Hailed in underground Literary octagons as a punk-lit
post-modern “masturbatory masterpiece,” WHAT WE WERE BEFORE WE MADE SOMETHING OF OURSELVES (often referred to by its
street name as Yellow Monkey Bars and Unbidden Erections – a failed campaign)
is a sprawling 1100 page anvil -heavy Britannica of sorrow, a linguistic
continent littered with paragraphs of hurt,
an emotional exegesis imprisoning the bellowing clangs of the human
heart. Written between 2000-2007 and tattooed in the tonal inflection of such
narrative masters as David Foster Wallace and William Gaddis YMBUE chronicles
the formative foibles and poetic puberty of four friends as they sociologically
skid through the gilded guillotine Mascot-headed hallways of Christian- Logos Seminary (an ersatz liturgical academy with a hippo pond, a 70’s flavored flower-power
Jesus Gymnasium, the world’s Largest indoor biblical themed mini-golf course
and a Versailles sized oscillating working mobile of the solar system) while
evading the hegemonic hell of the bullying VARSITE ELITE basketball squad
orchestrated by a sex-obsessed Headmaster via clambering up the rungs of their
imagination.
Gargantuan and bawdy, Rabelaisian in girth and propensity featuring Buster Highman (a Bavarian flatulent
artist), Lynnford Collins ( a 13 year old drag queen) and Judith Goldstein (the
closet Jew) and showcasing one of the most endearing protagonists to come along
in contemporary letters YMBUE is a panegyric hymn to the Pale King Peoria of
yesterday (ahem Lums on Western) a super hero swan song to both the transitory
echoes of youth as well as a zany semi-autobiographical picaresque meditation
on what we intrinsically were before we made something of ourselves.
Starting in
mid-November 2012 a fractal (chapter) will be posted every day until the novel
is posted in its entirety Sept 2013.
Feel free to slip in for a verbal nightcap or peruse an
occasional post and (as always) thanx for readin’!!!
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