Hurt is Universal
Harmony Korine, A Crackup at the Race Riots
Drag City, 172pp, £13.99, ISBN 9781937112103
reviewed by Robert Kiely
Harmony Korine is best known for writing the film Kids (1995) at the age of 19, which follows the 16-year-old-skater Teller as he spreads HIV amongst New York’s barely-pubescent virgins. Korine went on to direct Gummo (1997), Julien Donkey-Boy (1999), Mister Lonely (2007) and Trash Humpers (2009). The bizarre and dark humour of his films has garnered them a large cult following. His book, A Crackup at the Race Riots, was initially released by Doubleday in 1998; Korine’s cult-status meant that copies of the initial print-run have been going for almost $300 online in recent years. Drag City have done us all a good service in re-issuing Korine’s book off the back of his polarising neon pop-poem Spring Breakers (2013).
Someone once said to F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‘if I ever cracked, I’d try to make the world crack with me.’ Korine’s text is a cracked looking-glass for a cracked world, all flotsam and jetsam. It works by accretion, and is significantly looser than any of his film projects. Populated as it is by paedophiles, some guy speed-reading The Great Gatsby on crank, homophobes, a kid with no ears, Igor the amputee, et al, the book fits within the auteur-ish universe that Korine has hollowed out for us in Gummo and Trash Humpers. Perhaps there is a certain formulaic quality to the book, a weird-for-the-sake-of-being-weird – as Pat Padua tersely summarises it in a recent review: ‘A dwarf in a Ku Klux Klan hood has AIDS.’ But if Korine concentrates on the abject, those who suffer from not being Donald Cruise or Tom Trump, locked out of the American Dream, he does so without condescension. He would not abruptly terminate, shame-facedly, an interview with Charles Ramsey.
The book respects no boundaries, and continually reaches out to ‘celebrity culture’. Cuttings from a Johnny Depp interview, letters and lists from Tupac Shakur, rumours about Jackson Pollock and others, are churned up alongside spurious quotations from TS Eliot, and a wonderful Emily Dickinson imitation:
Angels – twice descending
Reimbursed my store –
burglar! Banker – Father!
I am poor once more!
1858?
In a recent interview with Blake Butler, Korine described the process of composing the book thus:
‘I was doing a lot of narcotics. I remember basically the process was that I would hear things, or I would see things ... I would hear somebody walking down the street, and maybe they’d say something interesting, and I’d put it on a piece of paper. Or I would see a pair of socks hanging from a telephone pole with a Star of David on the ankle, and I would just write that.’
So, the book is pretty disconnected. It’s more of a commonplace-book or a notebook than anything else. The whole is subordinate to the parts: an extended, sustained twitter-feed, a variegated tumblr. And yet the fragments also merge and coalesce the more one reads, and become difficult to untangle.
That said, there is some regularity to it—the entries usually strike one of three notes: serene frankness, madness and contorted one-liners worthy of Stewart Francis or Oscar Wilde (‘I gave up bowling for sex – the balls are lighter and I don’t have to wear shoes,’ or ‘A mistress is something between a master and a mattress’). Most of the book can be divided into segments of roughly a page in length, unrelated to other content unless part of a series — for example, a series of suicide notes, which includes space for the reader’s signature — and this style encourages a non-linear reading. I very rarely flick through a book, but after 50 pages I found myself breezing forward and backwards and losing the impetus to finish it. This is not to say that Korine’s work is substandard fare, nor that it is to be dipped into between bowel-movements – though it is not not a toilet-book. You might read it cover to cover, but it is more likely you’ll pick it up every now and again to fire some neurons.
And yet, this description doesn’t do justice to the text's deeper resonances. The title advertises a crackup, perhaps one of many, at a race riot – but which one? Limiting ourselves to Korine’s lifetime alone, there are all too many candidates, but a concern with race and some kind of legacy of the American South haunt the text in ways I don’t quite understand; they seem to simply be there. (Incidentally, Korine was raised in Nashville, Tennessee.) The book ends with a photocopy of a paragraph from Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away, a ‘Southern Gothic’ novel published in 1960:
All he would be was an observer. He waited with serenity. Life had never been good enough to him for him to wince at its destruction. He told himself that he was indifferent even to his own dissolution. It seemed to him that this indifference was the most that human dignity could achieve, and for the moment forgetting his lapses, forgetting even his narrow escape of the afternoon, he felt he had achieved it. To feel nothing was peace.
O’Connor’s novel is the story of Francis Tarwater, a 14-year-old boy who is trying to escape the influence of his great-uncle, a mad prophet. In this passage, his uncle Rayber relaxes while Tarwater takes Rayber’s son off to be drowned and baptised simultaneously. But that isn’t included by Korine; the violence is off the page. Although his writing is often explicit, Korine is more interested in the weird calmness that precedes or follows the storm than the violent act itself.
His art is candid, the kind of candidness which levels out truth and fabrication (no doubt this comes via Herzog’s documentary-ethos, as Herzog is a major influence for Korine: Herzog appeared in Mister Lonely and Julien Donkey-Boy, and has written an effusive, if naïve, blurb for this edition). The narration of the book is almost infinitely detached. Take this description of a picture, part of a series labeled ‘Ethnic Adolescent atrocities’:
A teenage boy and a teenage girl are dead and hanging by their necks from a branch of a huge tree. The symbol for Prince has been carved into their bellies. The girl has small fingers and boobs.
