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Ice Never F
Ice Never F is the second part in a trilogy of novels by the American poet Gil Orlovitz. The protagonist is again Lee Emanuel, living in Philadelphia, and the major personalities from the first novel--Lena Goldstein, now his wife, Lee’s parents Rachel and Levi, as well as a host of other people--appear again in it. Orlovitz has written that his aim in his books is ‘to educate a protagonist in the ramifications of the paradoxes of apparently commonplace phenomena’, and to this end he employs a variety of interrelated personal and contemporary events to suggest a ‘created presence’, in which conventional dogmas of time and character are rejected in favour of a poetic approach that celebrates the multiplicity of existence. In a long essay on Orlovitz in a recent issue of the Kenyon Review, the American critic Hale Chatfield notes that while this approach bears some resemblance to the painting of Jackson Pollock and the self-consciously absurd juxtapositions of Surrealism, Orlovitz ‘characterises himself by the intensity of his search for the significance of his own associations and his militant reluctance to let them go by without exploring themselves’. Mr Chatfield adds: ‘If Coleridge were here to evaluate Orlovitz, I am confident he would confine the Dadaist and Surrealist to the realm of fantasy--and admit, if not elevate, Orlovitz to the Kingdom of Imagination.’
Gil Orlovitz was born in Philadelphia and served in the Second World War. For some years he has been highly regarded by his fellow writers, but it was only with the publication of Milkbottle H that he reached a wider public. He has always been interested in the theatre and has written several plays and has also published many volumes of poetry and short stories. He is married with three children and now lives in New York.
Gil Orlovitz was born in Philadelphia and served in the Second World War. For some years he has been highly regarded by his fellow writers, but it was only with the publication of Milkbottle H that he reached a wider public. He has always been interested in the theatre and has written several plays and has also published many volumes of poetry and short stories. He is married with three children and now lives in New York.
333 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1970
116 people want to read
About the author
Gil Orlovitz
16 books9 followersOrlovitz was born in Philadelphia, PA. He worked as a staff writer for Columbia Pictures, co-writing the screenplay for Over-Exposed and writing episodes of The Adventures of Jim Bowie and The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp. He published several books of poetry during the 1950s and 1960s and his poetry, plays and short stories appeared in several anthologies and journals. He published two novels, Milkbottle H and Ice Never F, the first two parts of a planned trilogy, in 1967 and 1970 respectively. He died in 1973 at the age of 55.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
October 5, 2020
On the castiron fence, demarcating the adjacent yard the profuse brambles pricklepicket the red roses. Streamers of honeysuckle spiral, shoot, shimmy, loop and spurt up the brick wall of the back of the garage over the tiny square window up trellis and rainspout to reach the roof, there teetering, imminent acrobatics in a purr of breeze, the dense sweet effusion of civetsaccharine, a bladderthurible slowly swung in an imminent relief of osmotic dispersion by the breezepurr purring, a smellfilm molding whatever wave within or without, neargurgitantly sick drifting into the open door of the garage where the boy with honeysucked mouth and the flaring nostrils of the icepick stabs at the glass washboard in a studious fury. A fat little boy with black hair glinted oilblue and the ruddy flesh of Levi and big brown
The above snippet is representative of the style Orlovitz employs for most of this novel. As above, many such free associative descriptions break off mid-sentence and cut to another scene altogether.
There is a deceptive beauty to the writing, even if it presents a plethora of problems to the unsuspecting reader.
The author's attention to vernacular is clear, and even impedes understanding, unless you translate it after the fact in your mind. But if we are to consider this literature, does it contain the requisite ingredients? That would be: the presence of a mythic vision, enlarged and expostulated, made real through elocution of unique design, either intense verisimilitude, or convincing surrealism. I would say that it succeeds in qualifying itself, and it is often a joy to read.
With seamless transitions between dreamlike settings and harsh character interaction, the inscrutable text rambles on like a gaudy freight train, cinematic in its way. I instantly lost track of characters on every page, at every moment, which instilled a sense of panic in this reader. But the horripilating surprises lurked under every mundane suggestion and kept the pages turning. Arachnoid sentence fragments scrambled around vague blurs of characters, until they were so painfully dense and opaque and austerely dyslexic, it made me feel inadequate.
