Christopher Nosnibor — in conversation with John Wisniewski

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Christopher Nosnibor

 

— in conversation with John Wisniewski

 

Transgressive, surrealist, urban post-realist writer Christopher Nosnibor — author of This Book Is Fucking Stupid, The Plagiarist, and The Gimp — picks up where writers such as William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Jorge Luis Borges, and JG Ballard leave off, sharing influences with such contemporaries as Kenji Siratori, Stewart Home, Barry Yourgrau, and Mark Leyner. Urban Graffiti is pleased to present, “Christopher Nosnibor — in conversation with John Wisniewski”, the first in an ongoing series of evocative and probing conversations with contemporary experimental and transgressive writers. ~Editor

 

John Wisniewski: Could you tell us about your earliest writings — was the writing experimental in nature?

Christopher Nosnibor: My very first stab at writing was when I was aged about 7 or 8. I wanted to write an epic that was my own equivalent of Star Wars. I didn’t get very far. Well, I filled a heap of little spiral-bound notepads with explosions and so on, but never really got a sense of plot. Actually, that probably set the template for everything I’ve done since! However, it was later, after I’d read Naked Lunch that I stared writing as an adult. That novel, The Sound of Impact, written between the ages of 18 and 22, was highly experimental and not terribly successful as a novel. It’s not published, but parts of it have been reconfigured and used in subsequent works which have made it into the public domain. That was my first ‘word hoard’, I suppose. I chiseled out another brace of unpublished novels in my twenties which were pretty straightforward. My first published work proper was a collection of short stories called Bad Houses that I put out myself in 1997. Again, there are some experimental pieces in there, and it’s stylistically diverse. I think it’s fair to say there’s always been an experimental element to my work.
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Three Poems by Win Harms

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Three Poems

 

by Win Harms

 

The York Hotel
philthy philly

does my voice fade with every passing hour?
does my face become hazier everyday?
it’s the same for me on this end but
the essence of you is alive and well
in every word i read, every song i hear
i watch him listen to him, fuck him
my disgust grows as i try to forget your name
that terrible city lifetimes ago
that raped me, starved me, infested, infected me
i barely remember its name
but i remember the cadence and disparity
of those days not so long ago as i’d have them believe
when we starved for everything, anything
a hit, a meal, a fuck, a roof, a bed
those nights we bled and cried and created
were more precious to me than all the gold in Egypt
and now it carries me through the mundane
chaos with a hungover chaser is what I need
can i create without the chaotic cavorting?
through those city streets?
without you?

~Win Harms
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The Crows by Paulette Powell

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The Crows

 

by Paulette Powell

 

Crows fly Charlie couldn’t stop talking about the crows, “The crows, I’ve never seen anything like it before! I tell you, hundreds, weighing down the tree limbs… when it was over, all of a sudden, the whole flock flew away.”

He’d taken several snapshots of the family. On second inspection, I could see Charlie’s signature style, “photo victims” standing in obedience, as though his pic would be featured in the Telegraph magazine. It was always about presentation, even if it weren’t the truth. He was good at directing and folks would comply.

A family portrait. There was Uncle Peter, the poet, and sweet Aunt Elizabeth. Cousins, David and Emma, who once visited us in NYC, right after David’s great bump on the head that proved a miracle awakening. Brother Benedict, looking like a Hell’s Angel, his aura of defiance fighting his English attire. Alongside conservative sister in law, Liz, whose gray hair and glasses were neatly packaged in school teacher manner, revealed Benedict wasn’t really the black sheep to marry a practical spouse. The Parents, were located in the center. “Mum”, a tormented matriarch, who did her best to bare a heavy cross of a sick girl. Her face still revealed a handsome woman, a diplomat’s wife. And “Dad”, who seemed always distant, unattainable for family but faithful to Kate. His eyes revealed a deep sadness beneath a hard exterior, betrayed the knighted war hero. He wasn’t made of stone, but marble layers of duty kept him locked away, sentencing him to a numb existence.
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Urban Graffiti Mix #12

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Urban Graffiti Mix #12 by Mark Mccawley on Mixcloud

Exceptionally lyrical, subjective, personal. Tracks of love, ecstasy, longing, sex, obsession, desire. Tracks seeking out language to describe the indescribable; also, the madness that accompanies each acceptance or denial of longing, obsession, desire; for each who wins, another must lose; the agony of grief, loss beyond consoling, but not beyond words. Good words. Bad words. Mean words. Transgressive words. Most of all — lyrical words. Passionate, rapturous, ecstatic, euphoric. Yes, love hurts. It’s the only fire we again and again allow ourselves to be burned by.
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Guilty of Everything: Herbert Huncke in Amsterdam — review by Mark McCawley

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Guilty of Everything: Herbert Huncke in Amsterdam

 

Reading at Ins & Outs Press

 

review by Mark McCawley

 

Guilty of Everything- Herbert Huncke in Amsterdam“Hunke, whom you’ll see on Times Square, somnolent and alert, sadsweet, dark, beat, just out of jail, martyred, tortured by sidewalks, starved for sex and companionship, open to anything, ready to introduce new worlds with a shrug.”

~ Jack Kerouac, “Now it’s Jazz”, Desolation Angels, Chapter 77.

Hobo, narcotics addict, merchant marine, gay hustler, petty thief, convict, storyteller, writer — Herbert Huncke began living an underground life after dropping out of high school in his sophomore year in Chicago, drawn to the underbelly of city life, and quickly began learning how to support himself as a professional drifter and small time grifter.

An autodidact, and primarily anti-academic, Herbert Huncke, whose lifestyle and easy manner of speaking influenced so many, (eventually famous authors and poets, e.g. Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg) coined the term “beat” to name a generation.
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