FORWARD!
By Alex Ness
November 6, 2023
Beginning this with a bonus item, a review of RVR by Jamie Delano by a very close friend Joe Hilliard. He is literary, smart, talented. One of those smart fellers, whereas me? I am a fart smeller.
DELANO RVR A-GO-GO – Joe Hilliard
It seems like I have grown up, become an adult, with Jamie Delano. I was in high school when his HELLBLAZER hit my local comic store, that storm that became DC's Vertigo line. Awash in cyberpunk and hardboiled crime fiction at the time, his John Constantine fit right in with that sharp cynical me. His OUTLAW NATION came out with me as a new father, struggling with so, so many issues, failing and flailing in my life. And I understood. I still marvel at this ambitious epic sprawl of a book. Then his LEEPUS novels at yet another failing and flailing moment, calling out for a different, not so sharp and cynical future. They weren't cyberpunk, they weren't proto-solarpunk, they weren't exactly ecopunk, but they were something. They were definitely something. None of his works are easily categorized. But they all have the same fingerprints all over them. Can we call it delanopunk or delanonoir and be done with it?
And now? As my daughter is getting married to end 2023, here is Delano, along with his brother Richard James, unleashing RVR, subtitled "an hallucinatory navigation." In the endtro, Delano refers to it as an "unreliable memoir." Ostensibly, when you first look at RVR, it's poetry with pictures. Quietly, it's much much more than either of those descriptors. Quiet is not what you think of when you think Delano. And yet… as the poems slowly meander through the 70s and the 80s, across the river, interspersed with found object tableaux … there is a remarkable stillness to the project. Not the dead stillness of a cabinet of curiosities; there is a vibrance to the words, the images as they play across the page. In the endtro Delano notes that he had missed the marriage of the "visual element" with the words dating back to his comic book work. Design wise, here the fragments, the words, are encased in boxes similar to comic book caption boxes, evoking the trapped action of comic book panels, even as the words are flow along … married together. Dynamic quietness.
It’s no surprise that even in the reveries his youth, Delano infuses the work with a critique of modern society. I casually threw out the -punk modifier to describe Delano's prior work, and it has become the signifier for a rage against the machine, a going against the conventional grain. And yes, there is that vein running through Delano. The 80s failing Thatcherite England of Constantine. The hidden world that Story Johnson and his family inhabit. The post-apocalyptic river that Leepus travels down… the same river that the narrator of RVR inhabits? Yes. No. Does it matter. The streams coming together in one river, the 70s of Delano's youth, the comic books of the 80s, the world swirling – the disenfranchised, the lost, well, lost to those that "matter." And really that's what pushes through in RVR. What matters. Perhaps in a different form than we've seen Delano use before. I thought of BLUE COLLAR REVIEW, a quarterly poetic peon to those who keep the world really running. I thought of the poems of Countee Cullen.
But even more, I thought of Jamie Delano, and the steadiness of his voice, the steadfastness of his pushing boundaries, pushing what we should expect from life, what we have seen in life. The quiet here? It wells up in you, until the silence is deafening. Go and be deafened by Delano.
A PERIOD OF RETREAT AND DEFEAT
I initially began writing this with a long and drawn out account of why the previous four years sucked ass. But I believe it is enough to say just that, the previous 4 years sucked ass. I am ready to start a new chapter in my story of existence.
In a shorter take, ever since February 2nd, 2019 I have gone through 4+ surgeries, cancer scares, a broken neck, a totaled car and much more. Worse than those, I lost more than a dozen friends and family, including my brother and sister, my best friend Joe Monks, and my mother in law. Over that period, my blog reached 5000 + poems, I continued writing, I didn't release anything new until the horror convention Crypticon over September 2023. Crypticon went well for sales, and I did enjoy it quite a good deal. But it came about with a loss like everything already discussed, as I mentioned my writing partner and one of my very best friends Joe Monks had passed away in August 2023. Every step forward was followed by an equal amount in the opposite direction, and more. I was utterly defeated, and even more still, exhausted.
I must say, and mean it most sincerely, I don't plan to die, of stroke or car accident, cancer or by my own hand. My son will have children with a wife, I want to see my grandchildren. I want to watch my wife enjoy the comforts and due time for herself in retirement, she has books she wants to read, and more, travel the planet. I want to keep writing, and I'd love to live in a far away non-public address hidden chalet. Who knows the future? yes, but for all of us, upon this planet, let it be good!
