Oh, finally.

Garbage Boyz James Fred. Hit! Press, $12.95 paper (176p) ISBN 000-0-000000-01-6

Brix­ton sen­sa­tion Fred, in this peppy novel about a pair of cousins — Hesh, 17, and Mar­lick, 19 — who spend a week­end throw­ing a bunch of garbage off “Grammy’s ter­race” while their girl­friends are away in another coun­try sell­ing con­doms, tells a mem­o­rable tale of late teenage angst. The cousins drink car­tons of brandy in the bath­room together, take turns with the punch­ing bag while lis­ten­ing to Simon & Gar­funkel, and spend sev­eral hours sit­ting on park benches “chew­ing gum, kick­ing pigeons, and star­ing at the female passerby.” The ter­race is stocked with a great range of objects suit­able for chuck­ing, and all is shap­ing up to be “an entirely mad” week­end. The only prob­lem is that early Sunday morn­ing they hit an “elderly police­man on the head with a crate of tulips.” This leads to their arrest, and the rest of the novel is set in a “little prison” where the cousins are sub­ject to var­i­ous “little unpleas­antries, mostly involv­ing feath­ers and mis-​prescribed eye­glasses.” Garbage Boyz is a rol­lick­ing depic­tion of stu­pid­ity and dis­tress, and a fine addi­tion to the relent­less line of paper­back orig­i­nals that Hit! Press is spray­ing into the mar­ket­place. Read­ers look­ing for some­thing to glance at while on the can should turn else­where; Fred has cooked up some­thing a little more seri­ous here, which most office work­ers will enjoy over the course of three or four lunch hours.

Every era has to rein­vent the project of “spir­i­tu­al­ity” for itself. If you abol­ish the sym­bols, then you tear down the walls of your own house. There is, then, a ques­tion as to whether your god is really God.

Sure hope I don’t count as the “self-satisfy’d constructivist” John Latta vol­leys against today, but it’s hard (& prob­a­bly a mis­take) not to read his quo­ta­tion of Alice Notley on Steve Carey as a bit of gruff resis­tance to what I wrote here. From “Steve,” from Notley’s Coming After:

I write, in this essay, of the rela­tion of poetry and life, the poet’s life: they go together and echo each other, some­times one has depth when the other hasn’t (and vice versa). Steve (to con­tinue in the present tense) lays his life on the line for and in his poetry, in order to write it prop­erly. You have to give it some­thing, every­thing actu­ally, and I don’t know what the it is in that clause, which it is, poetry or life. Poetry isn’t a career, it’s much more exact­ing than that part of it…. If poetry isn’t, as the theory people say, or shouldn’t be about man­u­fac­tur­ing a prod­uct, then poets such as Steve are the ones who should be given more atten­tion. They aren’t, and not by the the­o­rists. You can’t study him if you can’t easily get his books (prod­ucts); if he doesn’t hang with a crowd of self-​advertisers (the­o­rists) telling you what his works mean and that he’s the only one; if his life is embar­rass­ing or some­thing, if it works accord­ing to its own (painful) rules. If you can’t sep­a­rate the prod­uct from the pro­ducer, the poet from the life. I love Steve so I’m not impar­tial or detached or what­ever that word; I don’t want to be that word; I don’t want to be a sci­en­tist about poetry—and I’m not just talk­ing about my friend. I’m talk­ing about poetry. It isn’t detach­able. It’s mixed in with every­thing, even when it isn’t obvi­ously being writ­ten; it’s con­sum­ing and if you’re a poet and you aren’t some­what rav­aged from that, there’s prob­a­bly some­thing wrong with your poetry.

Which is, as John notes, “a ter­ri­fy­ingly forth­right crescendo and cri de cœur.” But I’d also call it a ter­ri­ble con­fu­sion (amount­ing to slan­der) of the vices of pro­fes­sion­al­ism with the virtues of man­u­fac­tur­ing (from M.Fr. man­u­fac­ture, from M.L. *man­u­fac­tura, from L. manu, abl. of manus “hand” (see manual) + fac­tura “a working”). The aim of the artist-as-maker is not to be “impartial” or “a scientist” about her work (unless you mean the kind of sci­en­tist who actu­ally exists, and not the flimsy poetic effigy torched here.). The dream is unalien­ated labor, born out of every­thing you are, the kind that con­sumes and rav­ages before it lets you go. Pro­fes­sion­al­ism is a whole other game: alien­at­ing one’s efforts for the sake of the market, whether that market is the col­lected lis­ten­er­ship of NPR or a coterie of thirty on the Lower East Side.