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Behold Goliath
1964. First printing.
240 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1964
37 people want to read
About the author
Alfred Chester
14 books14 followersAlfred Chester was born on September 7, 1928 in Brooklyn, N.Y., to a family of Jewish-Russian immigrants. He received his B.A. at New York University in 1949 and completed some graduate study at Columbia University. In 1951, he left for Paris as other bohemian expatriates had done before him, most notably, Gertrude Stein.
While living in Paris (1951-1958) he began his career as a serious writer, composing such works as the collection of short stories, Here Be Dragons (1955) and his first novel, Jamie Is My Heart's Desire (1956). During this time, Chester also met and began a relationship with an Israeli pianist, Arthur, with whom he lived in Paris and, for a short time, in New York City. While in Paris, Chester befriended other literary figures, such as Susan Sontag, James Baldwin, and Princess Marguerite Caetani.
Upon returning to New York City in 1959, Chester enjoyed considerable success and fame throughout the 1960's, and was very much a part of the avant-garde literary scene. He continued to write essays and criticism for various magazines, and also published the works Behold Goliath (1964), The Exquisite Corpse (1967), and Head of a Sad Angel (1953-1966). During this time, however, Chester was afflicted with deteriorating health and psychological instability, and was as well a serious drug user and alcoholic. In 1963, he sailed to Morocco on the advice of his friend Paul Bowles, and this marked the beginning of a series of erratic travels all over the world. On August 2, 1971, in Israel, Alfred Chester died in obscurity; by this time, he had become alienated from most of his friends and the literary circles of New York.
While living in Paris (1951-1958) he began his career as a serious writer, composing such works as the collection of short stories, Here Be Dragons (1955) and his first novel, Jamie Is My Heart's Desire (1956). During this time, Chester also met and began a relationship with an Israeli pianist, Arthur, with whom he lived in Paris and, for a short time, in New York City. While in Paris, Chester befriended other literary figures, such as Susan Sontag, James Baldwin, and Princess Marguerite Caetani.
Upon returning to New York City in 1959, Chester enjoyed considerable success and fame throughout the 1960's, and was very much a part of the avant-garde literary scene. He continued to write essays and criticism for various magazines, and also published the works Behold Goliath (1964), The Exquisite Corpse (1967), and Head of a Sad Angel (1953-1966). During this time, however, Chester was afflicted with deteriorating health and psychological instability, and was as well a serious drug user and alcoholic. In 1963, he sailed to Morocco on the advice of his friend Paul Bowles, and this marked the beginning of a series of erratic travels all over the world. On August 2, 1971, in Israel, Alfred Chester died in obscurity; by this time, he had become alienated from most of his friends and the literary circles of New York.
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December 26, 2013
Nature could endure nothing but itself.
I think of other people's love lives as like the rain. I hear of it happening somewhere else. It is probably always raining, somewhere, to someone else. I guess it happens somewhere.
This was necessary, Goliath knew, because he who has given away his soul between nine and five cannot usually bear to face it (or does not know where to find it) between five and nine. He made this unreal world spring up around Goliath as if it had always been there, now wet and shivering. If you were speeding to the earth as fast as the collection it would be better than the no two alike. Closeness, happening because it had too. Goliath catches up with his own special/everyone has it because it is always happening somewhere. What comfort is that? It is the not consolation that we're all in the same shit hole. A man tugs on Goliath's scarf when he is going to go. Finally going to go, this time. I cannot recreate it in a book review what happens when he is wearing his own scarf and the new man his own, not Goliath's woolen noose.
He felt his heart struggling under the weight of it, and the emptiness that reached his eyes was more absurd than gluttony, worse than vanity, more terrible than affectation. It existed only by virtue of what wasn't there. Goliath sat on the cot laden down by every book and piece of clothing he had ever thrown away; they were inescapable; he was he who did not have them. Every loss had increased his possessions. Through the violence of his heart he heard his voice: "Why don't you have any furniture?"
