................

Tome of a Heretofore Unknown Personage – by Bardolph,
Baronis and Telling.

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I began this review long ago in a completely different vein,
a more commonplace and recognized style of ‘review’, yet my mercurial
temperament got the better of me and I decided to throw those virtual letters
to the virtual wind and begin again. Yet even still, as I now re-read and leaf
through this Tome of a Heretofore Unknown
Personage, I’m very tempted to make specific note of many, many sections of
verse… however, I realize that would be a disservice to the author… a
bastardization of the medium, a cheapening of his hard work. This is something
he created for people to read, to experience themselves, not something to have the magic and secrets greedily
sucked out of and marginalized by over-anxious commentators such as myself. I
do not want to kill the excitement and/or the mystery of the novel. It reveals
itself to you at its own, very deliberate pace as it is read; it was written a
certain way after all - and that way only becomes clear when experienced within
the meticulously constructed context of the whole. So forgive my new found
tendency to be very general when I speak of this work. I’ll focus the following
observations of mine around general themes and the “essence” of the work.

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Work like this is a blatant act of subversive defiance
towards our modern malaise, it refuses to allow us our pitiful and lazy
conceits… it does not pander to the safety afforded us by other, banal works of
modern writing. It is not a rote and linear story told thousands of times
before, comfortably recognizable in its structure… no, this is a bomb which
topples those structures with the perverse glee of a significantly inspired
madman. A bomb composed from pages and pages of lovingly loquacious and
multi-layered ideas; this is writing as rebellion; adamantly refusing the ease
of cliché. This is a novel made for what is perhaps a dead (or, at the very
least, certainly dying) audience; one willing to devote attention, thought and time to respecting literature not only as an
art, but as a religion… yes again, that frightening prospect to the modern day
reader; you’ll have to devote attention, energy and time… Apropos, as
time in this book is malleable, omnipotent, yet also utterly inconsequential in
a way, interchangeable and dynamic, it seems to posit that it indeed isn’t
really time which matters ultimately,
but ideas – ideologies and/or the lack thereof; the essential dichotomies which
infuse and define existence, life, drama, etcetera, writ large and lit with a
constantly honest and unflinchingly harsh light. Choice. Action, or the
decision, however subtle, not to act, is what time amounts to, what it measures
and suffers. Time, after all, is pre-defined, especially our time in these
bodies, we cannot change our allotted time, it can not evolve or expand within
our own experience… Yet on the other hand there is thought, thought can evolve, it can alter our experience of
time in a very tangible and corporeal fashion. It seems as if there is a
constant lucidity and, at the same time, an endless psychogenic fugue within
which this work exists and operates. Things happen with synchronicity, things
which happened long ago are referenced within the context of the character’s
present tense experiences, things which may or may not ever have occurred are
related and discussed. Of course our sly, serpentine author plays upon this
stage of strange literary devices, hiding under a cloak of presumed, fictional
anonymity, the ‘authors’ of the text(s), Bardolph, Baronis & Telling, are
avatars of this concept of time and space unraveled. They represent perhaps
fractured time, psyche and intent… The job of art, it may be said, is to
engage, challenge and confront the viewer… this book does these things before
you even open it. The cover itself, complicit in the game already, with the
abstract face, the “author’s” names; the fiction has already begun, it has
broken down the fourth wall, and slyly begun to nod your way before you’ve
turned a single page. The main character could be described many ways,
libertine, intellectual, father, artist, rebel, addict, mystic, searcher;
protagonist and antagonist at once. However, no matter how complex and
labyrinthine the characters, the plot or even the parlance seem to become, the
work still always remains somehow experienced on a base, emotional and very
relatable, human level. Speaking
directly to our instinct and id, engaging the reptilian and most sophisticated
areas of our psyche all at once, this work helps to re-define psychological
literature as something which can be immensely readable and approachable on an
enjoyable and absorbing level, breaking it free from the previously stuffy,
polarizing, un-enchanting and un-approachable mold in which it has unfortunately
been cast for so long.

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That all being said, I should make it a point to be a bit
more clear, so as not to scare potential, perhaps more casual readers away from
this profound literary experience; there is indeed a main character with a
storyline weaving through the entirety of the book, there is a strong thread
connecting the unique pieces herein. Admittedly there are asides, shorts and a
grand section of meditations which destroy the semblance of standard structure,
yet there is definitely a central storyline propelling the novel towards its
conclusion and it certainly flows along in a way which makes the rest of the
insanity seem perfectly sane and completely justifiable. There is nothing
superfluous here, everything applies accordingly and all the various pieces, no
matter how seemingly scattered, are poignant and necessary. This is not a
slap-dash collection of ideas thrown together in a hastily constructed collage,
it is a finely tuned and impeccably conceived work of the utmost care and
precision. One which does not, without sincere intent, befuddle and
discombobulate unsuspecting readers. This is not a sterile and overly stern
work; it has a sense of humor, it champions vibrant celebrations of emotion and
life within its pages, it enjoys itself and encourages this playful irreverence
in its reader’s as well.

