I, Judas is reviewed in the February 2012 edition of the Historical Novels Review – read and subscribe to the magazine via the link.
I, JUDAS
James Reich, Soft Skull, 2011, $15.95/C$18.50, pb, 224pp, 9781593764210
As Taliban fundamentalists dynamited the Bamiyan Buddhas, with this book Reich blows up the Gospels. How can I, Judas possibly be described for the innocent? (And if you haven’t read it, you are innocent. Yeats’ “Second Coming” is so optimistic in comparison.) Romanian/New Orleans poet Andrei Codrescu wrote for I, Judas’s cover blurb: “This one’ll have you clenched in a fetal position for a century, relieved only by the occasional orgasms of its mellifluous prose. You have to be strong to read this book: it rains fireballs.”
It is the story of Judas, who pops up throughout the centuries like a bloody Forrest Gump, always being betrayed and betraying. He’s with JFK, Oswald, and Ruby in Dallas, where “jackals careened about the passenger door. Scarlet broth ran down her sunglasses. His back brace held him corseted to his cross, and the shot pealed again.” Judas tells us, “I slept rough in the red light district of Jerusalem and was often overwrought with nostalgia born of suffering. Scripture is nostalgia, and Judea was addicted to it.” The entire Holy Family is greasy and fallen in these pages: Jesus’s father was content to make crosses for the Romans because there was a chance that he might make the instrument of the death of his wife’s lover.
Don’t even think about turning to this book for a cozy evening’s read. Yet Reich writes beautifully – I sometimes felt as though I was being sucked into a gruesome enchantment. It gave me a new and personal understanding of that old-fashioned word blasphemous. It is not, however, historical fiction. I’d recommend it instead for readers with a soft spot for iconoclastic and brutal prose poetry.
Two decades have elapsed since I first experienced D.A. Pennebaker’s vérité film Town Bloody Hall, and it’s a little over forty years since the spectacular 1971 ‘dialogue on women’s liberation’ that it records was staged. I had a VHS tape of it that I wore out and lost somewhere between the end of my teens in England and becoming a middle-aged writer in America. But, in the context of escaping the anemic pallor of the Republican Primary debates, I tracked it down again as a DVD from Pennebaker Hegedus Films, and I commend it to anyone interested in divining the chum lines of feminism… READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT THE RUMPUS
I’m extremely pleased to announce that LeYa Brasil have acquired rights to translate and publish I, Judas: A Novel for the Brazilian market. The novel will appear in Portuguese translation. You can learn more about LeYa by following the link.
I, Judas: A Novel, by James Reich reviewed. Extracted from the review by Charley Dunlap, Oct. 25.
“While reading through I, Judas, I often felt that I was reading the lost Gospel According to William Burroughs. The writing is surely influenced by Burroughs, not the random cut-and-paste that he became misunderstood for, but for the dreamlike, deep description and absolutely personal quality, the almost forensic sensual awareness of our physical bodies, blood and organs, bloom and decay, all very much evident in the first half of I, Judas; it somewhat gives way to the episodic story line in latter parts, but makes a potent return at the end.
William Burroughs is, of course, not the only influence here. I often thought of Flaubert’s Salammbô with its bloody sensuality, historical setting and redolently lush prose. Generally, though, James Reich is a sensible product of 20th century literature, Faulkner, Joyce, Cortazar, Ginsberg, Dylan, with a healthy respect for biblical prose thrown in — and perhaps one other stretch, not a writer: film maker Kenneth Anger. Not only for the similar blasphemy and humour of Scorpio Rising, but for the juxtaposition of time, the imagery and the general causticism of Anger’s work.
Beyond all these influences and interpretations, there is one thing that sets James Reich’s I Judas apart, and that is the quality of his writing. While it’s pretty clear James has a big brain, filled with encyclopedic knowledge, the attribute that serves him, and the reader, best is his surprising ability to strike home continually with an exalted, consummate phrase, paragraph, even a word. All the other qualities of the book indicate a fascinating thinker; this last means a genuine writer.
The warped pataphysical pocket watches of Salvador Dali’s small canvas The Persistence of Memory continued to mark molecular time from 1931 until the spring of 1974, when their position on the beach was usurped in a series of almost simultaneous works of popular culture. Dali had anticipated this in his repainting of The Persistence of Memory as The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory in the early 1950s, a treatment that acknowledges post-atomic mass production, and implicitly, the naïve apocalypse of the original canvas viewed through the lens of mid-century holocausts, and holocausts yet to come…
I, JUDAS: A Novel by James Reich – Review by Rob DeWalt for Pasatiempo, The New Mexican
I, Judas, his debut novel (available Tuesday, Oct. 11), proves Reich to be a thoughtful and meticulous provocateur – a much-needed voice in contemporary fiction… Reich’s narrative bends time, blending modern history and stark, grotesque, post-apocalyptic scenery with the natural and spiritual landscape of the Holy Land, placing political struggles and literary and artistic movements of the last 200 years against the backdrop of Dante’s vision of hell, the early formation of Christianity, and the fragility of the Roman Empire. The result is a surreal, gory, and sometimes erotic glimpse into the search for the “eternal,” a cautionary tale about embracing the concepts of heaven and spiritual faith without first questioning the source of their exaltations. …In I, Judas, there is a delicious lawlessness of prose, a revolt against conventional language and storytelling that dares the reader to abscond from his or her own belief system and delve into the unknown. Reich levels the playing field among biblical literalists, atheists, and the rationally devout alike by asking, “What if…?” Some may take offense to his insinuations; but isn’t that often the case with great fiction? - Rob DeWalt
Read the full review in Pasatiempo, arts supplement to The New Mexican on newsstands today.
