Excerpt from THE DEPTH OF THINGS by Nate

            “Just give me a minute.” She goes away. It’s cold. The images, when I close my eyes, the experiences, are too rapid now. I have no sense of time. I lose myself in this endless onslaught of experiences. The visions are like lucid dreams. I am inside of them. Moving deeper and deeper into what feels like a vortex, or a wormhole, the images are so rapid they begin to blur, I’m moving through a tunnel—there are an infinite number of tunnels I could be moving through, I move through all of them at once and the “walls” of this tunnel, these tunnels, all tunnels, these vortexes, are images and experiences, symbols, everything that has ever happened, pure understanding, pure experience, and every plunge down every tunnel leads to a singularity, a point of infinite awareness, and I spring back from it, only to plunge again, and this continues at such a rate that I lose track of my body, where I am, what I am and who I am, I become pure consciousness and there is a sense, a knowledge, the most profound understanding that this, this is a place I’ve been before—the place from which I come and the place to which I will return. This is the Absolute.

            “Here.” Joy has my sweater. She tries to hand it to me as if I should know what to do with it, but I don’t. I don’t know how to put the sweater on. Whether my eyes are open or closed makes little difference now. I can see her, and the sweater, and I can see my hand attempting to push itself into the sweater, but I am rocketing down into vortex after vortex. Joy’s face is a vortex, her eyes, the sweater, my hand. The answer, the absolute, is in everything, everywhere, all the time, and I am submerged in it. I am made up of it. She helps put the sweater on me and disappears. I close my eyes and go back to the tunnels. She returns with my pills and a glass of water. I take the valium. I can’t feel the water glass, can’t taste the water. Amazing, my body can do these things, like grasp objects, utilize tools, takes pills, all while I am off on these voyages—every time I return I can’t believe that only a second or two has passed.

Symbols By Nate

ghosts of girls
symbols tattoos icons
ideals
some with plane tickets inside them
some with pockets of pills
one all shadow
one all sun continuing
in all those reflections
this was a time
when everything meant
life and death
and mortality was an abstract toy that
we all took turns playing with
because it made us feel real
and it made us feel important
before the closing
of the hemispheres
before drawings of murder
seemed like threats
before mountain ranges
blocked anything
but the end was always near--
a comforting
and savagely mutable
conception.
what makes you feel alive today
can bury you tomorrow
and what an idiotic shock
when it almost does.

Things The Artist Should Keep In Mind

Here's the secret to success for any artist. Three steps and one principle to keep in mind. I don't personally follow the steps and I always forget the principle, but that doesn't make it any less true.

1. Make the best piece of work that you can, whether a poem, a painting, a song or a novel. The best you can possibly do. It helps to know what you're doing and to have mastered the form you're working in, so naturally it might take you twenty years to accomplish this. Or not.

2. Believe in that work with everything you've got. With an idiotically religious fervor, believe in the shit. It's all you've got and it's best you can do, so you damn well better get behind it one hundred and ten percent.

3. Push it like you're doing the world a favor--like if someone doesn't appreciate it then they must just be too stupid to get it.

Mediocre artists, morons and psychopaths who never experience self-doubt, accomplish amazing things regardless of the true quality of their work. This is because these three steps come naturally to them. They wouldn't have the self-awareness to question their own ability.

As for the important principle that all self-aware, self-conscious, self-doubting neurotic artists have to accept: We are trying to "work" and "succeed" in an Industry. It's a real industry in a real marketplace, regardless of how idealistic we might be. So expecting a professional, like an agent or a producer or a gallery owner to notice your potential and take you under their wing and help you to develop that natural talent and potential into something concrete and salable is, unfortunately, a completely delusional expectation. I know, it's a terrible blow. Nobody is going to "discover" you and make you rich and famous and well-respected just because you have potential. Potential is everywhere. What is not everywhere, and what they don't have, the people whose job it is to sell art, are finished products that need very little polishing. The bottom line, the disappointing reality, is that these people are not there to help you. They're there to profit from you. They'd rather get behind an idiot with a mediocre piece of polished garbage that's guaranteed to sell than get behind a genius with a rough but brilliant concept that's not likely to make them a bundle of cash. Agents, publishers, managers, music producers, film companies, gallery owners... These are not artists. They are business people. Do not confuse them with people who give a shit. They don't. Knowing that their only goal is to sell your property (if your property is salable) so that they can take ten to twenty percent of your money will save you untold time and heartache.

Sartre and the Moth

Most recent work, askew, on skewed piece of black cardboard...

The Tralfamadorian Novel

Well, fuck... I've read Slaughterhouse Five once all the way through and then several times just picked it up and dipped in wherever--that's usually how I read. I just dip in somewhere in the middle and see if I get anything good. If it's good, I keep reading or start from the beginning. Anyway, for as long as I can remember, my goal with writing has been to achieve something similar to the the collage. It seems almost impossible at first--it takes so much time to read, say, fifty thousand words, and there is so much information in there, so much to forget... Look at a collage and you've got it, instantly, whatever there is to get.

I just found this wonderful passage in Slaughterhouse Five (by Kurt Vonnegut, if you don't know, and if you don't know, you should--you really should) and this passage practically sums up this goal of mine to produce a literary work that operates like a collage. After all, my approach to collage arises from a philosophical perspective which does not include free will (which is an illusion, friends, I'm sorry to say, if you didn't know already, and you should know)--it's a kind of attempt to present as many possible concept or perspectives as possible at the same time, to show everything, right now, simultaneously, as it is. A snapshot of everything. Nice ideal, often not possible.

Billy Pilgrim, the main character of the book, is kidnapped by aliens called Tralfamadorians. He asks to see one of their novels. They tell him he can't possibly understand them but they give him several anyway. A Tralfamadorian novel is laid out this way--clumps of symbols, a star, another bunch of symbols, another star, etc. Billy says the clumps of symbols look like telegrams.

The Tralfamadorian says, "There are no telegrams on Tralfamadore. But you're right: each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message--describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time."

Gorgeous, isn't it? Perfect.