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I should also clear up the point of authorship. Out of
respect for the artist, and because I have not been specifically given
permission to do so, I will not divulge the author’s true identity, needless to
say his name is not Bardolph, Baronis or even Telling. I have my predilections
as far as the way my works are presented and I certainly appreciate the desire
and the will of other artists to keep their creation’s mysteries alive.

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SO…

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What does all of that add up to? What comes of the fact that
the author has written this book for an audience on the endangered species
list, that he not only refuses to play by the ridiculous rules paraded about by
all the sycophantic charlatans with publishing contracts today, but
systematically attacks and denounces them? It adds up to courage, to the only
reason to write anymore, honesty and passion in black and white, yet completely
grey all over. A commitment to keeping literature as a religion alive,
Surrealism and poetry personified.

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It is not hyperbole when I say this is definitely one of the
best contemporary novels I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. A work which
utterly destroys and reinforces my own desires to write; I see the arrangement
of words, which float effortlessly along, playing off one another in that
sublime poetic dance, possessed as it is in the pen of all truly great writers,
and I want to weep and shout for joy and futility all at once.  There were many times when I had to simply stop
and re-read a section I had just gone by, unwilling to let the experience of
the words drift away into another. This was an experience to remember, one that
will make you sincerely want to
revisit the world and characters it so succinctly creates. An experience that
will rank up with the best times you’ve had turning pages and projecting the
images of unknown pleasures upon the mind’s eye. This will be a book which
proudly and deservedly sits on your shelf amongst works that have changed your
views, breathed life into your many souls, invigorated the senses and without
question, championed literature as the religion of truth and life.

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Post script:

It may be in poor taste, or simply lazy of me to do this,
but allow me, for the sake of people reading this who may have been turned off
by my verbosity, to compare this work to other, more well known novels from the
past. These completely different fictional worlds, characters and stories do
not necessarily compare directly to Tome
of a Heretofore Unknown Personage, yet I feel they stand as strikingly
similar works in one way or another, be it tone, spirit or structure.

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Celine’s Journey to
the End of the Night

Cervantes’ Don Quixote

Joyce’s Ulysses

Random, anonymous author’s The Holy Bible

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The book can be purchased at some of the following places
online:

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amazon

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ecampus

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anabooks

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The Press Release can be viewed HERE

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The first teaser trailer I cut for Alex Monty Canawati's newest film, Return to Babylon:



Befriend Monty on Myspace:

Monty's personal 'space'

Return to Babylon on Myspace

Subject: July 4, First Friday, Jonathan Douglas Duran at red-light

red-light
323 Southwest Blvd.






Kansas City, MO 64108
816-421-1484

red-light@sbcglobal.net

July 4, 2008 – July 26, 2008

Opening Reception: July 4, First Friday
                               6:00 pm – 10:00  
Saturday hours: 12:00-5:00 pm.






Or by appointment call: 816-421-1484

"La Vita Nuova"
composed by
Jonathan Douglas Duran
presented by
Kenneth Gentry

"La Vita Nuova" consists of works which restlessly blur the line between the tired associations of medium; aural and physical textures coexisting outside of the accepted constraints willfully hoisted upon what many may call 'style'. To wit: music, photography, painting,film, sculpture and the written word; avatars of human communication, static and evolving, immaterial and tangible, all represented simultaneously through a series of works which will confront the viewer and arouse an active and fervent response. However diverse the choice of mediums may be in any particular piece the overall message remains concrete; eloquent coherence via frenzied incoherence;the inescapable dichotomies of our contemporary psychological zeitgeist.







red-light remarks: I feel like the rather buffoonish Polonius announcing the arrival of the traveling players to Hamlet, mad north-north-west. Polonius goes on to provide a litany of the actor's skills in the traditional genres, as well as a quizzical variety of mixed-genres. "La Vita Nuova" is very much in the vein of the latter.




 Imagine, if you will, Pasolini meets Voltaire, Poe meets Buñuel,Dante meets Rimbaud, Bacon meets Fellini, Dostoyevsky meets Arbus, and so on.



 Be prepared to be discombobulated. K.G.





 

Image Title: Journey To the End of the Night (re-birth)
Photo by: Jonathan Duran



www.surrealistgesture.com

I Stand Alone

or

Degradation is the enemy of intensities, endless, delirious and pitiless pursuer of honest passions.

