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OT: Low Life Books
Was clearing out my head this morning and came across 'Homeboy' by Seth Morgan and remembered how terrific it is/was. Wondered what else those hereabouts might suggest from their own experience. Of course, the book 'Lowlife' by Luc Sante might also qualify by way of its content beyond its title...anyway, other suggestions welcome.
As for Mister Morgan, here's some background: He was born in 1949 and grew up in privilege and amongst a literary culture that included friends of the family such as e.e. cummings, Robert Lowell, and Dylan Thomas.
In 1970 he dropped out of Berkeley and moved in with Janis Joplin, whom, it is reputed, he first made acquaintance with while delivering coke to her house.
After Joplin’s death, he was driving a new girlfriend on his Harley and crashed into a house that had once belonged to Jack London. The accident left the young woman’s face partially paralyzed and Morgan later said he married her in part so she wouldn’t sue him.
He became a heroin addict, a pimp, and an armed robber. All of which led, in 1977, to being sent to jail, where he served 30 months.
In 1986 he moved to New Orleans, where he was arrested twice in six months for DUI. The second time, he crashed into the police wagon used to pick up drunk drivers.
On October 17, 1990, shortly after midnight, Seth Morgan and Suzy Levine approached the right lane of a bridge in New Orleans at about 40 miles per hour. He lost it, they hit something, they died:
“If she’d been wearing a helmet, she might have lived,” one Officer Carmine Menchel was quoted as saying. “If he’d been wearing one, he might have had an open casket.”
Well, there you have it. A squalid little biography. Except for one thing. Seth Morgan also wrote Homeboy (1990. Random House/Vintage) which is a novel charting the "sleazy San Francisco experiences of the former junkie boyfriend of Janis Joplin."
And of its type (which is a type I am very fond of) Homeboy is a truly great work of American literature.
No longer in print, unless you want to buy it second hand. (https://www.amazon.com/Homeboy-Seth-Morgan/dp/0394575776/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1487361498&sr=1-2&keywords=Homeboy)
Like Jon Landau’s "I have seen the future of Rock `n’ Roll and it is called Bruce Springsteen" hype years before, I read Homeboy for the first time a few months before he died and was immediately convinced Morgan was the best new hope for American modern writing that had come along in past decade. His verbal virtuosity and plain re-invention of language had me thinking he was the Marijuana to Joyce’s Heroin and that once folks got a taste they’d be hooked onto a prose-poetry that would forever kill Dick & Jane. But the killing came by way of a motorcycle and Seth Morgan, dead at 41, has all but disappeared from any critical analysis of American writing.
To quote one Amazon reviewer from Saudi Arabia (yep): "Welcome to the colon of life: If you don't mind spending a few heart-pounding hours stuck inside the filth and sewage of the lower end of Northern California's food chain, then you are sure to be rewarded when you read this unforgettable portrait of a cast of lowlifes."
Quite. But it's even better than that.
If you’re at a lonely yard sale somewhere and see a 'Homeboy' in battered paperback, pick it up. Pay your 50 cents, take it home.
Comments
Wow - I'm really surprised to read about Homeboy here. I loved that book. It's still sitting on my shelf from my college days. Well, it has been over 15 years so time to read it again! Thanks for the nudge.
Very Cool.
Personally, I am a Henry Miller fan..........Aller Retour New York my all time fave of his.
Well, that's going on the list. Thanks, Johnny.
No thanks. The only thing worse that a self loathing puke is a self righteous puke, which is incidentally what the self loathing puke becomes when they inevitably fail to take responsibility for their predicament. It begs the question: Do they not realize the world doesn't revolve around them?
Thoroughly enjoyed your last recommendation and I know I will this. Although, as I scrolled down through the list of misdemeanours, there were few that I couldn't put a tick against. Yep, I was a lowlife and there are folk that still think I am because it's easier for them to deal with in their own heads. Fair enough. Each to their own. I do find it very sad though, when those same people are knocking my door for help with heroine addiction issues years later. One of the lines in next months covers entry says, "come on in and close the door."
Exactly. We've all fucked up..... haven't we?
Will get. Thanks.
Oh dear.
You've probably read all his stuff already, but I immediately thought of Raymond Carver. Flannery O'Conner's WISE BLOOD also comes to mind: a different facet of the American underbelly.
'What We Talk About When We Talk About Love' came out in 81 and that, along with Acker's 'Blood and Guts in High School' a few years later, made a tremendous impression on me. With Acker it was the subject matter, but with Carver it was the pace. She was an abandoned street full of lost people and he was the silence at night, alone in the corner of a cheap London room. Both threw me overboard from the good ship suburbia once and for all....
Very interesting. Im curious. Ive just ordered second hand from amazon in Uk. 2 quid well spent. My recommendation, I have no idea if it's relevant is Disco Bloodbath by james st james. About the rise of the disco kids in nyc, well written and fun. Fame comes very easy to some but it sure has its consequences.
That is a wonderful book. St James is an exemplary unreliable narrator. Highly enjoyable.
Sounds like a great read. How did I miss it? I will track it down because it is right up my dark alley. I think Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn is the finest American novel of the post-war era.
Selby's would certainly be up on my list, especially when you do that always impossible thing of putting it in the context of when it was written/published...
I know some of the new pop culture, music and literature through my wife (and no, not because she's younger, she's actually 5 years older) who keeps up with it and turns me on to stuff. I think the regulars here skew GenX or later and being born of baby boomers going through the Summer of Love etc. were exposed to music, film & literature going from 1940's-1980's (if their parents were hip).
My Dad of course suggested "Catcher in the Rye", Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson & some philosophy, etc. I learned of Bukowski, "Basketball Diaries", there was a great Beatles book by Ian McDonald " Revolution in the Head" that dealt with not only the their music but the culture of the 60's, etc.
Thanks for the tip on "Homeboy" Johnny, I don't recall ever hearing about it. The darkhorse book I always think of is "Raw Talent" by Jerry Butler. Not the singer Jerry Butler, lol, no the adult movie actor Jerry Butler.
It is an incredible book, especially since a book by a porn star on the surface sounds salaciously shitty. It's not only the study of an incredibly dark business, in some ways very music business, but it's a really potent study on the male sexual psyche and what it is to be a single man in the post women's rights era.
I get wary sometimes of the forums OT (off topic) threads but this one was awesome...the AudioBus Book Club ;-)
Hey, I too enjoyed Butler's memoir.
I also recommend a fictional treatment of the male sexual psyche in Richard Price's brilliant novel Ladies Man. It is a masterpiece.
John Rechy's City of Night is another remarkable book from that era. His subsequent output varied, but he hit it out of the park again with The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez. Highly recommended.
Kem Nunn is another author somewhat in the territory of Johnny's OP - California's dark underbelly. I live out here with the surfers and many of his books deal with the dark side of that culture. Iften think of how my own life could have gone terribly wrong like many of his characters. Many are people genuinely trying to be good and failing miserably at it. So many times things could have broken the wrong way for me. So many times I thought I was helping but either genuinely or in perception (mine and others) fucked it up, not as bad as those guys, but probably only because there's Someone out there looking out for me.