Ron Dakron

With PEN against idjits

2015-04-29T17:01:00.003-07:00

Just joined PEN cuz of their spirited Charlie Hebdo defense--murderers be damned! @PENamerican #hellodevilfish @threeroomspress

Quote 13 from Hello Devilfish! by Ron Dakron

2015-03-17T18:48:00.001-07:00

Quote 12 from Hello Devilfish! by Ron Dakron

2015-03-08T20:26:00.001-07:00

Quote 11 from Hello Devilfish! by Ron Dakron

2015-03-03T10:21:00.001-08:00

2015-03-01T17:15:00.002-08:00

Superb interview with savvy cub journo Constance Renfrow on Three Rooms Press site:

Quote 10 from Hello Devilfish! by Ron Dakron

2015-02-23T10:42:00.001-08:00

Quote 9 Special Valentines Edition from Hello Devilfish! by Ron Dakron

2015-02-14T17:14:00.001-08:00

Quote 8 from Hello Devilfish by Ron Dakron

2015-02-12T09:40:00.001-08:00

Quote 7 from Hello Devilfish! by Ron Dakron

2015-02-07T12:30:00.001-08:00

Quote 5 from Hello Devilfish! by Ron Dakron

2015-02-06T00:44:00.001-08:00

Quote 3 Hello Devilfish by Ron Dakron

2015-02-04T10:12:00.001-08:00

Quote 2 from Hello Devilfish by Ron Dakron

2015-02-04T10:11:00.003-08:00

Quote 4 from Hello Devilfish! by Ron Dakron

2015-02-04T10:11:00.001-08:00

Seattle Weekly waxes wryly over Hello Devilfish!

2014-11-04T21:51:00.002-08:00

The Seattle Weekly gives Hello Devilfish a rad review:

"Tokyo is burning, and Devilfish is laughing. He’s a kaiju, one of those fake-looking rubber monsters running amok—a giant blue manta ray, in this instance—and the very amusing narrator of Dakron’s Hello Devilfish! (Three Rooms Press, $15.95). Devilfish claims to be an enemy not just of Tokyo, where he gleefully topples power lines and elevated trains, munching on their passengers, but also of the novel itself. “Join us in plot-maiming fun!” he exclaims in Manglish, a comic lexicon made up of odd advertising slogans, poorly translated Japanese, LOL-speak, and I Can Has Cheezburger grammar. Destruction is this manta ray’s mantra. Yet the more his sting-tailed protagonist inveighs against Big Lit, local writer Dakron begins to sneak in some structure and literary mischief. Devilfish has an unwanted paramour in pursuit of him: another kaiju he calls Squidra, a giant pink kraken with tentacles and laser beams that shoot from her eyes. So there’s a bit of a love story in Hello Devilfish!, and a chase through the city’s smoldering rubble, an abrupt transformation (hello, Doug!), and flourishes of humor that recall Mark Leyner. Quoth the Devilfish, “I spit on realism and all its cunning henchmen!” Here’s a creature intending not to enter the literary canon but to destroy the library."

-- BRIAN MILLER

Reading from Chapter One of Hello Devilfish!

2014-10-10T17:04:00.004-07:00

BOOKSHOTS gives a chamber loaded, safety off review to Hello Devilfish!

2014-10-07T09:01:00.001-07:00

The Verdict:

The best way to read Hello Devilfish! is also the best way to watch a Japanese monster movie: all in one shot. Queue it up, pop some popcorn, sit back, relax, enjoy. I don't know if Dakron intended it that way, but, at 148 pages, you'd be doing yourself a disservice if you read it any other way. Putting it down and coming back to it would be like pausing Godzilla in the middle and finishing it the next the afternoon. It just wouldn't be the same experience.

Let's not get this twisted, though. Hello Devilfish! isn't some serious-faced monster story. It's a comic romp that makes you laugh nearly as much as you shake your head and say, "What the fuck am I reading?" It's a great feeling, a change-of-pace in a literary world with not nearly enough changes of pace. It's like Monty Python acting out a Christopher Moore novel, or Christopher Moore writing a Monty Python sketch, or maybe it's not like either of those things, and it probably isn't because it's one of the more unique stories I've read in recent memory and unlike anything you'll read this year.
And that's assuming Hello Devilfish! is only about what the blurb on the book jacket says it's about. Yes, a giant stingray is eating Tokyo like its out to lunch at some trendy Ramen shop, and yes, he must evade the unwanted romantic advances of Squidra, a 100-foot long (tall?) squid, and yes, a freak accident turns that stingray into a weak, pathetic human being (which is where the story really begins to shine), but it's more than that (it always is, right?).