You must only concern yourself with your own head, writing what you hear, what you believe, what you know to be true even if it is a lie. Block out the world, block out the opinions of the people who suffer their insecurities upon you. This whole world is designed to drag you down and every rat in it just wants to be on top of the sinking ship.

 

Sit in front of that blank paper, that throbbing screen, sit around waiting for answers. Is this pain or is this love?

I don't really have the strength... it's one of those instances where you wish you could reach out to another individual who shares a commonality of disposition.

Alone and enfeebled, all you want is a friend, but no one is there.


Slow. Sour.

..>..>..>..>

To all my fellow Surrealists, by freely admitted title or not: labels are ineffectual and useless when staring down the barrel of a rifle. So then, to re-start with all pretensions and assumptions aside: every ear (even the stone-deaf) in Villiers-le-Bel , comrades, artists, humans, REVOLUTIONARIES… I am an American. I shit down Mickey's rat throat, I vomit on the idea of George W. Bush, and I despise the capitalistic regime known today by both names: Christianity and Business; the AMERICA from which I was born. I am a Surrealist. My nation is my mind. My religion is life. My skin is whatever color yours is. I stand not only for complete intellectual freedom, but for a very literal, physical, social freedom as well, i.e. the destruction of any chains used anywhere to demoralize the human verb, the potential, the individual. For at the end of the day what are we left with? After we have been allowed to leave our places of "work", after we are free to focus on anything we want and profess any opinions we desire, after everything FORCED on us has fallen asleep like the fat slave masters they are, we have only ourselves. Our minds, our creativity, our imaginations, our dreams and desires for whatever change, whichever ideas make us feel more human, more alive. These bastions are the only pure places left on this bleeding and gang-raped earth of ours. We have been left NOTHING but what we create in our own heads, everything else has already been ruined or is very well into the process of ruin. We've been given nothing but scraps, rancid bits of meat from an animal we never agreed to kill in the first place. Not only have we not been left or given anything, we haven't even been OFFERED anything. We've been sold things, we've been assigned things, we have even been obliged things from time to time… but nothing that shouldn't have been ours already… for free. So yes, I am a part of one of the greatest evils in existence today, yes I am sitting idly on my computer writing to you of revolution while I pay and buy my life away here in the ignorant police state of the soul called America. All the more reason I'm able to offer my help. Tell me what you need. Materials, food, weapons... I will do everything in my power to provide. I will abuse the powers so thoughtlessly granted me, I will work my alchemy and I will turn their shit into your gold. Because after all: You must never give in, you must never stop. Shoot, punch, kick, BURN. Burn with passion and with the conviction that you are right in doing what you are doing. END THE POLICE STATE! Fight with every breath against racism and tyranny, then, when you've run out of breath, shoot a policeman in the chest and steal his. You are standing on the threshold; you are holding the key in each and every one of your minds. Anyone who has ever thrown a cocktail, ignited a bomb, pulled that trigger with pure sincerity, has taken that decisive step over into freedom. They have declared their disgust with slavery; they have refused to remain benign pawns in a crooked game any longer. Any one who has wished for release from the ridiculous bondage they were born into, who has written a single line of subversive verse holds the power of the atom bomb in their finger tips. You are in the ideal position, you have them scared, you have them angry, now you must STAND STRONG. You MUST not allow yourselves the weakness of comfortable and compromised submission. Keep pulling your triggers, keep burning your cars, the world needs to see these brilliant fires and explosions in order to wake them from their own prolonged slumbers. Do not bend to the will of other conservative parties in your country disguised as liberals, disguised as anarchists. The CP gravely failed you back in '68. Not only did they fail you… they betrayed you. And in that despicable series of moves they betrayed themselves (as if they hadn't already!) forever; exposed themselves as imposters, corrupt and eager deceivers of the proletariat. They are in perfect goose-step with Starkozy and everything he and his institution stands for. They are DEAD, decomposed, yet still desperately grasping at the last pink strips of flesh on their black and bitter collective souls. They are pale imitations of revolution, they are a brand… marketed and sold under the pathetic guise of "counter-culture". We must look back upon the history of French revolutionaries; Sade, Voltaire, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Rousseau, Ducasse, Jarry, Tzara, Apollinaire, Breton, Camus, Sartre… the list goes on and on… these men lived how they believed. These men chose to endure the poverty and the condemnation which resulted as a direct affect of their honesty and their base refusal to live pretending, lying, betraying, killing by buying, SLAVING. They refused. They created the world that we (not them; the bourgeoisie, they are closed off by their own admissions) now wish with all our willpower to live within. Freely moving about, giving and taking in equal measure, striking that perfect equilibrium of a truly emancipated society. "We must formulate a new declaration of the rights of man" By any means, at any price. We need you, the brave artists willing to paint with the blood of the oppressors. The emancipators. The saviors. Jesus on his cross, coming down to judge... All that Surrealism is can be conveyed via this single quote from Breton: (The Surrealists) "… adhered to the view that what was still - and by far- most shocking about the world around them was the subservience in which a miniscule part of the human race held the rest, without any justification whatsoever. Of all the evils this was the most intolerable, since it was entirely within man's power to remedy." So, I'm not begging or using this situation as an opportunity to parlay you into the party (for all I know many of you are already members), I'm simply offering my empathy. My support. I'm offering you anything I have to offer. Use Surrealism, if not in name, then indirectly. Use it as a symbol; take the Surrealist slogans ALL POWER TO THE IMAGINATION! IT IS FORBIDDEN TO FORBID! and use them again; blow off all the layers of dust which have been accumulating since 1968. They have not tired with age, you may very well find their edges sharper, more defined and blindingly prophetic. A potent weapon; a collection of hearts and minds willing to be true, honest and unashamed. You have started a fire in the minds of the rest of the world and it is now your pleasure to continue pouring their genocidal petroleum into the flames. We must destroy in order to save, a confusing truth, yet a truth all the same. Do not let anyone sway you different, reject all parties if need be, slash Surrealism to ribbons, just keep fighting, for the war has just begun. You have my support. WORKERS POWER! "Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain." ~Marquis de Sade - November 28, 2007 – Jonathan Douglas Duran - revolution4evolution@gmail.com

