Hero Of The Underground - Early Press Reviews
"Peter, a star at the University of Nebraska's storied football program in the late 1990s and a first-round NFL draft pick, details his short, frenzied life as a drug user and veteran of the treatment center circuit. It started with painkillers in college, which turned into a full-blown addiction as he battled an array of injuries that ended his career by his late 20s. Avoiding self-help urgings and self-congratulations, Peter (who is now clean) and O'Neill have crafted an unflinching look at the dark side of a life devoted to pleasure. The book's power lies in his honesty in detailing the depths of his despair from seeking the next high.”
- From Publishers Weekly
“Hero of the Underground gives us a portrait of red-blooded jock as monster dope fiend. It’s a savage, unsparing, eye-popping ride through the dark soul of big money, endless drugs, American manhood, and our national past time---self-destruction. We’re lucky he lived to tell the tale. Had Hunter Thompson been a football player instead of a fan, this is the book he’d have written. Flat-out, mash-your-face-in-the-dirt amazing.” –
- Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight
"Bruising... more harrowing than usual. Peter’s narrative relentlessly focuses on the brutalizing facts, and it is free from the macho posturing and self-congratulatory navel-gazing common in recovery memoirs. Nightmarishly honest."
- Kirkus Reviews
"Wow, I am not sure how to express how unsettling this wound up being, for me. The book is a sledgehammer. When I think about the book, I feel this sort of hollow whistling in my chest. Jesus."
-
I dream of
shaven-headed
skinhead girls.
They’re all
laughing
at me.
I’m just standing
there,
largely unphased.
Here's what happened. In order to bypass increasingly efficient filters, spammers began embedding blocks of text - often pilfered from great literary works via Project Gutenberg - in their junk mail. Techniques like the Dissociated Press algorithm were employed to randomly generate new, essentially meaningless texts or text collages ("word salads") so that each message would seem unique. Lee Ranaldo has compared the outcome to a "dictionary exploded". Another early aficionado, Ben Myers, observed that "it was as if the text had somehow been remixed and shat out down the wires of modernity". "Spam Lit", as Jesse Glass dubbed it in 2002, uncannily mirrored bona fide literary experiments that were taking place simultaneously: Jeff Noon's exploration - through textual sampling and remixing - of "metamorphiction" in Cobralingus; Jeff Harrison's aleatoric poems based on Markov chains; or even Kenji Siratori's baffling cyber-gibberish.
Equally intriguing was the trend Wired magazine identified in 2006 as "empty spam": Spam Lit messages that were, paradoxically, all lit and no spam. The consensus among geeks is that they were probably "misfires" due to faulty server connections. To their recipients, however, these instances of found poetry - often containing nuggets of unwitting but unalloyed beauty - seemed, in Myers' words, like "scriptures from the future" or "postcards from another planet". Discovering them in your inbox made you feel like Cocteau's Orpheus picking up cryptic poetic messages from the underworld on his car radio.
No wonder, then, that Spam Lit should have inspired the only new literary genre of the early 21st century (if we exclude crimping). The earliest examples of spoetry on record date back to 1999. A pioneering annual competition was even established by Satire Wire the following year. By 2003, when the BBC picked up on the phenomenon, it was already quite clear that writers were approaching spoetry in very different ways - an observation confirmed by Morton Hurley's Anthology of Spam Poetry (2007). Some, like Kristin Thomas only used the subject lines of spam messages; others were content to cut, paste and add their names à la Duchamp. Myers, who has just published a collection entitled Spam (Email Inspired Poetry) believes, for his part, that the secret lies in the editing: "A spam poet is as much an editor as a bard". Sonic Youth co-founder Lee Ranaldo, who has also just released an anthology (Hello From the American Desert), uses spam emails as a source of inspiration for his own work rather than as a raw material. Mark Amerika, meanwhile, describes the composition of his 29 Inches as a "spam collage" and a "narrative remix".
Although published last year, Amerika's work was written in 2004, which also happens to be the year when Myers and Ranaldo penned their first spoems. None of them were aware that others were doing similar things at the same time. There must have been something in the air. If my inbox is anything to go by, however, Spam Lit is now on the wane, so the time may have come to assess the merits of spoetry, its literary by-product. Beyond the genre's obvious affinities with automatic writing, cut-ups, constrained writing (of the Oulipian variety) and found poetry, is it any cop?
(Originally published here: www.blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/07/spam_poetry.html)
I grabbed my camera and walked to the park to capture
the pink winter sunset but two school girls were kicking
holy fuck out of one another in the midst of a baying
throng of about fifteen boys and girls in loosened Friday
evening uniforms so in a sudden and misguided flash of
community-spirited, adult-minded duty I waded in and
tried to tear them apart but they were pulling each other’s
hair and swinging fists, eventually they came apart when
another girl bit one of their hands and as they broke away,
one of them, a chubby black girl with bloodied teeth and
wild eyes, let out a killer right jab to my mouth and I had
to hand it to her, it was a good precise punch, and the throng
took a collective intake of breath but the fight was over,
the girls were all out of puff and after a while they all kind
of drifted apart and went their separate ways until there
was just me left standing there in the mud, rubbing my
swollen jaw and wondering what had just happened.
The pink sun had set. It was dark. It was December. My thirtieth year.
