THE BOMBAST TRANSCRIPTSRants and Screeds of RageboyBy...

THE BOMBAST TRANSCRIPTS

Rants and Screeds of Rageboy

By Christopher Locke

Perseus Publishing: 288 pp., $25

“The inspiration of all true art is a blank screen and a bad attitude.” There’s a lot of attitude going around these days but not enough to change anything. Still, this fast-talking, rule-breaking, opinionated and irreverent writing has the whir and hum of the ‘60s. How did Christopher Locke achieve the exalted position from which he mercilessly dumps on his readers (fondly called the “Reader Abuse Programme”)? “My resume looks like the routing manifest for some displaced person after WWII. I am merely a high-tech migrant worker,” specializing in artificial intelligence. Which is not what he was doing at IBM, we later learn. He was, to his great embarrassment, writing P.R.: “I don’t mind telling you about the acid, the drinking, the women.... But to admit that I was once in Public Relations ... well, try to imagine how painful this is for me.” This is a collection of columns that ran in Locke’s very own Web zine, now 6 years old, called Entropy Gradient Reversals, a title that had occurred to him 30 years ago while “deeply immersed in the study of psychotropic particle physics.” The best are pure rant: against corporate America, against fascism, against stupidity. Since the present is so rotten, so corrupted, many of the essays are memories of grand old trips on Sandoz pharmaceuticals, pure lysergic acid diethylamide-25. “I woke up angry,” Rageboy writes. “I’m tired of being angry. I’m tired of being scared. It makes me angry.”

*

BLUES FOR CANNIBALS

The Notes From Underground

By Charles Bowden

North Point Press: 293 pp., $24

Charles Bowden is so low it makes me want to nurse him back to health, a neat trick for a writer to pull on a reader. Bowden gets lost. I’ve admired this before, particularly in the text he wrote to accompany a photo book on the Sonoran Desert, which he knows and loves. Its great pleasure was learning the language the Sonoran Desert might speak. As a journalist, covering unions and sex crimes and bad business, he still gets lost, which newspaper editors might not like, but book readers will. When Bowden writes, for example as he does in this collection, about what it was like to write about sex crimes, he weaves his own sex life into the telling, as if to find the part of himself that would understand this part of human nature. Just when he starts to fall into blackness in front of us, his readers, he goes back to rough bark and rain and mud and even blood; to nature and to the image of the manzanita tree that grows around his home. Stab, hack, cut through. As a writer seeking justice in his words, he is like a man clearing the brush, trying to break through, to get enough light and oxygen to see his trees and sky again before he goes back under. In “Blues for Cannibals,” Bowden weaves the story of the deaths of four friends close to him, by drink or suicide or both. He tries to get to the source of the sickness, of the sadness that triumphed over them. “We are cannibals now,” he writes of the human condition. “We can devour and take but cannot give.” Such despair in the American nightmare. Bowden is invited to watch the killing by lethal injection of a prisoner on death row: “I watched and feel dirty for the watching.” Of course he would. He is never comfortable just watching. For a big bad Western desert anarchist, Bowden absorbs pain like a sensitive New Age guy. It just crawls into his roots and makes these leaves. The bark is rough. The wood burns hot.

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SENTIMENTAL, HEARTBROKEN REDNECKS

Stories

By Greg Bottoms

Context Books: 216 pp., $21.95

“I wanted to be that sad happy tragicomic narrator bleeding that jazzy blues-filled bebop prose, a dirty reefer-stoked martyr for the lost ... and the never-quite made-its.” This is Greg Bottoms’ ambition as a writer, a self-image with a history, a contrariness and the desire to describe undescribed lives. The time Bottoms gets sick after tripping along nicely on LSD for several days is when he finally goes to the bathroom and realizes that some little old lady doing her custodial job is going to have to clean up after him and all the other partying thugs. Bottoms plays with the idea of being a Southern writer in these stories, for which he uses the definition of Southern writing given by critic Lewis Simpson: “Southern fiction derives from visions in which faith in the [writer’s] ability to make his own world has had an entangled confrontation with an experience of memory and history that tells him he cannot do it.” Bottoms subscribes to this. To dodge this fate, he “becomes a character in someone’s story.” There are dead dogs and remorseful addicts and bad fathers and dead mothers. Bottoms, like Bowden and Locke, doesn’t just go out on his limb. He damn well tries to break it.