David Ohle, Boons & The Camp (Calamari Press, 2009)«Boons, co-written with an eccentric and anonymous South African professor of entomology, deals with the cultivation of half-bird half-simian creatures called Boons. The professor travels the world in his search for a Boon he can mate with, perhaps love, and finds Ruthie, the object of his dreams and the subject of his oddball experiments.
The Camp takes place around a provincial mill that spins sheep’s wool into theatrical and Santa beards. In the mill camp, workers live in brutal poverty under Mr. Ganzfeld, a cruelly whimsical boss who lost his nose in a lightning strike and will commit any depredation to find a “real” replacement, including murder.»
«David Ohle knows how to evoke the unsettling. Whether describing a subtly altered twentieth century or reviewing his childhood in New Orleans, his talent for quietly jarring imagery never flags. This volume collects two novellas, one that suggests the gender and geopolitics of the last century interwoven with Cronenbergian body horror, the other evoking economic exploitation with abundant, and bleak, comedy.
Start with Boons, about a disgraced South American professor with an obsession with the bird-people of the title. It is, literally, a visceral read: infections are described in grotesque detail, and worms and intestines make prominent appearances. (There’s also the professor’s own medical condition, in which his body occasionally produces bone “relics.”) It’s set in a world that strongly resembles our own in certain respects, though the fact that Pol Pot is among the historical figures to make an appearance indicates that we’re in a place, morally speaking, where atrocities are all too common. The boons of the title occupy a strange place somewhere between mythology and allegory. The Professor’s fixation on boons is both scientific and sexual, and is every bit as unsettling as one might expect. His tendencies in other matters, including the forging of false religious artifacts and the aforementioned encounter with Pol Pot, are no less comforting. And yet both the Professor and Ruthie, the boon with whom he becomes obsessed, are compelling and distinctive, their interactions tragic and horrific.
The Camp is set in a world that, at least on the surface, appears more recognizable, closer to our own. Its characters are, relative to Boons, much more stylized — almost figures from an archetypal melodrama. At one end are the Chungs, a comfortably married couple working in the kind of factory that leads to anti-capitalist protests. The fundamental decency of the Chungs is sharply contrasted with the rapaciousness of Mr. Ganzfeld, the owner of their workplace. Ganzfeld is a villain from an earlier era: Snidely Whiplash with a fake nose. (More precisely: a series of fake noses, each more horrific than its predecessor.) And while Ohle sets this story in a nebulous time and space, his characters seem taken from a masochist’s morality play: the virtuous remain exploited and abused, while the rich go to their graves with bloated wallets and heady satisfaction.
One quality shared by these novellas is Ohle’s ability to evoke unknown landscapes: the harsh industrial topography of The Camp feels every bit as vivid as the deconstructed exoticism of Boons, and each world feels fully inhabited. These are places where atrocities happen on nearly every level, but it’s hard to look away. Ohle’s craft is precise, and his funhouse reflections of our own anxieties, oppressions, and obsessions make for a grimly compelling read — it dwells in the place after the sense of wonder has been debased, spiked liberally with horror.» - Tobias Carroll
"Paired here are two delightful, equally brief and absurd novellas. "Boons" echoes Burroughs and Paul Bowles in depicting heading abroad as a messy business, wont to invite disease and exotic death. Ohle's version of Southeast Asia is gooey, gross, and gory—and, as in many a traveler’s tale, a mélange of specific and invented details. But the true horrors lie in what the travelers carry with them. The novella’s monstrous protagonist, “The Professor,” is Kurtz and Marlow combined, by way of Doctor Moreau. He scours the world for “boons,” indeterminate creatures variously described as having the features of birds, primates, reptiles—perhaps even seals (they “ride the waves”). Boons are also enslaved females who occasionally castrate their rapist male owners (although the Professor’s boon, named Ruthie, sticks to writing nonsense poetry). As in Ohle’s other dystopian works, “Boons” oozes disquietude: nonchalant deaths, gruesome medical details, cannibalism, self-amputations, and disturbing parallels abound (one character is born without any leg bones, while another fishes bone splinters from an open wound in his thigh, preserving them as relics). But the tone here is one of arch politeness, well suited to such an abruptly concise yarn. Even more forthright, but no less brutal, is “The Camp,” which records the trials of a couple, Mimi and Jerry Chung, as well as other “hopeful workers” employed at a sheep farm-cum-textile mill-cum-labor camp. These poor unfortunates are mistreated daily by the deranged, deformed Mr. Ganzfeld. Here, the narration assumes an air of detached resignation more reminiscent of Ohle’s classic Motorman and its sequels; the result is to make “The Camp” the more sentimental and moving of the two novellas. Its brusque style at times evokes an oddball fusion
of Jane Bowles and John Steinbeck—especially as it recounts how its bewilderedly wearied characters, victims of impassive and impulsive cruelties, struggle on. Unsettling pleasures, opposite sides of a single blasted coin, these whimsically perverse novellas offer further proof that Ohle is one of today’s best experimental fantasy writers." - A D Jameson
David Ohle, Motorman (3rd bed, 2004)«For a long time I was scared to read Motorman. It had come recommended to me in such hushed tones that it sounded disruptively incendiary and illegal. Not only would the reader of this crazed novel burn to ashes, apparently, but he might be posthumously imprisoned for reading the book—a jar of cinder resting in a jail cell. Books were not often spoken of so potently to me, as contraband, as narcotic, as ordnance. There was the whispered promise that my mind would be blown after reading Motorman. There was the assurance that once I read it I would drool with awe, writerly awe, the awe of watching a madman master at work, David Ohle, awesomely carving deep, black holes into the edifice of the English language.» - Ben Marcus
«Motorman is the only book ever given to me photocopied in full. That's how hard to get it was, and how badly I wanted it.
David Ohle's legendary first novel was published some three decades ago, in 1972, and it has since been out of print. Ohle himself, while continuing to write and intermittently publish, has remained almost completely unknown. So this earlier book, reprinted to coincide with the release of his new novel, The Age of Sinatra, enters the world as something fresh that is also the secret ancestor of the most daring speculative fiction of our time.
Motorman tells the story of a hapless everyman named Moldenke, who gets by in the gray areas of a world that's almost all gray areas - a science fiction world with two suns, a number of "government moons," man-made humanoids called jellyheads, and mock wars where soldiers volunteer for injury. Moldenke receives some menacing phone calls from a man named Bunce, who claims to have tapes of everything everyone's ever said about him. To escape from Bunce, he sets out to find his old mentor, Dr. Burnheart.