Hello Devilfish! is also a scathing commentary on "Big Lit" and contemporary society, veiled in Manglish and monster movie tropes and hilarious turns-of-phrase ("It's curious I even understand him—me talk Manglish, him talk Japanese. Hello Plot Flaw!"). It's quite a bit of fun if you're the absurd, open-minded type. And if you're not that type, you're the butt of the joke and the type who actually needs to read this book to understand why you're responsible for the world's current unstable state and its wholly uncertain future.

Full Bookshots/litreactor review

Library Journal gives fave rave to delish fish!

2014-08-28T13:39:00.001-07:00

New Library Journal 09/01/14 review of Hello Devilfish!

"Plots are for babies and geezers." If this novel by experimental writer Dakron (infra; Newt) has a mission statement, it's that quote from the titular narrator. The story follows a Godzilla-esque monstrous manta ray that rises periodically to destroy Tokyo for kicks. During his latest rampage, the ray is attacked and pursued by a love-struck lady monster squid that wants to mate with him, which is an inconvenience to his city-destroying plans. Hello Devilfish! (as the monster is called) doesn't just wreck Tokyo; he also tramples all over the fourth wall, detouring into several asides that rail against modern writing, classic literature, his own author, and the audience reading his book. To add to the disorientation, the story is told using Manglish, a language that approximates a bad Japanese-to-English translation. VERDICT For readers with a high tolerance of the unconventional, this is an audacious, laugh-out-loud novel that is brilliantly committed to its conceit. For more traditional readers, the kind despised by giant kaiju (monster) protagonists, it will be the literary equivalent of a headache. Recommended for fans of absurdist fiction authors such as Patrick Wensink and Carlton III Mellick.—Peter Petruski, Cumberland Cty. Lib. Syst., Carlisle, PA

Publishers Weekly drops gigantor kaiju props!

2014-08-03T15:32:00.002-07:00

The anarchist as social monster, scoffing at bourgeois values, is supersized into a 90-ft. “gigantor” blue stingray in this rapid-fire stomp through pop culture and Japanese monster movies. The titular creature, actually named Hello Devilfish! and also known as the “Marquis de Cod,” sprays napalm breath along with caustic commentary on the hapless residents of Tokyo while fleeing the unwanted affections of Squidra, a 100-ft. cuttlefish aiming to usurp his turf and his love. Seeking to destroy “Big Lit,” Hello Devilfish! proclaims his anti-book manifesto. Then an industrial accident shrinks him down into mere human form. Mistaken for a member of Blue Man Group, he wanders the Tokyo nightlife, sampling fast-food sea-slug sandwiches and cosplay bars, always dodging Squidra’s grasping tentacles. Dakron (Mantids) tosses out a stream of cultural criticisms warped as puns (“You gotta fight for your Reich to party”), even as he admits there’s no point in trying to upset our all-absorbing entertainment-industrial complex (“Nazi jokes are so 20th century”). Resistance may be futile, but this book at least makes it fun. (Oct.) http://bit.ly/1siPfWW

2014-07-10T16:06:00.001-07:00

Hey poets--rhyme on your phone anytime. DakRimer Android app at http://fanapp.mobi/dakrimer

Censoring Your Dreams

2014-03-10T20:51:00.000-07:00

In Forbidden Planet—that superb Freudian mishmash of sci-fi Van Dykes, Venusian décolletage and Leslie Nielsen straining not to laugh—professor Morbeus makes a tactical error. A murderous force created from his own id bashes into his bunker sanctum as he screams nah, it can’t be happening, he’s shielded by “Solid Krell metal, 26 inches thick!” So it goes with censorship—that mischievous id will always batter down them protective moral walls.