The Conversation

So, I think I'm finished with "novels." I never really wanted to write them--neatly packaged little parcels of entertainment. I can write them. I could probably write them better if I gave a shit, but that's what it takes to write really amazingly entertaining fiction. You have a to give a shit. And I don't. What I do give a shit about, though, is art, literature... real writing. For an example of what I mean by this all you really have to do is scroll down the side bar and check out my list of favorite authors and the books they wrote. They're the kinds of books that no one other than them could have written, because they lived what they wrote about. Maybe it all does just come down to self-validation or egotism or a deep fear of death, of being erased from human memory. It is those things and more, of course. I was thinking about art recently--I did a couple of new collages and was asking myself why, did some writing (as always) but asked myself why. Why does art matter? I mean, you could go anywhere with that question. Clearly it serves a social purpose, an evolutionary purpose. It means all sorts of things, but the one answer I settled on, because it's simple, and it doesn't need to be further reduced, is that art matters (to me) because it's always mattered to me. Every decision of my adult life has been influenced by books, by knowledge gained by reading them. My one hope is to produce a piece of art that makes others want to produce something of their own--no, that's not my one hope. I have always turned to literature when I needed to know what human beings, the world, reality, was all about. I've always been convinced that literature isn't about entertainment. It's a conversation that spans ten thousand years and the greatest minds, and some of the stupidest, have had their say--they've contributed to this conversation. The conversation is about this quandary we all find ourselves in. Here we are. What are we supposed to do? Literature is how we explore that question, how we offer possibilities, ideas, admonishments. It's the "message board" of human history. I always wanted to contribute to that conversation, because listening to it has given my life more meaning, more richness, infinitely more depth, than it would have had otherwise. It's the conversation, listening in, seeking out the most honest voices who had the most honest things to say, that has given me so much, and driven me to formulate responses and new questions. That's what it's all about. Fiction, even in it's worst form--dishonesty and distraction and fetishism rather than the honest sharing of genuine knowledge--certainly has its place, and so I do know of course there is a place for works like Olympia and even Argentine but those works mean nothing to me next to Good Behavior (which was not my intended title, no, mine was Prehistory, because the events in that book largely took place before I discovered the Conversation) and they're nothing next to the other sixteen books I haven't released yet because they're not quite ready... though maybe some are getting close. There are Books, perhaps the only things in the world for which I feel anything akin to reverence, and then there are novels, and though I respect the craft of novel-writing, sometimes blown away by the skill of a master novelist, it's still the Books that matter. The honest ones. The real ones written by real people whose lives are so tangled up in their stories that there's no telling what's true and what's not. And that doesn't matter, because what they really wanted to do was to contribute to the conversation--the conversation that had sustained them, as it sustains me, and surely sustains many others. It all matters... because that matters to me, and I don't need to reduce it beyond that. I think that's somewhat comforting.

Assassins Creed Tattoo

Did this last night. Not too shabby, I think.

San Francisco (sketches) by Nathan L. Henry

Cold fog choppy water deep as hell and dangerous I've never been so thoroughly cold and it goes all the way through me our last night in San Francisco coming in on the ferry after a trip up the bay that began just around dusk past San Quentin— I tried to get a beer on the ferry but the girl at the concession counter couldn't take a credit card but she asked me if I was a regular probably would have given me credit but I told her I wasn't. She gave me a smile and a shrug— Sorry. It's all right.  Joy and I went out onto the deck again. It was dark and freezing out there and those ferries move fast— a hell of a lot faster than I expected— loping side to side up and down a hard ride salt water pacific spray coming up into our faces.  Watch the city come closer and closer out of the fog and for a few moments there I got hold of something, a sense of what San Francisco is or what it was and how it got to be what it is. Opium dens lawlessness whores sailors coming into port from all over the world human trafficking it really feels like the end of the continent out there like the jagged violent fringe of civilization.  Imagine a metropolis growing up out of the chaos and violence of the gold rush flourishing and fattened by greed and vice.  Joy I were amazed by how few cops there were how little authority there actually was anywhere. You can sense a lack of safety a sense of being a bit more on your own than you are in other cities and you get sarcasm from everybody you talk to.  In Coit Tower that big two hundred foot tall cement dick at the top of a two hundred foot tall hill the elevator squeals and groans like every single agonizing trip up and down will probably be it's last and the Chinese kid that runs it, when a tourist asks him how long he's been working there, as he causes a jerk in the elevator with a twitch of his hand says with a straight face, This is my first day. The he smiles, barely— we realize he's joking but he doesn’t make much of an effort to let us know that he’s joking. The bums on Market Street dart out at the cars and make wild schizophrenic threatening gestures and menacing gorilla-like noises— Tourists by the thousands dumbly carrying their shopping bags in bright clothes with stupid confusion in their eyes bums by the hundreds yelling "Fucking eat shit!" at the tourists. No cops anywhere. I mean, fucking nowhere. When Joy and I get into town from our drive up the coast and after we drive up Market toward Embarcadero and finally find our hotel, we settle into our room. It’s a gorgeous room. It’s plush. This is the last little bit of a long trip that began in another San Francisco hotel— still a pretty nice place but closer to the Tenderloin where by day the world was an acceptably civilized place but the instant night began to fall the junkies came out and pimps beat their whores right there in the street— a trip that’s taken us over the mountains past where the Donners ate each other and into the Nevada desert the high desert where there are wild horses and legal prostitution and into the mountains again, down into Death Valley, up past L.A. and on up the coast finally to where we are now. Three stars for a hundred twenty a night. Valet parking. I said to Joy, as we got into the elevator, Plush as fuck, man. She smiled. Not bad at all. 

But then there were the douche bags and the bums...