This man, a dream of a dancer on a floor of her lost clothes. A recurring daymare. Goliath suffers and he is drowned again when he visits his mother. His mother's picked up lover is a corpse on the floor, or just a drunkard to be tossed back into the night void. May God forgive you and medicated dreamless sleep. I don't know who could forgive Goliath for plumbing the womb again for his missing piece. He would plunder and beggar if there was anything left to steal. So instead he cries with head in lap. Tell me who I am? And there are lovers who like boys and girls, as much as boys as girls, tricks and illusions, soldiers sailors tinkers and spies. An offering voice could find Goliath's room by the way it smells. Not for soil or pleasure, or any toll, has Goliath sewn his leanings into another's pockets. I think he must have misplaced the coat one evening. Left it on the back of someone's chair, a person only visited. Behold Goliath had been intended as a novel. The sections could have all been their own stories. I would have liked to read more about the man with the scarf. It reads like voices picked up until a light is switched on. A man makes nothing sound so good as black bread rubbed with a bit of garlic. The scarf man's collection of emptiness in his apartment and searching for a pair of big fat arms. That's how it looked in Goliath's running man mind, before the voices get close and the rain separates. I liked the way that Chester wrote the loneliness as if it belonged to everyone. Goliath doesn't just pick it up in the street. It follows him, toilet tissue to a shoe. Mostly I could read his descriptions of New York Forever. And summer swoops over Paris like a butterfly net...
Bombs sprang like teeth from her gums, her lips were tumid with flame and blood, seared skulls and swollen bellies, and along her tongue roared a pageant as deep as time splattered with man's inhumanities, his organized uniformed hatreds, a man marching gold into the golden flames, emerging, if emerging at all, melted, leaden, in pieces, and as cheap as breath. from 'Head of a Sad Angel'
I've held back from trying to cover my tongue tiedness to name Alfred Chester's humor senses. He cracks his funny bones like whiplash. It's like listening to Morrissey or Jens Lekman and a song you've heard a million times surprises you into nodding your head to a beat (solo, of course) of a smile. I'm useless at funny but it's been egging me on, all the same, that I should try to say something about this. 'Head of a Sad Angel' has obvious funny moments. When the marvelous mad madame musician sticks her filthy American pupil into her hirsute French armpits for tough love noogies. You must call it tough love or it is too sad. It is funny when she lands him with all her surprise bills. He's given up love and life to learn at her bench. Of course she has a favorite child er pupil, the romantic mysterious Claudio. I loved the it will be funny one day to bleed your knuckles so much for this bitch. Jesse tries to get his own back and of course he'll come crawling back. It's strangely sweet and bitter cute, all of this. All the time the music teacher, tumor eating her head alive, cold oven poverty apartment. Throws her dreams into the street as if it were a miserable lover's wardrobe. All for Claudio. Jesse is nothing. Jesse keeps his sad vigil for her and I don't know, there's something about this persistent affection Alfred Chester has that the I know I will laugh about all of this someday gets to happen now. I know I'll cry about it someday as he slides to the ground in the mausoleum. I waited all night. Is it some day yet. I know I'm crap at this. So she's talking about her friend who was a Jew. She hid her in her apartment for three years. Somehow someone found out and somehow they took her away. Nothing that happens to them can include Jesse. Claudio has known war. Jesse has not. There's something about this way Chester has of writing of wanting to be close and never getting to that really gets to me. It is no matter what, this cold rain shivering warmth. Also, he's just bad ass. Sentences not to hang on your wall but to swallow and sword tricks with. He's been compared to Faulkner and Jean Genet a lot (James Purdy too, which I had guessed he would be before I googled to check, and also Truman Capote. He was a big fan. Me too!). Gore Vidal once said he was "Jean Genet with a brain" and I wish I had thought of it. Where Jean Genet loves from his knees I feel like Chester walks on everything, is burned by everything. I find that more consoling than I can put in one book review. Somehow the comparisons don't really fit, though. He's his own brilliant dude. It's just that what I love about anyone I can see in him. If I love something it is most likely because someone gave a shit in the first place. So this crazy creative cinderella cretin sets herself on fire and Jesse watches and feels how I would feel and sees how I would see her sacrifice (and how she takes and takes).
