American culture, drug culture, dead generation culture in N. Frank Daniels Futureproof - By N.L. Belardes

Over the past few months I’ve wondered how RiotLit's N. Frank Daniels and I, both aggressive, riotous, raucous, supportive, bloggers, novelists, and separated by a nation, could write novels with a similar theme defining a generation. It’s almost as if my unreleased 1998 novel can’t exist without his work verifying the existence of my babble of prose. How? Daniels starts it off with one word, a title: Futureproof. He then defines his prose masterpiece with a dark paintbrush of words, reconstructing from an American cultural mirror of ominous truths of addictions and lies.

Futureproof isn’t a book you read because you do drugs. You read it because you want to understand drug culture and America’s growing addiction to becoming numb.



It’s been a few months since I read N. Frank Daniels novel, Futureproof, a book I consider the most important of 2006. What does his book mean to the average American? Perhaps what Jessica Cutler’s trashy novel Washingtonienne says about the state of America’s post-Millennial sex-warped political machine, N. Frank Daniels society numbing book Futureproof says for an entire generation with slacker origins: there’s a slow numb, what should we do?

Daniels work focuses on the culture of drugs. The culture he defines reflects stagnant American dreams, dreams that for a generation of rebellious-minded youth tend to float in a sewer of cultural addictions. Behaviors succumb to years of malaise before any kind of blossoming to American norms can ever take place.

Futureproof is an extension of counterculture literature that reaches to an American literary movement filled with (to name a few) Jack Kerouac’s Town and the City, On the Road, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, William Burrough’s Junky, Ken Kesey’s The Kool-Aid Acid Test, and Alexander Trocchi’s Cain’s Book.



Sure, there are a lot of drug-filled counterculture literary works that I’m leaving out: a lot of memoirs too, some Beat literature that deserves to be added and typed by my lazy fingers. Yet this isn’t a review of how vast the importance of literary greats like the Beats were to the body of Post-Modern American literature. This review is about a book that brings to life the darkest pit of our dead generation. And the dead generation isn’t dead because a generation is dying, it’s dead because a generation has become numb, futureproof.

Most of the books I mentioned were part of a significant literary movement of people and ideas. They fueled a riotous form of literature for their time: a kind of prose from people aware of each other, who knew each other, and who helped spawn a generation of literature that skips even to today’s drug-influenced culture. And so N. Frank Daniels monumental work Futureproof, of a man numbing himself against his own future and then drowning in his own dead generation, is a work that must be considered not only for its literary merits, but also for being a part of an important literary movement that wraps itself around culture, history, historical forces, and a group of writers who see eye-to-eye.



Futureproof, like Kerouac’s true-to-life fiction has completely blurred the lines between mainstream memoir and mainstream fiction. Yet, Daniels’ work focuses on what you might call it a hybrid between Generation X, Slackers, and a heavy dose of cultural malaise.

Who are the players of this movement? James Frey perhaps. N. Frank Daniels for sure. Myself with fiction/memoirs of a dead generation… others? I could start naming names. But maybe authors should speak up for themselves to consider whether Futureproof is part of a riotous new movement they’re also a part of.



I wrote in The Citrus Girl:

What are the historical forces directing our dead generation? Our MTV-sucked rebellious youth? We learned to not pay attention to anything. The lust for boredom was sanctimonious—us seeking holiness, our claim to malaise: Just know your town, your city, your street, your mall, your MTV, your video games, where you have your favorite bowl of rice, your favorite bed, and where you experience life by ‘doing’ life. It was not like being a spender—one of the plastic plunderers who storm inside a mall, never breaking ranks—just spend and move on to the next holiday. It was all a holiday to us.

(click to read a longer excerpt from The Citrus Girl about the dead generation)

Cultural making, and literary making forces because a generation was without a unifying theme of the hopelessness of war: WW2, Korea, Vietnam, The Cold War. Today’s literary movement emanates from a new kind of rebelliousness that, though there finally came a War on Terror, sees, as in Futureproof a war on the streets of America to fight boredom, to fight addiction, to be addiction, to fight the malaise of what often can appear as a hopeless American society. Why? For many, the America of corporate-ladder-climbing-makes-you-somebody appears as an unsatisfactory and un-intellectual career. A rebelliousness stirs in Futureproof, and that’s only the beginning from N. Frank Daniels.





In my interview with Daniels we get even more into what he’s doing besides writing novels. He talks about Futureproof, the blogs RiotLit and LitPark, and more…

Interview:

N.L.: What kind of reaction do you get from people who read Futureproof, but who aren't familiar with counterculture lit?

N. Frank Daniels: You know, I'm always a bit apprehensive when people first read FP. But I've gotten some pretty interesting feedback from those who typically read outside this genre. For instance, my mother-in-law actually got her book club to read it. She was worried about their reaction, and in all honesty, two of the eight ladies only got a few chapters in before refusing to go any further. I guess the book ain't for the faint of heart. But the other women were very open-minded and when I spoke to their group via conference call for their monthly meeting, most of them seemed enthralled with the world that my book had exposed them to. I think that that is what a book can do at its best: it opens eyes to concepts and events and LIVES that people previously had no interest in looking at or exploring. I just got a great review on Amazon from a guy named "Rhubab." In it he said "Daniels, through the person of Luke, has basically ruined me for looking down at the local drug-addict teenagers I see hanging out not-nearly-far-enough-away from my kids' school. I used to feel an intolerant moral disgust for them. But now I see Luke in there amongst them and it's harder to remain so detached. I guess I don't want to have any more to do with them than I did before, but they do seem a lot more like people now." This, for me, is the highest compliment. People learning to understand the plight of others through WORD. Plus, the buttoned-up ladies at the bank all love the book, give my kids extra stickers and lollipops every time I go through the drive-up window.



