Friday, December 13, 2013

Masturbatory Masterpiece...




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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