With Love and Squalor

BOOK REVIEWS With Love and Squalor Leora Lev Godlike Richard Hell Akashic http://www.akashicbooks.com 143 pages; paper, $13.95 Where to begin? Or end? Whose egress, entrance , exi(s)t wounds, innards, poetry, mud, rubies, godliness, shit?Are windows/bodily potholes portals toward illumination or annihilation, do they gesture in or out, up or down? Are birds "more like works of art than any other thing in nature" with "little black marks, deep black tiny streaks, like horizontal cedillas. . .," everpoised forflighton the decrepit fire escape railings ofNew York City's LowerEast Side bohemia ofautrefois! And/or turd dispensers?—as in the poem that Paul, the twenty-seven-year-old married poet whose middle-aged incarnation narrates this novel, writes with his sixteen-year-old punk boyfriend T. These questions permeate the words they play with in an Après midi d'unfaunesque prelude to messing with each other's bodies, and also constitute the book's viscera. It works all/both ways in this text, which performs the ecstatic, sublime, obscene, and unspeakable undifferentiation that is the place where art, death, andjouissance exchange body fluids. "I'mnot really afaggot. Ijusthave a queer streak. Alittle fond affection for cock," muses Paul, from the alwaysshifting epistemological place of low-rent, Proustian recollections issuing from his older, bumt-out, rehab internee avatar. These vertiginous recherches spun from post-nervous breakdown, prescriptiondrug -zonedness, "like that confused half-awake state, that halfwit death twin," function as the fragile scaffolding or birdie depot from which past, present, and future take flight and/or are ab-jected as offal . Careening between a past already hazy withthesensoryDetailfrom cover derangements of seventies downtown New York flâneur-dom and an equally precarious present, Paul's narration shuffles between impossible knowledge of T.'s and others' inner landscapes, and a visceral verisimilitude. This beautifully braised rendition of the Paul Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mme. Verlaine triangle animates not only the magic lantern projection ofhis own youthful self, but, in aprioristically self-deconstructing, thirdperson omniscience, the glyph that is T. The morning afterT, fresh from Kentucky, first approaches Paul at a poetry reading and they have sex in the apartment Paul shares with his pregnant wife, "the sun found them out on the floor ofthe little parlor entangled and gritty, the faint death-smell of the half-digested food and alcohol mixing with the brute light; bodies God's idle graffito." No cleanliness as godliness around here; smears, smudges, suspect stickiness are ciphers for god, light, transcendence . T., the vomit-spattered, strung-out teen, becomes Him. In the Washington Square hotel room where Paul and T. go after a nasty domestic showdown , T. scrawls: see the light look into the hole cheap hotel room wall to the next room past the hole in the crack of the desk clerk's bent rear end he's shown us the hole damn catalogue cheap hole tea-room hair-lined butt like a private eye out in the saliva to see the light look into the hole and then you eat it I know the taste of light Red: cock head, Blue: asshole (clean), Green: eyeball, White: blood Not bad for a sixteen-year-old! This Bataillean metonymy cross-references obscene corporeal offroad detours with the interstitial openings of the seedy hotel edifice that enables them, including the desk clerk—who himselfis both synecdochic to this downtown architecture, and used by the two lovers for/as his own lowly structures. Rather than balls (human or taurine), eye, breasts, genital orifices that wetly course through Histoire de l'oeil, here butthole, wall crack, eye, tearoom, keyhole cheekily open into each other, and are gift-wrapped with a cocky nod to the famous Rimbaudian reinvention of poetic language: "A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles. . .." Baudelairean correspondances and synaesthesias link dank, dripping backroom orifices not only with each other, but also with light, epiphany, and the language that both engenders and is spoken by them. With Godliness. Hell boldly goes, with this undifferentiation business, where very few dare. Shades of gay, for one thing, are still pretty unimaginable even within Queer Eyefor the Straight Guy, Willand Grace-style mondo metrosexuality of...