We go downstairs for a beer and we sit on the terrace of the hotel restaurant and I’ve been looking forward to this beer all day long and the table next to us is empty and there is peace. There’s a cool breeze coming in from the bay. We watch the boats, the water, the bridge... The waiter seats a group of Silicon Valley douche bags at the table right next to ours, and immediately, I can’t hear myself think and I can’t think of anything but these fucking douche bags because they’re so loud and so vocally domineering as if they’re at a barbecue in their own fucking back yard as if in their insane universe I, a total stranger, should WANT to hear their awful conversation—  And I mean, these guys are douche bags. When I say that, I can’t emphasize it enough, a couple of MBA shit-dicks on a double date talking about video games and the evil practical jokes and drinking games they used to play in their frat houses when they were in school and their brainless dates trying to pretend to stay interested. I can’t understand why these people exist. I keep trying to get a grasp on why they’re allowed to just roam freely in our society, wrecking every atmosphere they enter. I'm visibly upset. Joy says, Just ignore them. How the fuck can I ignore them? They’re pressing their balls against the side of my fucking face! I can’t take it. I slam down the beer and hunt for our waiter shove money into his hand and we leave.  Joy goes back up to the room and I go for a walk. I’m in a murderous mood. I’m in the foulest emotional state. I feel like I’ve just been raped a thousand different ways because douche bags like that really do exist— and they run the fucking world. After spending mere minutes next to them in a restaurant I know what kind of cars they drive, what their favorite video games are and their favorite fucking methods for torturing underlings…  Evil exists. I had just seen it. I was forced to listen to it. I was forced to exist in it’s overbearing oblivious universe long enough for me to want them dead, long enough for me to recognize the futility of wanting them dead, long enough to know that all I want is to never have to breathe the same air as anyone like that ever again.  I walk down the promenade on the bay side of Embarcadero looking for another beer— I’m sure that one more beer will cool me out, settle me down— if I can just stop into a little shop and buy one beer, sit down on a bench and smoke and look at the water and drink my cold beer everything will be fine— I’ll be able to relax but I can’t find any little shops and every place I pass seems like it’s packed with douche-bags exactly like the ones I just escaped and it’s so fucking hot out I start to sweat and I need water. I take off my jacket and carry it in my hand and I walk. I’m dying of thirst now. I just want a grocery store or a drug store now, some place to get a bottle of water before heading back to the hotel where I can hide for the rest of the day from this douche-bag infested hell.  Every major city in the world turns to shit on the weekends. Paris is the same way. Sublime all week long and suddenly on Saturday, the streets are clogged with douche-bags of one entitled obnoxious sort or another. At least  in New York I know what neighborhoods to avoid when the douche-bags invade, and it's sort of opposite there--the douche bags leave town on the weekend. I decide to just get back to the hotel but there’s an arts and crafts show on the streets I have to get through and I wind my way through the crowds wanting to punch people when they get too close. Everyone is too close. And then I can hear it. The plaintive whine of the worst kind of bum. I saw him in his wheel chair and his "help a vet" sign out of the corner of my eye but I ignored him. Excuse me, sir? I pretend not to hear it. I walk fast. I’m dying of thirst and the crowd is crushing me. Excuse me, sir? Where the fuck is a normal goddamn deli or drug store or café—don’t they exist in this goddamn city? Where the fuck is my goddamn hotel— where can I find one bottle of goddamn water? Excuse me! The bum screams.  I look at him. Can I have a cigarette? He’s got massive sloppy lips and he’s fat, squashed into his wheelchair and his clothes, his sweat pants are crusty and oily all over with biological excretion—he’s the slimiest piece of shit I’ve ever seen in my life. I keep walking, and behind me the bum goes into an hysterical spasm screaming as loud as he can, Fuck you, motherfucker! Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you! People are staring. I hurry. There is genuine rage in his voice. Who knows if he’s going to pull out a gun or get up from his wheel chair and chase me down with a knife and gut me there on the street— or maybe a pack bums are suddenly going to come to his assistance and surround me and that will be the end of me—a bloody spectacle for the douche bags.  I round a corner and lean against a wall. It’s a dead street, except for some bums.. more bums— the fucking bums are everywhere, but they’re not coming after me—not yet. They’re laying around on public benches. Bums here stake out little territories, little encampments and you get the sense that if you get too close they’ll drag you in and absorb you somehow, turn you into liquid nourishment by puking on you like flies do and suck you up off the sidewalk with straws.  There is no shade. I’m sweating. I try to light another cigarette but my mouth is so dry the smoke is sandpaper in my throat. The sun is beating down heavy. There is no shade anywhere. Oh, my God, I’m in hell. I look up and down the street. All the shops are closed. I’m in a nightmare world. If it’s not the douche bags it’s the fucking bums and the heat and the thirst. I just want some water and some peace.  I keep walking, and finally come across a drug store and it’s open and I finally get some water. I pay two dollars and fifty cents for a bottle of water. I make my way back to the hotel feeling like maybe the worst twenty-five minutes of my life have just occurred and the cute Russian girl at the front desk is nice to me. She smiles. I try to return her smile. I wave as I pass the desk. Get in the elevator and swipe my room key, hit the button for my floor. Take a drink of water, lean against the wall, lean my head back and close my eyes. I have no idea what just happened. I feel like I just stumbled away from a firefight or just got in from too long in the desert. I can't think. I swipe my card at the door to my room and I go in. The lights are out. I lock the door behind me. Joy has the air conditioning turned up and it’s so cool and dark and silent. Completely silent.  She’s under the covers. I get undressed and slip under the covers with her, discover that she’s naked. She says, What took you so long? I've been waiting for you. I almost fell asleep, she says, as she touches me. And the nightmare ends, just like that. 

Well, it's jazz...

So I'm probably not going to send a letter to Michael Ondaatje. I've got nothing to say to him, to ask him. I remember when I was twenty and wrote all those letters to William Burroughs that I never sent. What could he have told me then that I didn't eventually find out on my own? I thought he was some sort of superhuman back then. Now I know that "famous" people have still always been just as confused and striving as the rest of us, minute by minute, day by day, without any special powers. Just because you're famous doesn't mean you know what you're doing.

I asked my friend Dan the other day, over coffee at the coffeehouse, how the hell Ondaatje does it... "What the fuck does he do?" I said.

He said, "With what? Slaughter?"

I said, "Yeah, Coming Through Slaughter and to some degree with his other stuff, his short stories. He does the same thing with those."

"Well, it's jazz. It's as much about the pauses between notes as with the notes you hit. I think it's a simple, cheap trick that he puts to use, but he does it extraordinarily well."

"It's hardly cheap." I said, "Try to write that way."

"I guess it's not cheap when it's done well." He said. "It's cheap when it's done ineffectively."

Okay. Maybe it does seem simpler to him. Maybe I'm missing something. But I think there's more to it. Maybe it's easy to say, "Well he's just writing like jazz" when you can't play jazz and you can't write like jazz... I suppose I do it all the time, say with film--"Well, he's just doing a Woody Allen thing and mixing in some old crime noir." Okay, and I've never made a film in my life.

There's always more to it.

As Alan Watts said, the space around an object is as important as the space the object occupies. And the silence is as important as the sounds.

What you don't say is every bit as important as what you do say.

But there's more. I started writing because of what Kerouac did, or what he was trying to do, and he was directly trying to imitate jazz, and whenever I'm hitting it myself, doing it right, really rolling with it, it's all somewhere between free association and rhythm. It's a definite style of writing. I've imagined it as collage in literary form. A piece of it here, a piece of it there, an echo, echoes all over the page, distorting depending on what they're next to--you don't need to see it all right now, eventually it'll all come together.

Amazingly, I found just the right description of this effort, this result, in a critique of Slaughter on the web, just a few minutes ago:

I urge you to read the entire article, but here's an excerpt from Gautam Patel's piece at http://blogcritics.org/books/article/coming-through-slaughter/

"This is not an ordinary novel. It doesn't have a linear structure and, to those unfamiliar with the music [jazz], it might be irritating. It does not have rigidity or structural certainty. It lacks predictability so that you are not humming ahead of the bar or note in play. It is more like an unformed pool of limpid water on smooth tile, constantly being brushed and kicked and swept into different patterns and shapes and forms, sometimes puddling, sometime breaking in waves, sometimes slow, sometimes wild and uncontrolled and in a frenzied, almost sexual heat, its boundaries constantly shifting and changing. At the heart, however, it remains firm and unyielding, true to its own history: you can't change the past of jazz or its essential nature even as you keep playing with its form. Ondaatje takes all this and pastes it into a literary form: with anecdotes, snippets of conversations, poems, songs, fading images, shadowy persons who may or may not have been, and may or may not have been as he says they were.

"If you're looking for discipline and structural form, expecting that every scene will be complete in itself and thus slowly build the entire picture, you're going to be disappointed. But if you're willing to sit back and let it wash over you, knowing that you are before a master portraying an early master, prepared to listen and wait and wait and listen, then at the end, all the seemingly staccato, stuttering fragments suddenly come together like mercury finding itself. An hour later, a day, you will find yourself seeing the whole of it, with brilliant pieces echoing and reverberating endlessly in the mind - and that is the nature and stamp of great jazz."


