Simon Lesser is a man at a crossroads – seated in the kitchen of his Brooklyn apartment with a corpse lying on the floor next to him, typing furiously on his laptop. As he tries to make sense of the life that brought him to this point, he’s convinced that everyone and everything is overwhelmed by chaos. With that thought in mind, he tells a story he wishes to strip of the trappings and art of storytelling and relate the cold facts of its random absurdity in a series of non-linear events. He traces his life as a secret, fetishistic enthusiast for female bodybuilders (called a “Schmoe”), then as a bodybuilding competitor himself, his marriage to German competitive bodybuilder Martina and his love affair with world-class professional bodybuilder Erika Verletzen, an impassioned, indomitable lunatic. Erika brings WWFP Pro Jurg Betrug into the mix. Jurg, a menacing gangster of the German criminal “milieu,” has plans for all involved. But what about the corpse on the floor? Just what will Simon do with the body and with himself? Meanwhile, time is ticking away – and the corpse on the floor is beginning to stink!
Targeted Age Group:: Adults of all ages
What Inspired You to Write Your Book?
To write a novel that did more than novels do – to deconstruct a world while constructing a life.
How Did You Come up With Your Characters?
I created hybrids of people I used to know, created people I never knew. At times I painstakingly drew from life without making of it a roman a clef.
Book Sample
Prolegomenon
Go fuck yourself.
That’s it. That’s the opening.
A jolting yet near cliché first line I admit – but really the only truthful way to begin a story. Any story.
A not so clever turn at reverse psychology you say?
No, I mean it: Fuck you.
Go fuck yourself.
Every story begins with an attempt to charm you, draw you in and unfold to you a tale of some organization and craft – even the worst hodge-podge roman a clef or bildungsroman, the talky, slap-dash pastiche of reminiscence, of self-serving reconstructed memory, the churning of chaos into a flattering order of point and purpose.
It’s of course a pedestrian lie. A commonplace of the everyday exalted into codified form, episodic in series like movies and TV, streaming in smooth or jerky sequence, artificial and calculated by brute technical art to get you going, raise up your blood, motivate your tears, titillate your genitals. Create the illusion of connection by trickery and prosody to make you feel.
It has to be entertainment. A diversion.
A lie to emulate the heart of truth.
Telling you a story that lies from the very beginning with an underlying contempt for you and your credulity to satisfy your id, your frustrated longing, is the point and purpose in every tale. I must lie to give you a semblance of easily comprehensible truth, predigested events, sequential relations that give you the illusion of omniscience – so that you can look down on the action and the characters below because the narrator feeds you that which is invisible to those involved.
It’s a cheap confidence scheme.
It’s a gilded model that clumsily tries to evoke a truth by promoting a pack of lies. It’s paint-by-numbers to enforce the prevailing cultural waking fiction.
“What about great art?” you say and rattle off some eternal and ephemeral author names.
Just construction. Just a more tortuous set of lies ordered like a mosaic to make the chaos disappear in shadowed action – camouflaged by a continuum of gimcrack, artificial drama or the mechanical absurdity of comedy. Orson Welles said it best in an offhand remark: “What we professional liars hope to serve is truth. I'm afraid the pompous word for that is ‘art.’”
So, this attempt to un-tell you a story, to not succumb to the odiously beautiful fulfillment of structured device to build a tale to manipulate you, to trick you, to entertain you to satisfying climax, is yet itself also a lie – even against that pompous canard of pretended art, it actually becomes art. We’ll give the lie to the very first technical device or ordering of chaos into a tasty, logically formed lie. We’ll begin with the first control technique derived from the onerous dominion of that weighty fantasy we call religion.
Let’s begin with the confession.
The unburdening of the religious cultural cliché of sin is supposed to form the cautionary tale, the moral parable that excites you to stay along the prescribed path, conform to the ultimate hedge against absurdity and randomness; the social order. And, of course, the social order is defined and furthered by chaos – each new blow-up or wrong turn defines orthodoxy.
All along the broken and continually reconstructed path we are dragged toward death and end with nothing but a vacuole of succor and pretexts for joy surrounding us, swallowing up the small gap left by our oblivion.
Death is now dragging me along.
Death is on the floor.
Right by my feet.
Dogging me.
Death, the only real resolution to chaos – the ineluctable conclusion to entropy.
Death, licking its chops like a domesticated animal, manipulating all, spoiled and well-fed, ready to pounce at the first weakness.
Death is no liturgical mystery.
There's nothing fancy about it, despite what institutional and self-deluded religionists would say, despite the profiteering homiletic edicts from televangelists in their gaudy tele-temples built on the suffering of the desperately faithful. Desperately grateful – a fearful nod to their fictive deity in gloried hopes for more. Infomercial prosperity ministries bilking the gullible for “seed money” to aid a harvest that only comes for the orating Tartuffe. Desperate that their unacknowledged acts on earth will finally be lauded and handsomely compensated in a heaven of the here-and-now with as much validity of being as "The Big Rock Candy Mountain" – a song from the vast depression no longer so much in dim memory meant to lure young boys to follow the hobos riding the rails for comfort and companionship, if not to become outright catamites.
A siren song of depravity and loss.
A passion play against regret.
A commercial jingle, which is what most of modern communication has been reduced to – prosperity ministries of hypnotic, empty faith, coaxing money from thin wallets, easy financing "Pay Day" loans, no matter how badly your credit has been ravaged due to the financial crash serving the demiurge of sacrosanct greed crammed down your throat by Wall Street banking masters. Plant an “uncommon seed,” they plead, filling their coffers while emptying your pockets. When it doesn’t work, what does their non-existent complaint department tell you?
You weren’t faithful enough. You didn’t believe hard enough.
God is perfect, and you are not, so pony up and this time get it right!
Like death-spiral Republicans, making government smaller, ending protective regulations, cutting Social Security and medical benefits for the wretched, to squeeze from the vulnerable the last penny in their continuous, robotic, morally twisted massive theft of public wealth. They tell a story of liberty and freedom.
Liberty of corporate serfdom; freedom to murder the poor.
The lie of the story of ordered chaos is to convince the brain to cough up the money.
The lie frames chaos to an imposed consistency of conduct, an estampment of control onto conduct providing the illusion of chaos as ersatz order, broken down and renewed again and again by false belief.
Positive thinking.
Faith.
Sacrifice.
Prayer.
The crusty encumbrances of ancient, traditional social abuse to serve rich masters and reinforce their yoke of control.
You must believe.
Without your belief, the fact of chaos, of indifferent randomness, becomes the seductive demon, the bad poetry that their antiquated texts warned you against.
Satan.
The enemy.
Entropy.
Links to Purchase Print Books
Buy “The Ogre Life” Print Edition at Amazon
Links to Purchase eBooks – Click links for book samples and reviews
Buy “The Ogre Life” On Amazon
Buy “The Ogre Life” on Barnes and Noble/Nook
Buy “The Ogre Life” on Smashwords
Buy “The Ogre Life” on Google Play
Buy “The Ogre Life” on Kobo
All information was provided by the author and not edited by us. This is so you get to know the author better.
Leave a Reply