It is all here, the obscene violence (as in the folk-etymology, out-of-the-scene, off-stage), the crudity, the humour, the celebrity-culture, in the implication that Prince has gone mad. This is the work of a visual thinker. If Korine’s remarkable text is mere observation with little feeling, it is nonetheless profoundly affective. The text bears an immense, unrelievable tension. Korine writes: ‘Hurt is universal, so is making people laugh.’ His work is as uncomfortable as it is important.
Someone once said to F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‘if I ever cracked, I’d try to make the world crack with me.’ Korine’s text is a cracked looking-glass for a cracked world, all flotsam and jetsam. It works by accretion, and is significantly looser than any of his film projects. Populated as it is by paedophiles, some guy speed-reading The Great Gatsby on crank, homophobes, a kid with no ears, Igor the amputee, et al, the book fits within the auteur-ish universe that Korine has hollowed out for us in Gummo and Trash Humpers. Perhaps there is a certain formulaic quality to the book, a weird-for-the-sake-of-being-weird – as Pat Padua tersely summarises it in a recent review: ‘A dwarf in a Ku Klux Klan hood has AIDS.’ But if Korine concentrates on the abject, those who suffer from not being Donald Cruise or Tom Trump, locked out of the American Dream, he does so without condescension. He would not abruptly terminate, shame-facedly, an interview with Charles Ramsey.
The book respects no boundaries, and continually reaches out to ‘celebrity culture’. Cuttings from a Johnny Depp interview, letters and lists from Tupac Shakur, rumours about Jackson Pollock and others, are churned up alongside spurious quotations from TS Eliot, and a wonderful Emily Dickinson imitation:
Angels – twice descending
Reimbursed my store –
burglar! Banker – Father!
I am poor once more!
1858?
In a recent interview with Blake Butler, Korine described the process of composing the book thus:
‘I was doing a lot of narcotics. I remember basically the process was that I would hear things, or I would see things ... I would hear somebody walking down the street, and maybe they’d say something interesting, and I’d put it on a piece of paper. Or I would see a pair of socks hanging from a telephone pole with a Star of David on the ankle, and I would just write that.’
So, the book is pretty disconnected. It’s more of a commonplace-book or a notebook than anything else. The whole is subordinate to the parts: an extended, sustained twitter-feed, a variegated tumblr. And yet the fragments also merge and coalesce the more one reads, and become difficult to untangle.
That said, there is some regularity to it—the entries usually strike one of three notes: serene frankness, madness and contorted one-liners worthy of Stewart Francis or Oscar Wilde (‘I gave up bowling for sex – the balls are lighter and I don’t have to wear shoes,’ or ‘A mistress is something between a master and a mattress’). Most of the book can be divided into segments of roughly a page in length, unrelated to other content unless part of a series — for example, a series of suicide notes, which includes space for the reader’s signature — and this style encourages a non-linear reading. I very rarely flick through a book, but after 50 pages I found myself breezing forward and backwards and losing the impetus to finish it. This is not to say that Korine’s work is substandard fare, nor that it is to be dipped into between bowel-movements – though it is not not a toilet-book. You might read it cover to cover, but it is more likely you’ll pick it up every now and again to fire some neurons.
And yet, this description doesn’t do justice to the text's deeper resonances. The title advertises a crackup, perhaps one of many, at a race riot – but which one? Limiting ourselves to Korine’s lifetime alone, there are all too many candidates, but a concern with race and some kind of legacy of the American South haunt the text in ways I don’t quite understand; they seem to simply be there. (Incidentally, Korine was raised in Nashville, Tennessee.) The book ends with a photocopy of a paragraph from Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away, a ‘Southern Gothic’ novel published in 1960:
All he would be was an observer. He waited with serenity. Life had never been good enough to him for him to wince at its destruction. He told himself that he was indifferent even to his own dissolution. It seemed to him that this indifference was the most that human dignity could achieve, and for the moment forgetting his lapses, forgetting even his narrow escape of the afternoon, he felt he had achieved it. To feel nothing was peace.
O’Connor’s novel is the story of Francis Tarwater, a 14-year-old boy who is trying to escape the influence of his great-uncle, a mad prophet. In this passage, his uncle Rayber relaxes while Tarwater takes Rayber’s son off to be drowned and baptised simultaneously. But that isn’t included by Korine; the violence is off the page. Although his writing is often explicit, Korine is more interested in the weird calmness that precedes or follows the storm than the violent act itself.
His art is candid, the kind of candidness which levels out truth and fabrication (no doubt this comes via Herzog’s documentary-ethos, as Herzog is a major influence for Korine: Herzog appeared in Mister Lonely and Julien Donkey-Boy, and has written an effusive, if naïve, blurb for this edition). The narration of the book is almost infinitely detached. Take this description of a picture, part of a series labeled ‘Ethnic Adolescent atrocities’:
A teenage boy and a teenage girl are dead and hanging by their necks from a branch of a huge tree. The symbol for Prince has been carved into their bellies. The girl has small fingers and boobs.
It is all here, the obscene violence (as in the folk-etymology, out-of-the-scene, off-stage), the crudity, the humour, the celebrity-culture, in the implication that Prince has gone mad. This is the work of a visual thinker. If Korine’s remarkable text is mere observation with little feeling, it is nonetheless profoundly affective. The text bears an immense, unrelievable tension. Korine writes: ‘Hurt is universal, so is making people laugh.’ His work is as uncomfortable as it is important.