Even Weena would agree—don't get trapped in that faux sanctum. Censorship don’t work. Literature is a dream—and you can’t censor dreams. Sure, you can corral those hump male spacemen and lock your daughter in that shielded Krell playpen—but dreams will crash in. And just like that dream last night where you flew over Cleveland, gutting preschools with your destructo laser eyes, brzzzt brzzzt,the words on pixels or paper are someone’s else’s dream handed to you. Lit is a dream of pretend, of arranging selves and futures like some carnie’s shell game—it’s a dream of play. Lit is what if extrapolated from what is. While in the throes of some luscious nightshade fantasy swarming with lips and damp lace—do you really want some Morbeus popping up and yelling “Everyone in the sanctum! They’ll neverget us here.”

The argument for censoring Lit, music, art, whatever ain’t changed for millennia. It’s always a variation on Listen, Gomer—you’re too dumb to know what warps you. Just let us pick what gets into your seething brain and you’ll become a better husband / mother / economic serf. Those who wield power have a total jones to police their flocks’ dreams. Sure, there’s always a rational excuse—that there artwork incited murder, hatred, or my favorite—offense. As we’ve seen with both Salman Rushdie in Britain and Wendy Doniger in India, offending some hick theocrat’s atavistic cosmology can get you yanked out of print.

My fave example of Lit as a dream is the Marquis de Sade. Not cause I fancy his output—you don’t need 100 days of Sodom to get corn-holed by de Sade’s sheer dreary boredom—but because his clumsy exploration of the forbidden, the taboo, the wild thought caught red handed is what dreams do. They juggle our taboos while we bathe in a nice, refreshing pool of amoral goo. Look at those fuzzy cattails! Go on, stroke them. A lot. You dream you shiv your boss, date your cat or crash the Titanic into a second and third iceberg for the sheer thrill of it—that’s just how kids play. You already got to be Godzilla—I’m Godzilla now! I will smear all of Tokyo into mammalian paste, mwah ha ha. Don’t get in the way—your dream mind is trying on costumes and parading before your soul’s mirror. True, most of the costumes suck—they’re silly or vicious or fuglier than a weasel on Sudafed. But you gotta try them all on.

2013-12-30T16:04:00.003-08:00

My reviews of Kat Georges' Our Lady of the Hunger http://amzn.to/1cRB6LJ and Peter Carlaftes' i fold with the hand i was dealt http://amzn.to/1fWUdC2

Hello Devilfish lives!

2013-11-18T20:39:00.002-08:00

Just signed with cut-the-edge Three Rooms Press to publish my novella Hello Devilfish! in Fall 2014. Yowza!

Tricky (Julia's Anniversary Poem)

2011-04-18T00:52:00.001-07:00

you use fake plastic vomit as a valentine card
you greet stupid devils with a hand buzzer how-do
you once tricked night with a moon whoopee cushion
it vowed to get even
with rain and bums and insomniac crows
you apologized drooling from novelty teeth
you’re the banana peel my heart pratfalls on
giggling and squealing
you offer it gum
eeek don’t chew it it’s Red Pepper Hot
you offer it fly ice cubes and a rubber wishbone
not even worried
as night sprinkles comets like gold itching powder

That ancestral glance

2010-11-22T00:21:00.000-08:00

Today I mused on my artist grandpa, Martin. He ignored his sweat-class job and painted sparkling landscapes till fate pulled her usual Hello Cancer tricks. But that’s neither here nor gone; what I most remember is a look. At age six I snuck in his bedroom, picked up his concertina and worked out some melodies. Something in my tyke tunes made him peek in, slit his eyes and smile lightly. With that one glance I was admitted into a cunning wolf pack dressed in vellum shirts and sharkskin night. Later I turned teen and got bongos, rubies, vodka lofts and gored euphoria-—what doubtless sparked me on was that appraising head tilt, that grin lit with cigar glow that gave me the blessing. Smile on, dead trickster, smile fucking on.

Jodi and Jenn are miffed

2010-08-26T15:45:00.000-07:00

I’ve been much amused by a “controversy” on HuffPo’s Books tab (http://huff.to/aBXRkC). Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner whine about getting rich from Chick-lit tripe—but they’re not respected! Wah! Maybe because they're both hacks who jackhammer books out of cliché-infested wood. Neither remotely rises to Allen Ginsberg’s Howl lines about his Beat brethren:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection
to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

Starry dynamo in the machinery of night! Writing and sex demand beaucoup passion—and when you fuck for cash it ain’t love.