Narcisa left me feeling the sting of a brass-knuckled hook to the jaw. The pain comes on like a storm. But masterfully. At the precise point I can’t bear any more, it tackles me with a beautiful kiss. It’s a winderful feeling of pain and beauty that screams and sings to me at the same time.
-Bryan Ray Turcotte (Author of Fucked Up and Photocopied and Punk Is Dead: Punk is Everything)
Reading NARCISA: OUR LADY OF ASHES is like sliding into the world your parents warned you about. Jonathan Shaw’s had his knife on the pulse of the underworld for over thirty years. Now he’s cut it open, for all to taste the filth. Wanna be thrown against a brick wall of words? Crack this book…
-Howie Pyro (The Blessed, DGeneration, Danzig. Author of Confessions of A Rat Fink with Ed “Big Daddy” Roth)
CONGRATULATIONS TO NOAH LEVINE AND HIS BEAUTIFUL WIFE AMY FIELDS ON THEIR SOON TO BE BABY GIRL, HAZEL.
Narcisa is the confession of a hungry ghost, the insatiable, the unloved core of humanity’s deepest sorrow. The addiction to suffering, which is the self-created Hell realm so vividly described in these pages. This beautifully written, brutally honest tale speaks to the wounded and weary child within each of us.
-Noah Levine (Author of Dharma Punx and Against the Stream)
Thank you Ratso, for your “kind” words!
“Jonathan Shaw is a renaissance lowlife. Painter, tattoo artist, and now novelist. His openhearted prose reveals a man unabashed to be pussy-whipped by the Eternal Muse. This book is pure Magick- read it and weep. For joy.”
- Larry “Ratso” Sloman(Co-Author of Private Parts, Author of Reefer Madness: The History of Marijuana, Scar Tissue, and The Secret Life of Houdini)
An authentic and colorful novel like NARCISA can only be produced by an individual who has experienced an authentic and colorful existence. Few have dipped so deeply or functioned so extensively in the cultural underbelly of our world than the notorious artist and adventurer, Jonathan Shaw. In this literary firmament he is a virtuoso.
- Robert Williams (Painter, Author of Malicious Resplendence and Through Prehensile Eyes)
Tattoo of Robert Williams’ cartoon by Jonathan Shaw:
Thanks to a Godfather of high-end lowbrow, Joe Coleman, for your blurb.
“A writer of immense passion and soul, a true survivor who has painstakingly documented an archtypal descent into the various hells of this festering disease of a planet, Jonathan Shaw has the courage to vivisect his own soul. And what pours out is a staggering stew of passionate decay, rage, revulsion, desire, ecstasy and pain. As in an autopsy, Scabvender captures the putrid smells, the stinging sounds and the blistering sights in a complex, sensuous tapestry of the author’s own dark pathology. In the dungeon reserved for outlaw writers, Jonathan Shaw is right at home with both Carl Panzram and Louis-Ferdinand Celine.”
-Joe Coleman
A ROADMAP OF JONATHAN SHAW ACCORDING TO JOE COLEMAN
full frame, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.
banner, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.
top left corner, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.
top right corner, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.
bottom left corner, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.
bottom right corner, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.
In 1980 I lived in Stockholm, Sweden with Arab refugees from Afghanistan, Palestine and Syria…. my favorite books were Papillon and the stories of Fanny Hill in Finnish. I only knew Finnish.
One day somebody gave me Kerouac’s On The Road and Junky by Burroughs in English and I started to learn that curious language…
Reality is always stranger than fiction….
I ran into Señor Shaw a buncha times in late 80’s-early 90’s in NYC and LA… only remember remnants….
Now Jonathan Shaw has written a towering evergreen of a book with Narcisa.
Thanks for something I can finally dig my big teeth into in a barren land of literature…
Que Pendejo…
Sami Yaffa ( Hanoi Rocks/New York Dolls)
“Jonathan Shaw’s passionate descriptions of the surreal, paranoid jungle he inhabits capture the haunting poetry of his soul…Scabvendor is an original and compelling work…” -Hubert Selby Jr. 2003, Author of Reqiuem For a Dream and Last Exit To Brooklyn
I decided to post this week’s weekly blurb with a little bit of history. Underneath the blurb you will see an excerpt from Jonathan’s other memoir Scabvendor, which might give a little insight on their relationship…
“Jonathan Shaw is a fucked-off hunk of shit. A fish asshole cunt-sucker!”
- Charles Bukowski (1978)
A NIGHT WITH BUKOWSKI
The root problems of the writer are personality problems.- John Gardner
Stubby fingers pounding away at an old Royal typewriter. Classical music playing from a radio on a kitchen counter next to an empty whiskey bottle… Bukowski is sitting at a cramped breakfast nook by a window in his kitchen, wearing a wife-beater and boxer shorts, writing. He moves his head in a strange rhythm to the music, like a prizefighter, bobbing and weaving in a motion so subtle, only the benevolent spirits of his poetry respond…
He stops typing just long enough to fish a half-smoked cigar out of an overflowing ashtray, surrounded by a dozen empty Miller beer bottles. He shoves the cigar stub into his battered, junkyard face, lights it, and resumes his work. He hears a timid knock on the living room door…
“Go’waaay!”, he shouts automatically, as he types on.
Several short raps on the window beside him get his attention.
