Metarules of the S.M.F.

by Paul John Adams

Metarules of the S•M•F is a novel concerned with how culture is born at the level of the streets. It is the next, necessary development in intelligent literary fiction on an urban theme.

Mala and Cloud are organizing a set of smart, strong, determined young black men to carve out a territory and protect their neighborhood. They live by a code that unites them, and the rivals that confront them only fortify their resolve. The S•M•F brothers are ready to live together, bleed together, and die together in the streets, to make their mark and live their lives their way.

290 pages, Paperback

Published July 1, 2017

About the author

Author Paul John Adams is a father of two who aims to steer his children on the right path. He's lived well enough, but he's neither blind nor forgetful. He believes in the universality of human struggle and the occasional necessity of gallows humor. While he's alive, he knows it's the strength of family that sustains him. But if, through his words, he can help another soul to shrug off a bit of life's misery—and even have a laugh at it!—that too will be a treat.

Reviews

[Zadignose]

Hello fellow humans. Having written this book, I present it to you this July 1st, 2017. July comes early to the land of morning calm (soon to be renamed the land of morning rage). The revolution has begun. Should you choose to read and review it, that's cool, and I hope you enjoy it. You are welcome to use the comment space below to bash and banter if you're in the mood to boil my blood.

Spread the word, and get with the movement. The first 144,000 readers get a free pass into heaven. The rest can go to blazes.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Technically I am not gr=Friends with this author. In the sense that the author=Profile is not on my Friends List. However. The flesh and blood author seems to have embodied itself in a second profile with whom I am in fact gr=Friends. So everything here is a lie. Everything I say below is a lie. Or, if it's not a lie--it could be truth, disguised as a lie--you'll have to discover that on your own following your own scientific line of inquiry. And to make matters worse, in terms of my motivation to lie, the author shipped me transoceanically an inscribed comp copy. Imagine that.

Sons of Anarchy is the general gist of the story. Bad boys doing good. Forming a community against all odds.

Look. I've got this really pedantic hangup with the use of the prefix 'meta'. There are in fact no 'metarules' in this novel. There are rules, but no 'metarules'. Why? There are rules which govern the S.M.F. (a street gang more or less with aspirations to do their best by the community ; they are strictly anti-gun for example) but there are no rules about those rules (roughly said), their formulation, etc etc. Ie, 'metaethics' is not about ethics but about how we talk about ethics. Metarules would not be rules so much as how we talk about rules. And unless you're not bothered by infinite recursion (which I think still leads to absurdities), 'metarules' cannot be second order rules about the making of rules. Buck's got to stop somewhere. Which is why phenomenology is so much more powerful than anything the 'analytic' tradition has ever come up with. Ie, logic has to be grounded in something.

S.M.F. I've already insisted that it means Sick Motherfucking Friends of TS. But no. It is in fact Serious Mother Fuckers. At any rate, I had been looking for the place in the PMRC hearings where Gore (?) asks Snider about the name of his fan club which is a pretty cool moment ; but all I came up with is this Rolling Stone interview from recently :: "The one thing he had on me was the name of the fan club, the Sick Motherfucking Friends of Twisted Sister. So when he asked, "What does 'S.M.F.' stand for?" I got the proud distinction of being one of the few people to say "motherfucker" in Washington – well, on camera and not behind closed doors. I'm sure they all said, "That motherfucker Dee Snider" afterwards. But I kind of bitch-slapped him quite a bit, and I took some shots at his wife, as well." So there's that.
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/new...

And let's get this out of the way. There will be some PC storm about this novel. And that storm will all be hot air. If you take a moment to read (not even closely) this is not a novel that 'represents' a pre-existing racial reality. It is a political fantasy. And you can change those colors as quickly as you'd like ; (and you can change the slight street argot too however much you like if it bugs you). Just like in Sons of Anarchy. You can't so easily shift around the misogyny ; I mean, that part probably does reproduce some pre-existing non-fictional reality. Just like in Sons of Anarchy. But I mean, the whole thing is not some down in the mouth bleak future for humanity but much rather a rousing call for actually organizing ourselves for a better freakin' life. Exactly the opposite, politically, of what is being enacted in reality today. So, I'd call it a political fantasy in the most neutro-positive sense.

Just one more iteration of what I just said : We have the choice between organizing our life ourselves or having our lives organized for us by corporations. That is the choice. This novel clearly--clearly--favors the former and indicates, in fact, how far outside that possibility is from our typical political imagination. It's just like the choice between cooking/gardening yourself (and with others) or just saying fuck it I don't have time and stop by a fucking mcdonald's chamberpot.



Whadda you wanna do with your life? I wanna rock.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRwrg...

[MJ Nicholls]

I read 110 pages of this excellent novel of urban warfare, street gangery, and clan philosophy. The reason for non-completion: a recent spate of paranoia, self-loathing, and dental anguish sapped my usual readerly brio, in addition to this sort of fiction not being my bag. But the prose is well-hewn, the episodes fast-paced, and the characters have a swaggering credibility that makes their escapades hard to dislike, violence aside. It is also a bold choice in a novel of this sort one might confine to “genre” (unfairly) to focus on episodic moments with a less obvious plot pushing the whole thing along: this lends the antics a sense of vagabondage, that chimes with the reality of urban street life, although the SMF are more organised. The mingling of street slang and semi-literary language is also convincing, which is not an easy trick to pull. Recommend for doyens of the urban street fiction feat da yoof.

[Amitlissack · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thoroughly enjoyable and unique reading experience.

Playful and funny at times. Scary and violent at others. But always unexpected and engaging. Very hard to put down.

Get it!

[Mike Kleine · Rating 5 out of 5]

You think you know but really, you don't know... (Review forthcoming).

[Landon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Metarules of the S.M.F. was an interesting story. The story was unexpecting and engaging, once you start to read it you wouldn't be able to stop reading. Definitely wasn't disappointed in what I read.