N.L.: Your book seems like a case study for people stuck in a societal malaise, brainwashed by MTV, and uninspired by politics that have done little to encourage an exit from the slacker generation to successful careers. Comment?

N. Frank Daniels: I think you hit the nail on the proverbial head with that statement, Nick. The lion's share of my friends, by a large margin, are guys still trying to figure out what they want to do with their lives. I'm not sure exactly what it is about our generation that has bred this kind of malaise, but I am definitely inspired by the question. I'm sure it will drive my work for years to come. I myself have a hard time figuring out what I want to do. Write, obviously, but that doesn't pay the bills. I just applied at Home Depot. Cross your fingers for me.

As far as slacking, I don't know the meaning of the word. I actually have a shirt that says "No Slackers". Damn, I shoulda dug that one out for the pics. But my point is that there is no shortage of shit going on that anyone still able to breathe shouldn't be up in arms about. If you're bored then you're boring. But that still doesn't solve the dilemma of how you can make your causes and outrages pay. The way this society is structured really leaves very little room for extracurricular activity once you get locked into a career. We have the least amount of downtime of any western culture. Work will make us free though, right?



N.L.: Are you still Futureproof? Explain.

N. Frank Daniels: Is anyone really futureproof? Of course not. But it sure fucking feels like it when you're young and alternately pissed off/ totally wasted and can keep looking in the mirror and seeing nothing much changing. Then you wake up one day and find yourself with a mortgage. And eye crinkles. Which my wife says are endearing but she's always trying to ease me into old age. The only thing that really blows about getting older is that you start to realize it really isn't going to last forever, and then there isn't enough time in the day. So we write. All of this is a record. We were here. We made noise.



N.L.: You commented to me before about a literary movement working together. Working together for what? How could Paperback Writer and its readers make your agenda our agenda? Talk to me, brutha…

N. Frank Daniels: Your agenda IS my agenda. As I see it, every one of us that isn't Dan Brown is in a fight for our lives when it comes to producing and maintaining the time that it takes to produce. The way the publishing industry works now is so obscenely backwards. Writers are no longer valued in the slightest degree. We are all expendable in the machine. These corporate power Houses throw over 100,000 books a year at the wall and barely promote any of them. If they took all the shit off the shelves, brought back a resurgence of dime store pulp for the gossip rags and five-novel-a-year James Patterson pap, then spent more energy on really cultivating readership for true writers, the lit culture in this country would be much better off. The excuse I always hear from "industry insiders" is that they put out shit because that's what sells. Well maybe if they took the shit off the front tables in Barnes & Noble and in the airport book stalls, readers would be exposed to some more cutting edge stuff, stuff that opens minds and awakens passions. We are sleep-walking. There hasn't been a cultural revolution in America since the "grunge" thing in '91. We're long overdue. The music industry isn't gonna bring it. It's up to us.



N.L.: You seem very well tied in to a literary world that includes Susan Henderson of LitPark and James Frey. What do these folks mean to you?

N. Frank Daniels: I really just chanced into all the meetings I've had with the Frey's and Henderson's I've been lucky enough to connect with. Susan Henderson is such a gracious, giving person. She has a true empathy for writers, and was generous enough to open her blog to me. I post there every second Saturday of the month now. I literally met James Frey after randomly picking up a section of a four-day-old Sunday paper with a review of MY FRIEND LEONARD inside. It just so happened that he was doing a reading in downtown Atlanta less than an hour later. I've learned that in this business, as I would expect in any entertainment business, it is all in who you know. Like you, Nick. I consider you an incredibly valuable ally because when you have a couple of guys who have an audience, and these guys combine their audiences, suddenly you've gotten twice as many people operating on the same page. There is definitely power in numbers. I'd like to eventually (when I can get my webmaster around to it) have a side-bar or something on my home-page and on RiotLit's page saying something to the effect of "Our Partners", where we would highlight sites like your own, fellow warriors in this game forging a new path. And the more like-minded people you can connect with, the more excited they can get about what you are doing and what we are all potentially a part of, the more likely that our message is going to get out there. I really try to make a point of getting my book in the hands of bands that I've admired for years. Flaming Lips. Sonic Youth. Jane's Addiction. Frank Black (Pixies). These guys had more influence over me than anything else when I was growing up. Well, them and cult lit, but most of my lit heroes are dead, so you try to connect with your heroes still kicking, say "Look what your art bred in me with my own art."

N.L.: Is RiotLit as a multi-user blog making an impact? Or is its success further on the horizon? Talk talk talk!

N. Frank Daniels: RiotLit is slowly growing. We're still kind of making it up as we go along. Which is pretty much how we thought it would go when we started out. We knew it was going to be a trial and error kind of thing. At this point we have a pretty good interaction happening on the forum section of the site, but we envision it getting much larger, with readers and writers all interacting on multiple levels. And right now we're smack in the middle of our first of three contests. We have some spaces left to fill (we eventually want 12 members) and figured a great way to find talent as well as get more people interested was to open the doors to anyone who writes. "Send us your best shit. Break out." That sorta thing. What I see for the future of RiotLit is all of us "outsiders" forming like fuckin Voltron and making a giant impact on popular culture. Let people know that it's ok to come back to books. They don't all suck anymore. The cycle has rotated back to non-suck. You can now make fun of the asshole who thinks reading is lame. Because, you know, HE'S the lame one. WORD.



N.L.: Thanks so much for the interview…

N. Frank Daniels: Hey, my pleasure Nick. I'm honored for the invite. Anything I can do to help make your thing here bigger, I am at your service, man. We got all kinds of fight left in us. This shit isn't even out of round one yet.

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This entry was posted by N.L. Belardes, on Friday, December 08, 2006. You can leave your response.