Disgusting

by Richard Hell

(each cover is different) -- "This is the second book of Richard's published by Todd Amicon's and painter Josh Smith's 38th Street Publishers, the first being 2009's Voidoid edition illustrated by Kier Cooke Sandvik. Disgusting is a select arrangement of writings and drawings by Hell made in the past seven or eight years. All the pieces are quite different from each other, ranging from a page of prose on self-disgust to a drawing of the view of the darkness beyond the refrigerator in Richard's apartment, to a poem about time that concludes "Poets are fools but I don't give a fuck / anymore. Life's only good when it's well written" (and three other recent poems, each in it's own form and style), to journal entries about the deaths of his friends Lizzy Mercier and Robert Quine (which happened to occur within two months of each other in 2004). Regardless of the variety, though, the book is fully integrated, a work of its own, much more than the sum of its parts. The pamphlets are saddle-stitched and the covers are made from the heavy card poster for the recent DVD re-release of the 1978 movie Blank Generation. Each poster yielded four separate covers, so each pamphlet has one of four different covers. Customers are not allowed to specify cover choice, sorry. Every cover is great. Josh Smith hand-created each specially-painted set of "endpapers" (here that means the inside of both the front and the back cover, as well as the page that faces each), so every book is different in that respect. The item is a sculpture as well as a book! It's magnificent, in its disgusting way." From Richard's site October, 2010 Recycled posterboard Office paper 28 8.5"x5.5" 300

Hardcover

Published January 1, 2010

About the author

Born in 1949, Richard Meyers was shipped off to a private school for troublesome kids in Delaware, which is where he met Tom (Verlaine) Miller. Together they ran away, trying to hitchhike to Florida, but only made it as far as Alabama before being picked up by the authorities. Meyers persuaded his mother to allow him to go to New York, where he worked in a secondhand bookshop (the Strand; later he was employed at Cinemabilia along with Patti Smith) and tried to become a writer.
He arrived in the Big Apple at the tail end of the hippie scene. He took acid (and later heroin), but sought to develop a different sensibility in the manner of what he later referred to as 'twisted French aestheticism', i.e. more Arthur Rimbaud than Rolling Stones. He printed a poetry magazine (Genesis: Grasp) and when Miller dropped out of college and joined him in New York, they developed a joint alter ego whom they named Teresa Stern. Under this name they published a book of poems entitled Wanna Go Out?. This slim volume went almost unnoticed. It was at this point that Meyers and Miller decided to form a band. They changed their names to Hell and Verlaine, and called the band The Neon Boys.
During this hiatus, Hell wrote The Voidoid (1973), a rambling confessional. He wrote it in a 16 dollar-a-week room, fuelled by cheap wine and cough syrup that contained codeine. He then played in various successful bands: Television, Richard Hell and The Voidoids.
Hell recently returned to fiction with his 1996 novel Go Now.