What you (may have) missed on 3:AM recently:
Fiction: ‘An Insurrection’ by Jonathan Woods, ‘Shiny New Shrink’ by Tiff Holland
Non-fiction: Danny Hogan spends ‘Saturday Night at the Movies’ with The Descent: Part 2
Interviewed: Alan Kelly puts five questions to original Riot Grrrl Katiejane Garside
Reviewed: Pádraig Ó Méalóid on Harvey Pekar’s The Beats: A Graphic History:
As a group of people, the Beat writers seem, by-and-large, to have been a particularly obnoxious bunch. In a lot of cases, being on the road seems to have just been an opportunity to have run away from their responsibilities to family and friends. Any number of them were alcoholics, drug addicts, homophobic (in at least one case whilst being homosexual themselves), racist, and appallingly misogynistic. Whatever their achievements as writers, they certainly seemed to have been hideously bad at being human beings. Burroughs in particular is remarkable for his severe drug problems, his predilection for sex with young boys, and for shooting his wife dead whilst allegedly trying to recreate a scene from the legend of William Tell. And I found I just couldn’t get beyond that: rather than finding a desire to perhaps go and read any of their work, I find I feel quite the opposite. Any likelihood there was that I might have picked up On the Road or Naked Lunch is now gone, although I might still go have a look at Ginsberg’s Howl. His worst trait seems to have been his propensity to take his clothes off in public regularly, hardly worth mentioning, in the context of what some of the rest got up to.
Another reason I found I never warmed to this book was that the writing and art often seemed terribly static and undynamic. Harvey Pekar is an absolute maverick superstar in the field of comics, having self-published his wonderful autobiographical comic American Splendor for many years. However, while he seems to have the ability to make even the most mundane aspects of his own life interesting in American Splendor, his writing here seems to largely consist of a list of someone’s achievements, and generally there was just a lack of any sense of movement, of any sort of narrative. He is obviously enormously knowledgeable on, and enthusiastic about, his subject, but for whatever reason I just never felt that this translated out of the page. A certain amount of this seems to be down to Ed Piskor’s art.
First posted: Sunday, December 13th, 2009.