Jack waits for his father to die. His hospital pyre out to sea in a bathtub, loaded up with wood to burn, from (or to) his bored family. His dirty old man hands dirt claw their clean bed sheets and burn the cool nighttime pillows under drooling faces. He can take it with him. I can hear his dry throat shuttering like a camera as he holds onto them with last words. I can see the under the lenses of Jack's eyes as he turns over. His body over his body, his son over his body son. I loved the Alfred Chester imagery of the son's night-light on the map of the world, cornered with beasts from dangerous to most dangerous. The map bloomed red and grotesque like a nightmare-flower. It sounds simple, I guess, that he silent inwardly wants his son to not be afraid to look for himself. His father wanted Jack to have the same. Jack doesn't move. His lips don't move and his soul never says a word. But there was something about this story that I found unsettling. Like Jack wasn't waiting for his father to die only. He would become his father. But it was better than that, even. Something outside of Jack or his father. It is in the poster of the dragons. Somewhere his fears, something he just knows, has an outside place. What I really want to say is that I get this feeling about his stories of people who were born dying and who will live forever.
After a while, believing me to be asleep, she left the room, and I found driven into me a new and deep despair: for I was forced to consider that, after all, there might not be people anywhere, but only ghosts- sent by no one. from "Was Going Up the Stair"
David is dreaming in his bed of other people. The knock knock of who's there and parents say, who says, they all say on the doors to kiss goodnight. He stays in his bed and sends another him to say. He can watch from far away, out of body dancing to another's tune. I thought it was a wonderful idea for a ghost story that people never meet as themselves. Maybe everyone would be puppet masters and our bodies are pieces of wood to dance and go through the motions of what we are supposed to do. One day one of the people his parents have over (as an obligation, a mother of a deceased friend. The sort of person who is forgotten about before they remember to remember her) brings David a gift. As a reward to her he will send his real self, just this once, into the party. He cannot play the part, recite the poem, be cute and be happy and in his bedroom the dream for himself dies. When I was young I had elaborate fantasies about sending another me to school. I would be happy at home reading and listening to music. My fantasy typically ended with everything that could go wrong when half-me was living. The worst part isn't not being what he is wanted to be. My own half-me I did send to school (you can have la la land in your own head too) wasn't any good at it. I learned that one the hard way too.
The pain grew in my chest, and my wondering sorrow continued. It hurt me to breathe and to be curious.
Once his real self has slipped in with the shadows inside the people they find him out, whisper about his ghost, his own ghostly call unheard. He remains like this, alone, the chill of false connections. Is it another real person? I thought it was the worst deathly cold wandering in a life of no life. The doubt that there were ever any real people at all. "Tell me, I want to be real." I've often had this dead weight pressing on me. I don't know if it is my heart, or my throat but it feels like I can't speak and all I can think of is this idea of wanting to be a real person. That this can't be it and there must be something else. I don't know if there is any hope once you have been caught with the illness of fear that you aren't. It must surely be too late for David. Poor kid. So he hears this voice of grief if it is what it would sound like if it were coming from your ghost. The voice is so sad and he must stop himself from going to the singer's voice. I have this idea that it is too late once you think about going to it, though. You're better off if it never occurs to you to feel unreal. The singer's ghostly voice will just call from another side you can't get to. Chester wrote a ghost story for what happens to you when it is too late. He goes and he speaks to her voice and I don't know if he didn't believe her would he still end up not David anymore. Someone else's ghost. I felt like David's ghost was really this part inside himself that wanted to find parts inside of other people, the parts that hide from the windows, and he was lost to not wanting it so much that people looked like empty houses instead of people anymore. I loved this kind of ghost story best of all. Once you are afraid there is no going back.
