EPB 001: Start Here

In fact, I started Elboro Press in 2012 as a side project to get all my film scripts printed, bound and made available. But that was set aside when I made Ned Rifle in 2014 and, subsequently, began producing box-sets of my earlier films. This has kept the company pretty busy while I continue to write and direct. It only occurred to me this past year I was, by making these box-sets with all the printed material that goes with them, already publishing.

Then DJ Mendel self-published his novel, A Smile Shy. I bought a copy, loved it, and asked if I could bring it out in a new edition and promote it as best I could.

So, here we are: jump started into the publishing racket! And I couldn’t be happier that it’s with this novel.

Mendel and I have been frequent collaborators. He has acted in a number of my films. But he is a writer too and we’ve spent a lot of time reading each other’s material over the years. Most of his output has been plays. Tom, Dick and Harry, was produced at the Ontological Hysteric Theater in New York. Then there was Exhaust Pipes and Manifolds, about two mechanics trying to exhaust themselves into enlightenment! My Dick Done Broke, often performed by Mendel, was most recently staged in Brisbane, Australia. And, finally, Can’t Never Could, a play based on his sister’s letters to him while she was in prison, was performed in Minneapolis and awarded an Artist Initiative Grant from the State of Minnesota. 

DJ comes from rural Pennsylvania, where he played baseball seriously enough in high school to merit being tried out for a professional farm league’s recruiting squad. But, lacking the requisite passion for a life in baseball, he made his way to New York City to become an actor instead! I first saw him performing in a series of Richard Foreman’s plays at the Ontological Hysteric Theater: The Universe, Permanent Brain Damage, and Panic! He first acted for me in The Book of Life in 1998.

Onstage or in front of the camera, along with his intense and sharply articulated physicality, Mendel has a ferocious command of the spoken word. And, in A Smile Shy, I can’t help hearing the continuity between the performances and the writing. The book is rhythmic: simple, stubborn, one-dimensional sentences coalesce into paragraphs of complex emotional association. And these swell, like waves. Though, sometimes, too, he just states what happens in one phrase—end of paragraph, end of chapter. And the empty space that follows is pregnant with implication. He’s dramatic that way. The action and the feeling he describes—the way he describes them—is physical.

A Smile Shy mines a great deal of Mendel’s earlier preoccupations one might recognize from the plays if one’s read or seen them. He has great fun exploring the dark, troubled underbelly of masculinity with the blunt lyricism of an American country and western ballad crossed with the psychosexual interiority of a poète maudit. He’s great with derailed machismo. And, though occasionally and unknowingly clearheaded, these men he conjures up are positively baroque in evading reality as they tug at the strings that undo the knots that keep their tricky, half-imagined proclivities from tumbling out all over the place.

It’s kind of harrowing.

But another of Mendel’s principal strengths—and what is really the center of this book, I think—is that, though he writes female characters with a respect approaching awe, it is with undisguised male desire. The tender, self-effacing comedy that ensues is sometimes heartbreaking. With his two main male characters, Weezal and Marty, even expressions of love, tenderness and gratitude towards women are rude and clumsy, expressed as they are through a fog of alcohol and low self-esteem. But there is then the brilliantly imagined Teenage Jesus who is just plain psychotic and a danger to almost anyone. Or there’s Jesus’ handsome, well-educated billionaire boss, Millard Penn. With all these men (with the important exception of Weezal), violence towards women is always too close for comfort. And as hilarious, compelling, and worrisome as it is to read these guys, one is grateful for the appearance of Maisey Walker.

Maisey has been acquitted of killing two husbands—the first on purpose, saving herself from monstrous domestic and sexual abuse, and the second when the dimwit second husband ran out in front of her car after she caught him in the arms of another woman. Now, when not cleaning rooms at a Poconos honeymoon resort, she’s down in the basement of the courthouse searching through past court rulings awarding generous compensation to unlucky men maimed at work. She’s looking for a man who will share his sadly-earned fortune in exchange for female companionship—without the sex.

It’s Maisey who brings the fresh air and some degree of hope into the situation this novel relates. With Maisey Walker, and the less central but important Darlene McGraw, A Smile Shy, while definitely an epic of male failure, becomes an ode to female endurance.

A Smile Shy is impatient like, say, the Henry Miller of Tropic of Cancer. What has to be said must be said right now and to hell with the niceties of English grammar. But that doesn’t last too long, because Mendel likes a well-phrased passage as much as the next guy. On the other hand, the story of the fictional Penn Ink Incorporated—its beginning, its rise, its spectacular undoing—reminds me of something out of Vonnegut or Pynchon; a whimsical alternate history that is, nevertheless, pretty realistic.

Unavoidably, the book is a little coarse at times. But it’s beautifully wrought, outrageously funny, perverse and moving—a neorealist fairytale, simply and desperately stated; an expression of sorrow and outrage. And while it’s not sentimental, it’s fueled with empathy. For all the hard drinking, violence, sloppy sex and banged-up inner lives of these characters, one is never fully prepared for the waves of sympathy that flow through this darkly funny novel.

After decades writing plays, screenplays, acting, directing, and playing the drums, DJ Mendel has orchestrated all his major preoccupations into an outright howl. Johnny Cash meets Rimbaud in a Pennsylvania trailer park. Things get broken.

AND, COMING SOON!

In February, we’ll release Canadian writer Tom McSorley’s short book of poems, Partial Clarities. In April we’ll publish the screenplay of my own as yet to be produced eight-part TV series, Motherless Children. And later in the year, we’ll bring out Moya Aiken’s Shoulder, a poignant and hilarious memoir of a headstrong Irish girl growing up in Manchester, England, before making her way to New York City in the early 1980s.

And more will follow. Why not? Why not read a book?

Sign up for the Elboro Press Newsletter so we can let you know about all this. And please help spread the word about Elboro Press.

Thanks for reading. Be safe.

Sincerely,
Hal Hartley (“You mean, like, the publisher?”)