Book review: 'The Incredible Double' by Owen Hill

Los Angeles Times

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Book review: 'The Incredible Double' by Owen Hill

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thoughts on Life Of Crime--part 1

Life of Crime (Poltroon Press)

1

I was in Junior High, or what the Torrance Unified School District called Middle School.

Tricky Dick was coming to LA (I believe this was ’69). Big demonstration. I told my parents I would be spending the day at the beach. We hooked a ride with somebody’s older brother. He and his girlfriend tried to be protective (“stay away from the cops, and RUN…”), but they kept giggling. Stoned, I guess.

We parked, walked, sat on the grass in Exposition Park and read the dirty parts of the LA Free Press. Talking to the (mostly older) demonstrators, I felt like a rube from the suburbs. They were smart, combative, full of juice. Probably full of shit, too, but that’s part of being young. They cared about stuff.

Things got pretty rough. People were being beaten. It was routine by then—a year after ’68
.
I remember thinking that the cops looked bored. In my imagination I recall hearing the sticks make contact with skulls, but maybe not….as ordered, we stayed outside the hot spots. The older kids (especially the girls) watched out for us, and we loved the attention.

I remember hiding my face when a TV camera looked my way. My parents watched the news every night—would be hard to explain.

Later that summer, on the beach in Redondo, I remember feeling (first time?) the bland isolation of the suburbs, and also feeling that things were passing me by. Our older brothers and sisters were on the front lines, and I (we) would never know that kind of excitement. It’s a kind of Mister Roberts feeling—the war was somewhere else. I’m not quite the Ensign Pulver type—or maybe I am and I haven’t reached that boiling point, or I did once and nobody noticed.

2.



Have been reading Life of Crime, the collected newsletters from the Black Bart Society, pub. 80’s, having that feeling. At the time I was living in Santa Cruz, working at Logo’s Books, splendid isolation. I was pretty avidly reading stuff from both sides. Was drawn by personal taste to the Darrell Gray side of things. Used books would come into Logos—things from Toothpaste press, or copies of L=, and I’d read them both together, sort of weighing both sides. Not that my opinion counted—I wasn’t part of either coterie, didn’t publish (except a few poems in issues of Atticus out of San Diego). It just seemed important do know about it all. Such different approaches to poetry! You had to be one or the other. I went for the other. They seemed tougher, scruffier. And I had political reasons. Everybody with half a brain saw the rise of the right—this was when R-ism was taking hold. And all these people with lefty histories (editing socialist rags, etc), who could have formed an alternative voice in the arts, chose to retreat into Theory. I saw that as an act of cowardice—but I was young, naïve. They were just trying to take care of themselves, as people will do. Not that everybody had to write agitprop—I’ve never believed that—but some sort of resistance seemed called for—something beyond “the subject is language”. The Life of Crime people weren’t exactly overtly political, but there was an attitude that said, “Fuck this”—something that I related to Punk, Anarchy, things that I identified with.

The times just called for a “no-holds-barred” attitude. So many poets/artists wimped out. We know how the academy will set down that period. Profs won’t be assigning Paradise Resisted, even though it nailed the times as well as any book out of that period. Perhaps some of the New Narrative books will get some attention—they were probably the best pure writers—but I wouldn’t bet on it. I think of the eighties as one of those periods in US history when we lost a chunk or our collective soul—a few poets saw this and tried to grapple with it. Sadly, some of the best minds of that generation read postmodern philosophy, in translation, and will be assigning that junk until retirement. The war's lost, or it's someplace else.

3

If you’ve been a nihilist, and you’ve survived, you’re going to have to suffer some embarrassment.

God, the things I did/said at Punk shows, readings and in my own mags. Sour grapes, revenge, hurt feelings, spur-of-the-moment bad taste…

Mostly LOC’s pretty Don Rickles, no way you’d take it seriously, and the social context that I’m trying to get a handle on is subtext. There, though. Current poetry wars are missing that—hard to tell the flarfers from the slowpos without a program, and despite Dale Smith’s attempts to make it real, they’re mostly arguing over style. I long for a little more pettiness, mixed with delusions of grandeur. It’s war! Not a debating class.

As I read LOC I either think, Glad I didn’t say that! Or (sometimes of the same piece) Wish I’d said that! Just letting go and saying anything—a great feeling, at the time. Sometimes it makes for great art. There are few pieces in LOC that transcend the times. The Lives of the Poets entries are crack-up funny, there’s a piece by Nanos Valaoritis that is quite beautiful—and lots of funny stuff by Codrescu and Keith Abbot. A Bob Kaufman poem, and a great poem by Gray. A little digression: When, Oh When, will somebody publish a Darrell Gray collected? So much of his work is hard to find. HE IS AN IMOPRTANT POET!