There it is. Well-fucking-put, my friend.

A nice review of Good Behavior

GOOD BEHAVIOR by Nathan L. Henry

Category: Contemporary

Age Recommendation: Grades 9+

Release Date: June 22, 2010

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Reviewer: Kira M

Rating: 4 stars

Nathan Henry was the boy from everyone’s nightmares. Growing up in the poor area of Indiana as a child, his father exposed him to every violent or horror movie you can imagine. This and the friends he hung out with, inspired him to not only be a Satan worshipper, but a boy obsesses with sex, violence, guns, drugs, and alcohol. When his friend, Phillip, and he decided to commit armed robbery and run from the police, Nathan found himself facing trial as an adult. As he awaited trial in the County Jail, he found himself changing. Some for the worse, some for the better. This is his story.

GOOD BEHAVIOR is a hard-hitting story that really opens the reader’s eyes to the at-risk individual mentality and background. Although the swearing and sexual content is a little overwhelming at times, it fits well into the story and helps readers to see what was going through Nathan’s head as an adolescent. The narrative is well-written and easy-to-follow. The transitions between the past and the book’s present flow smoothly and do a good job of keeping the reader’s interest and painting the whole picture for the reader. High school-age individuals or older who are at-risk or like reading books about true-crime, urban fiction, or books by Walter Dean Myers will enjoy reading this book.

Michael Ondaatje (How the hell does he do it?)

I cannot do this justice with a short description, so you'll have to read it yourself, but here's my best shot. The last scene in Ondaatje's Little Seeds: An eleven year old boy in 1910 goes out into the winter night following what appear to be fireflies in the distance, though he knows all the fireflies have gone--it's the middle of winter. He comes across a group of European migrant workers skating on a frozen creak carrying flaming cattails in their hands. They are playing "tag" on the ice, and having a great time. All his life the day has been for work and the night has been for sleep and witnessing this scene of grown men playing in the middle of the night awakens something in him, a new perspective. He's too young to participate, and he doesn't understand the languages being spoken, so he goes back home.

The last line of the story is, "So at this stage in his life his mind raced ahead of his body."

This universal sense of wonder and trepidation over what is really out there in the world, right on the cusp of becoming aware, becoming skeptical. When the reality of your family, of what you've known, is no longer the only reality...

I read Coming Through Slaughter last year and was blown away. That, my friends, is art. The real thing; what literature is capable of. Most of what Ondaatje does, as an author, seems to just mysteriously fall into place as perfect art. As an author, I read books differently than people who aren't authors, the same way film-makers might watch movies. They see the whole thing--the script, lighting, camera angle, acting, editing, etc. I read a book and see the guy at his word processor, follow, or imagine I'm following, what's going on in his mind that motivates him to write the words he writes, and I imagine all the editing, all the after-the-fact rearranging of blocks of text. Maybe the original first scene in chapter one is now the third scene in chapter three and sometimes that kind of thing is clear and obvious to me, especially with cheap thrillers or lesser pieces, and sometimes it's not. With the good stuff, with the really amazing shit, it never is. The tricks are there, the artifice, the sleight of hand, is still there--that's what makes compelling storytelling--but it's done so well that you're left with something that appears to have come into being fully formed, effortless, without guile; art that completely conceals the fact that it's art, that it was manufactured, sweated over, beaten into shape, by a human being. It is a pure, perfect thing.

The most common question asked an author is, "How do you come with your ideas?" Or in other words, "How do you do it?" It's an ignorant question. It's like asking someone, "How do you live through a year of your life?" Millions of decisions, most of which we don't understand. Millions of accidents. A bit of underlying "wisdom" which is unconscious knowledge, like avoiding the company of violent psychopaths if we can.

But I'll be damned if, when I read Ondaatje, I don't desperately want to ask him, "How? How in the world do you do this?" Because this... this is it. This is true literature in the greatest possible sense.

I sent an email to his "speaking engagement agent" (whatever those guys are called) and asked how I might get a letter to Mister Ondaatje. Then I looked at the FAQ page and got my answer. I can just send it to them and they'll forward it. I don't know what I would say in the letter, though. I know it would be asinine to ask him how he does it, but I probably won't be able to control myself. Maybe it's worth it.

Sometimes, some artists can tell you how they do it, sort of, or they might be able to offer clues, clues that you probably won't understand because it's such a subjective matter. I know with some of my writing, some of my best writing, I have an idea of what kind of mind-set I have to be in for it to work. I know what it's like when it happens, and I could probably describe it to you, but it's the hardest thing in the world to reproduce. There is something subtle, though, that Ondaatje is tuned into, and there's a light hand at work in his writing, and a regard for the smallest things... the power of important things, however small. The power of moments. Gestures. With just the right amount gravity. He's doing what we're all trying to do, and he's doing it perfectly.

Yeah... how the hell does he do it?

I'll let you know if I find an answer.

Now Henry Miller can forever be with me...

I tattooed him on the back of my arm tonight.

True Till Death, a powerful memoir by Renee Parrill

Not long after 614 Magazine printed an article entitled The Ugly Truth by Erin Norris back in August of 2010, about the legal struggles surrounding the publication of my own memoir, Good Behavior (Bloomsbury USA), I received a frustrated email from Renee Parrill. I’d never met her, and never heard of her. She was looking for general advice about publishing, and a friend of hers had discovered the article and directed her to it. She was circulating queries for her memoir, even had it requested and then rejected by some agents, and felt like she was getting nowhere with it.

To the unpublished, the industry is a complete mystery. It’s gatekeepers, it’s agents, the apparent importance of the almighty query letter and the constant rejection with no useful feedback to speak of, all contribute to a slow process of the grinding down of an author’s confidence. No wonder she was frustrated. I was just as frustrated a year before. I responded to her and described my experiences, the compromises that I had made and the benefits and disadvantages which had resulted from them.

I did not offer to read Parrill’s memoir. No one does that. Ninety-nine percent of the time that is an invitation to a drowning in drivel, and the inevitable awkward struggle to find some diplomatic way of saying, “Thanks for letting me look at your mediocre crap. I couldn’t stomach much of it. But good luck!”

Two years passed and this very week I noticed a sponsored ad on Facebook announcing the publication of the ebook TRUE TILL DEATH by Renee Parrill and I wrote to congratulate her. She sent me a copy of the book and I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was not only “not bad,” but that I was amazed that the book hadn’t been snatched up long ago by an agent and sold to one of the “big six” publishing houses for a tidy bundle of cash. It was so good I read it in a single sitting, riveted to the agonizingly clear-eyed depictions of what it’s like to cling with everything you have to a man so battered in early life that his only true desire is to die, one way or another. So determined in fact that he eventually slits his own throat and while holding the bathroom door shut against the pleas and the battering of paramedics, he calls his mother to tell her that he can sink his thumb into the gash in his throat up to the first joint, but he’s disappointed because he missed his jugular. She hangs up, annoyed that he would bother her so late at night.