Motorman is a quest narrative, of a sort. But you won't read this book for the plot. It does have a narrative thread, but one composed of snippets whose ends barely meet. The language, too, is not quite English as we know it. Attributes and effects coagulate into strange new objects" a building with structural moans" while familiar objects are defamiliarized. Here's Moldenke taking notes on some birds: "Rapid pecking followed by pauses." Got it. "Long, agile tongue coated with a jellylike substance." OK... "When the tongue is retracted it apparently wraps around the brain." What? That "apparently" is the kicker here. This is a world that does facts we're not in the realm of pure poesy but the rules have all been changed. Don't expect Ohle to spell them out for you, either. Like very few other writers - the Joseph McElroy of Plus, the Burroughs of Nova Express - Ohle maintains a high level of indeterminacy in both his fictional world and the language he uses to tell us about it. The result is disorienting, vertiginous, thrilling: "Roquette pierced the water with his stick. 'Good,' he said. 'It's thick enough to walk on.'"
It helps to be light on your feet. Like one of the novel's geographic oddities, the River Jelly, this book is only semi-solid. The tiny chapters (sometimes no more than a few lines long) appear adrift in white space, which starts to feel like a positive substance, something Ohle himself might invent in his fiction: a sort of viscous fog from which unrecognizable objects emerge. "He felt something without form, something edgeless, rushing at him from the direction of eastern light." But before you float away on this nebulous fare, Ohle gives you something solid: a name. "Is that you, Bunce? Mr. Bunce?"
Bunce. A goofy name, a bounce with just a little of the air let out of it. There is something clownish about Bunce and his threats. But clowns are scary, and all is not right in this world of incessant, pointless surveillance, petty bureaucratic meanness, decay and graft and moral inertia. All is not right inside Moldenke, either, and that's obvious not just from the arrhythmia in his four sheep hearts but from the arrhythmia in the narrative, its stutter and lurch. By the end of the book, we have lost track of time (easy to do in a world where six "technical months" can pass in a single day), and neither we nor Moldenke knows exactly what has been going on. Moldenke thinks he might have let the goo out of a pair of jellyheads with a letter opener. Or was it a screwdriver? It's dizzying but exhilarating for a reader to be given so much room to play. A typical mobile might seem too pretty an image to serve as a descriptive metaphor for a book by Ohle, but I have a different image in mind. A friend from high school once called me in tears: He was trying to make a mobile out of dead bugs but was having trouble bringing them into balance. If he had succeeded, that mobile might resemble this book: delicate and grotesque, tragic and hilarious, precarious but perfectly balanced.
The Age of Sinatra picks up Moldenke - last seen heading into the floodplains of the River Jelly - after one of the periodic spells of Forgetting that sweep his world, erasing personal and social history. He is still more done to than doing, but while Motorman crepitates with secret agency, in The Age of Sinatra almost everyone is someone's patsy, as befits a world that worships the half-remembered Lee Harvey Oswald as the god Arvey. President Ratt keeps changing the rules, so you can be indicted today for what was mandatory the day before, and the hapless Moldenke, between arrests, finds himself involved in a plot to unseat the leader. He also develops a disturbing growth on his chin - a flocculus - that ripens with the plot. Something's going to give, but will anyone know the difference? Another Forgetting is coming soon. But even on the Titanic (where the book opens), you gotta eat. In this book, it's always time for lunch.
Do not read The Age of Sinatra while eating an egg-salad sandwich. It is to your average novel what "Great, Green Gobs of Greasy, Grimy Gopher Guts" is to "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." I'm told the manuscript's future hung in the balance as its own publisher gagged over the "green gland":
"He's showing his gland to us," Ophelia said excitedly. Within the flocculus, the green gland passed from top to bottom, paused there a beat or two, then extended its tip through the flocculus opening. Vink grasped the gland with the long fingers of his three-digit hand, pulling it out to its full extent. "Have a bite, folks."
It is a considerable achievement to conjure up an imaginary substance so vividly that something strange happens under the reader's tongue. An art critic once sniffed, "This painting seems to have been made for the sense of smell." If a book can reek, rot, ooze, swell, burst, flake, and fester, The Age of Sinatra is that book.
Why this obsession with the body afflicted? "I took a job one summer working for the Louisiana State health department, not knowing what it would be," Ohle said when he e-mailed me recently. "Turns out it was testing shit. Hundreds of jars of it came in every day from all over the state. It was my job to streak it onto agar in petri dishes and incubate it... Another thought is that my mother was dying of colon cancer when I was a freshman in college. I spent a lot of time with her and saw some very unpleasant things like oozing, bursting, and stinking." A caution, then: Let's not forget that "great, green gobs" can cohabitate with what is most heartfelt. Ohle's gross-outs come with belly laughs, but also with a strained tenderness. The Age of Sinatra, a litany of symptoms, is less like an ordinary novel than it is like a patient history. But those might be the stories we feel most keenly of all.
Motorman's scope is personal; The Age of Sinatra's is scenic; it's a sort of travelogue of hell. In the new novel, Moldenke is a roving eye rather than an actor, a decaying Candide whose suffering is meant to instruct us in the ways of the world. Bunce, with his air of a peculiarly private demon, has disappeared, to be replaced by the multiple eyes of a panoptic society where judgment is swift and brutal but transgression nonetheless rife. It's not a culture of control but one where punishment produces desire and vice versa in a febrile cycle of expenditures. Ohle's inferno shows some of Dante's gift for the grisly, but not his implacable sense of just desserts. If you have a waiver, the authorities will cheerfully punish the guy standing next to you. Possibly it doesn't matter much. The perks of this world (having your head cut off and sewn on backward tres chic!) are little better than its punishments.
This dystopia is a tour de force of scabrous invention. It is also uncomfortably real. As a kid I flipped through Science News and got an unpleasant shock when I inadvertently put my finger on a close-up of a spider's mandibles. Similarly, something about Ohle's prose closes the gap between the representation of a disturbing thing and the thing itself. You feel you ought to wash your hands after touching the page. But if you think that wiping will remove the stain, consider this: Doing time in the French Sewers (don't ask), Moldenke learns that they supply the bakery where edible paper - "for money, for waivers, for wiping, for books" is made. Shit is books, books are food, food is shit. The conclusion? We're in it. Deep.» - Shelley Jackson
«I came to read this novel because I heard Brian Evenson recommend it during a talk he gave at the Fiction Collective 2 conference I attended last summer. Am I glad I read it.
It was first published by Knopf in 1972, but Soft Skull brought it out again in 2004. I read the original version: there was a barely touched copy at a local college library.
The book enjoyed cult status for a long time, and it is not hard to see why. It is close to wholly original, and it deals with a dystopia more gripping to me than the prophecies of either Orwell or Huxley. (Yes, you read that correctly.)
The book is divided into 109 sections over its 116 pages. Some sections are only a few sentences long. But, as with many if not most books that could be dubbed 'science fiction' on some level, the setting is perhaps the most important factor.