A 320-page unbroken stream of text, haphazardly punctuated, with strange paragraphing, but an entrancing avalanche of atmospheric subtleties, fascinating juxtapositions leaping out of the tangled mess, dialogue interspersed with out-of-place description, a cocktail of voices, places and things, none of which are ordinary. There is peculiar subliminal social commentary, rapid fire navigation of motives and action, all difficult to parse but infused with mystery and an underlying architecture. Not only is it impossible to remember, it might be impossible to fully enjoy. It is unapologetic and variable, and reads a bit like e e cummings’ poetry, which for some, I suspect, will be a deal-breaker.
Within a few pages we are introduced to the following people:
Jennifer Hazlit, Gregg (with a clubfoot), Sue, Martin, Sy Tarassoff (painter), Herman Tarassoff (Sy’s father), Dave, Hymie Krause, Naroyan family mansion inhabitants, employees of the Levi Coal Company, Lee Emanuel, Sam Abram, Uncle Aaron, Daniel Naroyan (Danny), Ben, Rena, Edith, Bill Sachs, Sadie, Dora, Naomi, Bella, Fanny, Jeremiah, Laura Ingersoll (17 years old), Big Bernie, Christine, Georgiana, Cal Lacefield, Donna Zion, Rachel. Did you catch all that? What if they were all speaking without quotation marks?
Nothing’s spelled out for us, though the book is rife with contextual clues, and relationships must be surmised from dialogue for the most part.
These are desperate characters coming out of their self-imposed prisons, none of them are typical. We are treated to Biblical tragedies and troubling recollections amid the piecemeal network of interconnected people and events. Like modular stories interwoven until the whole is porous but flexible as fishnet stockings. They communicate through sarcasm, love, disgust, amid tough days and screaming nights, through military screenings, and even speculation on in utero coition. A lot of it takes place in Philadelphia streets, in a flurry of disparate voices, which require systematic untangling. At its heart it is McElroyesque in the best sense, and reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. It is ambiguous, haunting, exquisitely knurled with details, fluid, detached by disembodied narration periodically, so experimental, so jarring, yet harmonious, with word choices to make you scratch your head, and recurring images very like jazz music in rhythm and repetition, along with magnificent descriptions improvised right and left. Interesting portmanteaus abound in every sentence until the whole rickety cathedral of this book teeters like an overly enthusiastic 3D jigsaw puzzle, composed of shards stitched together with chewing gum strings. The blended metaphors can induce awe, and the Faulknerian subtext is uncompromising.
A gritty, thrilling read.
The above snippet is representative of the style Orlovitz employs for most of this novel. As above, many such free associative descriptions break off mid-sentence and cut to another scene altogether.
There is a deceptive beauty to the writing, even if it presents a plethora of problems to the unsuspecting reader.
The author's attention to vernacular is clear, and even impedes understanding, unless you translate it after the fact in your mind. But if we are to consider this literature, does it contain the requisite ingredients? That would be: the presence of a mythic vision, enlarged and expostulated, made real through elocution of unique design, either intense verisimilitude, or convincing surrealism. I would say that it succeeds in qualifying itself, and it is often a joy to read.
With seamless transitions between dreamlike settings and harsh character interaction, the inscrutable text rambles on like a gaudy freight train, cinematic in its way. I instantly lost track of characters on every page, at every moment, which instilled a sense of panic in this reader. But the horripilating surprises lurked under every mundane suggestion and kept the pages turning. Arachnoid sentence fragments scrambled around vague blurs of characters, until they were so painfully dense and opaque and austerely dyslexic, it made me feel inadequate.
A 320-page unbroken stream of text, haphazardly punctuated, with strange paragraphing, but an entrancing avalanche of atmospheric subtleties, fascinating juxtapositions leaping out of the tangled mess, dialogue interspersed with out-of-place description, a cocktail of voices, places and things, none of which are ordinary. There is peculiar subliminal social commentary, rapid fire navigation of motives and action, all difficult to parse but infused with mystery and an underlying architecture. Not only is it impossible to remember, it might be impossible to fully enjoy. It is unapologetic and variable, and reads a bit like e e cummings’ poetry, which for some, I suspect, will be a deal-breaker.
Within a few pages we are introduced to the following people:
Jennifer Hazlit, Gregg (with a clubfoot), Sue, Martin, Sy Tarassoff (painter), Herman Tarassoff (Sy’s father), Dave, Hymie Krause, Naroyan family mansion inhabitants, employees of the Levi Coal Company, Lee Emanuel, Sam Abram, Uncle Aaron, Daniel Naroyan (Danny), Ben, Rena, Edith, Bill Sachs, Sadie, Dora, Naomi, Bella, Fanny, Jeremiah, Laura Ingersoll (17 years old), Big Bernie, Christine, Georgiana, Cal Lacefield, Donna Zion, Rachel. Did you catch all that? What if they were all speaking without quotation marks?