"Cradle Song" reminded me of parts from The Exquisite Corpse told from the I will make what I wanted the some kind of justice. If there is such a thing as poetic justice and then there is also such a thing as hell then this would be what it looked like six feet under. In 'Corpse' this island girl tells her version of events just like people who lay out to you the fucked up thing they did in a curious self serving voice edged with if someone else was telling it in a different voice that had some compassion for this. Maybe like a roach scurrying to life. It isn't the same story but I couldn't help but be reminded of it. Both young women were incredibly stupid. Fuck me and make me feel good about myself afterwards. She would be just as likely to believe she never wanted you to begin with were you not what she wanted anymore. But this is Chester so it's a bit creepier than that. The stupid stud of her dreams is the guy that wants to screw the pup and then cling to his bosom virginal maid ideals. This isn't the kind of person I would spend too much time scrying their motivations. She murders her own baby by the walking penis who blights out the sun, moon and stars. Anything with a gravitational pull for any kind of meaning of life that isn't about him. But no, he wasn't only diddling her. Of course he wasn't. The stupid chick takes the infant of the other dumb girl. Maybe her Larry isn't the father but in this world I don't think it matters except as long as the voice goes on. The baby is lucky she has her for its mother. This baby is, but not the dead one. I was more impressed with how Chester managed the flip of the voice that speaks only for itself. It speaks to you but it is speaking for only itself. I thought it was interesting to feel that place of being them to hear that voice. Not their conscience exactly, because it is a viewing corpse. I guess being in hell where their own stupid voices go round and round living their roach scurrying justifications.
I'm going to write more about Alfred Chester another time. Most likely two more times (possibly a third). Maybe I'll connect my hands to the thoughts I get about him when I'm doing something like driving or working. Sometimes I'll read another book or see something in life and I wonder how Alfred Chester would describe it. What I really think is what would he give to them and it makes me feel less alone in my own musings and (I hope) more. It doesn't happen when I write but maybe one day it will. It probably doesn't matter, though, about that part. What I love the best is to take something and whatever the word for isn't as important. The way someone looked in my head or a feeling that can take off from an idea in a story is the best part. Alfred Chester is the best for that.
I think of other people's love lives as like the rain. I hear of it happening somewhere else. It is probably always raining, somewhere, to someone else. I guess it happens somewhere.
This was necessary, Goliath knew, because he who has given away his soul between nine and five cannot usually bear to face it (or does not know where to find it) between five and nine. He made this unreal world spring up around Goliath as if it had always been there, now wet and shivering. If you were speeding to the earth as fast as the collection it would be better than the no two alike. Closeness, happening because it had too. Goliath catches up with his own special/everyone has it because it is always happening somewhere. What comfort is that? It is the not consolation that we're all in the same shit hole. A man tugs on Goliath's scarf when he is going to go. Finally going to go, this time. I cannot recreate it in a book review what happens when he is wearing his own scarf and the new man his own, not Goliath's woolen noose.
He felt his heart struggling under the weight of it, and the emptiness that reached his eyes was more absurd than gluttony, worse than vanity, more terrible than affectation. It existed only by virtue of what wasn't there. Goliath sat on the cot laden down by every book and piece of clothing he had ever thrown away; they were inescapable; he was he who did not have them. Every loss had increased his possessions. Through the violence of his heart he heard his voice: "Why don't you have any furniture?"
This man, a dream of a dancer on a floor of her lost clothes. A recurring daymare. Goliath suffers and he is drowned again when he visits his mother. His mother's picked up lover is a corpse on the floor, or just a drunkard to be tossed back into the night void. May God forgive you and medicated dreamless sleep. I don't know who could forgive Goliath for plumbing the womb again for his missing piece. He would plunder and beggar if there was anything left to steal. So instead he cries with head in lap. Tell me who I am? And there are lovers who like boys and girls, as much as boys as girls, tricks and illusions, soldiers sailors tinkers and spies. An offering voice could find Goliath's room by the way it smells. Not for soil or pleasure, or any toll, has Goliath sewn his leanings into another's pockets. I think he must have misplaced the coat one evening. Left it on the back of someone's chair, a person only visited. Behold Goliath had been intended as a novel. The sections could have all been their own stories. I would have liked to read more about the man with the scarf. It reads like voices picked up until a light is switched on. A man makes nothing sound so good as black bread rubbed with a bit of garlic. The scarf man's collection of emptiness in his apartment and searching for a pair of big fat arms. That's how it looked in Goliath's running man mind, before the voices get close and the rain separates. I liked the way that Chester wrote the loneliness as if it belonged to everyone. Goliath doesn't just pick it up in the street. It follows him, toilet tissue to a shoe. Mostly I could read his descriptions of New York Forever. And summer swoops over Paris like a butterfly net...
