Rick’s Comments (group member since Apr 14, 2020)

Rick’s comments from the The Assassination of Olof Palme group.

Hi Mike. No, I haven't considered anything like that at all. First, Maintentenance Ends ran a successful gofundme for Voices After Evelyn. Then River Boat Books ran an absurdly incompetent gofuckme for this year's titles. I was already uncomfortable with it being no the heels of the ME drive.
I think the nature of this project is such that word will get out, and if I have any luck at all with other books in the meantime, this will become known and desired.
The real question is how, if it gets a contract, if it sells, how I distribute the money. At this second I think the best idea is I take 50% of the author money and 50% would go to a committee for writers run by people who contributed to the novel. That money would be used to support writers based on need and whatever else the committee would determine.
What do you think of that? I just thought it up now.

The flimsy spine of the narrative is me and my fiction stand-in, who I disinter in the beginning. We are talking back and forth throughout the novel. There is no attempt to make it stylistically cohesive as I will probably have written 80% or so by the end. But, for instance, there is a character named agent Mike who tends to get lost and a friend on Tenerife, Bori Praper, who has a book due in Fall from River Boat that's very funny and smart, too, is on a mission from me to find this agent Mike. so he is contributing short bits in his own style. I'm still looking for someone to play Klaus Barbie consoling a young US guy in Germany who found him, told his US boss, and was told to shut the fuck up. I imagine him crushed, going back into his office, Barbie coming in with a way of the world darkly funny pep talk...

What is this novel?

This is an anthological novel, meaning that it includes more writers than the man who conceived it, Rick Harsch.
It was inspired by the realization that writers should dismiss as many of the constructs the current business of writing imprisons us in. As Bob would say, the present writing landscape is mindbottling. I was writing this novel and came across a passage I needed to write and thought, Sesshu Foster would be a better choice to write this, and so I asked Sesshu to do it, and he agreed. Thus was born a collaborative effort.
The topics of the novel include the Reagan era's magical effect on the US populace, making them forget Vietnam and Nixon, the antics of US spies in Europe after WWII, how they contributed to bloodshed especially in Italy and France, but also employed and later ratlined out Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, from Europe to South America, where he was free to earn lots of money for 37 years after he should have been executed (the French wanted him bad, but the US kept him cozy a few hundred miles away for 6 years then sent him on his way). Iran/Contra figures prominently, as does Olof Palme. But the heart of the novel is Giuseppe Pinelli, pictured on the cover after 'falling' four stories from a police station in Milano in 1969. A right wing group that had received C4 explosives from a US agent had bombed a square in Milano and the anarchist Pinelli was arrested, killed, and now songs are written about him, and the Nobel Laureate Dario Fo wrote his Accidental Death of an Anarchist about him. Yes, the Balkans play a significan role in the novel, which will include at least 60 contributors. Right not I have about 70% of the material I need. You are all invited to contribute more, from one good word like mindbottling to a chapter or two or three...

Is that too much excerption?

This just came in and I have it now on page 2

Igor Pertot, a Slovene sailor on board ship, stuck off the coast of Miami (April 17, 2020)

There is Corona and I don't meen the beer.
Will "Blondie" win the ellections,
Can it meen the end is near.

Olympics can wait, industry can wait too,
Who can predict when we'll be through.

Men are bored at home, some are violent too,
Wives don' t hear anymore "darling I love you".
Kissing forbitten, blowjobs dangerous too,
Social distance is making use the hand through and through.

Sport results are not new anymore,
In the East beaten "blacks" due to a false spreading rumóur.

What we will become? Let's wait and see.
I hope we'll be no fascists and kneel on our knee.
Let's hope that some good will happen,
Or at least worse will not be...

HI Paul--great to hear about the Driftless Trilogy, famous in the lit world as a book chosen for a course in US film and literature at the University of Tasmania (true story!).

Surely you have then read David Peace's Japan novels?

Anyone can contribute, but we will get to that. One great word will do it, or a great chapter, part of a conversation...today I am putting in the novel a friend's brilliant word 'mindbottline'. We were on a whatsapp call and ths uneducated madcap genius does this all the time, his tongue slips and he keeps going, this time coming up with a neologistic mastrpiece. He also recently came up with the transgeograpical term panhappening recently.

This book eschews proofreading, else why do something different. Everybody fucking hates proofing.