Nothing’s spelled out for us, though the book is rife with contextual clues, and relationships must be surmised from dialogue for the most part.
These are desperate characters coming out of their self-imposed prisons, none of them are typical. We are treated to Biblical tragedies and troubling recollections amid the piecemeal network of interconnected people and events. Like modular stories interwoven until the whole is porous but flexible as fishnet stockings. They communicate through sarcasm, love, disgust, amid tough days and screaming nights, through military screenings, and even speculation on in utero coition. A lot of it takes place in Philadelphia streets, in a flurry of disparate voices, which require systematic untangling. At its heart it is McElroyesque in the best sense, and reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. It is ambiguous, haunting, exquisitely knurled with details, fluid, detached by disembodied narration periodically, so experimental, so jarring, yet harmonious, with word choices to make you scratch your head, and recurring images very like jazz music in rhythm and repetition, along with magnificent descriptions improvised right and left. Interesting portmanteaus abound in every sentence until the whole rickety cathedral of this book teeters like an overly enthusiastic 3D jigsaw puzzle, composed of shards stitched together with chewing gum strings. The blended metaphors can induce awe, and the Faulknerian subtext is uncompromising.
A gritty, thrilling read.
Read
May 20, 2017Nevermind. You will knot read this. It is so deeply BURIED, no tunneling mole will ever bring it back to the surface, to the sun. To melt the ice. No. Ice never fails.
Hold that thought. atm there is a seventy five dollar copy over at abe, a bookshop in Frederick MD ::
https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/Sear...
You'll likely not find one for less again. Unless of course--which is less and less likely in this db=driven world of bookselling--you find a copy in a warehouse unbeknownst to the warehouse=manager like in a goodwill but even they got computer collectors to sus out the $$$$. Milkbottle H, now, there maybe you have a chance of running across a copy and it is the better of the two novels I think at least in my opinion but years ago now it was I read Milkbottle H ; not that there's a great level of difference in style between the two. The rage and anger and hurt is in here too. And there's so much stuff in here that if it's autobiographical you can almost start to see why his family hates him and will never let his novels again see the light of day.
btw, Milkbottle H was in fact trans'd into German back in the day and it's cheap ::
https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/Sear...
Vorzugsmilch: Roman (the trans of the title is unfortunate, losing the the whole field of play of the "H").
abe has some affordable copies of Milkbottle H, depending of course on what it is exactly you're looking for ::
https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/Sear...
I get the impression the Orlovitz was primarily a poet. I don't know nothing about his poetry. But I'd be happy to hear any reports from the field.
As far as I know, no link of mine which links to booksellers ever results in a penny dropping into my taxable income bank account or other avenue of getting myself properly enriched by all this shilling I do for books that you've otherwise never the fuck heard of nor ever would have heard of unless through some other avenue of chance because there are in fact veryvery few people in this world that are looking under the sod. [sorry ; no real need to rant]
Disagree :: "Terrible. Tedious and dated experimental prose that refuses conventional punctuation and hops into non sequiturs and dialect and bland meandering from character to character and thing to thing until one’s oculars roll out. Nary a whiff of humour or underivative literary talent." I disagree. I just do. It's not like Ice will totally change your life or nothing ; but this is a novel that should be read and not just sampled. I don't really care if you don't like it of course and there's no reason Friend=MJ would like it (there are any number of points about which we differ for crying out loud ; can anyone say "Vollmann"). But the one point I will agree but differ is on the "dated experimental prose"--because Orlovitz is not what I would characterize as postmodern; he is very much High Modernist and in the late sixties, well, you just can't do that ;; except that there's that one guy in England doing it even Today!!! Sorry MJ, I think you're wrong. But what the heck!
And there's one more Ice review on gr, from Friend=Sean :: "...while on the other hand we experience the exquisite visceral pleasure of a child picking his nose." Yep.
So, yes, we require an Orlovitz revival. There is material here upon which you might build a dissertation. No one else is going to do it ; it'll require NEH grants. We'll need critical editions of both novels (Ice especially suffers from poor editing and will require some serious technical textual work in the direction of the Richardson project at Oxford) ; we'll soon probably need annotations. Whatever you can do that'll help fill out that c.v. and get you the (deserved) luxury and privilege of an academic appointment. Or you could do your work on Ray. Whatever floats your boat.