4.


Day six with LOC on my desk and I can’t stop reading, dipping in and out. I’m a poet, and poets love this shit. I think all this conflict is reassuring in a way—proof that somebody gives a shit. Because, if you give your life to poetry (a form of religious fanaticism) few people outside the subculture are going to care. Your’e in a lonely place. If somebody attacks your work you can assume they’ve read (at least some of) it. Might be fun, to be attacked by the likes of Tom Clark or Alastair Johnston. At times, reading LOC, I feel a little jealous. I published a couple of mags, and tried to be scurrilous, but nobody’s ever written “your magazine is an hysterical mishmash of pointlessness.” What’s Pat Nolan got that I don’t have?

news flash

I will be reading at Cafe Azul, 521 Fourth St., Santa Rosa Sunday at 2pm and at the Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge, Sunday 1/24 at 2pm.


Also interviewed by Kevin O'Neill for Mary, the St. Mary's Lit Mag:

http://dithyramb.org/mrry/content/reviews/3.htmlAn Interview with Owen Hill
dithyramb.org

Hallowed Rewind 2

4/98

city
keeps me awake
turn on Brahms
then the tv
homless
singing
outside
15 days into
spring
no flowers
in view
what do irises
look like
almost
imagine
snapdragons
bird of paradise
scent of gardenia
comes to mind
honeysuckle
is I think
edible

sinbad
the sailor
could save
his love from
deadly poison
if he could bring
a blue rose
or so the genie
told him and so
he battled various
movie monsters
across landscapes
of painted sand
blue flower
at the end of a maze
behind glass doors
he could not enter

hitches a ride
on a low-tech
special effect
monster bird
you could almost
see the wires
and strings
disembarks
with a red rose
says to his love
imagine this blue
and they do
and the genie
is a fool
or is fooled


strange
conversations
imaginary friends
outside and down
I like pink carnations
best they don’t
look real
artificial turf
has long been
a fascination
forever green
and almost
lovely
so little care
with a little
imagination
the lawns
aren’t phony
and all is well

fortune cookies part 1

the future's in your lap
so keep it warm

--Flo and Eddie

Hallowed Rewind--part one

I was at a poetry party. Pretty big party--Eileen Myles was the guest of honor, so there was lots of factional crossover. 21 Grand types, flarfers, 4th gen langpo--I feel embarrassed listing them because I'm so out of it now that I can't recognize the categories, let alone the players. Where's my scorcard? But it was pretty comfortable--or as comfortable as parties can be, for me. I thought, I'm a poet, they're poets, lots in common. But---

Talking to a younger poet--I really like her work. She's read in the series I curate, knows me as a buyer for the store. But said--"I didn't know you wrote poetry." Seemed quite surprised. She knew about the novels.

I realized that I haven't published poetry in years--except for two exceptions, David Brazil's mag, Try, and one chapbook on Blue Press. I've wanted to publish more, but my poetry seems miles behind (or ahead, or just outside) what other poets are doing now.

Lateley (to quote William Talcott) my ego's been barking. I've been rewriting old poems, and writing new ones. Would like to have a "New and Selected" published, but doubt there would be much interest. So--I'm going to post stuff as I finish, starting with early rewrites. Next party--I'll just point 'em to my blog.


Hallowed Rewind
new and selected poems


Loose Ends

We were on the roof gray day
The sky blended in with it
Saw a bird kind of slate
Said maybe we could go out
Get a drink or something noticed
A gray pole and a broken antenna
A rope wound around knotted
At the end knot made a clanging

Saw some blue beyond the clouds
Then didn’t you said what movie
Is this something foreign judging
By the slowness of the plot your
Head was in your hands then
You straightened stood stretched
Drifted to the edge


Secret Agent Man

People who wear exotic clothes
Often have conventional minds
I’ve decided to dress like a clerk
For the rest of my life

I once considered taking a vow
Of silence but feared I’d attract
Too much attention as a mute

I go to an office and file until lunch
Go for a sandwich at a sandwich place
Return to the office and file some more


I Wish They All Could Be

God only knows what I’d be without you
Shiver bow my head walking the avenue
Where people routinely bounce off the walls
Like bumper cars then fall in heaps
At the end of the street just like the plague

Only to be carried away in flatbed trucks
Crying 96 tears into 98 wounds

The Reviewers speak--all two of them

we all come into this world
with our little egos equipped

with individual horns now
if we don't blow them who

else will

--George Sanders


Tough to get reviewed these days--especially hard for small press writers.
The New York Times passed--also TLS, New York Review, um--SF Chronicle, Rain
Taxi...but a couple of nice feature pieces the Express and Daily Planet.