One of my contributors is John Sime the undertaker (cue up dark children's song), who wrote about C.Wright Mills in Madison, WI, and today delivered this gem:
Long after it was all over, an internationally reknowned mortician wrote the following about the death of Giuseppe Pinelli:

Well, Pinelli definitely died from a fall from a 4th story window. It was just a question of whether the police pushed him out the window or whether, Ooops, he tripped and fell. Either way, in such an injury one thing that happens is that the rapid contact of the body with the ground tends to explode cells, not just at the place whether the body hit the ground. while this guys face is basically intact, although there appears to be a medium sized scar on the left side near the eye, the most noticeable change from previous photos of his when he was alive is that it looks like somebody has pumped fluid into his face, making him look about 10 pounds heavier. what has happened is that a concussion wave has swept through the body, reaching outlying areas such as the head and face with enough force to explode cell membranes, emptying cell material out into open body space, like eggs shattered in a cardboard carton, spilling all over inside the bag of the body.

Okay, no posts yet from anyone but me and sidemod George, so I will just say Paul Curran is a writer and I just saw the cover of his novel and were i in a bookstore I would be looking it over in a creepy way right now, just to see if I coud outcreep it.

I know a few of you personally. Guiliano, my head is still spinning from all the information you imparted during your visit. Dan, I miss you. Otherwise I know some of you distantly or by writing. David David and Dan and George have all written really really good novels. Giuliano writes great articles. Or good articles and the others write great novels. Chris reviews. Is Jeff there? 2 great novels and reviews. Both are great reviewers.
Can you all please tell us something about who you are please? I think Paper Pills is Musilian.
Oh, According to Osterreichische post, LS Popovič's novel arrives here tomorrow.

here is one from Larry Riley. I asked him about Dan Mitrione and he sent this, which I included as a report to the author, Rick Harsch:

Mitrione was a small town Indiana police chief who was first recruited by the FBI and then filched from them by the CIA who sent him to two/three Latin American countries [starting in 1959, the year you were born, as this is an autobiographical novel] and one of the things he did was train police and military personnel and because of the numerous freedom fighting movements in the region and the United States predilection for supporting right wing dictatorships that training morphed into teaching interrogation techniques and then into torture. In Uruguay which was his last station and where he died--he was training police and military--they were grabbing homeless people off the streets and torturing them with the picata--or the cattle prod. They'd tie them down to a metal frame--douse them in water and go at their genitals, mouths, eyes--or more tender spots on their bodies. The homeless were their guinea pigs--the idea was that no one cared about them and no one would look for them afterwards and they didn't want these people telling stories so they killed them. The main resistance was the Tupac Amaru's--when they actually captured one of them people knew they had them......the thing that happened though was Mitrione was living on his own in this housing compound that was pretty much for foreign diplomats etc. and the Tupac's kidnapped him not knowing anything about him other than he was an American. He was being passed back and forth between two or three cells and the reason they killed him is because they were being closed in on and a signal from one cell to another was missed. There was a tape of an interrogation between Mitrione and his captors and Mitrione is trying to get them to let him go--he talks about his family, kids, I'm just a regular guy, blah, blah, blah. They had no idea who he was until after he died. Then it turned into kind of an event. Nixon went ballistic--the body went back to Indiana and Sinatra and Jerry Lewis put on a show.

I, rick harsch, conceived this project as a sort of lengthy purge to get the worst literature has wrought in my life as a writer out of my system. I love the idea of one of my best works not being 'mine'. I also needed to get some last thoughts about the US out of my system. Reagan had to be defaced, the protection of Klaus Barbie and his ilk had to be illuminated, there was one great joke to be told, and Guiseppe Pinelli deserves more than just one great play.

I'd love to see members besides myself and George come up with topics

By the way, if you are here, you have also been invited into the novel, into contributing. If you invited yourself, that's still an invitation, isn't it.