“JAMES CAMERON IS A PARASITE WHO CAN KISS MY ASS.” October 5, 2011.
Full disclosure: Personally, I regard James Cameron’s Aliens as a seminal example of the more-is-less failure of franchise cinema; I am unable to watch more than ten minutes of Titanic without being repulsed by the overwhelming impression of a mawkish amateur dramatics society drowning against a green screen; and, upon leaving the megaplex for a parking lot less gaudy and more attractive than anything on the cinema screen, I found Avatar the most nauseating film I had seen since Peter Jackson’s King Kong. That has been said, and is saying something.
Now, the debate regarding whether or not Cameron ripped off Harlan Ellison’s 1957 short story Soldier From Tomorrow broadcast as a 1964 episode of the Outer Limits entitled Soldier in making The Terminator (1984) should be dead. Legally, it is. As, arguably to a lesser extent, should be the controversy surrounding its relation to Ellison’s episode Demon With A Glass Hand – salt was rubbed into that particular wound by the referential episode of the Terminator franchise spin-off TV series The Sarah Connor Chronicles entitled The Demon Hand, 2008. It is evident that Cameron abused Ellison, and this should be clear to even the most partisan defender of corporate cinema’s JC, but Cameron did not have the decency to admit homage or credit Ellison until Ellison sued. Instead, the story goes that Cameron said: “Harlan Ellison is a parasite who can kiss my ass.”
Grudgingly, tellingly, Ellison’s name was appended to the VHS and subsequent releases of the movie. But, here’s another element of counterfactual art history that you should not forget if you remain vowed to defend Cameron against Ellison’s successful allegations: I want to remind you that even the name of The Terminator’s heroine is knowingly derived from The Outer Limits’ Soldier. The episode is easy to find. Pay a little attention to the actor credits as they appear at the beginning, second and third: Michael AnSARA and Tim O’CONNOR.
DIRT CITY CHRONICLES presents a profile of Venus Bogardus: ”…James Reich is tuned in to the American thought process, his political writings show just how well he gets us. Yet at times you get the feeling that James and Hannah play along to get along, be nice, don’t piss off the natives. James explains in the accompanying radio interview that Venus Bogardus, doesn’t really belong to any one place, they are transient. Which means that they’ll leave us someday and those of us who are anchored to this land of enchantment will miss them dearly.”
ARTHUR CRAVAN: Pugilist, Poet, Provocateur, Ponce, and the Queering of the Queensbury Rules.
Sept 19, 2011
Arthur Cravan, one of the legendary quartet of iconoclasts identified by Roger Conover in his classic 4 Dada Suicides (the others being Jacques Rigaut, Jacques Vache, and Julien Torma) exacted a most spectacular revenge against the tuxedoed savage who had defamed and bankrupted his uncle, Oscar Wilde.
Cravan, regarded as a proto-dada, or perhaps dada’s premature embodiment, was born Fabian Avenarius Lloyd in Lausanne, Switzerland on May 22, 1887. Lausanne is about two and a half hours southwest of Zurich where the reflexive birth pangs and parturient polyglossic noise of dada would trouble the tavern walls of the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916.
(Aside: it is worth noting, as no one does, that the posthuman zoological language/poetry of Hugo Ball, Tzara and others occurred in 1916 Zurich at the same time as the posthumous publication of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s seminal Course in General Linguistics, and that this strange autonomous zone, harboring the dadas and Lenin against shellshock and evisceration, was the roped off ring where language, the word, was dealt clinical blows, knocking out its gum shield and dislocating its senses.)
Arthur Cravan’s father, Otto Lloyd, was the brother of Oscar Wilde’s beard/wife Constance, therefore, Cravan was Wilde’s nephew. Throughout his turbulent and transnational life, which was also his art (Andre Breton referred to Cravan’s life as “the single best barometer for measuring the impact of the avant-garde between 1912-1917”), Cravan assumed multiple aliases, of which several –Dorian Hope, Sebastian Hope and B. Holland- were Wilde-related or Wilde-derived. Cravan’s exploits are noted in detail elsewhere, and Conover’s book remains an exemplary source, but aside from his enigmatic suicide/disappearance and various reports of his return from oblivion, arguably one of his two greatest succès de scandale was his posthumous encounter with his uncle in Oscar Wilde est Vivant!/Oscar Wilde Lives! a fictional meeting in which Wilde returns to Cravan’s home and is plied with drinks and molested before vanishing again, published in Cravan’s own sarcastic art-tabloid Maintenant in 1913. This account, written thirteen years after Wilde’s death was the literary hoax precursor of the Orson Welles/Mercury Theater broadcast of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (1938) and it sent reporters scurrying from New York to Paris to investigate Wilde’s return from the grave.
The electronic, Kindle and e-reader edition of I, Judas is released on Oct. 1st from Amazon.com and is available for pre-order and spooky delivery to your device. The Kindle edition looks to be initially priced at $9.99
Check it out, and recommend it to your posthuman readers group. Click the link here or on the classic smashed iPhone to get I, Judas for your Kindle...