MY RESOLVE
"Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line
of poetry written with a splash of blood." Yukio Mishima
It is one thing to be aware of the disasters that I've experienced or caused, it is quite another to vow not to go back and repeat my errors, or to watch as others fall, and not help them rise. So from here on out, I will not linger in the past. I will not let my mind adopt fatalism and take that mindset. I will appreciate all the good things in life, and will endeavor to share them, give them oxygen to breathe and grow, and will forgive myself, and all those who've wounded me. I am no different than anyone else, in that I am flawed, but I make the mistake of holding grudges. It is time for that to stop.
THE BOOK AUTHORS WHO ARE MY SURE THING (in no particular order)
row 1- HP Lovecraft, Alan Dean Foster, Juliet Marillier, Anne Rice, August Derleth
row 2- Lord Dunsany, Clark Ashton Smith, Elizabeth Moon, Nancy A. Collins, Fritz Leiber
row 3- Robert E. Howard, Edgar Allan Poe, Ursula K. LeGuin, Mary Shelley, Brian Lumley
I appreciate numerous writers and artists, film directors and actors. But there are few who work every single time I pick up their work. This image displays those writers who are my go to list for great writing and getting my money's worth from a purchase, and reward for reflection upon the time invested in a work. I am grateful these people, because, while Yukio Mishima, Ernest Hemingway, and others are the best writers I know of, it requires work sometimes to understand the deeper concepts found in their writing.
THE BOOK I WROTE WITH JOE MONKS
It is a chapbook, so rather small, compared to a novel or anthology. Both Joe's work and my own are focused upon Minnesota, since it was written for a Minnesota convention of horror. My story is a sequel of sorts to my very first comic work, found in Josh Howard's Sasquatch, illustrated by the enormously talented artist Paul Harmon. That story, so to speak, wasn't a story so much as a piece written to illustrate why we see Sasquatch when we look into the darkness. This story was how they exist, and we do not see them, and they live near humanity, and do not like humanity. That is, we are aware of something we've not seen, but it doesn't want to be seen, and as such, events happen, involving them, and we can't figure things out. The chapbook is brief but I think my best story I've written, thanks to Joe's edits and his wife Pamela's work to format and present.
Available only as limited print, 75 total copies and is offered here at $7 postage paid.
My email is AlexanderNess63@gmail.com.
Methods of payment: I take paypal, checks and in person, cash.
If you'd like to buy it and other works I've written...
Check out my published works link: AlexNessPoetry.Blogspot.Com/2007/01/My-Work.html
and if you'd like to add something to the pile, if I have them in stock, I'll work a deal.
REALLY GOOD THINGS IN THE FORM OF ART
My love of Japan and all things Japanese is well known. My favorite photographer Masahisa Fukase suffered truly for his art, but the world of image and ideas he opened the doors to, if painful in birth, was glorious.
The amazing insight, comprehension of the future of modern culture, and how architecture can reflect those heights of culture, and temptations and sins of excess and the ever present hubris and idolatry. Metropolis by Fritz Lang and Thea Von Harbou, a film, The City of Lost Children and the book The Metropolis of Tomorrow by Hugh Ferriss all share a beautiful but dangerous vision of a world of great heights as well as a debauched vision of worth. Celebrating a society that isn't peopled by humans, rather humans as small gods, with new ideals, creating new humanistic mythologies. Each adapted past values and ideals to highlight their own greatness, rather than let the splendor be devoted to a common values and morality. The high esteem in which they achieved, simultaneously sullied and stained by the cultural bile of elites served by the untouchables.
Graphic Novel adaptations of Opera in beautiful collections. Each work sharing the brilliance of the composers of the operas, and telling the stories in forms all can appreciate. P. Craig Russell and Gil Kane did amazing work, and it should be so, they were interpreting some amazing composers and lyricists. Opera, in my humble opinion, is the highest form of cultural expression. I don't listen to it often enough.
REVIEWS AND STUFF
FINALLY... I can be found on Facebook, Twitter or through email Alexanderness63@gmail.com. I accept hard copies, so when you inquire at any of these places, I'll follow through by telling you my street address.If you send hard copies for review I will try to always review them, but if you prefer to send pdf or ebooks to my email, I will review these at my discretion. I don't share my pdf/ebooks, so you can avoid worry that I'd dispense them for free to others.My Creative Blogs:
5k poem blog AlexNessPoetry.Blogspot.Com
Published works AlexNessPoetry.Blogspot.Com/2007/01/My-Work.html
Social Media:
Bluesky
X/Twitter
All images are copyright © their respective owners, use is simply as fair use and no ownership rights asserted.
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