Melancholia Pub

Hi Tony....

I was reading «Songs from...» at Starbuck downtown Montreal and I had on the table all your books, the 2 covers of «Down and out...» etc... A girl from McGill University was doing her session paper or something and she glanced toward my table and kind of froze there reading the titles... I got shivers going thru «Stardust memories»... what a fucking well written piece of life, or is it fiction, or a bit of both: in any case the story hit me all the way to my soul! So good, so intense and so perfect: the rhythm, atmosphere, choice of words, images etc... So that is why this book is important and you will have to salvage all the stories in it, although I haven't read all of them I am sure that they are all as good as «Stardust» and they could maybe be the first part of a 2 part book of short stories... Bukowski style, or you know that girl writer who wrote Bare Back Mountain, can't get her name I think it is Proulx... anyway she wrote good short stories about Montana I think I read some of them... and short stories are in vogue, as hot as those «graphic novels»... So far tony you have a pretty good body of work around a very precise thematic: life on Low Life Street... «exile on Main Street«... and you should I think keep on expanding that body of work... although it in the heavy metal aspect of that hardcore life, there is sensibility and despair etc... You are to the addict life style what Bukowski was to booze, without destroying yourself in real life... you did not get caught in the Destroy Trip... thanks to Nico and Vanessa! But from what I feel so far from reading you I think you should dig more and more into that aspect, at least until you have the fell for it and love writing about it... after well you will see... or maybe you'll keep on going in that vein (no pun etc)... I had fun playing around with all kind of variation of Stardust Memories and Seizure Wet Dreams... mixing them together etc... Some were sounded pretty good...

So far you have manage to construct a universe that belongs to you... very personal and sincere and written in a literature quality... A lot of people have lived what you write about, like a lot of people did what I did... but who as the guts and talent and inspiration to lay it down on paper or on tape or on the stage! You are on your way to a great literary realization! You have found what is so hard to find and sometime impossible: a voice of you own, a tony O'Neill poetic singularity... and that is not a gift from the gods or God... it has to be stolen from the Devil, fucking the Muses till they scream »Please write your motherfucker!»... And we obey, we do it... I am talking here about the type of writing we do, and writers like Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso, Bukowski, Fante, etc... and Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Breton, Tzara etc... it is another story for writers like I don't know, ... ? Rilke, Claudel, and all those poetic precious poet... the heavy-metal hard-core soul searchers, «star fuckers», brain blowers that we love to read and that made us write do not take writing for granted, like it is a birth gift given to the few... the writers I like went to hell and got the devil so scared that he ran by the back door... no forward address... gone! the writers I love are soaked in blood sweat and tears... I do not know if that make any sense but I tried to translate what makes me tick and adopt a writer for life... I know that from the start... It was that when I read the first paragraph of «Down and out...»... Hooked from the start, and addicted without any remorse...

Here Tony I will give you a description of the books I am sending you so keep this part of this e-mail:

1. Express pour l'Eden, my most recent book of poems... I am proud of it... good stuff... maybe you will get the feel of it just glancing thru it...

2. Roman d'amour, a very early book, a collector's item here and in France... out of print... a kind o f novel «à la Brautigan» but on the junk side of writing...

3. Chants de l'Amérique inavouable, all the lyrics I wrote... most of them recorded with Aut'Chose and Francoeur...

4. Des images pour une gitane, a book and a cd: love poems that I wrote for Claudine in the eighties and that were published in small number and in traditional typesetting and artisanal paper... I will give you the original editions when we meet, if we do and I hope we do... There was 3 books at the time and they are collected here with a lot of modification from the original poems and some never published poems... People went nuts when it was published: some said I had sold out with that soft poetry other said it was the mark of great writers (I tend to believe those were right!)

5. Chansons d'épouvante, a cd released 2-3 years ago... sold well in Quebec: a re-recorded the songs of my 3 first albums under the name Aut'Chose (my cration of a band) but the musicians that formed that new Aut'Chose were legend of alternatif rock of the nineties: Voivod (world known), Groovy Ardvaark, Grimskunk... We played the songs live on tape, with no arrangements: we kept the songs the same exactly... the sound was more powerful... And that edition of the CD is special it contains 2 cads second cod with a bonus song of Francoeur... that was a limited edition... can't find it no more...

6. Rimbaud: this pocket book edition was the first one ever published and the one that we all read and made us love Rimbaud... it is a legendary edition... we can still find some in used books library... not often though! That book carries all kind of memories for me... the jacket was perfect with that legendary drawing from Verlaine...

7. Le calepin d'un menteur, a very original little book, worth a lot of money for collectors... impossible to find like Roman d'amour... very vulgar exercise in writing... stuff written on napkins, piece of papers, matchbook covers etc... on the road from Mtl to Vancover to L.A. to Frisco and back and on acid booze junk etc etc... Very outrageous book...

8. Neons in the Night, choice of poems from all the books that were published at the time of the translation... it was well received... I think it either won a prize or a mention in translation... You will notice that the early stuff is very hermetic... we were creating a new language at the time... lsd poetry: new words, English words and expression, surrealistic effects, organic images etc... All the French poetry of the sixties and seventies in France and Quebec had to experience that intense exploratory language searching... while the Canadian and American poetry was more realists and still is... The closer to what we were doing are Philip Lamentia and ee cummings... and maybe other that you know better than I do or cannot think of now... In the eighties, I started to write in a more direct style and everybody followed my traces... And today everybody does what one wants, in all directions... there is a lot of weak and bad stuff... some think that all you have to do is tell a story and that is it... if the story is good great but if it is weak then it isn't worth shit! Myself and a few other are called by the literary academics the «californificateurs» (californificators) or the «américanistes»... we wanted to be part of the American counter-culture, the flower-power movement, de psychedelic revolution: that is why we had to use American words and expressions etc... The stuff is great when you smoke a joint or drop an acid tab... like listening to Sgt Pepper or The Doors... I am due for another translation of my stuff... I would not put the French version of the poems in it... I might put in that book those poems as the first part called Neons in the Night and a second part with new translations of poems not included in here... I have to work on that sometime...


so that it
hope you enjoy either reading some of the stuff or listening to some other or just look at it...

take care Tony


lucien xxx
rock-desire

I think that is it

I still have to send you a few other books
and 2 dvds...