About Me
Click HERE to read THE INFORMATION HIGHWAY, an excerpt from my new book, Kissssssssssss , from FC2 .
Like a soapbox preacher on a poetic rant, Steve Katz declares, "Dysfiction is right now and beyond." Kissssssssssss is a miscellany swarming with American kooks and modern primitives who demonstrate the absurdity of our reality. A man's head detaches during cunnilingus then continuously recites scientific formulas of flight. In a parallel universe Los Angeles, a young boy embarks on a strange bildungsroman to avoid being eaten by his parents. An African Grey parrot pontificates on the plight of parrots in war-torn countries.
Applying syncopated language and Anthony Burgess-esque hyper-slang, Katz interweaves the iconic traumas of the 21st century with prescription drug commercials and sub cultural body modification, reflexively avowing that the absurd is our reality: "In our times the trivial is typical, and the typical is not what we need." Like Katz's characters, we choose to sit quietly amidst the horrific banality of the world or purge our fears with sick laughter.
fc2.org/katz/kiss/kiss.htm
Ronald Sukenick interviews Steve Katz - Rocky Mountain Writers series
Steve Katz was born in May of 1935, and that's all there is to it. That was in the Bronx, and he couldn't help it. Then some kid with a stiletto stabbed his basketball and that was CREAMY & DELICIOUS (eat my words in other words), published in 1970 by Random House, that started the avant-snack movement in the pre-postmodern revolution.
But before that in 1968 he published at Holt, Rinehart & Winston, THE EXAGGGERATIONS OF PETER PRINCE (yeah, three g's, do something about it), the likes of which novel has never been seen since, a Manhattan kind of a book, provincial and puckered with graphics, full of skidmarks, false turns, pictures of boats and midwifing instruments, a whole section crossed out, another overprinted with dreams. It's a hell of a book. You read it and your life turns to garbage, blessed garbage. But even before that, he published THE LESTRIAD in Lecce, Italy, a novella of immense innovation, recently reprinted by Bamberger Books.
Meanwhile he was living his life, three great kids and a great wife. He lived it in Eugene, Oregon, in Winnemucca, Nevada, in Lecce, Italy, and in Verona, in Ithaca, New York, in New York City; and he worked for the forest service, and in a mercury mine, and as many different kinds of waiters, and construction work, and bartender and other things, and then he started teaching, which was subversive, because he always hated school, was never good at student life. He does that even today, living in Denver, Colorado. And he has studied Chinese internal martial arts, and he still does, so he knows how to hurt himself.
And he published SAW at Alfred Knopf, a sci-fi swat team of a novel that demonstrates how a hippopotamus evades an astronaut, and safe sex with a sphere, and how oblivion comes when a cylinder's on the loose. And as a Fiction Collective pioneer he published MOVING PARTS, a book that among other things, zeroed in on the number 43, and was the first work of retrojournalism, in which the author writes an enormous, fantastic story, called Parcel of Wrists and then keeps a journal as he tries to live that fiction.
Then he took a small bite out of the ass of Hollywood, writing with Leo Garen a film called Grassland, later rented out as Hex, though the best that came of it for himself was CHEYENNE RIVER WILD TRACK, a book of poems focussed on making a feature film in exotic South Dakota.
Very quickly the new and improved STOLEN STORIES came out, a book of yarns classic as godzillo riding a hunch from noter dame, such stories of spiritual dread and mortal triumph as never before squeezed into a tube of instant language paste. (Available from the author in convenient family size for sexual avoidance or indulgence, as you wish. 43 bucks.) Sun & Moon Press, bless its enthusiastic, evasive, courageous little publishing heart, produced an unparalleled threesome of books -- WIER & POUCE, FLORRY OF WASHINGTON HEIGHTS, SWANNY'S WAYS. This triad, sexier than a hockey rink blanketed with doorknobs, warm as all humanity hovering in helicopters above the volcanic rift, is a brand new look at the art of narrative, and an heroic assessment of our times.
Then JOURNALISM, a book of poems -- prison, New York City, Hollywood, Cape Breton -- so compassioned, so germane. And Sun & Moon did 43 FICTIONS, swiping passages from all his books, and including some new works of mind expanding, free-fall honesty and free speech.
Today Steve Katz has given up writing to volunteer for a program that puts him in feathers, transforms him from a human being (of which there is an enormous glut), into a california condor (of which there be a pitiful few). So if you feel the shadow pass over your body as you stroll in Santa Monica or Borrego Springs, and happen to look up to find its silent source, it could be steve katz that poopoo in your eye.
http://www.stevekatzwrites.com
My new book, Antonello's Lion, is available HERE from Green Integer .
Myspace Editor
Pimp MySpace