“True till death” aptly describes most of the themes explored in Parrill’s memoir, but it also describes her approach to doing business with the publishing establishment. After reading her book it is clear that once she has determined her priorities, she is not up for compromise. After years of work to bring her fascinating and painfully honest story to the public through traditional publishing channels, and after countless heart-wrenching disappointments, even after being offered representation from a New York agent—if she would be willing to change the book to suit a young adult audience—she took matters into own hands and published it on her own.

Think of that. The holy grail of every unpublished author everywhere. An extended hand from the New York publishing community with a contract for representation… if only she’ll lop off the second half of her story, and stick to telling a child’s tale of falling in love with a bad boy. But that wasn’t her story. Her story was of sticking with a man whose life was “destined” to end early and which, without her help, might have done so—without taking anything away from the heroism of her husband, who fended off madness to become a respected and successful artist and businessman, a man who deeply loves and provides for his family—and that’s the story she tells, with intelligence and skill.

True Till Death is now available on Amazon. (Click the book cover above to go there.)

The book is about Parrill’s devoted, obsessive, codependent relationship with her husband, local tattoo artist Matt Parrill, owner of Fate Tattoo on High Street in Columbus. It begins when she meets Matt. She is sixteen years old and he is nineteen and they are dirt poor with shattered families. She excels at math and describes herself as a solver of problems with unknown variables. Matt is nothing if not a black hole of unknown variables.

The book is about many, many things. This might explain why so many agents failed to champion this book. The industry requires easy-to-market products, with simple-to-communicate descriptions. This one defies easy categorization. It is a complicated book—not difficult to read, except perhaps for the squeamish—but it can be ambiguous. It’s a coming of age story. It’s a detailed and knowledgeable primer for understanding the art and science of tattooing. It’s an equally detailed and insightful guide for anyone interested in understanding the progression of the diseases of addiction and depression.

Above all it is a love story and it’s metaphor is the tattoo. It might make you turn down a beer, but it will make you want to go get a tattoo.

From an underground culture of extraordinarily violent, tattoo-obsessed Straight Edge teens through the culture of home-made tattooing, to the highest bar of tattoo industry standards and beyond, this is a book about tattoos. Tattoos as revolutionary acts, as self-negating symbols of emptiness, tattoos as expressions of unconditional love and redemption.

A dissection of the self-destructive personality, and the environment from which it inevitably grows, it’s about a mother who calls her seven year old son a “cocksucker” and leaves him alone with a known pedophile while she goes off to work, and the utterly predictable and despicable results.

It’s about learning that the object of one’s love is on a mystifyingly calculated, high-speed course to self-obliteration, and what follows is a wrenching investigation into the causes of these circumstances. Because as a solver of problems with unknown variables, if Renee can understand the circumstances of her relationship, and what caused those circumstances, she might stand a chance of solving the problem, and saving the person she loves.

She writes simply from the point of view of her sixteen year old self, “I think that if I can figure out what Matt needs, then I can give it to him, and he will be fixed and love me. I never tell anyone my plan, not even Matt.” This naïve but intelligent girl falls in love with a nihilistic thug who uses the excuse of Straight Edge philosophy to brutally harm other people. What makes the story work is not only her wit, but her objectivity, primarily her awareness of her own codependent behavior. Indeed it’s when she finally recognizes this and takes action against that destructive behavior, that Matt becomes aware of new possibilities. It is not the story of a battered wife, or a victim, but rather of the complex dynamics of a relationship between a woman who loves an essentially good man, handicapped early by multiple forms of abuse.

As an author, she balances all of this deftly, with great humor and impressive insight. In her life, sticking with what she believed in worked out. Matt Perrill fell into a well that a lot of us skirt, some of us trip over, plenty of us drown in, and he clawed his way out, turned his life completely around and is an example to us all. By refusing to compromise, and self-publishing, as more and more authors are doing, let’s hope Parill has the same good fortune with this touching story of redemption.

Argentine may be disturbing, but it is not glorification--by Nathan L. Henry

Sex and drugs and psychopathic violence are pretty much the main themes of that novella. Readers of it may mistakenly feel that I’m glorifying the disturbing behavior of my characters. I hate to think that this is true. I’ve both perpetrated and been the victim of violence in the past. I’ve seen it up close, and the reality of it disturbs me tremendously. I’m an atheist, I lack superstition, so for me the only monsters in the world are other people. Matt Grott is a depiction of a complicated monster.

I've spent a large part of my life doing drugs and I’ve had some pretty horrendous experiences. I know a lot about drug experiences, and if there’s anything that offers a great spectrum of strange emotional and perceptual states, it’s drug-use, so I enjoy writing about characters using drugs. Does this mean that I advocate their use? No. I think I’m a better person for having had the experiences I’ve had. I've also committed armed robbery and written about it--that doesn't mean I think everyone should go out and try it! Because of my drug-use, I know what it’s like to be schizoid, paranoid, one with the universe, and pathologically impressed by the presence of another person. My awareness has been stretched about as far as it can be with drugs, and as I said, sometimes those experiences were pretty awful. However, I now have a vast reservoir of empathy, a long roster of emotional and psychological experiences to draw from, because of those experiences. And I do value that.

Writing about drugs, or violence for that matter, is not the same as glorifying them. It’s the manner in which you do it. Although Argentine may be the most disturbing book some people ever read, because it’s about a drug-using ultra-violent psychopath, that doesn’t mean that I, by any means, endorse the use of drugs or violence. That’s an insane presumption. Here's my advice about drugs (meth in particular) in a nutshell: It was the most amazing stuff I've ever done in my life, and it caused me to be psychotically and suicidally depressed for the next three solid years. In Argentine, I think I spend more time describing the miserable aftermath of speed-use than I spend describing how good it makes you feel at first. No depiction of drug-use which only shows you the pleasurable part is a fair depiction. Same with violence.

Depicting violence is not the same as glorifying violence. Personally, I’ve undergone such a dramatic transformation since my adolescence that witnessing violence actually makes me physical ill now. My personal philosophy when it comes to writing about violence or showing it is that it should be so realistic that it makes the reader feel sick too. Violence is disgusting—there is no other way of describing it. If the violence in Argentine makes a reader uncomfortable, it should, and I’m glad it does. If the drug-use makes you think twice about getting high, that’s great too. Glorification is saying, "Look how cool this is!" Realism is saying, simply, "Look at this. Look at all of it." Sex, on the other hand, is something else.

I don’t think you can glorify sex. Sex is not negative thing at all, so when I write about it, I don’t have any qualms about making it look great. As for the sex Matt Grott has with the girl from the carryout in Argentine, while his friend watches—that sex is in a sense a violent act, so it was my intention to draw the reader in pornographically and then hit them with the sickening sense of this girl having been violated in a horrible manner. The orgy with the cousins is a completely different issue. It's meant to be sexy. I've got no problem with that. Besides, it's a set-up for the real horror that comes just a few pages later.