Ohle never tells us anything about this setting. He simply lets it sink in. Apparently, early in his life Moldenke, the main character, lived in an atmosphere similar to the one we inhabit: there was only one sun and one moon, people did not have to wear special goggles, and people had only one heart.
By the time Moldenke is more mature, artificial suns and moons compete with the real one, 'jellyheads' rather than people do a lot of the work, and, most bizarrely, he has four hearts, three of which came from sheep. And there is a river so thick and polluted it can be walked on.
It is very difficult, if not impossible, for us to fully orient ourselves to the timeline in this book. There are a lot of unnanounced flashbacks and, to make matters more complicated, undated letters that could come from any number of places on the time line. I have figured out a rough timeline: perhaps a future literary critic will complete the job (and I have no doubt there will be a lot of critics writing on this book).
1. Childhood - "they kept him in a crumbling home."
2 &3 - Working as a bug taster at a lab run by a jellyhead named Featherfighter - Working at Tropical Gardens. Meets Cock Roberta, the love of his life.
4. - Fights in "mock war." He agrees to sacrifice a minor broken bone and the continued ability to feel a list of feelings, including it would seem love.
5. After war he and Cock Roberta exchange letters, but never seem to meet again. Moldenke tries valiantly to feel again, but fails.
6. Kills two jellyheads
7. I am a little unsure about this, but I believe Bunce, a hardboiled talker who seems to control most everything in this more and more artificial world, imprisons Moldenke for the crime.
8. Bunce calls Moldenke on the phone repeatedly and threatens him. A Dr. Burnheart, who implanted the sheeps hearts in Moldenke, tells him how to escape.
9. He wants to 'go South' across 'The Bottom' to where he believes Burnheart is
10. Stops by Shelp, the weatherman's place. Learns that Bunce orders the sort of weather he wants, and Shelp is to announce it.
11. Runs into Roquette. He helps him walk across the Jelly River. They get on a boat that seems to be like a cruise ship. Cock Roberta is on the ship but they never meet up.
12. Things get really crazy: the boat seems to be, at the same time, a boat, a vehicle on a street, a vehicle in a tunnel, and so forth.
13. The end, which I won't divulge.
Let's just say that this book is about the overwhelming artificiality that threatens our very human dignity. In the end, poor, lonely Moldenke, makes a stab at reasserting his dignity. It might not work, but the attempt alone is enough: it proves that Bunce and his crew have not completely destroyed who we are.» - Jefferson Hansen
«The legend of David Ohle was born in 1972 with the paragraph,
'Moldenke lived the hainted life. As a child he was kept in a crumbled brick of a house where thickwindows moaned in their frames through summerfall and gathered ice by winter.'
This was on page 98 of the January issue of Esquire, opposite a surrealist painting of a dismembered hand holding a telephone receiver on a stool swarming with insects. The story was called "Some Moldenke," a strange, fragmentary piece starring a listless, almost translucent observer in a bizarro world.
Esquire was the first place Ohle's work had ever been published. The other piece of fiction Esquire chose to print that issue was by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He would win the Nobel Prize for literature 10 years later. Ohle was a master's student in English at the University of Kansas. He was in his early 30s and had shoulder-length hair.
Paragraph two reads,
'In the prime of his boyhood an ether tree patiently died in the view from hisbedroom window. In the spring a green woodbird flew down and pecked spiralsaround its dry trunk. Moldenke would fold himself in his chair and watchseveral suns rise behind the ether branches, studying the woodbird'shabits.'
The story got published after Stanley Elkin, a prominent American novelist and short story writer, was brought to KU to visit with the creative writing students. Ohle showed Elkin his thing about Moldenke.
"This is pretty interesting," Elkin said. He told Ohle to send the story to his friend Gordon Lish, the fiction editor at Esquire. After it was published, a high-profile literary agent named Candida Donadio called Ohle. She represented Catch-22 author Joseph Heller, among others.
She marketed the Moldenke piece to publishing mogul Alfred A. Knopf. Not long afterward, Knopf published Ohle's 117-page novel, Motorman. Ohle graduated, with the novel as his master's thesis, and landed a job teaching creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin. They did not interview him. They just read Motorman.
Back to Esquire, page 98, paragraph three:
'Days would rush on a klick a minute. All things were tight then. Moldenke was free and green, bright suns behind him, spirals ahead.'
Motorman went out of print a few years after it was published. Ohle's next novel was a sequel called The Age of Sinatra. One-hundred-sixty-eight pages. It was published in 2004.
I met up with David Ohle for an interview at the Bourgeois Pig. When I got there he was sitting in the corner in front of a painting of the moon with a drink called a horsefeather in front of him.
From the KU Spencer Research Library's "Guide to the David Ohle Collection," on what happened after Motorman was published:
"Over the next few years, his short fiction appeared in the Transatlantic Review, Paris Review, Harper's and elsewhere. He also edited the non-fiction oral history, Cows are Freaky when they Look at You: An Oral History of the Kaw Valley Hemp Pickers (Watermark Press, 1991).
"Ohle taught at the University of Texas in Austin from 1975 - 1984. He then returned to Lawrence and continued to write and publish. In 2002 he began teaching fiction writing and screenwriting as a part-time lecturer at KU."
He was denied tenure at Texas because he couldn't get a second novel published. He sold his house in Austin and made about six times what he paid for it. He moved to Lawrence and worked various jobs. He wrote for a small advertising firm for a number of years. When it went tits up, he got a job teaching English at KU.
He became good friends with William S. Burroughs, who lived in Lawrence from 1981 until he died in 1997. He ate dinner with Burroughs and friends on Thursday nights, often cooking for them. He also typed up and did some initial editing of Burroughs' manuscripts, including "Queer" and parts of "The Cat Inside" and "The Western Lands."
In 1993 the Lawrence Journal-World published an article about Ohle, a New Orleans native, called "Getting his gumbo fix":
"To make it taste right, you have to have shrimp heads to make the stock,' he said, explaining that the fat and the richest flavor in a shrimp is in the head. 'The only place to get shrimp with heads on around here is at Asian markets.' "There's always a fall back, however. 'If you can't get shrimp with heads onthem you can use the shells to make a passable stock,' Ohle said. Thelast-ditch solution is to use bottled clam juice."
The article, diverting briefly from Ohle's gumbo secrets, mentions: "Of late, he's written The Flum, a sequel to his novel Motorman, which was published in 1972 by Alfred Knopf. The Flum is excerpted in the current issue of the literary magazine Conjunctions."
The truth was, The Flum had been finished in some form for years, and would wait in the wings for more than a decade further.
Pieces of it were published all over the place, from the Paris Review to the Missouri Review to the Transatlantic Review to the New Mexico Humanities Review.
But he could not get his novel published. He had an agent sending it everywhere. Each time it was rejected, he changed it and sent it off somewhere else, where it would get rejected again. At various times it was called The Neuts of Wall Street, On Oaken Homer, The Necronaut, Now and Then, and The Age of Oswald.
