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Where's the Omelet? So asked George Orwell much to the chagrin of egg-breakers. And hope, of course, was the last "evil" to escape Pandora's Box. Like religion, hope compensates for something the human world seemingly lacks. It is no coincidence that the enslaved are among the most hopeful, the poor and unreasonable among the most religious. The better one lives the less need one has of hope, or the more spiritual and cognitive one is the less need one has for religion. My writing serves as a personal correction for all the eggs I've ignorantly broken, and is my most sincere attempt, hopefully not entirely in vain, of making an omelet from the mess of my life. Chuck Richardson June 1, 2007 | In response to my inquiry, Chuck Richardson explains: “It’s been so long since I posted anything online there’s no point in my sending along publishing credits. You might just say I posted numerous anarchistic rants on 50+ web sites, including Dissident Voice, The Beast, Z-Net, Smirking Chimp, Uruknet, Jihad Unspun, Alternative Press Review, Selves & Others, Buffalo Report and Countercurrents.” Chuck has worked professionally as a journalist, but his scathing truthfulness in a series on racism in his hometown rendered him a liability to some, an asset to others, and given the cultural, social, and economic identities of these parties, ultimately intolerable. He is the co-founder and editor of the late NiagaraBuzz.com, an online free press focusing on political happenings in Western New York. Buzz, like his own site BastardPolitics.com, also now defunct, was widely read and occasionally cited.
Additionally, Richardson’s "Creative Perception as Existential Endurance: A Reading of Kafka’s Paradoxical Parables," has been included in Mauro Nervi’s The Kafka Project; two pieces of short fiction--Digressions On A Recurring Dream and Trust Me--are appearing in the Fall 2k7 issue of BlazeVox; and one of his anti-war essays has been anthologized in the forthcoming book, Cost of Freedom, from Howling Dog Press.
Jared Schickling Author of Aurora, from BlazeVOX [books] Suburban Eggs, Publish America | A Layman’s Attempt at Reviewing a Writer All Should Read:
A qualitative description of Chuck Richardson’s fiction
By Jared Schickling
It must have been 2002 when I met Chuck Richardson in a downtown café. Patrick Lowther, a photojournalist, artist and mutual friend, had invited me to this meeting. The two were gearing up, recruiting for their baby, an online free press called NiagaraBuzz.com. With Pat’s death in 2004, the remarkable Buzz closed up shop.
It is now 2007. Through Pat and my involvement with Buzz I came to know Chuck, an encyclopedic creative mind and unerring friend. Today we pass books and manuscripts back and forth. Our infrequent but regular sessions pass late into the night.
Since our meeting, on my side of the fence I’ve been chewing a cud; and what conclusion, dear reader, has it come to? Number one: A pulp where to describe Chuck Richardson as a writer is to gloss the facts of the matter. If only hovering over this vast body of literature available to us there were equally convenient categories in which to place that which is more than a story, more than a poem. Richardson’s writing is more than writing. It is romping. Savagery. Elemental.
Chuck's most recently completed project is a novel, Smoke. Developed and expanded along with new material, earlier pieces are re-situated here, some of which first appeared on Buzz and later found their way into his first collection of short stories and poems (as I say, insufficient descriptors), Memos from Apartment 5. One of those, “Nothing Ever Goes Away”—-already wrenches at the gut. It’s the story of a nameless woman who cancels her appointment at an abortion clinic. I don’t hesitate to ruin an ending cuz, oh, it’s what it is within the context of what it’s not that sets Richardson, as a writer, apart. Here, as elsewhere in Memos and throughout Smoke, he does not write but captures. He does not tell about or how, but of. In other words he shows. No reveals.
“Nothing Ever Goes Away” is not a story of this unnamed woman in the usual sense, detailing the details of her life that have brought her to a particular time and place. Indeed, the reader gets almost none of this. The closest we come is to know that a) she is pregnant, which means she has become pregnant, a detail that unfolds in a one-plus-one sequence of punctuation, meaning facts are characters occurring naturally, organically, without effort; and b) that she is in a relationship. This latter detail flows into the reader’s awareness only towards the end of the “story.”
So if the point—-and it does seem to be the point-—is to inform us of what it is that causes the unnamed to decide to have her baby after (apparently) deciding not to, how is this accomplished? I don’t know. That’s the beauty. But it is accomplished. Richardson takes us on a trip through a woman’s distressed psyche, where the dividing lines have blurred between dream and waking life, life and death, subjectivity and objectivity, possibility and impossibility, natural and unnatural, male and female. As so often is the case, Richardson strives for the full spectrum of plural reality by obscuring its clarity and clarifying its obscurity. The readerly experience is a sinkhole of sense and rationale.
Page 1: the brain and heart finds itself naturally alert. They pick and choose, pausing to wallow, evaluate. But the language has a life of its own, an intoxicating quality. The narrative evolves as syntax and vocabulary draw the reader in, closer and closer yet, unsettlingly, farther and farther away—-and from what? The eye begins to sag, the tongue annunciates, each syllable caressing each word, each phrase, each image; keep your nose buried in the page and eyes commence their disconnect, severed from brain to inform instead a sheet of changing light across which folk and city and mother nature and all of her creations dance and converse and sing and careen-—the soul made manifest. Here is Richardson’s power: His ability to articulate an ineffable worthy of religion. Our awakening mirrors that of the unnamed herself, in a place as strangely familiar to us as it is for her: The point of understanding.
“Nothing Ever Goes Away,” formerly distinct within Memos, has in time dissolved into but one aspect, one movement within a larger narrative. Formerly the body it’s become an organ, embedded in a structure of one supreme insistence: The present tense. In Smoke, past and future are addressed-—are felt-—as aspects of the here and now. (I’m reminded of Dorothy Lee’s writings on languages where past and future conjugations don’t exist.) Perhaps this sounds like nothing special, nothing new, something attempted, even accomplished before. Such objections are irrelevant. Like Memos, not to mention Chuck’s other writings (criticisms, journalisms, and most recently an indefinable counterclockwise), Smoke is truly conscious writing, aware of the stuff informing life, this passage through and its translation into possibility—-being the other side, which approaches the beginning again. Naturally it is subversive, dealing justly with this cycle. No Hollywood here, no paperback romance, no contrived rise and fall of action. Just pure, unadulterated, glorious, tender, witchcraft. Jared Schickling is the author of Aurora, from BlazeVOX [books] and Suburban Eggs, Publish America. His work has also appeared in The Advancing Idiom, The Argotist Online, Feed Me Seymour: Name Volume Ate, KNOCK, Word for/Word. His poem, "the canal," won the 2006 KNOCK Ecoliterature/Green Art Prize in Poetry, and he also won the 2006 Albert Cook, Mac Hammond, and John Logan Literary Prize. Schickling took honorable mention in 2006 for the Arthur Axelrod Memorial Prize and Academy of American Poets Prize, for which he also won honorable mention in 2005. |
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