The April 09 edition of Beat the Dust is devoted to the work of Dan Fante, our fourth Featured Writer. Unlike the other issues we've done with Featured Writers Mark SaFranko, Adelle Stripe and Steve Finbow, this one is more a retrospective. Dan has raided an old trunk (full of photographs, original type-written scripts, newspaper reviews, extracts from old notebooks etc.) to provide us with a number of previously unseen pieces and some special insights into his writing career, particularly the early years. We also have extracts from some of Dan’s early novels, video clips and pieces of work from some of the writers and musicians Dan considers his key influences, and some favourite poems from his first poetry collection. There is also a sneak preview of Dan’s forthcoming novel, 86’d plus an exclusive interview with the man himself conducted by cult American writer, Mark SaFranko especially for this issue. PLEASE NOTE: The next issue of Beat the Dust open to all writers will be in JULY. Submissions for that are welcome between 11th May and 26th June.
DAN FANTE RETROSPECTIVE
Author:
Dan Fante is interviewed by Mark SaFranko
MS: Beat the Dust’s editor has asked that I conduct this interview as a dialogue, which sounds like a good idea to me since most interviews with writers put me to sleep. I find it infinitely more interesting to go at a writer from different angles that are not necessarily “literary” – the reader learns a lot more that way, though I suspect some questions about writing will find their way in. I hope this is okay with you, Dan… Let’s start by talking about English bulldogs. You’ve owned a succession of them. I happen to be a dog lover, so tell me about your choice of that animal. What is it about the species that attracts you?
DF: What I like about bulldogs is what I enjoy in people; defiance and stubbornness, and non-conformity.
MS: Recently I got to spend some time in the southern Arizona desert. The Sonoran landscape is like no other place on earth -- it’s like being on another planet. The flora and fauna is extraordinary and fascinating. You moved to Arizona not all that long ago. Why? How does it agree with you? Has it found its way into your work?
DF: The desert is open and expansive. Freeing. The eyes look out and the mind bounces off nothingness. Wonderful for a writer. Limitless.
Submission Date:
03 Apr 2009
Category:
Script
In Chap-book
Title:
smoke – episode one (reproduced exactly from a photocopy of the original script)
Excerpt:
Dan introduces his radio play smoke:
My radio drama smoke ran for two years from 1969-1971 on New York station WHBI. It featured the first black super-hero anywhere. It had never been done before. smoke was aired for half an hour one night per week. It was the only currently-produced radio drama on the air at the time. Near the end of the run I had a meeting with a national producer who wanted to syndicate the show. 50 stations around the country. I was drunk at the meeting and when the guy didn't offer me enough money I told him to go fuck himself. That was the end of smoke... and me for the next fifteen years.
DF on Eugene O’Neill: O'Neill's frankness and raw emotion showed me that a writer can portray rage and love and brutal honesty and compassion in one scene.
Submission Date:
03 Apr 2009
Category:
Video
Title:
long day's journey into night
Excerpt:
A scene - Jamie's Confession - from the Sidney Lumet-directed film version of long day's journey into night. It was made in 1962, starring Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards and Dean Stockwell.
Dan Fante is interviewed by Mark SaFranko (continued)
MS: You’ve been known to pay visits to Chavez Ravine to catch L.A. Dodgers’ games. Have you always been a baseball fan? Did you play the game yourself? Do any other sports interest you? Have you become an Arizona Diamondback fan?
DF: I’ve loved baseball all my life. If you were a child of John Fante, and didn’t love baseball, you might well have been sold into slavery or driven from his home. There wasn’t much room for any other sport when I was a kid. Eventually I developed into a decent pitcher and played that position from the age of ten to eighteen in school and the various athletic leagues. If I could have played baseball professionally I would have.
As far as The Arizona Diamondbacks are concerned – they reside in Phoenix (or as I call it, Penix) Unfortunately my dislike for Penix is so great I cannot bring myself to enter its city limits, baseball or no baseball.
Submission Date:
03 Apr 2009
Category:
Review
In Chap-book
Title:
Article reviewing smoke
Excerpt:
Photocopy of an article in the Night Owl reporter column of the New York Daily News, Tuesday, September 14, 1971, reviewing Dan’s radio drama smoke.
DF on Bukowski: Bukowski's ability to say things with simplicity and expose the deeply personal, is brilliant. I had the opportunity to know Bukowski. He admired my father's work and visited him. Later, when I read his poems, it was helpful to my own work to have known him. The same holds true with Hubert Selby. I got to know 'Cubby' and I showed him my first novel. I've been lucky enough to have met three of my most important literary icons.
Submission Date:
03 Apr 2009
Category:
Video
Title:
the secret of my endurance
Excerpt:
A video clip of Charles Bukowski reading the secret of my endurance.