Publishers said it would not sell. It was too weird. Nineteen-seventy-two was the time and place for a guy like Ohle. People dug weird. Then the world returned to normal. The hippies lost. Ohle lost. Vince Lombardi and Raymond Carver won.
Ohle tried to change his writing style. He could not. He wrote screenplays and stage plays. He read them before small groups in New York. He hoped something would sell. Nothing did.
"Any number of times, I sat down and said, 'All right, I'm gonna write a novel now that's gonna be normal and it's gonna appeal to a wide market and I'm gonna make some money,'" he says. "I'd sit down and two or three paragraphs later, (clap). Can't do this. It's not my thing.
"I write that way because that's the only way I can do it. I have no choice."
Another thing was that The Flum et al. was weirder than Motorman.
Although Motorman is a very strange little novel about a guy (Moldenke) with four hearts (sheep hearts), it is a simple narrative and easy to read. The Flum demanded more patience. It covered a broader scope. It jumped around. It was not a simple narrative.
The catalyst for Ohle's change in style was a newspaper he published calledThe City Moon. The City Moon was kind of like The Onion. Except instead of running satirical headlines like, "Bush Proud U.S. Economic Woes Can Still Depress World Markets", they were more like,
"DREAMER DEAD AT TENSLEEP," "submarine guts peculiar boy," or "TITANIC RAISED: 3 DEAD 6 HURT 11 WILL HANG."
The paper was set in a bizarro world with reoccurring characters like the "Ape of Golf" and someone named Oneba, who at various times was the president. From 1973 to 1985 Ohle and his friend Roger Martin published 18 issues, distributing them exclusively in Lawrence (although one issue proclaimed "Life in Ancient Wichita" at the top.)
They had no ads, except fake ones ("Gons Hotel" [Picture of Transylvania-style castle] "Very Choice"). They did sometimes charge a nickel for the papers, sold at the KU Bookstore, and ask for donations. Martin taught English at KU, so they had access to the KU presses. They once got a grant for about $180 from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
In 1976 they received a little notoriety when Chancellor Archie Dykes ordered the paper removed from the student union. The predominant headline for the issue in question was,
"MAN SUCKS WETNAPS; BELLED BUZZARD SEEN; NECRONAUTS CRUISE."
That same year, The American Spectator fingered The City Moon as the worst example of "sewer journalism" in the United States, saying that only in the sewers of liberal New York could such smut conceivably be created.
Today you can find every issue at the Spencer Research Library, a bizarre place to read such things. Don't rest your elbow on the paper. They will yell at you. (I went to Martin's house instead.)
"The motto that I carried away from The City Moon was to always stop just short," Ohle says. "That was our motto. To never, ever completely tell enough detail for anyone to figure it out. And I think that applies in almost everything that I write. I don't want to over-explain things. Leave it kind of vague and uncertain.
"Motorman was different because that happened before City Moon. That was its own thing. Everything after that came after The City Moon, I developed all these notions of taking real stories and breaking them down and cutting them up, processing them and changing them. That's how that happened."
When we last left Ohle: He was writing advertising copy, etc., getting things published here and there, but no novel. In 1991 he co-edited Cows are Freaky When They Look at You, an oral history of hippies in and around Lawrence. Motorman was dead, The Flum unpublishable.
At some point in the early '00s, Ohle went to a literary hangout in New York called KGB Bar to read some stories. Somebody had read Motorman, realized Ohle was still alive, and invited him. Many more people showed up at the reading than he had expected. They had photocopies of Motorman.
"We've been reading this," they said. "We've been passing these copies around for years. We love it. Would you sign it?"
Listen to Ben Marcus, born in 1967, author of novels, head of the master's of creative writing program at Columbia University, big shot (he's got a wikipedia entry [unlike Ohle], with subheads, the whole shebang.)
He heard of Ohle from Gordon Lish. Lish is the guy who published Ohle in Esquire in 1972. Lish "was always talking about the classic forgotten books that he published," Marcus says. "David Ohle was sort of this legendary figure."
Legendary in the sense that Marcus heard all about how fantastic Motorman was but couldn't find a copy. He and his buddies got obsessed and searched all over New York. Finally he found one, read it, loved it, shared it with all his friends, anybody who would take it.
This occurrence had been happening, in small circles where such things happen, for years. My father, at some point in the 1970s, photocopied the thesis page-by-page from Watson Library. Photocopies like this became scattered across the country. Ohle was oblivious.
"I honestly had no idea, not one idea, that anybody was reading it at all," he says. He mentions his thesis. "I don't know if it's still there or not. Somebody might have stolen it."
Someone has, in fact, stolen it. KU library records show that it went missing in 1993. Another copy of the book went missing in 2002. Another copy is currently checked out. (The Lawrence Public Library doesn't carry it at all these days. Otherwise it would probably be missing there as well.)
The last few years have been somewhat miraculous. Not in the sense of Ohle becoming famous or making a lot of money, but in the sense that he's gone from forgotten author to, at least among some fans, "forgotten genius," and Motorman has gone from a forgotten book to "cult classic."
Motorman was reprinted by a small publisher called 3rd bed in 2004. Ben Marcus wrote the introduction. The Flum was published that same year as The Age of Sinatra by another small publisher, Soft Skull Press. Ohle also edited a nonfiction book last year on Burroughs' son, called Cursed From Birth: The Short, Unhappy Life of William S. Burroughs Jr.
In a storyline somewhat resembling the Flum debacle, Ohle was supposed to have another Moldenke book, The Pisstown Chaos, published by Soft Skull Press. The cover was designed and everything. But the publisher didn't get enough orders from booksellers to cover the cost of printing.
In other news, Ohle wrote a short novel with his long, lost, strange childhood friend who's a professor in South Africa, called The Duck Ladies. Ohle sent it to a publisher and is waiting to hear back.
How Motorman ends
As always, I remain, Moldenke.
The Duck Ladies is a novel Lawrence writer David Ohle and his friend Randall Hepburn wrote together. Ohle and Hepburn grew up together in New Orleans.
Beginning in first grade, they'd spend their days together playing in the graveyard and the racetrack when it was empty. Hepburn went to a seminary for high school, Ohle says, but was kicked out for heresy. They went to LSU together and then Ohle moved to San Francisco and applied to various graduate schools for writing but didn't get accepted.
Meanwhile, Hepburn was at KU getting his PhD in entomology, the study of insects. Ohle asked him if KU had a writing program, and it did, so he came to Lawrence.
In 1969 Hepburn moved to South Africa and got a job teaching at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
Ohle did not hear from him for 36 years. Then, several months ago, he got an email from him, asking if he wanted to collaborate on some kind of writing project. Ohle said sure, and Hepburn started sending stuff based on his world travels as a bee expert.