“Who arrre yaaaa, whaddya waaant?” he growls.
“Hey, I’m sorry to bother ya”, I say. “I write for the Free Press…”
Bukowski mumbles distractedly.
Standing on the dirty concrete porch, I talk to the window, playing my last card, “… I got some beer…”
Bukowski starts to say something, then stops, editing himself. He surveys the empty beer bottles standing like little ghosts around his typewriter. Finally he speaks, in a weary, W.C. Fields-like drawl. “Yeahh, alriiight… just hold onnnaa minnit.” He pounds out a last line and stops. He grabs a dirty kitchen towel off the counter, throws it over his work, and gets up. The big man steps into a pair of ratty slippers and walks, slouching, across the little living room to the door.
I’m standing on the porch, looking down at the cement… hallowed ground. No welcome mat. Shivering nervously shifting my weight from foot to foot, holding the heavy case of beer. It feels cold in my hands in the summer air that smells of cat piss and night-blooming jasmine. I hear classical music playing behind Bukowski’s window. A baby cries and a television blares from apartments across the courtyard. A gunshot pops off in the distance… Awkward as a schoolboy on a blind date, I stand by the dirty screen door and wait…
Suddenly, the door opens and Bukowski’s big, battered face is there before me. I’m standing in the presence of Genius… and it looks like it’s about to knock me flat on my ass.
Without ceremony, Bukowski reaches into the cardboard box I’m holding like a temple offering. He casually extracts a can of beer and cracks it open. Without giving me another look, he turns and disappears into the little bungalow. My eyes scan the cement porch, my brown leather boots, the cuffs of my dirty jeans…
“Jeee-sus, kid, ya just gonna staaaand out there? Bring it in-siiiide,” he drawls from the darkened room. I step over the threshold.
Later, I’m sitting around a cheap coffee table covered with empty cans. An empty pint bottle of whiskey sits on Bukowski’s end like a captured Queen in a chess match. A pile of my poetry sits out on the table between us. I reach into the empty cardboard box and crack open the last can of beer.
“Heeey, giii-me thaat”, Bukowski protests. I ignore him, drinking the beer.
“Soooo, yer a wriiiiiter, haaah?” he says finally.
I pass the half-finished can over. Bukowski takes it and guzzles it down. He burps.
“Weeeelll”, he says, looking drunk and rather nasty now. “If yer a wriiiter, what ya do is ya wriiiite, get it? What ya don’t do is sit aroooouund taaalking abooouuut wriiiting with other guys who wriiiite. You wriiiite. And then, ya wriiiite some moooore. That’s it, baby. But… if ya got nothing to saaaaay, then youre just another bum with a ten dollar typer, with alotta taaaalk, and shit for braaiiins… And, to be brutally honest, Jono, yoooou impress me as a self-conscious punk who needs to do some liiiiiving…”
“Who you callin’ a punk? Ya old fart…” I hear myself say, instantly regretting it. Too late…
“YOU! YA LITTLE CUNT LICKIN, FISH LIPPED MOMMA’S BOY. PUNK. PUNK. PUUUUUNNNNK!!!”
“Motherfucker”, I yell, rising to my feet, fast, knocking beer cans off the table.
“Yeeeaahhh, I fucked your mother. And I’ll fuck you too, fish fucker,” Bukowski taunts, coming at me like a train.
Drunk and crazed, I take a swing at him and feel my fist connect with the rough, bearded skin of his face. Not phased, Bukowski clobbers me in the ear. I see stars. Now it’s two of us, drunken poets, trading drunken blows, I taste blood in my mouth and keep hitting him. But Bukowski is getting the best of me, pounding away with those big, red, ugly mitts.
I crouch low, defending my face, and try to head butt him in the gut, but he grabs me like a bear, and we both wrestle to the floor, toppling over the coffee table which cracks and splinters. I’m rolling round on the dirty wall-to-wall carpet in a spinning chaos of beer cans, pages of poetry flying, pissed and gasping like some savage, lumbering beast of old, an ugly, deformed, drunken puppet, breaking everything in it’s terrible path…
Finally, breathing hard, bloody and sweating we both stop, laughing hysterically…
“Geeeeez, kid”, he says finally, “ya fiiiight just liiike a giiiirl I useta fuck in a toiiii-let…”
“Was that before, or after she shit in yer mouth?” I snap back.
“Shit, I shiiiit bigger than you… Look at my beautiful cofffeeeee taaa-ble. You oooowe me for that, ya little shit…”
We end the night sitting on the floor, drinking, trading insults, reading poetry, and toasting to each other’s speedy demise as the sun rises, emerging like a punch-drunk sea monster over the smoggy purgatory of Bukowski’s doomed Los Angeles…
Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.
Jonathan Shaw has had his passport stamped in hell so many times he could get his mail there. Vile as junkie-cum, beautiful as a dead drunk’s bible, Scabvender will keep you clawing at the pages, wondering how one man can wreak so much havoc, suffer so much for Art, and still have enough brains left to put a sentence together, let alone the heart to create this unique, riveting, hyper-colorful and –scariest of all — brutally true adventure. Written in blood, Scabvender takes us places most people never come back from. This is gonna hurt, motherfucker, but the author is living proof that whatever doesn’t kill you can get you laid… What are we, in the end, but the sum of our scars?
– Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight, and Perv- A Love Story