cont'd
More than once.
So why not again?
Indeed.
Palme was murdered on Sveavagen. Coincidence? Would Spear know the street? We have Spear in the Gladio, linked to one O. North—
Tenuously.
Tenuously in the bitter, swirling world of betrayal and lust, greed and bad faith—
There the French again fuck the prose with philosophy. What if, what if, let’s suppose just for one second, what if Sartre or Camus, or even what was her name—
Stop that.
de Beauvoir, sorry, a nod to Algren—what if they had the hairy assed humor of their forceptors?
Anceptors?
Anteaters, fuckitmatter?
Fact, I would argue tenuously. The tenuous descript, or decrypt. Thin, maybe—but tenuous? Hardly. Firmly, undersea, alien to the airs, tendrilous—yes, that’s what I’m looking for, Tendrilous! Thin and yielding ultimately unbreakable. Oh yes, we throw around baboons like nobody’s bobo, but—
Come back…
Say things like tenuous without we give it the testes of baboons, the—
Come back…
Right right right. Point is, and you accept this, for was it not you who—
Yes.
So the one untenuous FACT of the ContraNorth and our man Spear is the sharp stick in the eye of that one phone call, the tendrilous

cont'd
And now?
Now?
Have you and Patches patched it up?
Suleiman, and what do you mean patched it up. This is current. In the current.
Is that some kind of point? I mean, the autobiographical hardly need be timely.
True enough, but to provide an example.
An example of what? It’s wonderful stuff: a man and his dog.
Wonderful stuff my rectum: it’s banal horseshit.
Not in the least, but I’m not going to scour it for superflatitudes. Anyway, you’re obviously exaggerating because you want a liberating point, to make a point that liberates you to do whatever the fuck you want, which is hardly necessary as for all anyone knows that’s not only all you do anyway, it’s all anyone anyway does. Look: over there the Wings of the Dove, flat on its back. Modern Library, looking brand new. You bought it, let me guess, because you had an unreachable scroff up your cavern, tip of the ol prostata, and just had to buy an English book in a Slovene knjigarnica, am I right. Haven’t touched it since. Not the point. Point is Hank there as far as we know that very book was Hank on absinthe and nipple clamps, typing in jock strap yelling yee haw! every return of the cylindrical.
Good enough, good enough. Yes, saves me the trouble of spelling it out. Why don’t you write your autobiography? Who doesn’t? or would you recognize it if I did? What is more central to my weathered withered wayfaring than the puny outpourings of rage in the streets of 1985 La Crosse, Wisconsin? Hence, more speared into my craw than Oliver North? Or that fat Israeli I always want to call Shimon Peres?
You mean Sharon.
Haganahagahahaganah: right, that’s Suleiman clearing his throat. Sharon, pure white fat Polish onionized lard in a jar fat hate and how I fucking hated and hate him still. I see a photo of him next to Casper Weinberger, some fucking magazine back then, and if Casper Weinberger had been Primo Levi I would have hated him, such was the hate that fat fuck had harboured it heaved off him in waves like heat, demon heat, hell heat.
---
See? Now that’s autobiography. That’s my guttural, my intestinetwisting twooth.
---
Let me give you another example, as if I need further to make my point. A short autobiographical bit, this time you sit still and I’ll give you a snapshot, utterly without action, Spear, still life, long enough after the thwang-waves invisible of arrowhead in tree have disappeared. Label it Stockholm, 1985, Winter:

Aurora borealis, Spear said, leaning against ceiling to floor glass. Read about it. Read about it. And air density, curvature of the earth, vision, the psychology - all psychology - related to views. Nice view. In his native arrogance he ascribed to Stockholm a provincialism it would retain even as he delivered of himself historical elements of Swedish past that had the lustre and weight of the foam that built the old city. Vikings, too: Swedish Indians. That’s a Lapp*…or a Sami. Spinoza or Leibniz, one of those two had written of the atomic, or carbuncular, or perhaps plain granular nature of reality. The past was illusory. He could not imagine Jews here, the Jews of Sveavagen, perhaps. Diamonds and, later, weapons…but still diamonds. The Jew had called from Malmo. Called. There would be no more calls, the phone a bakelite wreck against the door, the tail of a rat that can’t be exterminated. How the fuck did anyone have this number? And Frankie the Jew, no less. Is that you? He said nothing. It’s Frankie. Still he said nothing. I saw the Indian—here in Malmo. He didn’t see the need to hang up when he could just fire the intrusive machine against the door, one of those thick Swedish doors that traps sound on your side, even the sound of bakelite bursting, which sounds like a homemade blown bomb cased in a thick esoteric alloy canister. The Jew saw the Indian in Malmo. What the fuck were either of them doing in Malmo? This was the last time he would be lured to Stockholm, or anywhere else in Sweden—no reading Cellini in public. Last time he saw the Indian was on the Lido, where his skinny legs were revealed for all to see. Who would have thought the dreaded Indian had legs like bamboo stalks? And what could be more dangerous than such an exsuffligate revelation? So that later, at the hotel bar in Dorsoduro, out of nowhere the Indian made one of those nonpareil mystery moves, his hand around the neck of Frankie the Jew. Only Spear knew what to make of it, the bamboo legs. Some things are best left unknown. Fucking Lido. It was Frankie the Jew’s idea, so what’s the big deal. The Indian let go, didn’t he? The way Frankie the Jew sounded on the phone the Indian still had his hand around his neck. The Indian is in Malmo. So get the fuck out of Malmo. You think I’ll spend another night in this frozen Anasazi hive? What price loyalty? This price loyalty. 24 hours in Stockholm in the dead of winter. The worst of it was that anybody else could have managed the assignment. Pantelleria Jack gets Capri and I get fucking Stockholm. His father, his father who had spent a year in Oslo and Stockholm, had once advised him, “Assagai, be loyal and obedient always. Otherwise leave no bodies in writhing.” In this cold a body could not writhe, nor rise and no writing about it: the tomb uncarved marble yet to have found its future form.
*Realism: difficult as it was for me to refrain from the joke I left off the word dance and forged straight forgewardly fore.