"They would be one or two pages of this bizarre, really interesting stuff," Ohle says. "He was always a good writer, but this was way over the top. And I thought, 'That's great.' He would send me two pages, I would write two pages. He'd send me one page, I'd write one page."
One day, after four or five months of this, the writing from Hepburn stopped as abruptly as it had begun.
"He just said he'd run out of words," Ohle says. "He still sends emails but no more writing. : We had about 100 pages done at that point, so I thought, 'Well, that's it. Each of us have done about half of this thing, and it's just 100 pages long, that's all. It's just a short novel.' And that's where it stands."
Ohle has sent it to a publisher and is awaiting word." - Frank Tankard
David Ohle, The Age of Sinatra (Soft Skull Press, 2004)«"If David Ohle's writing is any indication, modern fables with sharp political critiques are definitely on the upswing." In the Lawrence author's newest book, he Age of Sinatra," Ohle (rhymes with cannoli) documents and caricatures political and social observations over recent years. His story explores a dark and bizarre society where unimpeded leaders use mass mind control techniques, surprising objects are edible, law and jurisdiction are arbitrary, hair is smoked, and the smack-down of one (regardless of guilt or innocence) is good for everybody. The Age of Sinatra is written in a unique style that mocks much of what we see in politics and society by watching "ordinary" people live in a grim reality.
Fighting the good fight, in the most passive way possible is hero, Moldenke. He unwittingly becomes a major player in an attempt to assassinate the president by just being at the wrong place at the right time. However, the political uprising is rarely directly addressed, as none of the main characters care about it any more than they care about the daily gossip in their edible newspapers. Tragically, even though everything Moldenke does is a direct result of something that happens to him, he is still at the brutal whim of fickle authorities. This forces a sense that both thoughtful action and submissive inaction yield the same results, giving an oppressive despondency to the book.
While the plot can be boiled down to an attempted government coup, this really isn't the gist of the book. Because the revolt aspect only becomes obvious after the halfway mark, it seems almost like an afterthought-a storyline that was merely laid on top of the twisted, dystopian world that Ohle needed to channel into print. But while a reader idles in Ohle's reality, waiting for him to get us to where he wants us, there is plenty of information to soak in. This is the point.
The setting is heavy on quasi-real elements, observable today, like stylish self-mutilation and media that can be bought for political marketing. Ohle describes these traits out of proportion and to a grotesque extreme. As an example, there is a widely acclaimed doctor that performs the best elective deformations on people-one character is literally all-thumbs, all the time. While many of the characters have some sort of trendy surgery, the most pervasive aspect of The Age of Sinatra is the regular radio announcements performed by President Ratt. It is law that everyone must stop and listen to the public broadcasts of the president as he decrees new outlandish regulations and repeals rules from days before. These radio announcements, it is speculated, are also responsible for the periodic "Forgettings." Not surprisingly, attitudes toward the Forgettings go as the president says, "Come rejoice. Every Forgetting is a renewal, not a loss." And perhaps that's what makes Ohle's hopeless world worth living. To calm a prisoner who was unjustly sentenced to break up sludge in the French Sewer, Moldenke's mother says, "No sense in worrying. A great Forgetting is on the way. All this will be gone." These Forgettings, a reader can hope, are the only reason characters see fit to divulge every disgusting and intimate detail of their personal lives with each other while sitting around smoking hair.
All aspects of this repulsive world are written about in a tone that is dark and organic. Ohle focuses intensely on human flatulence, secretions and decomposition. Vivid descriptions of putridity riddle the pages and because of this, there is a constant, perceivable background that mires the story in filth. Oddly enough, inspite of the muck-or aided by it, perhaps-Ohle manages to be funny. Whenever a character mentions a Forgetting, invariable another character quips about something that slipped his mind. And then there's the rhyming. In an interview with Moldenke's mother (famed inventor of edible money), a reporter's first question is, "Is it true, about the glue?" To which Agnes Moldenke then describes her insatiable appetite for drinking the stuff.
Rhyming is just one way Ohle reveals his fanaticism about playing with not just words, but language as a whole. He explores how language-play, when controlled exactly, can extract a precise sentiment from a reader. For instance, there is a character name Hilter who appears on the cruise ship Titanic. Even with two letters of his name transposed, a reader instantly suspects a fellow with a name like that to display cruel or racists traits. Not so. Ohle does the opposite of what is expected and never treats Hilter's name any differently than those of Moldenke or another character, Ophelia Balls. And just when I was lulled into not taking any name at name-value, the Titanic sinks and forces me to rethink my assumptions.
When I first began to read the book, I put it down about a third of the way through. The style of The Age of Sinatra is designed to keep the author in control o the reader. There are no chapter divisions in the book and no wasted words. Ohle leaves holes in his descriptions that forces readers to trust that he will reveal more details later. When I looked at the book again, I knew I needed to start over and just plow through it. This, surprisingly, was a satisfactory way to read The Age of Sinatra. It gave me a useful familiarity with the unrealistic setting, the characters and style that allowed me to cringe and laugh and gag in all the places where the author might have intended» - Katie Greene
"The Age of Sinatra by David Ohle again features the protaganist of his early 70's novel Motorman, Moldenke. While in Motorman we experienced a world wildly divergent, but with startingly similar parallels, to the one we live in, THE AGE OF SINATRA offers an alternative reality teasingly similar to ours. Ohle achieves this mostly by using various powerful words out of context — the Titanic, President Kenny — in addition to adding more "realistic" dialogue.
The characters in the book are quite concerned with temporal eras, which are named according to the year of forgetting that originated them. The first era is The Age of Sinatra. Right before the end of this age an excavation unearths a corpse, with the middle name of Arvey, that all, at least early in the book, are required to worship. The Age of Sinatra came to an end with the Forgetting of '64. We learn little of this time period, because most of the book is set after the Forgetting of '69.
It is thought by many that the apparent leader of the society, Radio Ratt, creates these mass forgettings to keep himself in power. That said, other characters wonder if he is simply a 'semiotic construct'. At one point Ratt is quoted as saying that there have been 12 forgettings, but, like most everything else in this book, we need to take this with a degree of skepticism.
In order to locate some firm ground from which we can begin to make sense of this book, it helps I think to consider what remains stable throughout: the class system; borders between human, machine and animal blurred; laws and the legal system. There seems to be three, possibly four classes, or maybe races, of people: Settlers, Stinkers, and Neutrodynes, or 'Neuts' for short. (I assume that 'normative' characters, such as Moldenke and the characters he spends his time with and treats as equals, are 'settlers', but I could be wrong.) Both the Stinkers and the Neuts seem to be treated more or less like slaves. We frequently see them in cages of one sort or another. They seem to be required to do what the Settlers tell them to. And, probably because it is sometimes taboo to mate with them, many Settlers find them sexually attractive.