Dan Fante is interviewed by Mark SaFranko (continued)
MS: Isaac Singer once said that he wouldn’t cross the street to meet Tolstoy because everything a writer has to say is in his work. I happen to feel the same. Meeting an influence or an idol would have to be an anticlimax, if not a disappointment. You made a point to meet Hubert Selby. Why? Was the result worth the effort?
DF: Selby was not a nice guy. He was cantankerous and could sting you. But he was alternately very kind, especially when he found out I was a writer. When I’d run into him or call him on the phone I was always wary of who he might be that day. I’d say a few words then wait…
Submission Date:
03 Apr 2009
Category:
Poetry
In Podcast and Chap-book
Title:
shepherd hill
Excerpt:
Dan introduces his poem, shepherd hill:
Shepherd Hill is a poem I wrote circa 1974. At that time the fellow I was a chauffeur for owned a house in upstate New York. He also owned a firm in Manhattan that designed office space interiors for large buildings. Marv was a wealthy, successful guy. He remodeled a home and grounds in Pound Ridge, New York. I wrote Shepherd Hill and gave it to him as a gift to dedicate to the country house. The poem was taken to The Metropolitan Museum of Art where the curator of ancient documents inscribed it on parchment. He then sealed it between two pieces of glass and certified it would last 500 years.
Dan Fante is interviewed by Mark SaFranko (continued)
MS: As a musician, I was surprised to discover that you were once the manager of a professional singer, as well as his lyricist. What happened to your career in that industry?
DF: Cocaine happened - alcohol happened. A nasty mouth happened. Friends and business associates scattered to the winds. A nice career took a large shit.
MS: And what music goes through your head on a daily basis? For me, for some reason, probably because it hit me at a critical moment of adolescence, it’s the opening measures of strawberry fields forever. I know you’ve mentioned a connection to the punks. For me that’s a very limited area, though. What other music or musicians do you actually like?
DF: The blues. I’m invulnerable to the blues. Bettye LaVette, some Van Morrison, most of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee and all of Jimmy Reed. I was twelve when I first heard Little Richard. It changed my life forever. Much the same way as seeing my first Eugene O’Neill play did.
Submission Date:
03 Apr 2009
Category:
Poetry
In Chap-book
Title:
untitled poem – photocopy of an old hand-written poem from a 1975 notebook
Excerpt:
Dan introduces his untitled poem:
Here is a poem fragment from my days as a New York City cabby. For a few years I carried notebooks with me on my shift. If some lines for a poem came to me I would pull over and write them down. I threw most of the stuff out – as a matter of fact almost all of it. If the shit wasn’t brilliant – Dylan Thomas – I didn’t want any part of it. The poem fragment here somehow survived my destruction of it.
MS: I’ve always had a need to express myself in many different ways: writer, musician, actor, painter, and so forth. If you weren’t a writer, what kind of artist would you be?
DF: A musician. My books feel like the blues to me.
MS: Being raised in Hollywood with a movie-connected family member, you couldn’t have been untouched by cinema. Do you share my own feeling that moviemaking should be left to the Europeans since so they’re so much better at it? (This of course is a heretical statement to those who purvey the American film product.) What films are your favorites?
DF: American: dr strangelove, aliens and one or two pink panthers. Italian: Fellini’s la strada is a stunning piece of art. Swedish: the virgin spring and the seventh seal. (I once spent the afternoon with Bergman.) French: jean de florette
Submission Date:
03 Apr 2009
Category:
Poetry
In Podcast and Chap-book
Title:
Selected poems from a gin pissing, raw meat, dual carburettor v-8 son-of-a-bitch from los angeles
Excerpt:
Dan introduces a selection of his favourite poems from his first collection:
I wrote some poems before chump change, years before. A few survived and made it into my collected poems, a gin pissing, raw meat, dual carburettor v-8 son-of-a-bitch from los angeles. I’ve selected four from this collection, including my favorite poem that begins, "Now that I've written...'
DF on John Fante (picture left, from a family album circa 1960): John Fante's unflinching honesty and frankness about his emotions, set a tone for my work. An example of what is possible in modern fiction.
Submission Date:
03 Apr 2009
Category:
Novel extract
In Podcast and Chap-book
Title:
ask the dust
Excerpt:
Dan kindly gave Beat the Dust permission to publish an extract from the start of his father’s novel ask the dust.
One night I was sitting on the bed in my hotel room on Bunker Hill, down in the very middle of Los Angeles. It was an important night in my life, because I had to make a decision about the hotel. Either I paid up or I got out: that was what the note said, the note the landlady had put under the door. A great problem, deserving acute attention. I solved it by turning out the lights and going to bed.
Dan Fante is interviewed by Mark SaFranko (continued)
MS: Now this is an incendiary topic, especially in today’s PC world. Long ago I began to notice that many right-wing or reactionary artists – some so far off the charts they could be considered Nazis or Fascists – were far more interesting than the lefties, both as artists and as personalities. I’ll throw out some names: Dali…Pound…Kerouac…Hamsun…Celine…Mishima (if there was ever a more fascinating or complex human being, I can’t think of one)…Isaac Singer…Simenon…Dostoyevsky. I could drop more, and there are lingering suspicions about others, like Bukowski. Is this just my imagination? A coincidence? Is there more room on the right fringe than the left for lunatics?