Bombs sprang like teeth from her gums, her lips were tumid with flame and blood, seared skulls and swollen bellies, and along her tongue roared a pageant as deep as time splattered with man's inhumanities, his organized uniformed hatreds, a man marching gold into the golden flames, emerging, if emerging at all, melted, leaden, in pieces, and as cheap as breath. from 'Head of a Sad Angel'
I've held back from trying to cover my tongue tiedness to name Alfred Chester's humor senses. He cracks his funny bones like whiplash. It's like listening to Morrissey or Jens Lekman and a song you've heard a million times surprises you into nodding your head to a beat (solo, of course) of a smile. I'm useless at funny but it's been egging me on, all the same, that I should try to say something about this. 'Head of a Sad Angel' has obvious funny moments. When the marvelous mad madame musician sticks her filthy American pupil into her hirsute French armpits for tough love noogies. You must call it tough love or it is too sad. It is funny when she lands him with all her surprise bills. He's given up love and life to learn at her bench. Of course she has a favorite child er pupil, the romantic mysterious Claudio. I loved the it will be funny one day to bleed your knuckles so much for this bitch. Jesse tries to get his own back and of course he'll come crawling back. It's strangely sweet and bitter cute, all of this. All the time the music teacher, tumor eating her head alive, cold oven poverty apartment. Throws her dreams into the street as if it were a miserable lover's wardrobe. All for Claudio. Jesse is nothing. Jesse keeps his sad vigil for her and I don't know, there's something about this persistent affection Alfred Chester has that the I know I will laugh about all of this someday gets to happen now. I know I'll cry about it someday as he slides to the ground in the mausoleum. I waited all night. Is it some day yet. I know I'm crap at this. So she's talking about her friend who was a Jew. She hid her in her apartment for three years. Somehow someone found out and somehow they took her away. Nothing that happens to them can include Jesse. Claudio has known war. Jesse has not. There's something about this way Chester has of writing of wanting to be close and never getting to that really gets to me. It is no matter what, this cold rain shivering warmth. Also, he's just bad ass. Sentences not to hang on your wall but to swallow and sword tricks with. He's been compared to Faulkner and Jean Genet a lot (James Purdy too, which I had guessed he would be before I googled to check, and also Truman Capote. He was a big fan. Me too!). Gore Vidal once said he was "Jean Genet with a brain" and I wish I had thought of it. Where Jean Genet loves from his knees I feel like Chester walks on everything, is burned by everything. I find that more consoling than I can put in one book review. Somehow the comparisons don't really fit, though. He's his own brilliant dude. It's just that what I love about anyone I can see in him. If I love something it is most likely because someone gave a shit in the first place. So this crazy creative cinderella cretin sets herself on fire and Jesse watches and feels how I would feel and sees how I would see her sacrifice (and how she takes and takes).
Look said Jack, the word hanging soundlessly from his lips. Look and see who it is, Freddie. There is nothing to be afraid of for there is only darkness, and darkness is thin and comprehensible: you have only to look and you will see through it. And it is harmless, after all, in spite of everything I've said, for there are no dragons here- and strangely it is only your father.from 'Here be Dragons'
"Please, who is it?" The boy wept quietly, choked with fear, and made an oddly mature sound of distress exactly like a mourner.
Jack waits for his father to die. His hospital pyre out to sea in a bathtub, loaded up with wood to burn, from (or to) his bored family. His dirty old man hands dirt claw their clean bed sheets and burn the cool nighttime pillows under drooling faces. He can take it with him. I can hear his dry throat shuttering like a camera as he holds onto them with last words. I can see the under the lenses of Jack's eyes as he turns over. His body over his body, his son over his body son. I loved the Alfred Chester imagery of the son's night-light on the map of the world, cornered with beasts from dangerous to most dangerous. The map bloomed red and grotesque like a nightmare-flower. It sounds simple, I guess, that he silent inwardly wants his son to not be afraid to look for himself. His father wanted Jack to have the same. Jack doesn't move. His lips don't move and his soul never says a word. But there was something about this story that I found unsettling. Like Jack wasn't waiting for his father to die only. He would become his father. But it was better than that, even. Something outside of Jack or his father. It is in the poster of the dragons. Somewhere his fears, something he just knows, has an outside place. What I really want to say is that I get this feeling about his stories of people who were born dying and who will live forever.