That said, the class structure seems to be a cultural construct, for we learn that Ratt himself is part Stinker. In addition, Moldenke begins to grow a flocculus on his chin, which is characteristic of the Neuts. This cruel and arbitrary hierarchy is held together not through any true differentiation, but through violence and the threat of violence.
Categories are furthered blurred by cross-specie surgeries. This book has characters who engage in elective surgery in order to have infected limbs or three eyes. It is thought that these come from animals, but there is evidence that Stinkers are harvested for their parts. This society is one where the boundaries between human, machine, and animal, between healthy and unhealthy, have been blurred and at times completely dissolved. Yet the class system remains.
The final frequent and clear referent is to the legal codes and the criminal justice system. The system is arbitrary in two ways. Laws may be decided on by Ratt about ridiculously random issues. And he often contradicts himself. One day reading on the bus is punishable. The next day people are required to read on the bus.
What's more, guilty people, even those who committed heinous crimes, are considered innocent if the have a 'waiver,' and rumors seem to abound as to where they can be picked up. On top of this, all crimes must be blamed on someone, so if a person has a waiver, another, innocent person is arrested in their place.
Such absurdities go on and on.
So what is this book about? It is about controlling a population as told from the perspective of those being controlled. It is about how people can be distracted by the unimportant. How they are encouraged to sugarcoat cruelty. How they are encouraged to forget what they most need to remember. It is about the narcissism of profoundly confused people.
Sound familiar?» - Jefferson Hansen
«David Ohle is a natural born terrorist — insofar as Naked Lunch is the definitive English translation of the Koran. And if — as was provocatively asserted in Don DeLillo's Mao II — the terrorist has hijacked the novelist's role within our culture, is it then somehow supercilious of me to report that Ohle has written a novel that will behead his readers? Said novel is The Age of Sinatra, in which, it should be noted, "elective deformation" of one's body is the predominant fashion trend. Readers, in this case, can attire themselves however they see fit (the orange jumpsuit is optional). And I'd like to propose that getting your head lopped off by Ohle's fiction is a strange and unforgettable experience.
Some essential backstory: The Age of Sinatra is billed as a sequel to Motorman, published in 1972 by Knopf, and just reissued by 3rd Bed. Here we first encountered Moldenke, the stonepick-smoking, compulsive letter-writing, Beckettian hero ("At best I can say that I am here, although I don't know where. I am at large and about") as he journeys to and through a place dubbed the bottoms. Moldenke, suffering from a heart condition, consults his physician, Dr. Burnheart, who installs four sheep hearts in Moldenke's chest, and removes one of his lungs. Moldenke is also a veteran of the "mock War" in which citizens enlist for an injury of their own devising. He, in a moment of guilt-induced heroism, volunteered to give up "a list of feelings" and to receive a "minor fracture," whereupon a nurse promptly smashed his kneecap.
Motorman's landscape is chockablock with multiple suns and moons (Ohle effortlessly strafes the traditional tropes of science fiction, the epistolary novel, and the picaresque), and is populated with a nefarious breed of faux humans called jellyheads. Here is a scenish bit of prose in which an otherwise listless Moldenke combats two hitchhiking jellyheads he unwittingly picked up in his k-rambler: "Moldenke exposed his letter opener. 'You first.' The man came forward. 'Bend over.' The man bowed. With the letter opener, Moldenke opened a small hole in the back of the neck, enough for two fingers. He put a thumb and forefinger in and widened the hole, a clear jelly spilling out, down his trenchpants. He did the woman, her jelly more clouded, her rubber skull a little thicker than the professor's had been. In the morning, with two suns behind him like stray moons, he examined his vehicle." This is a textual torture so pleasurable that Motorman generated an ominous subplot while out of print—that of readers' reverent anti-chatter about the novel's spiritual effects. Forget cult status: Motorman birthed its own sleeper cell.
In The Age of Sinatra, Ohle has seemingly concocted some sort of covert Oulipian recipe regarding the fantastic versus realism. Yes, there's still a wealth of joyful, invented terminology (edible books, contraband hair) in the sequel, but this time around there's substantially more reality injected into Moldenke's world, which paradoxically bolsters the novel's bizarro quotient. Familiar historical icons (the Titanic, the name Hitler, etc.) are invoked in such a light as to make them seem alien, heretofore nonexistent. When we catch up with Moldenke in The Age of Sinatra, he's aboard the Titanic, and suffering from the most recent "Forgetting," which amounts to an erasure of the citizenry's collective memory. One day in the Titanic's bistro Moldenke is convicted of a crime he did not commit ("Crime is not a failure of the individual, but of the culture. As long as someone is held accountable, and punished accordingly, that's jolly good for the commonweal") and is sentenced to do time in the French Sewer. His daily task is thus: "The procedure is simple. Use the rabot to break up the clumps when you see them. Push the material along." After serving his sentence, Moldenke's heart and scrotal sac are replaced with those of an actual "French pig," although in reality the heart probably belonged to a "Stinker," the latter to a "neutrodyne." Moldenke eventually gets entangled in the one-eyed prison guard Sergeant Montfaucaon's campaign to have President Ratt assassinated (the same President Ratt who in his radio address declares the number 11 should be called onety-one). Think The Phantom Tollbooth in a Technicolor, head-on collision with the Book of Job.
So how does the sequel measure up to the original? Both novels are required reading, and one wishes 3rd Bed godspeed in their apparent mission to exhume innovative works of contemporary fiction from our nation's literary graveyard (their other resurrected title is Gary Lutz's syntactelicious Stories in the Worst Way). American readers should take note of this insurgent fiction writer, David Ohle, who flays the human condition to singular, hallucinatory effect.» - Gabe Hudson
David Ohle, The Pisstown Chaos ( Soft Skull Press, 2008) )«The Pisstown Chaos is a novel about disease and forced-relocation. Political power seems to be solely in the hands of one Reverend Herman Hooker, an “American Divine” who revels in the peoples' suffering as they are “shifted” (separated from — and then randomly coupled with — one another) by decree every five years. There are up-shifts, down-shifts, and side-shifts, but no attempt to make harmonious pairings. Chaos rages on as parasitic infestations spread and the Reverend rules with an iron fist from his Templex headquarters, spouting platitudes to the ever-moving masses.»