Garrett Caples' review in the Guardian got bumped:





Double Penetration

The Incredible Double
by Owen Hill
PM Press

review by Garrett Caples

Poet, bookseller, reading series curator at Moe’s Books in Berkeley, Owen Hill is among our under-recognized literary talents. Like Kenneth Fearing before him, Hill has turned to the detective novel as a genre befitting a poet’s love of phrasemaking. The Chandler Apartments (2002)—an actual building around the corner from Moe’s—introduced readers to book-scout-turned-unlicensed-PI, Clay Blackburn, who returns for a new novella, The Incredible Double (PM Press, $13.95). This phrase, initially referring to sex when a man comes twice before withdrawing, accrues many significations, from doppelgangers to double agents to group sex, suggestive even of Clay’s bisexuality (much meditated on, though consummated in Chandler, not here).

She was a bundle of clichés, but again, I wasn’t noticing. Or maybe it’s that in Berkeley we live with a different set of clichés.” Here Clay announces Hill’s great achievement. For Berkeley seems a recalcitrant city for noir aesthetics. Yet Hill finds what he needs; Telegraph bums become informants, anarchists gun-toting muscle, Trieste a suitably low-key clandestine rendezvous. A trip to Orinda evokes all the disdain of Marlowe’s visit to Burlingame in The Big Sleep. Hill’s style is tasty but not overblown: in the first paragraph, on Route 24, Clay “wagged a middle finger”—a phrase so wrong becomes more right, like the dog that “screamed” in Stephen Crane’s “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.”

The plot—involving a Wal-Mart-like organization’s attempt to penetrate the Bay with evil retail—isn’t quite perfunctory, though it’s more a premise for Clay to muse on his obsessions: poetry, sex, wine, espresso, etc. As it grows more fantastic, the book heads in the direction of David Meltzer’s Agency Trilogy, a fine direction indeed, exceeding pulp much as Meltzer amps up pornography to where it explodes. All in all, Double is an excellent contribution to the tradition of poets’ pulp fiction.




Also, a review/post on Andrew Goodwin's excellent blog, Professor of Pop:



Owen Hill's first novel, The Chandler Apartments, was a page-turner, read literally in one frenzied Saturday morning. Declaration of (minor) interest: Owen is a friend of a friend (& once kindly gave me discount @ Moe's but don't tell anyone that.)

Here's the opening para from his new novel The Incredible Double, words that will draw you in like a punter to a strip club -- ok then problem drinker to a dive bar -- if you read them aloud:

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"My '87 Tercel is in great shape, only a hundred thousand miles and almost new everything, but it does have trouble with the Bay Area hills. Coming out of the tunnel on 24, leaving Berkeley, heading toward the suburbs, I was losing speed and the SUVs were losing patience. I shifted it down into second and wagged my middle finger. My best friend Marvin says that driving slow in a small car is a revolutionary act. Maybe's he right. A woman in a Hummer, no lie, who probably weighed in at 97 pounds, half of it hair, gave me a look that could kill and, waved her phone at me. When you think of spoiled little brats in military vehicles careening through the 'burbs, you know how rotten the twentieth-century will be."

+++

Most important 2 words: no lie. That gives you the genre for cert & tells you that while our narrator has some ironic distance on Marvin, they are perhaps (or were) ideological cousins. Owen isn't afraid of cheap shots if they're funny & tell you something ("half of it hair") because he knows he's been freed by genre. The prose never drifts into agitprop but it's constantly hinted at it, as if this were an Op-Ed piece in Socialist Worker, written by a poet with an acute sense of humour. The first para immediately sets up the dystopian world we are about to enter but you don't feel trapped in it exactly. You just know that the mise-en-scene for wherever our story & our narrator are headed is going to be "rotten".

And this rotten-ness dear voyeur from cyberspace is happening right here right now in river city as Berkeley gets increasingly comfy with being a rich town (a security guard asked Susan to move her bag from where it might be stolen last night @ about 6pm... on a main throughfare in mf Rockridge) where even the south side (site of the Historic POP Homeland) has monster homes and monster cars and of course therefore monster peeps.

Like The Chandler Apartments, The Incredible Double captures a time & a place perfectly: here, now. But that would be boring because it would be too obvious, so Hill never forgets that you make it interesting (& significant) if you pepper the story with nostalgia for times passed.

He does, after all, drive an '87 Tercel.

Raymond Williams once described literature as a record of lived experience which is of course not always the case since neither lived nor experience are really the correct terms for a lot of contemporary fiction. But in the case of the savvy crime-thriller, if you can set the noir against the nostalgia then you have one powerful vehicle (if you're a poet) for evoking the time & the place that is the fag-end of Berkeley as we now know it.

And anyway, whether or not you care about that (& you should), Owen Hill has written another page-turner.

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