Taking a fucking sharp knife to it: An interview with N Frank Daniels

N. Frank Daniels’ Futureproof is an exhilarating take on the coming-of-age novel. Drugs, sex, frustration, anger, it’s a modern-day Catcher in the Rye, if Holden Caufield had fucked the prostitute; a Romeo & Juliet for the chemically numbed post-grungers. Frank describes himself as the “luckiest asshole you’ll ever know” but, as you’ll read in the interview below, Daniels is one tenacious bastard. He worked long and hard at getting Futureproof read (including flogging his gear on eBay to fund a promotional tour of his (then, self-published) book). And Futureproof is worth reading. Don’t believe me? Ask Jay McInerney. Or Sebastian Horsely. Or Jerry Stahl. Or, indeed, the Futureproof 500. Like his favourite artist Banksy, N. Frank Daniels isn’t afraid of flaunting authority, of breaking the rules. The name of this interview, I’ve stolen from Bansky – “Think outside the box, collapse the box, and take a fucking sharp knife to it.” It makes sense Frank likes him.

Two Stories

BALLAD OF JERRY NERVAL

One day, maybe today, just picking my nose, walking past a picket fence, the slats begin to walk themselves; wobble along the periphery; rob consciousness. On the way out, catch myself coming to – eight blocks, two murders, one rape down the street.

Witness, perp, victim – take your pick. Too stunned at the moment to pick my own brain’s lute.

Regard pavement. Take my pick of the litter. Retrieve a Cricket, a Camel. Pop butt in mouth. Snick Cricket. Scrape thumb raw snicking. Hold sparks – because no fuel – to tobacco wrapped in poly-lipped paper. Leave Bud bottle with Newport drowned in it. Forget mustardy napkin, tampon, Puget Sound white fish, toothpick, Ziploc dogshit.

Have a puff. Think about it.

Stripped

In the shower that morning Jack had noticed what looked like a seam running down the length of his forearm. It began just below the bend of his elbow and continued all the way to the back of his wrist. He had worked his fingers over its rough edge to assure himself that it was real and not just an illusion of the shifting light and shadow in his small shower stall. After the shower he had dried his skin with a threadbare towel and chosen a shirt with long sleeves.

His arm didn’t start to itch until shortly after noon. He was perched in a booth at one of those casual dinning concepts that seemed to be displacing everything beautiful, looking down at the chunk of meat on the end of his fork. For some reason he couldn’t help thinking about the reality that each bite he took had recently been a living thing with a fully functioning limbic system. Just thinking about it made his penis start to elongate. Jack didn’t think that that was the healthiest reaction, psychologically speaking, but wasn’t about to second guess his own biology.

Three poems

SLEEPING THROUGH LIFE

I fall
into recognition
that I have
been sleeping through
life.

Does it change anything?
If I would have
kept my eyes open, would
life have given me some gift?

Introductions

Stagnant, irritable, underpaid by the feds, a door-closed internet addict, I contact a man.

The Ventriloquists

“Sigmundstrasse. Stunde Null.”

“There was a tradition called ‘Stunde Null’ and I was prepared to hand it over.”

Where the twentieth century truly began, I was beginning to understand, was arbitrary and local, or, rather, localized.

“What I wanted to come off the page was the same thing that came out of the speakers: desperation and joy.”

The Fic-Blogosphere Manifesto

There’s a spectre haunting the blogosphere, and it is the spectre of too much commentary. The Internet was supposed to allow for a creative revolution in literature. It was hailed as the avant-garde technology of avant-garde — oh, what the hell, just plain new — writing.

But the lit-blogosphere has instead developed without any over-riding artistic ideology devoted to the potential of the medium itself. As prolix but disjointed as an email written on a caffeine-high of organic dark chocolate and re-heated coffee at 2 a.m., it contains its fair share of brilliance. But to what end? Serving what purpose?

We acknowledge the vitality of the lit-blogosphere! We salute its prolific nature, its earnestness, its seriousness! May a thousand interesting comments threads bloom!

Sitting Alone [trilogy]

SITTING ALONE AT AN ARKANSAS WAFFLE HOUSE

My server Rocky’s a good guy
Long hair, unshaved, big belly
and a green tattoo that says “Monica” with an underscore on his left forearm.
Been driving five hours and no speaking to a single soul
but Rocky partook in my small talk,
The chocolate chip waffle and hash browns with tomatoes were good, I said
so was the coffee.
Days before Christmas and I was a thousand miles from home
hoping to find a souvenir to tide things over with my old lady.
Howzabout this Waffle House coffee mug?
She just loves it here and we don’t have em in California.
No can do Rocky says
He’d love to, but he could lose his job.
Look behind, I replied, you got a whole stack of these things
Just tell your boss this one broke
No harm no foul
Nope, Rocky said, couldn’t do it
Much better than the time I worked at Sonic Burger, he said
And I understood.
In these parts, the midnight shift at a North Little Rock Waffle House
is a gig you don’t turn your back on.

Daisy

When his pappy, a man with ape-like tendencies, named his son, Daisy, he expected a Johnny Cash toughening up of his male progeny: chippy, murderous Sue, that kind of thing.

What he got was a Pee-Wee-dressing soppy drip of a boy, whose sole ambition was to dress up in a uniform and slime and slide his belly along the floor at the service of anyone and anything that came his way. Fair made his pappy puke like a rabid-chimp-anzee.

A Beatnik Stew: Kerouac & Burroughs

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a novel written in 1944, by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, has at last found the light of day. Presented in alternating chapters narrated by Will Dennison [written by Burroughs] and Mike Ryko [written by Kerouac], the story follows a rootless group of characters adrift in New York City’s demimonde in the last year of WWII.

In the opening scene we’re introduced to the major players sitting around an apartment smoking schwag. One of the characters eats broken glass. Another character brings the diner a plate of old razor blades. Your typical day in coolsville.

Three Poems

Bureau

There’s a change in the weather today.
You seem not to have noticed.
As you draw the curtains the telephone rings;
voices cry like children fed the same line
over and over again. There was a change
in the things trampled on the street today
but like an engineer you believe
in a certain shaped solution.
Through the window,
from the chair I strapped myself into,
even there I could not help but notice
the line of cars iced over,
dragging one by one into the other.
Though you may not feel it,
the street is colder
and the ink in your pen is frozen.
There’s been a change in the air today
you may not have noticed;
I heard your fingernails working overtime
scratching tiny decisions on the wall.

That Age

It is my turn to visit nana. I deliberately scuff the rubber toes of my Converse into the silty ground as I wander down the cut. The old railway line is deserted. There’s not much reason to come this way, since they shut down the open-cast and boarded up, one by one, the crumbling terraces which only my nan and a couple of other old-timers stubbornly inhabit. Mum says they can’t leave their memories. Kids come here sometimes, to mess about in the hillocks and potholes on buzzing quad bikes; and teenagers from the comp at weekends, leaving empty cider bottles and charred campfire circles, crisp packets and condoms snagged in the long grass.