«Ohle's 1972 classic, Motorman, and its sequel, The Age of Sinatra (2004), made him a legend. Fans will rejoice-in their own dystopian way-at the arrival of this mesmerizing installment. Ohle presents a parallel universe where people travel in vehicles called Q-peds; subsist on starch bars, urpmilk and perhaps some imp-meat; and get drunk on Jake and stoned on willywhack to dull the anxieties of the age, which are many. The blighted landscape is overrun by "stinkers" suffering the final zombie-like stage of a parasite infection, and an unspecified "Chaos" perpetually threatens Pisstown. Then there is the deranged authority, the "American Divine," led by Reverend Hooker. In this world, readers follow the fortunes of the Balls family. Grandmother Mildred is quarantined with a mild parasite infection and must protect a corral of stinkers from wild imps. At the family estate, Mildred's granddaughter, Ophelia, battles stinkers burrowing under the house until she receives orders from Hooker. Ophelia's brother, Roe, eventually comes under Hooker's sway as well. Ohle's creation of a vivid world, both familiar and foreign, dark and slyly humorous, makes the book a grim delight.» - Publishers Weekly
«In Motorman, David Ohle's dizzying 1972 debut, we first meet Moldenke, the author's hapless, indelible alter ego. Moldenke is as unfortunate as his name might suggest: passive, inert, afflicted. In one Motorman scene, he has four sheep hearts installed in his chest at the casual recommendation of his physician, whose prescription for post-op convalescence is: "Imagine yourself in a mock meadow, grazing."
Though Moldenke has now played the ostensible protagonist in two of the three novels Ohle has published, it's the world he endures that is Ohle's true subject—whether Motorman's Texaco City, with its multiple suns and "government moons," The Age of Sinatra's Titanic cruise (on which Moldenke is arrested and sent to a prison known only as the "French Sewer"), or Pisstown, the plagued, vivid setting of The Pisstown Chaos.
In Pisstown's ailing landscape, a parasite is turning citizens into decaying "stinkers"—"dead, but not enough to bury." Moldenke is infected, a "death traveler" glimpsed passing through Pisstown's Bum Bay. But it's the Balls family—Grandpa Jacob, Grandma Mildred, and their grandchildren, Ophelia and Roe—that the novel most closely chronicles. Forced apart by arbitrary "shifting orders," which come down from the Reverend Herman Hooker (a mad-despot heir to Motorman's Bunce and Sinatra's President Ratt), the family must wander, weathering episodic periods of chaos. Mildred falls prey to parasites and ends up in isolation in a prison colony, where she's cured by the bite of a fiddleback spider; Ophelia becomes first the consort to the Abbot of Bum Bay, a carnival giant formerly known as Dimitri Machnov, then an investigator of unsolved crimes; Roe ends up working as a special assistant to Hooker himself, where his duties include masturbating the great man over a sink.
Part epistolary satire, part Fénéon's Novels in Three Lines (the narrative, such as it is, alternates with cryptic and alarming Pisstown news bulletins), Ohle's book pulses with the cool logic of the insane—the kind of deadpan surrealism that Ben Marcus once memorably pegged as "apathy noir." The familiar battles the strange, and the duel ends in a delirious tie.» - Zach Baron
«One could thumbnail The Pisstown Chaos, David Ohle’s third novel in thirty-odd years, as a dark-comic fantasia, and the author himself as a long-term toiler in the fields of postwar American experimentalism. And yet he remains elusive, far more obscure than he deserves to be, and the book, like the rest of Ohle’s small oeuvre, is a bit hard to account for. His first book, Motorman, from 1972, could be situated within the vein of Barthelme et al.; but what came after—well, what came after was silence. Decades passed, the debut accruing cult status all the while, until the appearance of the extraordinary The Age of Sinatra (2004), a kind of sequel to Motorman, set in a dystopian future America and crafted, seemingly, on another planet.
Pisstown follows to some degree on Sinatra’s heels, after a gap of only four years, and makes with the previous works a disjointed trilogy. If you think the Bush years have been bad, wait until the era presided over by Pisstown’s Reverend Herman Hooker, whose pseudotheology accommodates both the nonsensical and the sinister, with proverbs like “Travel is the serious part of frivolous lives” and “Too much learning is a dangerous thing.” His administration’s brief is twofold: to quarantine the innumerable poor bastards infested with parasites, which over years turn their hosts into living-dead “stinkers,” and to destabilize the populace with continuous “shiftings” and forced matings. Society’s ills include rampant violence, scant power beyond that provided by human-pedaled flywheels, and a mania for the repugnant commodity of tooth gold, harvested on occasion from the living. The diet consists more or less entirely of starch bars, eel, grasshopper, something called urpmilk, and various cuts of imp, a creature that the cagey Ohle avoids describing physically but that behaves, like his universe, in both playful and savage ways.
Unlike the writer to whom he is most often linked, William S. Burroughs, Ohle eschews radical prose play; the characterization of his writing as experimental derives from his grim absurdity, the flatness of his characters and tone, and his rejection of traditional novelistic arcs. His style is approachable and precise; he writes with dry humor in detailing the bizarre: impregnation by suppository, a Russian giant receiving a leech treatment, a job deliberately misfolding parachutes. Like Burroughs, however, Ohle locks on to dehumanizing situations and processes; his characters speak in a benumbed, perplexing blend of blank Americanism and stilted B-movie dialogue. And check the baroque carnage chronicled in the popular newspaper The City Moon:
After an evening together at the Bones Jangle a steam press operator and his stinker paramour returned to their hotel, The Gons, where he plunged a knife into his companion’s body. She, in turn, quickly unsheathed the blade from her taut, sunken belly, and plunged her lover twice. Still, they laughed until other guests complained.
The faux-journalistic deadpan of these entries, which echo the stories in Thomas Bernhard’s The Voice Imitator, sets the tone for the book’s approach to emotional life and humanism, and the chapter openings they comprise provide some of the book’s finest writing.
Pisstown resembles the United States at the turn of the last century; we encounter patent medicines, house hands with names like Red Cane, and a lack of indoor plumbing, from which the scatologically obsessed Ohle seems to derive no end of pleasure (I have never read a novel with so many enemas and colonics or a writer with such a grasp of the erotics of discharge). This last emphasis is to a point, however. In foregrounding both the abjection of the body and desperate small power plays, Ohle recalls Beckett. In particular, he does so during the book’s single eruption of nuanced psychology, when one of our heroes, a simple young man named Roe Balls, accidentally plunges headfirst into a latrine while trying to retrieve his only wad of cash. As things get grim (“That’s when I got sick and vomited the first time”), Roe begins to panic, hallucinates, and is struck by a feeling unglimpsed in the rest of the book, one of a lesser order and all the more human for it. He is embarrassed:
I thought that the waste might start rotting my skin. I worried about catching diseases. But the main thing I started worrying about was, what will Grandmother think when I get out? I was humiliated, extremely shamed. I was mortified. I thought about suicide. It might not be worth getting out if Grandmother was going to tease me and make fun of me. And I knew she would. I felt like ending my life right there. It wasn’t worth coming out. . . . But I didn’t kill myself. I waited, and I cried until the dawn finally came and I saw the first light through the hole, the hole that led up to life, real life, not life in the pit.