Hold that thought. atm there is a seventy five dollar copy over at abe, a bookshop in Frederick MD ::
https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/Sear...
You'll likely not find one for less again. Unless of course--which is less and less likely in this db=driven world of bookselling--you find a copy in a warehouse unbeknownst to the warehouse=manager like in a goodwill but even they got computer collectors to sus out the $$$$. Milkbottle H, now, there maybe you have a chance of running across a copy and it is the better of the two novels I think at least in my opinion but years ago now it was I read Milkbottle H ; not that there's a great level of difference in style between the two. The rage and anger and hurt is in here too. And there's so much stuff in here that if it's autobiographical you can almost start to see why his family hates him and will never let his novels again see the light of day.
btw, Milkbottle H was in fact trans'd into German back in the day and it's cheap ::
https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/Sear...
Vorzugsmilch: Roman (the trans of the title is unfortunate, losing the the whole field of play of the "H").
abe has some affordable copies of Milkbottle H, depending of course on what it is exactly you're looking for ::
https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/Sear...
I get the impression the Orlovitz was primarily a poet. I don't know nothing about his poetry. But I'd be happy to hear any reports from the field.
As far as I know, no link of mine which links to booksellers ever results in a penny dropping into my taxable income bank account or other avenue of getting myself properly enriched by all this shilling I do for books that you've otherwise never the fuck heard of nor ever would have heard of unless through some other avenue of chance because there are in fact veryvery few people in this world that are looking under the sod. [sorry ; no real need to rant]
Disagree :: "Terrible. Tedious and dated experimental prose that refuses conventional punctuation and hops into non sequiturs and dialect and bland meandering from character to character and thing to thing until one’s oculars roll out. Nary a whiff of humour or underivative literary talent." I disagree. I just do. It's not like Ice will totally change your life or nothing ; but this is a novel that should be read and not just sampled. I don't really care if you don't like it of course and there's no reason Friend=MJ would like it (there are any number of points about which we differ for crying out loud ; can anyone say "Vollmann"). But the one point I will agree but differ is on the "dated experimental prose"--because Orlovitz is not what I would characterize as postmodern; he is very much High Modernist and in the late sixties, well, you just can't do that ;; except that there's that one guy in England doing it even Today!!! Sorry MJ, I think you're wrong. But what the heck!
And there's one more Ice review on gr, from Friend=Sean :: "...while on the other hand we experience the exquisite visceral pleasure of a child picking his nose." Yep.
So, yes, we require an Orlovitz revival. There is material here upon which you might build a dissertation. No one else is going to do it ; it'll require NEH grants. We'll need critical editions of both novels (Ice especially suffers from poor editing and will require some serious technical textual work in the direction of the Richardson project at Oxford) ; we'll soon probably need annotations. Whatever you can do that'll help fill out that c.v. and get you the (deserved) luxury and privilege of an academic appointment. Or you could do your work on Ray. Whatever floats your boat.
Want to read
February 9, 2019Tough Poets Press edition now kickstartin' ::
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...
sampled
July 10, 2014Terrible. Tedious and dated experimental prose that refuses conventional punctuation and hops into non sequiturs and dialect and bland meandering from character to character and thing to thing until one’s oculars roll out. Nary a whiff of humour or underivative literary talent.
March 21, 2019
New edition is being published April 24, 2019. Available for pre-order now: https://www.amazon.com/Ice-Never-F-Gi...
Read
April 27, 2019Just arrived, very happy to see many Good Reads friends in the acknowledgements!
June 4, 2025
M2 Browning literature.
Think of it as:
A freeform collection of emotions, events, quotations.
Loaded individually into an ammunition belt.
The trigger pressed and held until the gun overheats, jams or the belt is spent.
And/Or
Listening to an avant-garde jazz soloist.
Leitmotifs and recurring blocks in the text.
The notes make sense, and at times there’s periods of cohesion, but at its heart it is bottled chaos.
No structure or funny business here boss.
Be miserable you fuckers.
Think of it as:
A freeform collection of emotions, events, quotations.
Loaded individually into an ammunition belt.
The trigger pressed and held until the gun overheats, jams or the belt is spent.
And/Or
Listening to an avant-garde jazz soloist.
Leitmotifs and recurring blocks in the text.
The notes make sense, and at times there’s periods of cohesion, but at its heart it is bottled chaos.
No structure or funny business here boss.
Be miserable you fuckers.
January 5, 2016
Review here.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews