Josh Peterson Granite City Blues (2019)
It took me a while to get settled with this one, if settled is really an appropriate term here. Josh Peterson writes the dense autobiographical narrative of an existence which endures despite poverty, degradation, meth, and kiddy fiddlers. It's transgressive literature if anything is transgressive literature, although I doubt Peterson - or indeed anyone with a brain - would be entirely happy with the categorisation. I have the impression that, having set up shop, Amphetamine Sulphate have become subject to all manner of unsolicited submissions from persons actively setting out to write transgressive literature, and I recall Mr. Best himself darkly muttering something about bad copies of Sotos. Anyway, Granite City Blues gets off to what initially seemed a poor start blending Peterson's somewhat forensic analysis with references to or quotations from Whitehouse, Burroughs, Sotos - your basic transgressive box ticking, then a run through of certain books or records - which Simon Morris did to better effect in his books; and it isn't that any of this is without value, or a point, or that snippets of insight don't come as part of the collage, but it feels somehow obvious - at least initially. The references are the sort of thing which, as I say, have worked for Simon Morris, possibly because Morris' narrative voice is a little more conversational with his motives better communicated. Here they are distracting, particularly embedded within such a dense monologue delivered with a cadence approaching that of a medical textbook. I was struggling, and if it's any indication of why, I found a 204 word sentence on page eighty-four.
That said, this opening section yields a fairly satisfying summary of two inspirational authors whom I assume to be respectively Peter Sotos and New Juche - neither directly identified presumably through Peterson wishing to avoid ticking boxes on the transgressive reading list which, if so, suggests that he's at least aware of the pitfalls. I've never read Sotos, so I'm not getting into that fucking argument, but for what it may be worth...
It took me a while to get settled with this one, if settled is really an appropriate term here. Josh Peterson writes the dense autobiographical narrative of an existence which endures despite poverty, degradation, meth, and kiddy fiddlers. It's transgressive literature if anything is transgressive literature, although I doubt Peterson - or indeed anyone with a brain - would be entirely happy with the categorisation. I have the impression that, having set up shop, Amphetamine Sulphate have become subject to all manner of unsolicited submissions from persons actively setting out to write transgressive literature, and I recall Mr. Best himself darkly muttering something about bad copies of Sotos. Anyway, Granite City Blues gets off to what initially seemed a poor start blending Peterson's somewhat forensic analysis with references to or quotations from Whitehouse, Burroughs, Sotos - your basic transgressive box ticking, then a run through of certain books or records - which Simon Morris did to better effect in his books; and it isn't that any of this is without value, or a point, or that snippets of insight don't come as part of the collage, but it feels somehow obvious - at least initially. The references are the sort of thing which, as I say, have worked for Simon Morris, possibly because Morris' narrative voice is a little more conversational with his motives better communicated. Here they are distracting, particularly embedded within such a dense monologue delivered with a cadence approaching that of a medical textbook. I was struggling, and if it's any indication of why, I found a 204 word sentence on page eighty-four.
That said, this opening section yields a fairly satisfying summary of two inspirational authors whom I assume to be respectively Peter Sotos and New Juche - neither directly identified presumably through Peterson wishing to avoid ticking boxes on the transgressive reading list which, if so, suggests that he's at least aware of the pitfalls. I've never read Sotos, so I'm not getting into that fucking argument, but for what it may be worth...
The former exudes a consistent acknowledgement of the pain of a life lived where the latter seemed to have found a natural talent at soothing it. The former has my respect more for being true to who they are (or were), rather than any boastful suppression of instinct; without which we'd lack the society from which these men allegedly transgress.
Anyway, as I say, such instances of anonymity seem to suggest a need to maintain a certain thematic purity, or at least that Peterson wasn't sat in some darkened room with just a candle and a Maurizio Bianchi album, frantically scribbling his descriptions of sexual acts previously seen only in Johnny Ryan comics, occasionally pausing to throw back his head and cackle, 'Just wait until those fools read this!' Indeed, when it comes to self-image, self-mythologisation, or any of that shite, Josh Peterson seems refreshingly lacking in ego.
There are some reading who may still be in possession of some of those trash samizdat that I self-published. I'm inviting you to piss on them. To photograph yourself or your girlfriends or your female friends or really whomever, pissing on them, so that I can clearly see both the person urinating and the target and the stream of urine.
Given this last point, I'm inclined to wonder whether the opening pages might not represent some kind of test, something to separate the wheat from the chaff; although it probably isn't anything quite so deliberate.
People act as if you actually want or choose to be whomever you are, when rather only a very small percentage of us ever accept and decide to enjoy the lack of options.
References to obscure authors, noise gigs and so on, tend to present an impression of an author speaking directly to a limited audience of personal acquaintances, maybe a circle limited to those who liked the last one on Goodreads; which is fine but makes it a frustrating, even pointless read for those of us outside the circle. However, once we're past the references to Whitehouse, the tone seems to shift towards something broader and which communicates one hell of a lot more, even if it isn't necessarily anything we're going to enjoy hearing. The sentences reduce to double figures, and Granite City Blues draws closer to the thing promised by its title as Peterson picks apart his own existence and attempts to make sense of it in moderately less clinical terms than I recall from Missing, or even from the first twenty or thirty pages of this one. He's thus far had an interesting life - in the Japanese sense of interesting - and one I'm fairly happy to read about as having occurred to someone other than me; and, as is probably obvious, adversity is nothing if not educational and so you could probably learn one hell of a lot from this book.
Peterson is almost the New Juche of shitty urban America in terms of understanding his environment and in being equipped to analyse it without arbitrary moralising; and there's even a brittle sort of poetry to his analysis. Regardless of the opening bars, this is a great book, possibly with greater to come, going by his present trajectory.
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