Roe’s account of his ordeal, offered to a magistrate trying him for the crime of “privy dipping,” stands in for a conventional climax. It seems that Ohle wants to show the reader that the toy-theater cutouts he moves about so masterfully could, with a shift of light, reveal a third dimension at any moment. They don’t, but the possibility of our being made to feel causes the tale to turn quite bleak, and Ohle’s rich black comedy becomes, as you go on, a bit harder to laugh at.» - Domenick Ammirati
«When Motorman (1972), David Ohle’s surpassingly weird first novel, was brought back into print four years ago to coincide with a long-awaited sequel, The Age of Sinatra, acolytes appeared from the blue, professing devotion (“awesomely carving deep, black holes into the edifice of the English language” was how Ben Marcus described the book) as if they’d been waiting all their lives to testify. Because, as another author/fan, Gabe Hudson, remarked, it wasn’t a cult Ohle had generated; it was a sleeper cell.
With the publication of The Pisstown Chaos, Ohle’s siren call has rung again. His third novel takes place in the same menacing cartoon of a dystopia as his earlier books, which means that its chronological relation to those books is also kind of fuzzy. Time has never had much purchase in Ohleland. Although some folks can still recall when “Kenny” was president and when “Arvey” assassinated him, at some point—in ’64 to be precise—something called the Great Forgetting officially expunged the nation’s collective memory. And as for Moldenke, the stoic everyman who persevered through all the gross-out iniquities Motorman and The Age of Sinatra could throw at him (including a surgery to implant four sheeps’ hearts), he’s no anchor for the reader. Moldenke makes only cameo appearances in The Pisstown Chaos, as a touring performance artist.
These days, Moldenke and his countrymen live in a theocracy under the Reverend Herman Hooker. Determined to limit the spread of a parasite that turns its human hosts (Moldenke included) into odoriferous “stinkers,” Hooker has instituted a national program of enforced “shiftings,” dividing up families seemingly at random, and relocating them to trailers, shantytowns, prisons, and labor camps. Among those ordered to abandon their homes and assume far-flung bureaucratic assignments are the hapless protagonists of The Pisstown Chaos, wealthy widow Mildred Balls and her grandchildren, Ophelia and Roe.
Yet, as usual, it is Ohle’s topsy-turvy mise-en-scène that’s the real main character. Like his precursor Beckett, Ohle knows just how funny, and also how frightening, a world without memory is (“Stars? Moon? I don’t know. I never looked up much”). Each of the novel’s twelve chapters opens with excerpts from the City Moon newspaper, and Ohle’s exquisitely rendered journalese is awesome in its deadpan illogic: “Moldenke, the touring stinker, has filed a deed to purchase certain properties in the afterworld. Local legals say the properties do not exist. Moldenke says they do, at the edge of the city, and that he has seen them as recently as two nights ago.”
Ohle has lived in Kansas for decades, but he has always identified himself at the backs of his books, presumably with pride, as a “native of New Orleans.” And so in this macabre novel of a people dispossessed, written in what for him must have been an unprecedented hurry (thirty-two years passed between Motorman and The Age of Sinatra), it is difficult not to spot the imagery of Hurricane Katrina. Still, Ohle didn’t dig those black holes with mere political allegory. Or by writing politely. No amount of description will prepare you for the icky, cavernous, taboo places in your mind to which he’ll lead you, hand in hand, Virgil to your Dante. You’ll recognize some of these places, of course. The question is, how did he get in there?» - Benjamin Strong
«Moldenke, the touring stinker, has filed a deed to purchase certain properties in the afterworld. Local legals say the properties do not exist. Moldenke says they do, at the edge of the city, and that he has seen them as recently as two nights ago. "They are vast. Their earth is black, rich and fecund," he told the City Moon. 'It has arable soil, surprisingly rich in nutrients. A white cabbage grows there in profusion.' With a wink to one of the Guards, the legal asked Moldenke, 'This afterworld of yours. Do the wicked on Earth continue in their wickedness there, and the good in their goodness?'
Moldenke's answer: 'Yes, in churches and nice homes. The wicked get worse, the good go bad, only the indifferent remain the same. The average Joe can't understand it.' " - David Ohle, The Pisstown Chaos
The Pisstown Parasite has transformed masses of people into stinking, decaying wanderers. An all-powerful leader, Reverend Hooker, American Divine, is continually shifting people all over the place, from Pisstown to Indian Apple to Bum Bay to Permanganate Island, at random.
Folks don't drink beer. They drink Jake. They don't smoke pot. They eat willywhack. They don't drive cars. They pedal Q-peds. They live off of imp-meat, starch bars and urpmeal bread. Water is usually contaminated. Corruption is widespread. Manners are crude.
The Balls family-Mildred and her two grandchildren, Ophelia and Roe-are torn from their wealthy estate through Reverend Hooker's shifting program and kept on their toes by the whims of circumstance and Hooker's fickle, impulsive decrees.
Characters come to accept their fates, protecting their sanity through passivity as their lives bounce from one random occurrence to another. Order isn't expected. Resistance seems useless.
This dystopian world that 66-year-old Lawrence author David Ohle has created in his third novel, The Pisstown Chaos, may take a while to acclimate to, but once this occurs there is a profound joy to be discovered in being enveloped by it.
The novel is preceded by the following quote by Reverend Herman Hooker, a real-life 19th century American preacher: "We die that we may die no more." In the world in which Pisstown takes place, this quote becomes the first and most important aphorism of the fictional Reverend Hooker's Field Guide, which every good Hookerite is expected to memorize.
Ohle says he was flipping through an old reference book, The Dictionary of Thoughts, when he came across the quote under the heading of "death."
"The Reverend Hooker in the book believes that death is insignificant, it doesn't matter, it's actually good for you," Ohle explains. "This is the fundamental philosophy of his way of looking at things."
Such distortions-social tenets sometimes spun backwards, other times in more arbitrary directions-are one of the defining features of Ohle's novels.
In the 1970s and '80s, he and local journalist Roger Martin sporadically published an absurdist newspaper called the City Moon - which survives as the name of the newspaper in the world of Pisstown-and the unofficial motto that guided them was "stop just short."
"I don't want to over-explain things," Ohle once said of his writing. "Leave it kind of vague and uncertain."
The material is so strange-one critic compared reading The Age of Sinatra to "getting your head lopped off" - his novels are often misclassified as science fiction, which many small bookstores don't carry. "Satire is all it is," Ohle says.» - Frank Tankard
David Ohle, Cursed from Birth: The Short, Unhappy Life of William S. Burroughs, Jr. (Soft Skull Press, 2006)
David Ohle, Roger Martin, Susan Brosseau ,eds., Cows Are Freaky When They Look at You: An Oral History of the Kaw Valley Hemp Pickers (Watermark Press, 1991)