DF: Mencken was a brilliant social critic too. And you mentioned Hamsun. I also consider Hesse to be a radical thinker, not a fascist, but a revolutionary. Kafka too. Nietzsche as well. For me, those who set themselves apart, who speak from a sense alienation and anger, are powerful voices.
Submission Date:
03 Apr 2009
Category:
Novel extract
In Podcast and Chap-book
Title:
chump change
Excerpt:
Dan introduces an extract from his debut novel, chump change:
My first story (undestroyed) was my novel, chump change. Two years in the writing and editing and re-writing. Here's the start of it...
My name is Bruno Dante and what I’m writing about here is what happened. On December 4th, the St. Joseph of Cupertino Hospital alcohol and nut ward in the Bronx, on Moshulo Parkway, let me go. Released me, again. Each time I took their twenty-eight-day cure I found out how much their in-patient charges went up. This last time, I stabbed myself in a blackout and they almost wouldn’t accept me as a patient. This last time was the worst, because all that I could remember seeing when I came around was the blood gushing out my stomach onto my clothes.
Dan Fante is interviewed by Mark SaFranko (continued)
MS: From the beginning I realized that since I had no money I would always have to work a job or jobs to support my artistic pursuits. This in turn meant that I would have to learn to work anywhere at anytime, in fragments, whether fifteen minutes or forty-five or whatever. How about Dan Fante? Take me through a Dan Fante day from morning until night. Has it changed much over the years?
DF: As you know I’ve had a hundred jobs but I’ve always been a hustler. Had I gone to school I might have learned to subsidize myself in an anal academic environment. No such luck. My favorite jobs were the ones I did alone: Cab driver, chauffeur, hotel night manager. These days I get up, have my coffee, then do an hour or more of secretarial snot, answering e-mails and business correspondence, then I write. Writing nurtures me. Stretches me. I keep discovering, turning corners. So far, the pond is still deep enough to catch a decent fish from time to time.
Submission Date:
03 Apr 2009
Category:
Novel extract
In Chap-book
Title:
mooch
Excerpt:
Dan introduces the extract from his second novel, mooch:
The telemarketing business saved my ass and destroyed me simultaneously. Struggling to stay sober and hold off my demons, I found a phone-sales gig hawking computer supplies. I became good at it, slamming the mooch on the other end of the line. Very good. Then, as fate would have it, I met the love of my life (at the time), a crazy ex-lapdancer named Jimmi. Jimmi taught me what real pain was about.
MS: You were once led by a psychic to a forgotten manuscript written by your father that was subsequently published. And you and I have known each other for what has turned out to be many years now, a relationship which has resulted in several rather uncanny events that I won’t go into. Actually they’re so unusual and fortuitous that someone once suggested to me that we were brothers in a past life. Are there unseen energies and powers in life that we will never understand? It’s my feeling that despite the rise of religious fundamentalism, the present age is a spiritual void. There also seem to be more atheists than ever. But it seems to me the height of arrogance to suggest that any of us knows anything one way or the other with such dead certainty. Isn’t mystery at the core of the universe in the end? Shouldn’t that in itself provoke some kind of awe?
DF: My mother, Joyce, was a wonderful Tarot Card reader and a practitioner of Wicca. She taught me card reading. I have done it for over thirty years. But there’s another aspect. I’m also sober quite a while now and have practiced an absolutely necessary spiritual discipline for years in order to contend with my own personal madness. My thinking. My mind.
This has led me to experience several unusual events. I call them spiritual. For instance, last year I was in Italy touring with a rock band. I was alone in my hotel room summarizing a poem to be translated into Italian. The poem was about my mother. She’d been dead for three years but we had never really resolved our differences. For instance, she was very difficult to converse with toward the end. Very absolute. And very caustic. I was relieved when she died, not saddened.
As I was transcribing the poem she appeared in front of me in the form of energy – I could feel her in the room. It was overpowering. I began talking to her. It was as real to me as you are. And it was absolute and clear. Lately, I’ve started to talk to people like my dead brother and my father. Usually, on long rides when I’m alone, I experience a kind of conversation with these guys. There it is. Go figure.
Submission Date:
03 Apr 2009
Category:
Novel extract
In Podcast and Chap-book
Title:
86'd
Excerpt:
Dan introduces an extract from a chapter from his forthcoming novel, 86’d, (which will be published by U.S. Publisher Harper Perennial in September 2009. Harper Perennial will also reissue Dan’s previously out of print novels chump change, mooch, and spitting off tall buildings in December 2009):
My brother was a very smart guy, much smarter than me. But, like me, he had a nasty alcohol jonz. This story is dedicated to him. Included here is a chapter from 86’d called my brother was dead…
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