After a while, believing me to be asleep, she left the room, and I found driven into me a new and deep despair: for I was forced to consider that, after all, there might not be people anywhere, but only ghosts- sent by no one. from "Was Going Up the Stair"
David is dreaming in his bed of other people. The knock knock of who's there and parents say, who says, they all say on the doors to kiss goodnight. He stays in his bed and sends another him to say. He can watch from far away, out of body dancing to another's tune. I thought it was a wonderful idea for a ghost story that people never meet as themselves. Maybe everyone would be puppet masters and our bodies are pieces of wood to dance and go through the motions of what we are supposed to do. One day one of the people his parents have over (as an obligation, a mother of a deceased friend. The sort of person who is forgotten about before they remember to remember her) brings David a gift. As a reward to her he will send his real self, just this once, into the party. He cannot play the part, recite the poem, be cute and be happy and in his bedroom the dream for himself dies. When I was young I had elaborate fantasies about sending another me to school. I would be happy at home reading and listening to music. My fantasy typically ended with everything that could go wrong when half-me was living. The worst part isn't not being what he is wanted to be. My own half-me I did send to school (you can have la la land in your own head too) wasn't any good at it. I learned that one the hard way too.
The pain grew in my chest, and my wondering sorrow continued. It hurt me to breathe and to be curious.
Once his real self has slipped in with the shadows inside the people they find him out, whisper about his ghost, his own ghostly call unheard. He remains like this, alone, the chill of false connections. Is it another real person? I thought it was the worst deathly cold wandering in a life of no life. The doubt that there were ever any real people at all. "Tell me, I want to be real." I've often had this dead weight pressing on me. I don't know if it is my heart, or my throat but it feels like I can't speak and all I can think of is this idea of wanting to be a real person. That this can't be it and there must be something else. I don't know if there is any hope once you have been caught with the illness of fear that you aren't. It must surely be too late for David. Poor kid. So he hears this voice of grief if it is what it would sound like if it were coming from your ghost. The voice is so sad and he must stop himself from going to the singer's voice. I have this idea that it is too late once you think about going to it, though. You're better off if it never occurs to you to feel unreal. The singer's ghostly voice will just call from another side you can't get to. Chester wrote a ghost story for what happens to you when it is too late. He goes and he speaks to her voice and I don't know if he didn't believe her would he still end up not David anymore. Someone else's ghost. I felt like David's ghost was really this part inside himself that wanted to find parts inside of other people, the parts that hide from the windows, and he was lost to not wanting it so much that people looked like empty houses instead of people anymore. I loved this kind of ghost story best of all. Once you are afraid there is no going back.
"Cradle Song" reminded me of parts from The Exquisite Corpse told from the I will make what I wanted the some kind of justice. If there is such a thing as poetic justice and then there is also such a thing as hell then this would be what it looked like six feet under. In 'Corpse' this island girl tells her version of events just like people who lay out to you the fucked up thing they did in a curious self serving voice edged with if someone else was telling it in a different voice that had some compassion for this. Maybe like a roach scurrying to life. It isn't the same story but I couldn't help but be reminded of it. Both young women were incredibly stupid. Fuck me and make me feel good about myself afterwards. She would be just as likely to believe she never wanted you to begin with were you not what she wanted anymore. But this is Chester so it's a bit creepier than that. The stupid stud of her dreams is the guy that wants to screw the pup and then cling to his bosom virginal maid ideals. This isn't the kind of person I would spend too much time scrying their motivations. She murders her own baby by the walking penis who blights out the sun, moon and stars. Anything with a gravitational pull for any kind of meaning of life that isn't about him. But no, he wasn't only diddling her. Of course he wasn't. The stupid chick takes the infant of the other dumb girl. Maybe her Larry isn't the father but in this world I don't think it matters except as long as the voice goes on. The baby is lucky she has her for its mother. This baby is, but not the dead one. I was more impressed with how Chester managed the flip of the voice that speaks only for itself. It speaks to you but it is speaking for only itself. I thought it was interesting to feel that place of being them to hear that voice. Not their conscience exactly, because it is a viewing corpse. I guess being in hell where their own stupid voices go round and round living their roach scurrying justifications.