In one way you can repeat the past

When I was 18 years old, I got this tattoo on my hand. I decided I wanted to get a professional tattoo, then I drew it and colored it in with colored pencils, found a shop that was open and went and got the tattoo. That was 18 years ago. Finally, today, I got the thing redone and it looks better (I think) than it did the first time. When I look at it right now, I feel like I'm 18 and just got the tattoo. Very strange. I suddenly recall what it was like when it was brand new, what was going on, who was around, who I was in love with...

Fancy Cat

Jones originally named this cat Trouble and when I met her I said, Oh, this is a fancy cat. Her name should be Fancy. And the other cat, not pictured--I said, And this one should be called George. She said, You're renaming my cats? (This was our second date.) No, I said. I'm just saying that's what they look like to me. But I did. I renamed her cats on our second date. (Those other two freaks are Pookie, looking out the window, and Philip, looking at Pookie.)

Fancy died of heart disease in early 2011.

One of my first (1997)

It was one of these first collages that was stolen from a show at Franklin University in 2000. I don't have an image of it, but I do remember Malcolm X was somewhere in it, and he looked very angry. That was the most money I ever made from my visual art--it was insured for 200 dollars. I hope they still have it, whoever stole it, and I hope it's hanging prominently in their living room. I hope everyone who comes to visit says, Hey, I like that piece. Where did you get it? And they say, I don't know who did it, but I stole it from some show at Franklin. Ts ts ts ts ts...

True Till Death memoir by Renee Parrill

Fellow Columbus author Renee Parrill just published a great memoir on Amazon called True Till Death. I read the thing in a single nine-hour sitting, a searing, brutally honest investigation of the self-destructive impulse and how it can be inverted. It's a love story, a book about tattoos, suicide, redemption and self-realization. I urge everyone to buy it and read it. Right now!

Kerouac's grave and my grandfather who died in 1955

In this collage is my grandfather, who died at 34 when he was crushed by a mountain of stone, with one of his daughters on a porch swing in West Virginia. He's two years younger, at least, than I am now. There is also me (at twenty-one) when I used to wear old suits all the time standing over Jack Kerouac's grave in Lowell, Mass. Bottom right is a picture of the deli in Marysville where I used to spend a lot of time. I think that might be Io in the center, but I can't be sure. It's almost certainly one of Jupiter's moons. That's me with the shades and the cigarette too. I've never been able to find another pair of sunglasses as cool as those were. 

Some Notes on Writing and Purpose

I just jotted these ideas down on some index cards and thought they might be worth posting here--index cards are liable to be lost in piles of paper in my office. At least here, the ideas will be accessible later on.

Note 1. It is okay to entertain "pessimistic" concepts (i.e. humanity is a cancer, or a virus killing its host, the earth) so long as you keep this in perspective and do not give in to nihilism. There is a danger in waffling on this subject. As Camus said, "The only truly serious philosophical problem is suicide." Something like that. Yes/no to life is what everything comes down to. For an individual it MUST be yes--otherwise suicide.

Note 2. A writer, especially one dealing with real life, has an obligation to address all the questions he is able to formulate, most importantly the questions of meaning and purpose and death. One has to question whether their work lacks seriousness.

Note 3. Seriousness in art is as imperative as seriousness in life. The purpose of art is to illuminate life; to help the living better understand and perhaps appreciate their predicament. Is this propaganda on the side of life? Perhaps--for the individual--not for the species.

The point is perhaps that all ideas must be held within the broadest possible context. And so should art.

WATCH OUT FOR THE VAMPIRES by Nathan L. Henry

I was in some café

in the village

and it was raining outside

the money was running out

and the woman I was staying with

not having sex with

but staying with

was starting to ask questions

like,

Are you looking for a job

and I’d say sure
I'm looking for a job

then I’d wonder around all day

ignoring signs

that said

help wanted

and I’d sit in cafes

and drink coffee

wondering what the hell I was doing.

I had enough money to last a month.

it wasn’t clear to anybody

not to myself or to my wife at the time
(who was still in Ohio)

what I was supposed to be

accomplishing.

I met a guy in a little tea

and coffee shop

because I started going in there

every night alone

and he was the only one working

so we started talking

and the first thing he said was

Watch out for the vampires.

New York is full of vampires.

I thought he was nuts

so I said,

All right

I’ll watch out for the vampires.

eventually he stopped talking

like a lunatic

and started talking about theater

which is what he did

and I talked about writing

which is what I wanted to do

and we talked about collaborating on projects.

one night I was there when he closed up

and he asked if I smoked pot.

sure, I said,

so we walked with to St. Mark’s Place

in the East Village

and we scored a bag of pot from

these black dudes that wanted

to take us back into an abandoned building

and we said,

Hell no,

we’re not going back there with you.

they wanted to see our drivers licenses

we said what the hell?

they said they wanted to make sure

we weren’t cops.

do we look like fucking cops?

so they finally sold us the pot

and we went to this guy’s place

over in Brooklyn

and we had to be quiet

his room mate was sleeping

and shit…

it was the best pot I’d ever smoked.

he was running some water for something

and we got stuck

watching the water stream

out of the faucet

for a long time.

then we went out onto the fire escape

and smoked cigarettes

then we went out and

walked around Prospect Park

and he said,

Man, I don’t know why I said that shit

about the vampires.

It was just stupid,

there’s a lot of crazy people.

I said, Yeah, I know.

I’m sorry, he said,

I was just trying to come off

sounding cool.

I said it was all right.

Are we safe out here?

Yeah, he said,

if you’re a dude

with another dude.

I didn’t buy it.

dudes with other dudes

can still be mugged

and killed in Prospect Park

Brooklyn

at three in the morning.

I really liked the guy

and that night in Brooklyn

is one of the only two or three nights
from that month in NY

that stay with me.

after that night I got in touch

with another guy who lived in NY

a guy I used to do poetry readings with

and we spent every night together

and there wasn’t much time

for the coffee and tea place anymore

but I stopped in there

one night with this other guy

and another guy who was a friend of his

who was traveling the world

and I met this Brooklyn guy’s girlfriend

who was black

and very pretty

and he introduced me

and we shook hands

and he never saw me again

because I came back to Ohio

a few days after that.

I always worried that

he thought I was racist

or some shit

like it fucked with me

that he had a black girlfriend.

but I liked him

I liked his girlfriend—

I should’ve moved in with him

and his pretty black girlfriend

and kept on being just me

but I came back

home to Columbus

and all the shit

that I had tied into choking knots
were still here

and bad things happened

and that new world in NY

was choked to death

on the hot sun-beaten streets

of this flat

ignorant city

and I broke my hand

and my wife wrecked her car

and on and on

and on

and the way out was lost

forever

again.

A GIRL IN THE BASEMENT by Nathan L. Henry

there was this girl who

lived in Adam’s basement

for a while.

she was good-looking but

she was paralyzed

couldn’t use her legs

rolled around in a wheel chair

with a blanket across her lap

and would sometimes pull

herself up the stairs

when she needed to.

mostly she just

ate pills

stayed in the basement

and listened to music.

she had a cat

said she liked her cat more than

any human being

which I can understand.

she also had a .357 magnum

a revolver

a big revolver

snub-nose.

