Thursday 5 January 2012

'Ask The Dust'

"What's on your mind?" the identity machine called facebook asks. what's on my mind? John Fante, of course, and 'Ask The Dust'... I read it on christmas night between midnight and 6.a.m., coming off the Tramadol. To say it was like finding treasure is a bit clumsy and dumb, but, well..I am. It stopped me going insane, endlessly clenching and unclenching my fists, calf muscles, jaw muscles and taking deep breaths,seeing how long I culd hold them. It stopped me jumping up and hoovering the whole flat, too, which would have been lousy for the sweet sleepers in the gaff. It gave me mental energy, at the same time as absorbing and commuting it. A lightning conductor. It seemed to include a young me in some of its phrases, its ordeals, stupidities and idle fantasising and made me wince and want to go back and rearrange things that can't be rearranged. So it gave me summat to do in the present and future.

Strange in one way that Charles Bukowski adored Fante so, as he (Fante) is not the same sort of bum/bruiser/drinker type. But what they share is time, place, a compromised, deferred and out-of-place identity and a yearning for the words and the escape they can point towards if you cast them just right. Fante is daintily brutal in a way, in 'Ask The Dust', honestly painting himself bravely as prissy, cruel and annoying, like lots of clever young men can be, while Bukowski, his gorilla cousin (growing inexorably from cub to seedy buck before our eyes  in 'Ham on Rye'), is ever-keen to break the branches noisily and beat his chest, flnging dung round the nest. Quite a pair. But 'Ask The Dust'... Jesus, what a book.

Tap, tap, tap...

mc

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