Nothing happens, I guess that’s your point. Nothing happens yet the resonance is far greater—it’s like a radioactive…turd, or whatnot. Suggests universes. Piques curiosity. It opens, despite the closed door, thick, soundproof, while the tale of the dog contains the dog, suggests the wife tale is typical, dull, yet another…Pantelleria Jack, Frankie the Jew, the Indian—stick legs and rapid murderous moves. Sveavagan, winter. Countdown to murder: now there’s a title. Probably been used before.

(cont'd)
Elliot Abrams and other worthies who shall be prancing about these pages like nogoodniks do when the guillotine has been put away and the prisons serve sorbet. Returning, we turn left, and on our immediate left, is a strip of more and different struggling greenery, this but two meters wide, not an island of flora, yet neither a hedge, given the struggles of whatever swampedge species officialdom is experimenting with—still, just as good a place for Suleiman to sniff, lick, douse, dance and crap. We move on, past the street crossing back to our building, to the end of another block, cross back over there, and he is thus afforded yet one more island of houndsmells to inspect. Last night, though, having had these troubles regarding our relationship that I have alluded to, I decided to talk it through with him, and kept up a sort of running account of how his specific behaviors affected me, how, for one instance his stops and starts prevented me from achieving a proper, healthful walk. By the time we were three-quarters home, and he had cleansed his bowels, was dawdling near some hideous skeletal brownery that was probably dying from fear of what it saw happened to the palms and oleander of yore across the street, I finally told him quite simply that as he was an animate creature it was rather unfortunate that I would be better off with a potted plant for a pet. Now an intimate of mine, say Bob, and ask no more of him here, would jump to the conclusion that I am still miffed about the incident a few nights before, when I awoke to the utter confusion with which a deep and badly needed sleep yields to a dog fucking the head so troubled already. I didn’t strike him, rather I rose calmly and made my way to the balcony and lit a smoke and let the black, very black night lure my mind to something like a status quo, after which I read a bit and returned to the bed just when a low rumble of thunder gargled the skies and Suleiman began the heavy breathing that precedes his thunderstorm panic and I had the answer I was, in truth, not looking for. In fact, it was Bob to whom I had already expressed my growing disillusion with the pet just days before. I had gone to bed a bit too unprepared for sleep, yet quite calm, and soon grew thoughtful. There at my head was my dog; far across the bed my wife, sound asleep, and not for the first time I considered irresolutely the circumstance that my dog and I had a more intimate relationship in bed than my wife and I—remember, I noted that we have very different schedules—and now she was pressing that point with some of her more common sleep noises, something very much like a snore, that it occurred to me, in that it was in no way obnoxious or distracting, was perhaps the engine of her sleep, and the moaning noises were without drama of any kind. Why that perfectly affectless brainstorm and demi-poetic swell of observation should have led me to examine the character of my pet dog, I have no idea. But there you have it.

First discussion: what is an autobiographical novel?