I was sitting down there

in the basement with her

one night

arguing with her about

philosophy and it got

pretty heated

and turned to general misanthropy

and she said, very excited

and not excited in a good way

I just fucking hate people so much

I WISH somebody would break in here

so I could FUCKING KILL THEM!!!

and out came the hand-cannon,

she whipped it right out from under the blanket

where her hand had been hidden

this whole time I was arguing with her

and she held it up in the air.

I said, Yeah, I know what you mean.

she put the gun away.

this was about ten years ago

when she was at least trying

to take care of herself.

if I was single I probably would have fucked her

it wasn’t a secret that she wouldn’t have minded.

she moved out of his place

a long time ago

things had gotten bad there

with her threatening to kill everybody

or at least certain people

it got so bad one night

I had to take her gun away from her

and she called the cops

and the cops convinced her

to let a neighbor hold the gun

for a little while.

after that she didn’t consider me

much of a friend any more.

there was one night

when I was talking to her

back then when she asked me

if I was an organ donor

and I said no, I just like the idea

of being buried with all my organs

and as soon as it came out of my mouth

I knew how stupid it sounded.

she argued for it a little longer

even though she didn’t need to

and I said, You’re right

it ought to be mandatory.

next time I got my license renewed

I became an organ donor.

well…

Adam called me the other day

and told me she was dead

that she shot herself.

her legs had apparently

started to rot

and “they”

doctors, social workers

whoever

were going to take her legs

and that’s when she did it…

in my mind

she was still in the basement when she

pulled the trigger

because I can’t imagine

that girl ever being in the sunlight.

I can’t tell you enough

to make her life meaningful to you

but sometimes a couple of images

can do the trick.

probably not this time,

it’s an effort at best but…

she suffered

and she didn’t deserve to suffer.

I don’t know that there

are any people who do.

GOOD BEHAVIOR IS NOT A YA BOOK by Nathan L. Henry

Good Behavior was published as a YA memoir. I find it in the library and bookstore under "teen non-fiction" and nowhere else. It's annoying, but at least it's out there... somewhere. I'm considering donating some copies to the library on the condition that they classify it as "crime non-fiction." That might at least get it out of the ghetto it's in now. I say ghetto because how many people in general go looking for reading material in the "teen no-fiction" section? Not many.

A memoir it is, but it was not written specifically for a YA (meaning young adult) audience. I wrote it as a piece of autobiographical literature, in the vein of Kerouac and Henry Miller and Bukoswki and all the other great guys who made their very lives the material of their work. GB was a serious attempt to get to the core of my experiences as a child, as a juvenile delinquent, an armed robber, and this necessarily had to include lots about family and friends. It was, is, a funny piece of art that shows unabashedly what it's like to become a psychopathic teen-aged boy, and then to become humane again.

The world is full of nearly or wholly psychopathic teen-aged boys, and we as adults pretend not to understand them, not to recall, somehow, just what a sadistic jerk off high school was, or just what kind of tyrannical assholes our parents were. But, I took it all on, and it's all in the book, and every adult who has ever read it has loved it, and every kid to whom it is marketed, I'm sure, skeptically waits to be preached at--fortunately for them they never are, because art doesn't preach. Literature, true literature, doesn't have so narrow an agenda. Unfortunately for me, adults are not likely to go out of their way to read a YA book because they think (and in most cases they're right) that it was written for kids. This one wasn't. It was written for people, people of any age. When it's reviewed by adults who know that it's been marketed to children review it through that lense. It is, to them, a product created for consumption by young adults. They decide therefore, one way or another, whether they think my "message got through."

There was no message, or rather, there are a thousand messages in the book. Children are to be feared and respected, and told the truth. There is no God or Satan or magic. You cannot put a child in a straightjacket and fill them with fear and expect them not to explode sometime in the future. In fact that's the best, most proven way of creating a psychopath.

Good Behavior has been out now for about a year, and it was not a best seller. Maybe the mistake of selling it to a YA publisher, of having it marketed as a YA book, will eventually be overcome, and it'll finally be seen for what it is; a remarkably honest, funny and disturbing, searching book about growing up in American, a schizophrenic country, with insane people for parents, and ignorant people for teachers, and perhaps sinister, definitely greedy, people for doctors, about how one becomes so alienated that one picks up a gun and almost commits suicide by cop before they've even gotten their drivers license. It is, unfortunately, not a unique tale. It's not about being a victim (I never portray myself as a victim in the book) and it's not about blame--it's about being human, as literature is supposed to be about, and about trying to find a solution to the insanity that is our culture, the insanity that is contributed to by, and a burden to, each and every one of us.

Collage by Nathan L. Henry

TERROR ISN'T PERSONAL by Nathan L. Henry

scared and too careful with everything

maybe its all tied up with sex drive

after all

I take the pills so that I don’t

end up overdosing some night

like some pathetic shit

who never knew what he wanted

and when he got it

he couldn’t take it

believe me I know exactly

what it’s like to almost choke to death

on my own vomit

so maybe the pills I take

to block up all my opiate receptors

also suppress my sex drive

so there isn’t so much desire

and frustration

because my normal sex drive is such

that if I don’t get laid everyday

I get extremely frustrated

and end up hating everything

and maybe that’s what it takes

to write decent shit.

it takes

being pissed off about something

and then knowing what to do

with all that anger—

misdirecting it

with premeditation.

all art all power all greed

comes down to sublimating

the sex drive.

that’s what Freud would say

and he’s probably right.

I’ve got this picture of my dad

when he was twenty-two

taken in one of those booths

and he’s got a hard jaw

and sensitive eyes

an eagerness

and a woundedness

and something behind it all

that will slit your throat

because it’s spent every second of it’s life

backed into a corner.

I’ve always got this picture here

right beside me on the desk

because when I look at it I understand

the blindness of everything

and the terror isn’t personal

it’s just the driving force of nature.

A TRUTH by Nathan L. Henry

we were not made

and nothing else was made

it all just… happens

as it must happen

determined without

predetermination.

I was going to say it happened

(past tense)

but memory is a product

of consciousness.

as it is now

removing that faculty of ours

from the picture

the past

does not in any way exist

nor does the future

so what is now

is and is and is…

it isn’t lofty pseudo-mystic

philosophical bullshit

it’s cosmology

it’s a matter of understanding

the state of things

the state in constant flux

and yes “flux” implies past and future

but neither apply.

all of it

everything

is the same thing

always.

but it couldn’t be

without change

motion

flux.

you can’t get to the truth

without those ideas

and you can’t cling to those ideas

or they’ll get in the way of understanding

the truth

not that I can know the truth

and even if I did

I couldn’t explain it.

so

I have a job interview tomorrow

at a pizza shop out on Fifth Avenue

where I hope that I will be given a job

delivering a food

universally adored by Americans

to people who will tip generously.

otherwise

I am fucked

financially

and that is a truth

that we can all understand.

