’t in their best interest either.

7/14/2015

San Francisco