I'm going to write more about Alfred Chester another time. Most likely two more times (possibly a third). Maybe I'll connect my hands to the thoughts I get about him when I'm doing something like driving or working. Sometimes I'll read another book or see something in life and I wonder how Alfred Chester would describe it. What I really think is what would he give to them and it makes me feel less alone in my own musings and (I hope) more. It doesn't happen when I write but maybe one day it will. It probably doesn't matter, though, about that part. What I love the best is to take something and whatever the word for isn't as important. The way someone looked in my head or a feeling that can take off from an idea in a story is the best part. Alfred Chester is the best for that.
January 22, 2008
Paul Bowles led me to Chester. Unintentionally, I'm sure, since Bowles couldn't stand him. And it's hard to blame Bowles (or anyone else) for that considering the mad antics and creamy drama through which Chester put everyone of his friends, enemies and acquaintences.
April 7, 2025
I will start off with a quote which wonderfully illustrates Chester's masterful prose:
"The city offered distractions, glorious dreams. one could descend from the unreality of an office to the unreality of a street and thence to the unreality of a night club, a theatre; a public meeting, a music hall, a religious activity, a library, a brothel, a circus, a gambling casino, a street filled with whores and whoresses, a picture gallery, a queer bar, a lunar park, or most frequently the rectangular darkness of the national church with its two-dimensional gods in technicolor. Those who had been unable to encounter themselves throughout the day thronged these places at night that they might escape themselves a while." -Behold Goliath, Entertainment
Two fables - The victory was my favourite story since Chester creates an apocalyptic future where the war has been raging so long that children around 8-6 are being drafted and end up invading their own country, desperate to find the government to overthrow in the desolated, bombed remains of their own street.
One cannot write a review about Chester without appreciating how true to himself he is, living as a gay man in times where this was not widely accepted:
"We exchange funny stories from our adventures. He becomes annoyed that I am talking too loud, that I say "him" when I mean "him" and not, as he says, "a person" or some other euphemism. "If you don take care when you talk I will go home." Outraged at being made to feel vulgar, uncouth, I bellow: "I wasn't taught my manners by your Madison Avenue closet queens." -Ismael
And here's one last quote that will hopefully make you go and find a copy or archived version of this book right away:
"Although the room faced north, the air was amber as if once by chance sunlight had stumbled in, been reluctant to leave, and so remained, growing pale, growing dry, hanging to the walls and to the enormous chandelier whose crystals rang at the breath of our entry." -The head of a sad angel
"The city offered distractions, glorious dreams. one could descend from the unreality of an office to the unreality of a street and thence to the unreality of a night club, a theatre; a public meeting, a music hall, a religious activity, a library, a brothel, a circus, a gambling casino, a street filled with whores and whoresses, a picture gallery, a queer bar, a lunar park, or most frequently the rectangular darkness of the national church with its two-dimensional gods in technicolor. Those who had been unable to encounter themselves throughout the day thronged these places at night that they might escape themselves a while." -Behold Goliath, Entertainment
Two fables - The victory was my favourite story since Chester creates an apocalyptic future where the war has been raging so long that children around 8-6 are being drafted and end up invading their own country, desperate to find the government to overthrow in the desolated, bombed remains of their own street.
One cannot write a review about Chester without appreciating how true to himself he is, living as a gay man in times where this was not widely accepted:
"We exchange funny stories from our adventures. He becomes annoyed that I am talking too loud, that I say "him" when I mean "him" and not, as he says, "a person" or some other euphemism. "If you don take care when you talk I will go home." Outraged at being made to feel vulgar, uncouth, I bellow: "I wasn't taught my manners by your Madison Avenue closet queens." -Ismael
And here's one last quote that will hopefully make you go and find a copy or archived version of this book right away:
"Although the room faced north, the air was amber as if once by chance sunlight had stumbled in, been reluctant to leave, and so remained, growing pale, growing dry, hanging to the walls and to the enormous chandelier whose crystals rang at the breath of our entry." -The head of a sad angel
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