Good Behavior By Nathan Henry in 614 Magazine

This is an absolutely wonderful article--very, very pleased.

(Unfortunately, this is a dead link now. At some point I will scan the actual article and post it, if I'm allowed to do that.)

The Ugly Truth by Erin Norris

Well, now, The Other Paper

Gave my book a very enjoyable write up... came as a total surprise to me. Have I ever said how much I love The Other Paper?


Good Behavior Review by Kitty McConnell

Why Good Behavior Is An Important Work of Literature (A completely unbiased statement)

I was writing an email to my cousin tonight, explaining the publishing industry, the whole process of getting published, how one might know whether one has "succeeded" or not, and ended up wondering about the prospects for my own book and I ended up telling her this: "I personally think (Good Behavior) is an important book. Sociologically speaking it's an important book. There isn't anything like it. It explains in a very clear, reasonable and entertaining way how certain kids become violent psychopaths. When something like Columbine happens, and everybody says, How could this happen? What were those kids thinking? My book gives the world the answer. These kids, the troubled ones specifically, are divorced from reality, and if there is enough repressed anger or fear, their "reality," which is really not much more than a collection of fantasies already, will easily morph into something that can be very dangerous." But there are so many other important components to the book. There is the transformation, the redemption that, though perhaps not possible for some kids, is absolutely possible for many of them. It's a very personal book for me, naturally--it's a memoir, it's my life--but in order to write and to appraise such a work, I have to possess an ability view the work objectively. In order to write what I write I have to see myself as a character, as a symbol, therefor I have to also see the book itself as something far more than just autobiography, masturbation, self-exploitation. The book itself, beyond what it does for me personally (the validation and illumination it affords me), has to always be something beyond me. It has to say something about the world, and it does, loud and clear, on a lot of different levels. It has to be a philosophical statement, many of them, and it is. So... whether or not I am successfully avoiding direct self-congratulation, I insist here that Good Behavior is, in the broadest sense, a truly important book, and I'm sure that the world will not fail to agree. (There you go--my whole-hearted endorsement of my own book. Surprised?)

The Quiet Times

When I lived down south (Southern Ohio), around twenty-six, one of the quietest times of my life--here's a portion of a collage from then...

Henry Miller Defending Sexus in a letter to Norwegian Supreme Court (Breaking news)

Here is a link to the letter that Miller sent in defense of his book Sexus when it was banned in the late fifties. It's a great piece of writing, and does a better job than most at giving one an idea of the sweeping universal nature of Miller's perspective. Funny, biting, and generous. http://www.evergreenreview.com/119/21.html

ATOMS FOR PEACE by NLH

Good Behavior gets a wonderful, intelligent review from the Mean Old Library Teacher

I was thrilled to see this today--an insightful, compassionate review from an obviously brilliant person:
CHECK IT OUT: http://meanoldlibraryteacher.blogspot.com/2010/04/good-behavior-by-nathan-l-henry.html

This is what writing feels like to me

Coswell's Chess Board

Coswell worked in a factory in his younger days, and due to his lifelong allergy to work, he'd often slip away from his station and wander the factory, pocketing little pieces of metal here and there, oddly shaped nuts and bolts, clamps, etc. From this odd collection of tidbits he constructed several unique chess sets and with help of my dad, he cut, carved and stained several chess boards as well. After his death only two or three sets existed and one was given to me by another uncle of mine--I was speachless when he gave it to me. This chess set is a monument to Coswell--perhaps the best possible monument.

Good Behavior in the Kirkus Nonfiction Preview 4/15/10

Good Behavior

Nathan L. Henry

Bloomsbury / July / 9781599904719 / $17.99

When Nate Henry was arrested at age 16 for armed robbery, he thought he’d be sent to a juvenile detention center in Mercantile, Ind. “Juvie wasn’t bad,” he thought, as he says in the beginning of his book. He’d been there before. Instead he was sent to a county jail for adults in Illinois. This memoir records his time there, alternating with instances fromhis childhood that led him to that point. “Life after jail has been in a lot of ways just as messy as life before, minus the violence and the crime,” says the author, now 32. “But the awakening I had there allowed me to live face to face with the true meaning of what it is to be human, finite, alive, in a real world, with real consequences and real love. WhenI finally was able to begin to write down honestly what my childhood leading to this experience was like, I was able to make sense of it, discover patterns.” (Ages 14 & up)

First handmade collage I've done in a long time

Better Than Sex by HST

This is just a gorgeous hardcover edition, 1994, Random House--an early anniversary present from my wife.

m. d'or

A rare portrait of the obscure determinist philosopher, a man whose thoughts have had a tremendous influence on me... Unbelievable that the world doesn't know anything about him. He's written thousands of notes, possibly HUNDREDS of thousands of notes. Brilliant notes. Notes you wouldn't believe. AND he packs heat.

I asked m. d'or, "I've heard that you're a man of peace, a man of reason, a man who prefers the life of the mind, so to speak, over... how should I say, the life of hot-blooded action. How do you explain the firearm?"
His response: "The firearm is a reminder to myself that Reason conquers all, and a reminder to the listener that Reason shall conquer all... whether they like it or not."

A Fine Piece of Design

The anarchy thing is a metal medallion I used to wear when I was a kid. My brother made it for me out of part of a bicycle sprocket, a circle of sheet metal and nails. Very cool.

Homage to Dead Heroes

The keys of an old typewriter given to me as a birthday gift from my dear friend Mike, and the cat fur trapped between the keys.

Tattered edge of an unfinished collage with a framed picture of the NY skyline in the back (which was taken by a close friend of mine, Mary Ellen Kenney, not too many years before she died too young).

That's me back there in 1996, just bought the trench coat, feeling intense and Burroughsian, probably high on pot--I was always high on pot back then--hense I was always feeling intense, out of whack, and the world was a horrifyingly surreal farce--see? Burroughsian makes perfect sense,

Steps of Montemartre next to Chat Noir and another famous French photograph... when I finally got to Paris a couple of years ago, I climbed those steps, and when I took a rest on the way up, I saw one of the only three cats I saw in Paris (it was not black unfortunately)--one other in the Latin Quarter, a sleek young stray, came right up to me and let me pet it, and the other was in Clignancourt, creeping along a ledge two storeys up. Ten years before I finally got to Paris, I'd look at these post cards and feel like it was phantom, a myth, like I would never get there. Just like I felt about NY before I finally got there too.

Me in 1991 and then me in 2008--the first photo was taken not long before I was nearly (and justifiably) annihilated in a hail of police gunfire and the second photo was taken on the day I first met my literary agent face to face, elated of course, because the future was bursting with unimaginable prosperity, (I swear I could see it, right there in the sky in front of me, all swollen up a glorious blimp-like amniotic sack about to rupture and drench me with world-wide fame and fortune).