I will provide an excerpt from Olof that should lead to some answers of more questions:

So, Rick, the autobiographical then.
Sounds like a grammatical: the autobiographical then.
Now! He veritably barked.
So I dogged him, but fairly so: fine, I just returned from a walk with Sultan Suleiman, the remaining family dog. I get the night walk. The two of us have been estranged of late, the result of a sort of evolution of my thoughts about him, what he means to me, what he means when he behaves as he does, in his dutiful, little varying quotidian, he being in his mix more shepherd than terrier, than his spaniel mother, than that fourth of him that made his bastard father a threesome of Istrian jebačery.
[sorry, Slovene/Serb: jebač=fucker, meaning no more than gigolo, the dialect a dance differing.] So Uroš the dog expert told me. Suleiman has at least four breeds amingle in him, though it did not require an Uroš to spot the predominance of shepherd. It’s that which explains what I would have until recently called his personality and find more and more strikes me as something less than that, something more mice in a maze about him, his fundamental decency and his slavish facelicking. Say a pack of us, visitors new to him, the family--make us seven in toto--are returning home, walking up the four flights of stairs. Suleiman accounts for one and all rushing to the first step, making sure it seems the first of us gets the idea, as if he were directing the climb; and, yes, indeed, should one newfound lamb pause to correct the behaviour of a shoe, to slap at a brat, Suleiman will pause, let part of the pack pass until movement is regenerated, problem solved, no doubt in his mind due to his diligence, whence he will rush back to the lead. At the door, he will enter, yet remain in the vestibule until all are accounted for. The home life is similarly shepherded. And of course in his mind or what passes for it, or what genetically speaking owns his soul, Suleiman has been responsible for the orderly and endured day after day. He owes to me—would he but acknowledge it--what variety our nebulous needies afford. For I am unstable, I vary, I sleep poorly, I go down, I get up. All others operate according to plans that he must account for. He must remain all afternoon on the bed of B. until B. returns else he is not doing his duty. Yet when she returns and he has wildly greeted her, mad barking, faceslavering, etc., he soon returns to that room to the bed of A., who will be back a bit later. Suffice to say in shortcuts that my wife is stable, sleeps quite early, nods off rapidly, indwells deeply, leaving me to conquer the night, or at least the time that gives it its name. Suleiman not being without his own needs, I take him out when all others sleep, take him out without a leash, in violation of statute…—fuck it, I shan’t look it up: the fine, though, is out of proportion to the offense, on this point I insist. Here is Suleiman’s one chance to dash about freely…if only he would. I mentioned estrangement. I mentioned we just returned from a walk. It was what, rather unfortunately, has become our standard walk. See, he does not run freely, though he does appreciate a good long walk—the problem is he stops too often and I spend far too much of a long walk waiting for him to sniff leaves and branches, signalling his departure from these particulars of verdure with a leg lift and a douse of pee (to be fair, early in the walk they are jets of pee pee), so that, at best, I end up having taken the air, rather than exercised. I could go on about his deteriorating eyesight and the effect that has, but the point is we generally stick to our standard walk down the overly wide, considering the scarcity of feet trafficking it, sidewalk before our building, which is bounded by three long oval islands of greenery too oft overhauled by the minions of the mayor—this is the Mediterranean, let it grow, let it grow let it grow—now utterly palmless!, which is where he sniffs and pisses and eventually, leading up to the symphonic dumping up innardly solids with a surprisingly nimble ‘dance of the blind dog’. At the end of the fat sidewalk we reach the wall, or what was The Wall, the Wall Pub (now Café d’Istria), so named as it is on the corner where city walls once wedged. There we cross the street to another wide sidewalk, more aptly obese for it borders the sea and contains the irregular passeggiata, an Italian custom retained in this city in which 90% of the Italians remain so elsewhere, replaced by Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Northern Greeks or Macedons, Bosniaks, and Albanians, all in great number, and perhaps representatives of a couple dozen more nations, including that of Elliot Abrams

The full title, and this is important, is The Assassination of Olof Palme, a People's Novel.
Using Olof in the title is a classic misdirection play, straight out of the Miami Dolphins offensive line's playbook from 1972. Olof IS back there, and the his river rushes, but another gap opens, this one a DIVIDE, and up through comes Spear and Son, Raspeguy, our man on the cover Giuseppe Pinelli, and here we find there is another ball and Nancy's trying to get round end on Ronnie's giddyup, her hand grasping the waistband of the jock strap, holding it high over her head...

To be clear, the book is in progress. In fact, tomorrow I expect to receive a passage on an assassination in Washington DC that was part of Operation Condor . The 'reporter' is Larry Riley, the translator of Roberto Arlt's The Flamethrowers, first in English, completing in English finally one of the seminal novels of perhaps the most advanced literary civilization of the previous century.