The same-old-same-old words below I found in a document, currently titled ADIDAS Poetry School, which I've been making on and off for about 18 months. I deleted them from the document and paste here. For a future read. A future edit. A future delete.
The Howl Books. There is no monopoly on the word howl. Below is a list of books I've read that howl to me. Most literary genres can do it: a novel can howl, a poem can, plays, diaries, autobiographies, essays, even scripture. Mainly it's the language. But a writer's life can make a book howl, their personality. They leave no maggot lonely. I dunno. I'm unsure. There'll be thousands of howl books I've not read and my choices are stuff everyone reads. The list changes organically as I work out my kind of dumb obsession with the word howl and howling. I've not thought much about yawp. But that word is significant. And I think: Maybe a writer howls when their voice is at the upmost pitch of vitality. When I read a howl book my mind sees memories of Jawbone, the village where I grew up, or memories of things my parents said or what friends said or teachers. Sometimes when I read a howl book my mind says: You're not alone.
The Book of Job: My flesh is clothed in worms and clods of dust, says Job whose name I pronounced as job until Myra chuckled and said: You pronounce it Jobe.
The Works of Shakespeare: Act IV on the heath, to cracking thunder, Lear says: Howl, howl, howl, howl. Is it the first howl in English literature? The first time that we smell the air, he says. We waul and cry. The Folio version of the play ends with King Edgar, who rid Britain of the wolves that roamed the countryside after Lear's death. 1 of Shakespeare's styles or tones is to riff apocalyptically. Like when Gloucester says: My old heart is cracked, it's cracked! The howl is in those words. You can hear suffering represented as a flow of the world as we find it or make it for ourselves. I have no friends and apart from my brother no family. I just spent Christmas Day alone. When I leave the UK, the Complete Works will be in my rucksack. And I think: With his idea of all-the-world's-a-stage, Shakespeare is saying everything is art. What you say is art. The little of what you do in your room or when you bike along a street and you go in TESCO and buy a packet of oats and a carton of yogurt and a banana is art. Being alone in a room on Christmas Day leaves no choice but to try and turn your life into something else.
Tristram Shandy: The Sterne howl is that of a jester.
The Books of William Blake: Every time I read Blake I see the word howling, which thrums louder than the other words on page. You see it mainly in his prophecy books.
Moby Dick: Like most howl books it's inspired by Shakespeare. When reading this and other Melville the voice in my head occasionally flows into that of Werner Herzog. I mean it's as if Herzog is narrating it to me.
Leaves of Grass: Sound your voice! All howl books are life-howls and death-howls.
Kafka's Diaries: Like a dog, says K as he dies in The Trial. Kafka knew the howl sensibility. In his Diaries he turns his life into an art factory and it's a precursor to Warhol's studio, I thought. I know what I mean.
The Sound and the Fury: Faulkner read the Old Testament, Shakespeare, Moby Dick. In his prose I can hear the human voice. Spittle in the throat. There's a beat to the words and sometimes when I think of his style I hear a tolling bell from a church in a desert, which I know isn't Yokonapawtha. But it's just what my brain does when I read his prose.
Apocalypse: Here's to DH Lawrence. In his poems and novels and non-fiction he is ululating. This winter I have been compositing in my brain the howl of DHL and the howl of Kanye West. Compositing is a word I read in a Harold Bloom essay. West had an on-stage breakdown. He yawped about Obama saying the outgoing President wasn't allowed to do this: Eeyahhhhhhhggggrrrr! He jumped up and down, arms flailing over his head as he talked of Brexit and Trump and I thought: There's something going on here. Technology is making us more primitive. Dunno why or how.
Tropic of Cancer: The first howl book I read. July 1993. A month later I slept in the bushes of a Paris park. This howl is a mix of the Whitman howl and the Celine howl. Maybe every Miller book is a howl. I've not read them all.
Finnegans Wake: It's has to be a howl, a howl of howls. An autobiography. After Hamlet, and the chaos it represents, there's this book built like a cube that is a musical instrument with peepholes you play with your eyes before going to kip to dream of things you can't tell people and if you tried they'd say: Don't tell me. The syntax is like Shakespeare. Sometimes it works if I read it in the voice of Mark E Smith's lyrics, which is okay cos a Wake motif is the fall of shit. And whoever built the first atom bomb was building the atom bomb when Joyce was making The Wake. It took him seventeen years. The character Shem Penman is an alter-ego who wrote about his back-life using his body as foolscap paper and his shit for ink. It's an autobiography of his brain, a performance piece. When writing he'd dictate to Beckett and there was a knock at the door and Joyce said come in and Beckett wrote it down. When Joyce read back what was written he said: What's this about come in? You said that, said Beckett. Joyce paused and thought of Moses and then said: Let it stand. I've owned 4 copies of The Wake. The first was the Penguin with a bruised cloud on the cover, the last birthday present my mom got me. A foggy afternoon ages ago I built a fire in the back garden and I burnt loads of old bank statements and gas bills and water bills and cos I had got the Restored Text hardback I burnt this copy of Finnegans Wake cos a character in the novel called ALP is a goddess of rebirth and I connected her with my mom. I remember the tongues of fire, that afternoon. I remember the grey sky, my jacket smelling of smoke. The hedgerow was black and leafless.
This novel is BBC, ITV, NBC, CNN, Fox, Fox, Yahoo, Apple, Google, Google.
Fable for Another Time - I and II: Every Celine sentence in these two novels is a howl. He yells. I got my Fable I copy on 1 of the loneliest days of my life. 12th of August 2012. It was the last day of the Olympic Games and I got a train from Manchester to London.
Three Novels: Beckett.
Think, when Krapp says: Spoool!
The Adventures of Augie March: I was gonna use the word rhapsodise and I thought of Bohemian Rhapsody, which is the first thing I remember seeing on TV. The video. I was on the settee in the flat on Long Street. When I was born, a coalmine whose mound you could see outside our living-room window would clatter with conveying machinery and trucks all day and night. But you didn't notice. I wish I remembered. I can only recall the sound of the whistle that announced the start or the end of the pitmen's shift. But anyway, rhapsody: I read that Saul Bellow uses a rhapsodic style in his 800 page novel The Adventures of Augie March, which is a howl, especially at the end when it says: Oh to XXXX.....
JR: This is more like the Faulkner howl.
Suttree: This novel is a third-person howl. But if you found the words he and Suttree and replaced them with I, without much damage to the flow, you could change it into first-person. There is a loneliness in Suttree, a man who lives in a floating cabin, who owns a skiff and catches catfish on the Thingy River. Maybe if I list this novel I should also list Huck Finn. There is a clang, so to speak, to Cormac's language, that comes from the King James and Shakespeare and Melville and Faulkner and Hemingway and Joyce and a howling voltage in the prose makes me think: Mmmm black coffee.
Sabbath's Theatre: The Roth howl began with Portnoy's Complaint. Typed in the first-person the novel is famous for Portnoy wanking with a piece of liver. Roth was inspired by Bellow and Kafka and Celine and Henry Miller. The Roth howl was perfected in Sabbath's Theatre. The prose is steel, how it runs across the page.
