8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dissonant Portraiture., June 24, 2001
This review is from: Distorture (Black Ice Books) (Paperback)
Witness today's overhip lit: rock lyric quoting, gutter-worshipping fiction by those who mistake posture for content. As if fiction must reverberate with the quirks and affectations of fleeting fads to ensure its validity. As if it can't stand on its own without a crutch of trendy reference. As if literature is not itself a genuine art form, but a pallid lifestyle slide-show, its anemic screen earning merit only when it throws off the correct volley of shabby-pop imagery: Crack. Prostitutes. Meaningful alterna-tunes. Painfully conscious yet infuriatingly unexamined slouching.
A cursory glance at Rob Hardin's short story collection, Distorture, might lead one to identify it with the above. After all, the opening tale, "Knives for a Narcoleptic," seems to have all the attributes in place: a street-level Alphabet City backdrop, delinquent youths with names like "Ratboy;" drugs, music, scarification, mutilation, etc. However, these surface symptoms aren't given the treatment we've come to expect from the slacker hacks: This time around, the characters aren't archetypes or constructs supporting a trite political or cultural stance. Neither grubby angels nor totems of cool, they are instead substantial and ironic explorations. The teens in this story who play grisly doctor with an unconscious woman are each cast in an unsympathetic light that reveals more sinuous personality curves than dreamed of by ten sex-positive pornographers. (And, yes, despite the naturalistic characterization, it's still a very *artificial* scenario -- but why shouldn't it be? This is fiction, not journalism.) Behold adolescent Tim's never-neatly-resolved conflict of lust and scruple: "He's probably only ever lost it about girls with scars. He swabs the blood off her stomach, the edges of the scalpel's lineations still transparent white. He puts his lips to the design, feels horrible, pulls away. Then sneaks another look, lives there for days. He ministers to her back, imagining scenarios in which he alone cares for her-his whispered enchantments resurrecting her health." Clearly, this isn't some simple role-playing fantasy designed to reinforce one's comfy notions of outsider status: Pandering to the reader has no place in serious characterization. Real psychic perspectives are agonizing labyrinths-never pat, never easy. Though a twit, Tim is granted dimension-a brave move, and the best one in this case, even if it means that Hardin's refusal to flatten the story's dynamics into a sermon will be construed by the witless as cruel or unsympathetic. In fact, it's often in this very absence of a comfort level that the author's ambitions are most visible, and we see that this type of debased scenario has at last been put to profound use.
The influences at work in Distorture result in ornate and complex prose that further subverts the familiar subject matter. It's no mistake that names like Dowson, Poe and Beddoes surface sporadically in the texts, and if the autobiographical essay "An Inquiry Into Subjective Evolution" is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, the passage on Baudelaire's significance comes off as earnest. Hardin repeatedly utilizes 19th Century literary aesthetics to achieve effect in a manner that still manages to sound thoroughly modern, thus demonstrating the enduring strengths of Edwardian dissipation and French Decadence. Musical influences abound as well: A trained musician, Hardin is clearly mindful of counterpoint when using articulate, elegant language to verbalize surreal and futuristic imagery: "Fish-eyed, famished, I gaped at addiction's fata morgana; I'd never seen a giant skull before, but there it was, sprouting quads and veinage like the lode that squats on a victim's bulging neck." Composers' names come up often, and one group of pieces, which appear to have been based around musical structures, is gathered in a separate section labeled "Orchestrations." Fortunately, Hardin displays a wide musical palette, ranging from discordant fugues ("Matterland") to darkly harmonious chaconnes ("Val Demar's Pear").
With all of this going for Distorture, it's odd that many of the book's readers seem to notice only its most superficial, sensational qualities-corpses, rough trade, Lower East Side appeal, etc. These elements, integral as they often are to the stories, are still merely the subject matter. The real reason to pick up Distorture is not because it might define your subculture or tell you what it's like on the streets. This is a volume of carefully wrought and revised, icepick-sharp prose. It's the work of an author who invests a great measure of thought into his writing. This may not seem fashionable, but it's what we need.
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13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Pretentious exercise in self-display, July 13, 2000
This review is from: Distorture (Black Ice Books) (Paperback)
"Distorture" is a plodding and self-regarding debut from writer-studio musician Rob Hardin. "Distorture"is by far inferior to the stories of another writer/musician, M. Gira, titled "The Consumer", which explore virtually the same themes with greater success. The stories in Hardin's collection, by contrast, propounded by its promoters in such empty, gimmicky phrases as "fiercely modern" and "lyrically demented", are not only dreary and unattractive, but artificial, with strained attempts at pseudo-erudition. Hardin strives for originality with the steadfastness of a constipator trying to unburden his agonised bowels, the result being discordant thought, fragmentary narratives, unfathomably elaborate page layouts and illustrations, in addition to forced, obviously "concocted" imagery, e.g. "the stained remains lay plainly disembrained" and so forth. Here is a quotation more illustrative of Hardin's "word-magic" and "profundity": "When writing seems poised like a window between reader & speaker, its opacity is gloved in a veneer of transparence." A prize for the first who is able to decipher this delirious, almost self-parodying rattle of words.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a beautifully orchestrated song translated to words, November 7, 2001
This review is from: Distorture (Black Ice Books) (Paperback)
My brain has been reduced to a pool of clear liquid; as I type this it is dripping methodically out of my ears. I hope it doesn't stain the carpet. Rob Hardin is to blame for this, and really, it's an experience I wish I could repeat over and over again. Distorture is pure, distilled intelligence blended with the most basic of human emotions to create a collection of stories that scarify the mind and leave the reader in utter awe. Excuse me while my head implodes.
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