a SURREALIST questionnaire

 

 

Name: Jonathan Douglas Duran

Party Affiliation: Independent as a hog on ice! (Voltairian Surrealist) "I'd never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me as a member."

Links to you online: voltairiansurrealist@gmail.com

 

 

1. Who are you? King shit of fuck mountain.

 

2. At what age were you born? Some men are born posthumously.

 

3. Describe what the future sounds like, bleeding out of a speaker. Dissonance. Cars, televisions and sound waves of pure cancer oozing as open sores. Gunshots and drumbeats… indistinguishable from one another.

 

4. Which month has all the days crossed off on a calendar you will never see? No one reads the papers around here, pal.

 

5. The virgin mary's favorite television show is: Hookers at the point. Real Sex (all of them, the whore!)

 

6. If Jesus Christ (assuming the worm existed) came back today the first thing he would do would be: Vomit the compassion right out of his heart.

 

7. Two of the conditions surrounding the inception of god were: Giddy superstitions given ridiculously ersatz validity by scared and angry old men afraid to acknowledge their animal ancestry that dangled between their puritanical thighs.  

 

8. The blood of others will be: Red with embarrassment.

 

9. The most violent shape is: North America

 

10. The most beautiful sound is: Wounds healing

 

11. To choose the right verb you must: Let it choose you.

 

12. What sort of hope do you place in love? The hope to momentarily displace some senseless pain.

 

13. How do you picture the passage from the idea of love to the reality of loving? Much as the idea of defecation to the actual reality of the smell of feces.

 

 

14. Would you, willingly or unwillingly, sacrifice your freedom for love? Have you ever done so? Yes. No. No. no. No. Yes. Well, maybe, sometimes though I…

 

15. Do you believe in the victory of love's glory over the sordidness of life, or in the victory of the sordidness over love's glory? SORDIDNESS. I enjoy that word.

 

16. Addition or subtraction? Addition can be subtraction and vice versa when utilized correctly.

 

17. The opposite of art is: Slavery.

 

18. Surrealism is: Complete freedom of the mind.

 

19. Rebellion is: Necessary and unavoidable. It is right under your skin, behind your eyes and throbbing through your fingertips.

 

20. Freedom is: Surrealism. (see above)

 

21. Your personal manifesto in one sentence: All power to the imagination.

 

22. Where can people find you? In the last place they'll look for me.

 

23. The precise formula for dignity is: Two parts intelligence and four parts bleeding fists.

 

24. (association) Woman: nigger, menstruation face/glow.

 

25. Pages yellow, skin ____fever___________

 

26. Your hymn to the night, please: Ever present, enclosing, enveloping unending grace and spite. Both sides of the worthless coin spread across the sky represents the night. (but there is always a way you can light up the sky)

 

27. The great victim is: The human verb

 

28. The great evil is: Anything which diminishes or deigns to devalue or trivialize the individual's imagination.

 

29. Please create your own question and provide an "answer" here:

List your top three reasons for wanting to fuck jesus christ:

--> --> -1. Those wash-board-abs, mmmmm…

--> --> -2.  Wine. Anytime.

--> --> -3.   wash-board abs!!!!!