Read Online I'm Open to Anything William E Jones 9780996421898 Books

Product details Paperback 150 pages Publisher We Heard You Like Books (April 15, 2019) Language English ISBN-10 0996421890

I'm Open to Anything William E Jones 9780996421898 Books Reviews

• I tore through I’m Open to Anything in one sitting. I laughed and cried, got turned on, and then I read it again. This is one gloriously salacious book packed with sex, lots of fabulously dirty sex, loss, love, stench, pleasure, friendship, anatomy, fulfilled and unfulfilled desire, anger, ideas, bodily fluids, history, fantasy, art, kink, long lost dive bars, the Midwest to the West Coast and the cruel passage of time. It also gives you a picture of a Los Angeles from long ago that you end up pining for even if you’ve never lived there.
  
  Like all the greats, this novel is titillating and intellectual all at once and makes you imagine wider possibilities for the world and your life, inside and out. You’re along with the sharp-eyed narrator on all his ribald adventures, inside his heart and mind as he tries to figure out how to create a life for himself with some freedom in it and find sex and companionship in a rapidly unraveling American landscape. His struggles and ecstasies are on full display and his unsentimental voice haunts you as if you’ve received an unforgiving transmission from decades past telling you in the present that it could have turned out different but there yet may be ways to get your kicks.
  
  William E. Jones is a treasure and one of the most essential writers coming out of North America these days (there aren’t many of them). He’s also written two unforgettable biographies of luminaries from the outer fringes of American life. If you’re looking for some stimulating stuff to make you think and feel in new ways, buy this book. And thanks to We Heard You Like Books for publishing a novel that most publishers would be too afraid to publish, let alone read. Plus, this has to be one of the great covers from the annals of literature. Yes, judge a book by its cover. I hope Jones continues reaching deep and provides us more of where this came from. I need it.
• A few years ago at Cornell University (mentioned in the book as "the top of the middle" - as a former student there I had to laugh) I attended a lecture by Jodi Dean titled "Communist Desire." Dean was confronted in the talk by an interlocutor from the audience, former Cornell prof Susan Buck-Morss, who stated flatly that she had no interest in desire, but "Communist drives" (in her mention as per Georges Bataille in particular) were of the utmost importance. Drives shape the social body and by extension in the larger political world.
  
  "Communist drives" seem to me to be the true subject of William Jones' novel, which follows the exploits of an oblique narrator, who describes his shift from leaving a dead-end Midwest rustbelt somewhere for the mysteries of Los Angeles, an urban setting that is a kind of annihilation of the dismal structures of the Fordist production of the "flyover states" by virtue of both sprawling incoherence and a promise of depravity. The horrific Reagan era packaging of identities and bodily functions, and rendered a bit senseless in the entropic urban labyrinth of Los Angeles (a suspicious calm before a storm of real estate speculation?), becomes a lost world in our current passage to a feudal fascist state. Our hero is able to connect to others through a keen sexual curiosity unencumbered by sentiment, and a discovered, illuminating talent for fisting.
  
  At the risk of making another off the wall association, the novel also resembles the trajectory described by Lionel Trilling in his essay about Henry James' novel The Princess Casamassima in the book The LIberal Imagination a type of narrative Trilling described as "the young man from the provinces" gone big city, from naif to knowing, which had been the theme of earlier writing such as Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, and novels such as Flaubert's Sentimental Education, or Stendhal's The Red and the Black.
  
  The narrator's picaresque adventures are also a vehicle for expositions on the aesthetics of gay pornography, cold war politics, the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Fred Halsted, and Werner Schroeter, and the spectral presence of Jean Genet, among others. There is also a brief exposition on the photographs of Joel-Peter Witkin which is about the only interesting thing I have read about Witkin. That a novel could be a forum for critique is both old and contemporary. Thomas Bernhard is mentioned. The novels of Herve Guibert come to mind reading this book although Jones is so much more euphorically filthy and fun, and interested in the most fantastic lowdown places and extraordinary characters. The relish of a Los Angeles off the maps, although hidden in plain sight, and the potential profundity of sex with others make this both a page turner and an philosophical treatise. Witty, well-written and dirty! What more to ask from a book?